Fountain

I wonder whether anyone has ever connected Marcel Duchamp's Fountain with Schopenhauer or Kraus, Schopenhauer writes (in The World as Will and Representation) that:

when some external cause or inward disposition lifts us suddenly out of the endless stream of willing, delivers knowledge from the slavery of the will, the attention is no longer directed to the motives of willing, but comprehends things free from their relation to the will, and thus observes them without personal interest, without subjectivity, purely objectively, gives itself entirely up to them so far as they are ideas, but not in so far as they are motives. Then all at once the peace which we were always seeking, but which always fled from us on the former path of the desires, comes to us of its own accord, and it is well with us. It is the painless state which Epicurus prized as the highest good and as the state of the gods; for we are for the moment set free from the miserable striving of the will; we keep the Sabbath of the penal servitude of willing; the wheel of Ixion stands still.

But this is just the state which I described above as necessary for the knowledge of the Idea, as pure contemplation, as sinking oneself in perception, losing oneself in the object, forgetting all individuality, surrendering that kind of knowledge which follows the principle of sufficient reason, and comprehends only relations; the state by means of which at once and inseparably the perceived particular thing is raised to the Idea of its whole species, and the knowing individual to the pure subject of willless knowledge, and as such they are both taken out of the stream [255] of time and all other relations. It is then all one whether we see the sun set from the prison or from the palace.

Inward disposition, the predominance of knowing over willing, can produce this state under any circumstances. This is shown by those admirable Dutch artists who directed this purely objective perception to the most insignificant objects, and established a lasting monument of their objectivity and spiritual peace in their pictures of still life, which the æsthetic beholder does not look on without emotion; for they present to him the peaceful, still, frame of mind of the artist, free from will, which was needed to contemplate such insignificant things so objectively, to observe them so attentively, and to repeat this perception so intelligently; and as the picture enables the onlooker to participate in this state, his emotion is often increased by the contrast between it and the unquiet frame of mind, disturbed by vehement willing, in which he finds himself. In the same spirit, landscape-painters, and particularly Ruisdael, have often painted very insignificant country scenes, which produce the same effect even more agreeably.

He has in mind natural objects and scenes, but one might either mock or try to confirm Schopenhauer's ideas about the objective perception of insignificant objects by presenting a urinal as a work of art.

Then there's Kraus (writing in 1913):

Adolf Loos and I – he literally and I grammatically – have done nothing more than show that there is a difference between an urn and a chamber pot and that it is this distinction above all that provides culture with elbow room. 

I don't know how much Duchamp would have known about either Schopenhauer or Kraus, but Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven might have. 

Even if there is no causal chain from Schopenhauer and/or Kraus to Duchamp (or Freytag-Loringhoven or whoever submitted Fountain), one still might wonder what, if anything, Fountain says or shows about Schopenhauer's philosophy.

OK, back to grading papers.

Nutshell studies

"We make pictures of facts for ourselves."

"A picture is a model of reality."

"Take any action allow'd to be vicious: Wilful murder, for instance. Examine it in all lights, and see if you can find that matter of fact, or real existence, which you call vice. In which-ever way you take it, you find only certain passions, motives, volitions and thoughts. There is no other matter of fact in the case. The vice entirely escapes you, as long as you consider the object. You never can find it, till you turn your reflection into your own breast, and find a sentiment of disapprobation, which arises in you, towards this action. Here is a matter of fact; but 'tis the object of feeling, not of reason. It lies in yourself, not in the object."

"Suppose one of you were an omniscient person and therefore knew all the movements of all the bodies in the world dead or alive and that he also knew all the states of mind of all human beings that ever lived, and suppose this man wrote all he knew in a big book, then this book would contain the whole description of the world; and what I want to say is, that this book would contain nothing that we would call an ethical judgment or anything that would logically imply such a judgment. It would of course contain all relative judgments of value and all true scientific propositions and in fact all true propositions that can be made. But all the facts described would, as it were, stand on the same level and in the same way all propositions stand on the same level. There are no propositions which, in any absolute sense, are sublime, important, or trivial."

"If for instance in our world-book we read the description of a murder with all its details physical and psychological, the mere description of these facts will contain nothing which we could call an ethical proposition."

"The murder will be on exactly the same level as any other event, for instance the falling of a stone."

"Certainly the reading of this description might cause us pain or rage or any other emotion, or we might read about the pain or rage caused by this murder in other people when they heard of it, but there will simply be facts, facts, and facts but no Ethics."

"There are no propositions which, in any absolute sense, are sublime, important, or trivial. Now perhaps some of you will agree to that and be reminded of Hamlet's words: "Nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." But this again could lead to a misunderstanding. What Hamlet says seems to imply that good and bad, though not qualities of the world outside us, are attributes to our states of mind. But what I mean is that a state of mind, so far as we mean by that a fact which we can describe, is in no ethical sense good or bad."

More about these scenes here. And, if you're wondering, these are just pictures from an exhibition I visited recently accompanied by passages of philosophy that they reminded me of. I'm not trying to make a deep point.

Playing along with the art school boys (and girls)

His mother bought him a synthesizer

Got The Human League in to advise her

Now he's making lots of noise

Playing along with the art school boys

The Undertones, "My Perfect Cousin" 

It's striking how many musicians and former musicians are successful visual artists. I have no theory about this, but I feel like pointing out some examples, as well as drawing attention to some work that I like a lot. The example that inspired this post is Billy Childish, who I had read about before because of his involvement in The Delmonas (he seems to have been in dozens of other bands too). Via the magic of Twitter, I found that he is also a painter. I like this one:

  

But there's also Elizabeth Price of Talulah Gosh, who won the Turner Prize. Anja Huwe of Xmal Deutschland is now an artist. Aggi Pastel (formerly of The Pastels) is artist Annabel Wright. Edwyn Collins draws birds too. 

Some people have too much talent.

Ornament and Crime: the book

One of my Christmas presents was Adolf Loos' Ornament and Crime, which includes the famous essay of that title but also many more short pieces on related themes. There aren't many huge surprises, but he's funny and seems very similar to Wittgenstein in matters of taste. I couldn't wait to blog about it, but now that I've finished it I don't know what to say. Here goes nothing.

One reason I found the book interesting is that Wittgenstein once wrote that: "It is as though I wanted to change men's and women's fashions by talking" (Culture and Value p, 71, according to some notes I have, but I don't see it there in the edition I own). Loos sort of tries to do this, although he also recognizes the problem with such an enterprise. He also, like Wittgenstein, rejects talk of beauty in the arts in favor of talk about getting things right. Or rather, Loos rejects one in favor of the other, while Wittgenstein, if his students' notes are to believed, merely observed that we tend not to talk much about beauty and instead use words like 'right' and 'wrong'. Here's Loos, from the essay "Men's Fashion" (from 1898):

...what does it mean to be well dressed? It means to be correctly dressed.

To be correctly dressed! With that expression I feel as if I have removed the mystery with which our fashions have been surrounded until now. For fashion we use words such as beautiful, elegant, chic, smart, or dashing. But that is not the main point at all. The point is to be dressed in such a manner as to attract as little attention to oneself as possible. (p. 40)

He is not doing aesthetics here but trying to change men's fashions by talking. He is making propaganda, that is, against the foppishness that he identified as popular in Germany and in favor of what he identifies as the English (he is very pro-English, which probably ought to make one suspicious), modern, refined taste in men's clothing.

On the other hand, he does acknowledge that this is not generally how fashion works:

Today we wear narrow trousers, tomorrow they will be wide, and the day after narrow again. Every tailor knows that. Couldn't we just abolish the wide-trouser period, then? Oh no! We need it to be able to enjoy our narrow trousers again. (p. 60)

He does suggest, though, that the industry can impose styles on people, or at least force the speed of change to increase. And, presumably, the industry might be encouraged to do so by respected essayists. But:

Fashion progresses slowly, more slowly than one usually thinks. Objects that are really modern stay so for a long time. (p. 92)

Another engine of changing fashion is social change:

...we are heading toward a newer, greater age. Women will no longer have to appeal to sensuality to achieve equal status with men, but will do so through their economic and intellectual independence, gained through work. A woman's value will not rise and fall with fluctuations in sensuality. Silks and satins, ribbons and bows, frills and furbelows will lose their effectiveness. They will disappear. And rightly so. There is no place for them in our culture. (p. 111) 

Much has been made of the handles that Wittgenstein designed for the house he built in Vienna. (You can even buy a version of them, although his design has been reworked "to bring it in line with modern technology." The horror!) But has Loos' remark from "The New Style and the Bronze Industry" (1898, presumably, although the date given in the book is 1878--Loos was born in 1870) been noted?

There is only one decent door handle in Vienna accessible to me, and I make a special detour to see it every time I am in the vicinity. (p. 49)

From the surrounding text it seems clear that what distinguishes this handle is its lack of ornamentation. If Wittgenstein was a big fan of Loos' then he might have tried to design something that would have pleased the master. This is not easy:

Changing old objects to adapt them to modern needs is not permissible. We must either copy or create something completely new. (p. 46)

And a craftsman's best work will be the work that corresponds "most closely to his nature, to his temperament, which he produces without effort, which bear[s] the clearest stamp of his personality" (p. 45).

One rule of thumb that seems to apply throughout the book is that the duller the chapter title, the more interesting its content turns out to be. For instance, in "Interior Design: Prelude" (1898) Loos speaks of styles of furniture as languages: "Our cabinetmaker speaks German, the German of Vienna, 1898. Do not call him stupid or naive just because he cannot speak Middle High German, French, Russian, Chinese, and Greek as well" (p. 53). Perhaps this isn't earth-shattering, but it seems rather Wittgensteinian.

As, in a way, does this:

...the ancient Greeks also knew a little about beauty. And they were led by practical considerations alone, without taking beauty into account at all, without wanting to satisfy some aesthetic need. And when an object was so practical it could not be made any more practical, they called it beautiful.[...]

Are there still people who work in the same way as the Greeks? Oh, yes. As a nation, the English; as a profession, the engineers. The English and the engineers are our ancient Greeks. (p. 69)

I wonder whether Wittgenstein read this before he went to England to study engineering in Manchester.

Punk leads to Putin?

Jon Cogburn:

Punk is great art, but the nihilism leads to Putinism. Again, consider the United States. We had two punk eras, punk proper and grunge. Analogous  to Russian punk and Putinism, punk proper led to Thatcher/Reagan and grunge to Bush the younger.

Robert Paul Wolff:

All societies exist for the purpose of transferring wealth from those who create it -- the poor -- to those who do not -- the rich.  The academic professions exist for the purpose of rationalizing this transfer, the churches exist for the purpose of blessing it, and the arts exist for the purpose of decorating the transfer so as to make it as charming as possible [even though this often comes to nothing more than putting lipstick on a pig.]

Cogburn is always right (in the sense that he is always edifying) even if some of his individual points are wrong (and he sometimes retracts things he's said, so he must be wrong sometimes). Here he looks wrong, but I think we have to go with the "nihilism leads to Putinism" part of the quote above rather than the "punk proper led to Thatcher" bit. Earlier on he says this:

For rock to be rock, there must be an audience base that believes in the possibility of liberation. Once that is gone, rock isn't really possible. And when rock stops being rock, its parents (blues and country) get a divorce. And, like a lot of children of divorce, rock gets angry and starts acting out. It becomes punk.

So the real problem, as he sees it, is the possibility of liberation, or the ability to believe in this possibility. And that ability apparently declined in the 1970s. Hence both David Bowie's "We never got it off on that revolution stuff/ What a drag--too many snags" and Hawkwind's "We used up all of our magic powers trying to do it in the road," in their rejection of Beatles politics in favor of violent revolution (the lines are from the song "Urban Guerrilla"). Bowie, too, rejects the Beatles and the Stones in favor of glam rock, which involves dressing like a queen but also kicking like a mule and drinking a lot of wine. Punk is roughly a combination of the would-be terrorist strain of hippiedom and the gaudy hooliganism of glam rock. It doesn't lead to Putin or Thatcher or Reagan, but the same despair that fuels it also opens the door to the likes of them. In short, Cogburn is right.

What about Wolff? It's not plausible that societies are a sort of con job that the poor are tricked into in order for the rich to be able to either take from them or use them to take from other poor people. Societies exist in the same kind of way that schools of fish and swarms of bees exist. That's just how human beings come: in packs. It's also relevant that we would struggle to survive otherwise.

But once we are in a society (which we are, as they say, always already) what then is the guiding mission of the society? Wolff's claim about the purpose of all societies looks plausible as an answer to this question. And the rest of what he says seems about right too. Except that there are norms internal to academia and the church and the arts that go against this idea. Academia might be allowed and even encouraged because it helps the rich get richer, but the norms of academia don't themselves directly promote this kind of useful idiocy. Nor, of course, do those of the churches or the arts. So I think views like Wolff's are true a lot of the time, maybe most of the time, maybe 90% of the time, but I don't think they are entirely true. Comically or not, I think he's exaggerating (and presumably he knows it, since I doubt he really thinks of himself as rationalizing the transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich).

Does punk then put lipstick on the pig? Real punk doesn't. This was always the complaint about disco and other kinds of mainstream pop music: they are and were a distraction from political reality, or perhaps just reality in general. Pretty much the definition of alternative music, which includes punk, is that it doesn't do this. The hard part is to be true to this ideal while not being godawful musically. It can be done, but the audience is always going to be relatively small. The Red Wedge tactic is never going to work. Which sounds like despair but only means that the goals of academia, religion, and the arts must be academic, religious, and artistic, not political. Art for art's sake, in other words.

Nonsense and art

I've been half-thinking of writing something about the nonsensicality of heavy metal lyrics. For instance,

And I say, "Ooh ooh, I'm a robot man."

Why do you say the "ooh" part of that? There's some vague kind of story that the song implies, but no one would listen to the song for the sake of that story. The point of the lyrics is pretty much just to say "robot man." It's like Motörhead singing "It's a bomber" or Girlschool getting right to the point and having the one word chorus: "Demolition." It's also very much like my son when he was little smashing two toy cars together and shouting "Powers!" A movie version of this sort of thing would be all explosions. It doesn't make any sense but it appeals to something very primitive in (some of) us.    

And then I read a review of a book about Picasso that got me thinking. What can we make of this?

He observes that most of Picasso’s paintings employ what he calls a “room space”, self-contained, intimate and able to provide a setting for the expression of powerful feelings. He considers this room space to be a basic premiss of how Picasso treats beauty and subjectivity – what Clark calls the artist’s “truth-condition”. Such a space, he feels, is integral to the artist’s world view. It is not merely a medium or a vehicle, such as a grammatical or structural device, but a “semantics”, the creation of a new kind of reality.

Although some of this may seem self-evident,...

The review, by Jack Flam, goes on to criticize T. J. Clark for bringing Wittgenstein and Nietzsche into the attempt to appreciate Picasso's work. I can imagine that Clark's discussion of Wittgenstein helps little. But what about Flam's account of Clark above? How is a "room space" (Clark's expression) different from either a room or a space? How can such a space be a premise or a truth-condition? I think this just means that it is something like a presupposition or fundamental element. But then how can it be a semantics? And in what sense is a semantics the creation of a new kind of reality? Picasso has a new vision of reality--that's about all I can wring out of this, and we knew that already. The rest, as far as I can tell, is an attempt to sound clever by using philosophical vocabulary. Which is what Flam criticizes Clark for doing. Maybe they are all at it.

Heavy metal is a kind of nonsense, but it's honest nonsense. The best of it has no pretensions whatsoever (although there is something a bit Häagen-Dazs about the umlaut in Motörhead). The nonsense that comes from trying to sound smart is a different matter. Saying nothing because you aren't trying to say anything is better than saying nothing because you have nothing to say but either think you do or else want to appear as if you do. But I suppose everyone agrees with that, and I might have missed something (or a lot) in what Flam says about Clark.

Wittgenstein's Chinese man argument

According to Béla Szabados: "Wittgenstein said to his friend Drury: "It is impossible to say in my book one word about all that music has meant in my life," adding, " How then can I hope to be understood?"" Szabados remarks that, "This is an interesting remark for it surprisingly relates understanding music's significance for Wittgenstein as a person, to understanding his philosophy." This sounds right, but it might be worth looking into why Wittgenstein considered it impossible to say what music had meant to him.

On p. 7 of the 1938 lectures on aesthetics (as recorded in notes taken by some of his students) Wittgenstein is reported to have said: "It is not only difficult to describe what appreciation consists in, but impossible. To describe what it consists in we would have to describe the whole environment." Later, on p. 29, he is reported to have said that:

'The sense of a proposition' is very similar to the business of 'an appreciation of art.'

Neither, he seems to believe, can be explained:

"Then why do we admire this and not that?"  "I don't know." [p. 30]

Szabados's take on Wittgenstein's remark about music, which I think is pretty natural and standard, may well be right. Wittgenstein might have meant that anyone who did not understand him well enough to know what music had meant to him would never understand his philosophical work. But I think a different interpretation might be possible. He might have meant something like this: given that it is impossible to explain x, how will anyone understand my book on y, which is very similar to x?

The very idea of explanation in aesthetics seems almost to be a mistake in Wittgenstein's view, although he may well have meant that it is a mistake to look for the kind of explanation that we tend to look for. There is little to be said by way of explanation in any case (that is, even if there is something to be said). I will return to this, albeit briefly.

Now, what of the Chinese man? Here's the relevant passage:

Thinking is not even speaking with accompaniment, noises accompanied with whatever may be, is not [of?] the sort 'It rains' at all, but is within [the] English language. A Chinaman who makes [the] noise 'It rains' with [the] same accompaniments--Does he think 'It rains'?   [p. 30, note 1]

He only thinks "It rains" if he means what he says, and we have to suppose that the Chinaman in question cannot mean "It rains" because those words mean nothing to him, being in a language that he does not know. If he makes the right sound and has simultaneous mental pictures of rain this does not give the sound the meaning we are talking about. One can think without such an accompaniment, and one can have the accompaniment without thinking, without meaning. What gives words meaning when we say, write, or think them is, it seems, "the whole environment." And this cannot be described. Nor can how or why this context makes words meaningful be explained. This is where the connection with aesthetics lies. Why certain pieces of music make such an impression on us cannot be explained, Wittgenstein seems to have thought. (And he might have put why murder is wrong in the same category, I don't know.)

We tend to want to reduce, to go in, to locate thoughts in the brain (or computer) and feelings in the stomach (or wherever). Wittgenstein wants, as it were, to expand, to go out. If you want to understand the laughter of the audience at a comedy show, attend to what they are laughing at, not to the laughter itself (which will be much like all other laughter) or to things unknown going on inside them. If you want to understand a feeling look at its full expression (the flower, so to speak), not at its origin (a point-like seed, hard or impossible to distinguish from other such seeds). It's almost like Blow-Up in reverse (in order to see the details a photographer magnifies a picture more and more, but all he gets is a big blur). What he needs is greater definition, not magnification. Wittgenstein's view seems to be that we reach for the microscope when we don't understand something, but that this will give us no better focus. Nor do we need to expand, in fact, because the expansion has already been done for us. The expression of the thought or feeling is the magnification that we need. The phenomenon we want to understand includes the inner and the outer, but the inner is, so to speak, tiny, hidden, almost fictional, whereas the outer is open to view and comprehensible. It is this big end of the phenomenon that we should attend to. But we need to do so in the right way. To understand what is funny about a joke we should not look for hidden causes of its funniness but at the joke itself and for the reasons why that would be funny in this context (attending to the context means looking out, taking a broader view, not looking inwards or back to the root of something). To understand what is so great about this painting or music we should not look at what happens in the brain when we see a painting or hear music, but focus on the painting or music itself, and perhaps on the context, which will include art or music history as well as politics, culture more broadly, and the rest. This is how we acquire appreciation. Once you have it you might still be puzzled or mystified by it. I take it Wittgenstein was. But he doesn't seem to think there is anything to say that will explain it. The mystery, a kind of wonder, might be part of it.

I don't mean that one cannot say anything at all in Wittgenstein's view about why certain works move us as they do. But I think he thought that any such explanation will itself be an expression of appreciation. It will be analysis or criticism, not something more obviously scientific or causal. So you couldn't have an anaesthetic explanation of aesthetics any more than you could have an amoral explanation of ethics. Or rather, you could (perhaps), but even then it would not be what we really want. Someone wondering at the greatness of Michelangelo or the terribleness of murder is not looking for facts about the brain or evolution.

      

To Rome With Love

Woody Allen's new film is, I think, better than his last one. The only way in which it's inferior is in showcasing its featured city. Rome actually looks better in real life than Allen makes it seem here, although that could be because his taste in urban scenery is different from mine. It might also be because what's so good about Rome is not so much this view or that but the fact that the good bits go on and on and on, which is probably hard to show in a film. Anyway, like his last one this one made me think, partly in ways it was clearly intended to.

Let me show off: when I was having dinner with my family at a restaurant in the square shown here earlier this summer a camera crew showed up and started filming. A crowd, including my children, gathered around to watch. We didn't recognize any of the actors, but the rumor was that the filming was for French television. Perhaps Allen had a similar experience (or perhaps his whole career feels like this), because one theme of his  latest film is fame, and specifically the way people will flock to look at and hear about famous people despite their having no other reason to take any interest in these people at all. Why should my (non-French) kids want to see French television stars? The whole thing could even have been a psychology experiment to test the lure of a camera crew with bright lights and alleged stars. What seems at first to be bad acting and/or writing on Allen's part near the beginning of the film in retrospect seems possibly deliberate. Allen's character is on a plane and complaining about his fear of turbulence. It isn't funny or interesting or how people talk in real life. But it's recognizably Woody Allen, neurotic and kvetching. Why should we care? Well, why indeed might be his point. And yet he's made a career out of this sort of thing. Why should this be? What sense does it make?

Allen's view of life is basically that it is meaningless, and that's the general theme of To Rome With Love. All kinds of things happen by pure chance (a man becomes famous and, just as suddenly, ceases to be so, another man finds a beautiful prostitute in his hotel room offering to do anything he wants (she has gone to the wrong room by mistake), couples meet and get married following a chance encounter, and so on). And three times, just in case we miss the point, people refer to "Ozymandias melancholia," the despair brought on by thinking that all human achievements will eventually end up in ruins, like the ruins with which Rome is peppered. And, just in case we don't get the Ozymandias reference, another character says that it's "ironic" that the once great Roman empire is now in ruins. I don't know whether Allen really has a point to make, as such, but the movie is sort of a meditation on contingency, on the way things, especially love and fame, come and go for no real reason. 

If that sounds depressing wait, there's more. One character runs a funeral parlor, dealing with death all day long, and he works long hours to support his family. Although the film is a comedy, it includes the end of an opera in which the last line, after a couple of people have been stabbed to death, is: "La Commedia è finita!" My Italian is not great, but even I can translate that. The end of the comedy is death. The whole film is reminiscent of Schopenhauer's claim that: “The life of every individual is really always a tragedy, but gone through in detail, it has the character of a comedy.” But this is a comedy. Every character's story ends more or less happily, and there is a lot of enjoyable absurdity along the way. You might not ROFL or even LOL but you will GQO (grin quite often). 

One more note before I get to any bigger point: not everything is arbitrary here. One character who apparently "just has something about her" that makes her attractive also works hard to seem interesting, in a phony way, so maybe she makes herself attractive this way rather than just lucking out. And another character's failures seem more stupid than "ahead of their time" as a kinder person might put it. And yet there is an awful lot of luck here too. It's luck whether you're born pretty or plain. Powerful and/or famous men are presented as being very attractive to women, and power and fame, in turn, are presented as having a lot to do with luck. You might have a fine singing voice but never be discovered, or you might find yourself famous simply for being famous. Very much depends on opportunity, and opportunity is largely a matter of luck. Or so Allen seems to see things. (And he has a point.)

Now for my attempt or gesture at a bigger point. If tragedy is not just a story with an unhappy ending but a story of how a fatal flaw in someone's character produces an unhappy ending then Allen's view of life does not lend itself to tragedy. Character is not destiny in his world. A thief is created by the opportunity to steal, nothing more. We are all more or less the same, differing above all in the opportunities that happen to present themselves. This can only lend itself to comedy, not tragedy. (Of course it might not lead to any kind of coherent story.) Perhaps if life seems meaningless then you really do have to laugh.

Another feature of the film is that the story seems to take place out of time. Somehow a woman's stepping out to get her hair cut and getting lost allows for (what seems to be) several days' worth of adventure and misadventure. Somehow also a character in the film becomes a sort of narrator or chorus, visible to perhaps only one other character. We seem to be outside space as well as time, or at least the normal rules don't apply. So we see things, in a way, sub specie aeterni.

Maybe that's a stretch, but the prevalence of sheer chance along with this apparent freedom from the laws of time and space means that we have at least the suggestion of the makings of a Schopenhauerian work of art. Allen presents the world roughly as Schopenhauer says a work of art presents it. And for Schopenhauer this is a key to enlightenment. The early Wittgenstein (up to at least August 1930) seems to have thought in similar terms (I quote the relevant passage here). Now here's what I'm wondering: what kind of connection might there be between senselessness in the sense of the non-applicability of the principle of sufficient reason and senselessness in the sense of nonsense? Consider tragedy, say Hamlet or Macbeth. All the killing has a cause (so the principle of sufficient reason applies in that way) but still might strike us as senseless. Indeed, we might not even have a tragedy unless it strikes us that way. The killing needs to be not just bad but terrible, hard to accept or comprehend. Perhaps the coming apart of reason and cause could even be regarded as the essence of tragedy. Comedy is not like this. There does not have to be a causal nexus in comedy, everything can happen by chance.

Both comedy and tragedy then can make us question, or simply suspend, our faith in the causal nexus. It need not be part of a comedy at all, and it is not enough for tragedy. If belief in the causal nexus is superstition, as Wittgenstein once wrote, then drama is anti-superstition. (And we might question the very meaning of 'causal nexus', since Wittgenstein can't be in any position to reject belief in it a priori unless the very idea is suspect. Of course we can at the same time question whether he's right. Or his rejection of such belief might be a matter of personal taste. But it does seem to be a problematic idea, leading to questions like what caused the causal nexus?, or apparent evasions like talk of grounds rather than causes, or moonwalking into some version of the cosmological argument.) In this way, that is, by combating superstition, fiction might be more honest than non-fiction, or at least the kind of non-fiction that leaves superstition alone. Fiction reminds us that it ain't necessarily so, that things could be otherwise, which is both true and mentally liberating (potentially anyway). Maybe that's why we like it.

[I was reminded of the passage from Wittgenstein by Reshef Agam-Segal, and some of what I say here is inspired by his recent work on seeing aspects. I'll try to make the connection clearer, or better, or both, in the near future.]

A bit of singing and dancing

I keep meaning to do some real work and then other things come along instead. Similarly with blogging. One of these days I'll have a go at proper philosophical blogging (if that's what you want, Matthew Pianalto, Reshef Agam-Segal, and Daniel Lindquist have been managing to do great stuff despite its being summer), but I haven't managed much of that lately. In the meantime, Rupert Read has some interesting reflections on sport that I'd like to try to respond to. He touches not only on sport but on politics and other things too.

On the commercial corruption of 'sport' he writes:

As our climate-damaged sport-saturated ‘summer’ continues, it’s worth taking a moment perhaps to reflect on the concept of ‘sport’, and what it means today.

Take recent Wimbledon tennis finalist Andy Murray, for instance. Murray said on Radio 4 in the run-up to that final that he only enjoys winning, not playing / taking part – he regards tennis purely as a job. If so, he is a tennis player for the age of faceless soulless capitalism: an obscenely-over-rewarded workman. 

There's a lot going on here: climate-change, 'sport', soulless capitalism, and obscene rewards, for instance. Let me say a few words (literally) about each of these, to remind myself where I stand, if nothing else, before moving on.

Climate change: this recent article is worth reading, though also depressing. My view is basically that we are doomed unless global or nearly global action is taken. That's not to say that no one should bother recycling or walking when they don't have to drive, say, but that kind of individual effort won't save us. Another aspect of my view that is worth mentioning here is that Rupert Read makes heroic efforts in this department and puts me to shame. By this I don't mean simply that I admire him for what he does. I mean literally that I feel shame when I do things like drive or run air-conditioning, and I consciously connect this shame with him. Rupert would walk or ride a bike, I tell myself. Rupert would put up with this heat, or use a fan, or something. I'm not him, but I do genuinely (an earlier draft of this sounded sarcastic--I hope that's no longer true) admire his work for the environment, and the integrity he shows in doing it.

'Sport': I'll get back to this.

Soulless capitalism: a bad thing, but the other kind of capitalism is something I rather like. I don't buy the idea that everything government-run is bound to be inefficient and bad. Whatever you might think of the United States' socialized military, it's surely better than Blackwater. But I'm not a socialist. I like small businesses, family-run farms, and the like. It's big business that doesn't seem so good. Especially any business deemed too big to fail and therefore given public money. If we need businesses that big, it seems to me, they should be publicly owned, so that we share the profits as well as the risk and the cost of keeping them going.

Obscene rewards: I'm all for progressive taxation, and against enormous inequality.

OK, where was I? Later in the same article Read says:

In another, earlier, interview Murray also claimed, ‘My body feels like a machine.’ These words will be of interest to a philosopher like Merleau-Ponty, or Zygmunt Bauman. They are a confession of a way of living the body and of experiencing oneself as an industrial object, and a commodity, which is critiqued beautifully also by a philosophical neurologist like Iain McGilchrist (see my piece at http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=3398). They reveal the ethos of an activity that goes beyond inspiring youngsters to work hard to achieve high aspirations. Rather it fills youngsters with the idea that it is OK and admirable to be alienated from your own body; that winning is all that matters; that joy is unimportant.

So now we have the commodification of the body as well. That's a bad thing. Whether that's really what's going on with tennis players like Murray (and I think Andre Agassi said that tennis was a joyless job to him too) is another matter. Some of the comments below Read's post address this question. Machinification is everywhere, though, including the slow death of the humanities and the growth of distance learning. As Read implies, this is linked with a kind of consequentialism without utilitarianism, without hedonism. Winning is all that matters, joy is unimportant. This is the attitude of soulless capitalism, and it's the attitude that Read seems to be primarily against.

This marks the difference between 'sport' and sport. As he writes here:

I have serious reservations about modern spectator ‘sport’. I think it isn’t really…sport any more. It is a kind of madly-over-rewarded professional body-machinisation and semi-prostitution.

And:

When referring to these professional capers, we should always put the scare-quotes in place… (As Confucius would have it: the most important task for a public intellectual is the rectification of names. The name of ‘sport’ has now been thoroughly turned on its head. We need to recover the old meaning (As in ‘What sport we had!’ Or ‘Now that was sporting!’).)

I'm not sure about the semi-prostitution idea (though women's beach volleyball is a possible exception), but the main idea, as I see it, is that professional sport has become joyless. It bears the hallmarks (excessive financial rewards, machinification of the people involved, exclusive focus on winning) of soulless capitalism, and involves precious little fun. This is, at least in general (and it is meant as a general point, after all), true.

Read also suggests that the Olympics causes people to "forget about solidarity with the Arab Awakening, to forget about the collapsing Euro, to forget about our day-by-day smashing of biodiversity and destruction of a liveable atmosphere." And that it increases nationalism. And that instead of watching sports people should be out playing them instead. All of which is questionable. It is possible to watch the Olympics and care about, or even do, other things as well. Nationalism, at least in the United States, is not likely to increase because of the Olympics. We're already pretty much at saturation point. And I would blame the commentators before I would blame the games themselves. I also don't like the idea that we should not watch but play. Why not do both? What if you can't play? Mark Edmundson said something similar about music, and my sense was that he just doesn't really like music. If you want to be in a band, good. But no one should feel that they have to be. And no one should stop listening to good music, or watching good sport, because of some participation ethic. If you want to join a team, fine. If you would rather go running on your own, also fine. If something else is your thing, fine too. We're not boy scouts. Part of the point of sport and art is to express yourself. The self part of that is important, and it requires freedom, including freedom not to join in.

What's good about both art and sport is the quasi-religious aspect (which brings with it an idolatrous aspect, of course: as I was sort of getting at here) and the aesthetics. Am I really going to try to talk about the aesthetics of art? I suppose not, but I will talk about the aesthetics of sport, or of sport as art. Or I'll let other people do so:

That's Stephen Mulhall, from Inheritance and Originality. Here's Geoff Dyer on the marathon in the 2004 Olympics:

Victory and triumph over adversity (as supremely achieved - twice - by Kelly Holmes) are uplifting, but defeat and failure can be utterly transfixing, too. [...]

When Elfenesh Alemu went past her, Radcliffe realised that not only would she not win gold but that she was out of the medals. [...] It was like watching someone having a complete crack-up before your eyes. As such it made superb television. (The grassy verge on which she ended up even lent a Zapruderish touch to the footage.) Athletes deny nine-tenths of themselves so that they can pack the remaining tenth with incredible intensity and purpose. While plenty of people succumb to the urge to give up (going to the gym, trying to be an artist), it goes pretty much unnoticed. But for Radcliffe this was both a public and complete ontological collapse. And it happened, let's not forget, on the very day that that icon of modern despair, Edvard Munch's The Scream was stolen. Who needs art when you've got sport?

Tears of one kind or another were everywhere in evidence at these games. Enough were shed on my sofa to leave me repeatedly and blurrily amazed by sport's capacity to reach depths of emotion that used to be regarded as the preserve of high art. [...] At a time when our responses to everything - especially so-called tragedy - are consistently being cheapened, coarsened and, preprogrammed, sport accesses some zone of shared feeling that remains mysterious in spite of the familiarity of the clichés by which it is routinely articulated. Wordsworth claimed to have thoughts that lay "too deep for tears" but the tears that left Matthew Pinsent a quaking hulk on the podium came from so far within they were practically chthonic.

[...] The majority of the occasions that left me blubbing involved some display of sportsmanship like this: when the decathletes, shattered by their exertions of the last 36 hours embraced each other; when the beaten Bernard Lagat shared El Guerrouj's joy at winning the 1500 metres that had eluded him for so long.

By contrast, the idea that winning is the only thing has become so entrenched in football as to render the sport abhorrent as often as it is thrilling (it was also one of the reasons why the Euros ended up being such a bore). 

Mulhall and Dyer alert us to the art that sport can be, even if we also recognize that the joyless and selfish obsession with one's own victory that Read decries does exist and is a blight.

But is it art? Dyer focuses on the elicitation of emotion, but Mulhall talks also of style, elegance, innovation, of a form of communication, and of seeing, and making visible, something that no one else sees. I think he's right, and that this is enough to make talk of art perfectly appropriate.

Does sport share other features with art? In August 1930 Wittgenstein wrote:

The work of art compels us—as one might say—to see it in the right perspective, but without art the object [der Gegenstand] is a piece of nature like any other & the fact that we may exalt it through our enthusiasm does not give anyone the right to display it to us. (I am always reminded of one of those insipid photographs of a piece of scenery which is interesting to the person who took it because he was there himself, experienced something, but which a third party looks at with justifiable coldness; insofar as it is ever justifiable to look at something with coldness.[)]

But now it seems to me too that besides the work of the artist there is another through which the world may be captured sub specie æterni. It is—as I believe—theway of thought which as it were flies above the world and leaves it the way it is, contemplating it from above in its flight.  [copied gratefully from here]

Do Manchester United (when playing at their best) capture the world sub specie aeterni? Do Olympic athletes? They don't show us an object in the right perspective, because they aren't engaged in representational art. What they do is closer to music or to dance than still-life painting or photography. But there is a sort of ecstasy that comes from seeing incredible skill. Incredibility is the key, I think. When we ask "How did they do that?" we aren't looking for information, as a fellow athlete or coach might. We mean !, not ? And although this is a crude thing to say, great music does something like that too. You might not shout "Woah!" in the middle of a piece of music, but that's roughly what happens. There is a feeling almost of physical movement (not your toes tapping but something like floating or flying, a weightlessness inside that can come on quite suddenly), and a mental transportation. The idea that art presents the world timelessly comes from Schopenhauer, and  it was he also who said that the inner nature of the world, behind or beneath the phenomena we know as the world, is music. Phenomena are sensible expressions of this inaudible music in, I suppose, roughly the way that dance is a visible expression of music. The world as Schopenhauer sees it is a performance of music, something like a song or a dance. By instantiating a Platonic form each kind does its own dance: trees do the tree dance, bears do the bear dance, and so on. (Although really there is only one dance, so trees perform the tree part of the dance, bears the bear part, etc.). And sport is, or can be, something like this. Of course if Schopenhauer is right then everything is like this, but Wittgenstein's point is that it takes an artist to make it clear that any given thing is like this. A dance, not to the music of time, but to the music of no-time, the eternal music, the music of time standing still while Beckham bends it or Ronaldo corkscrews it or Kagawa sees and executes a pass that no one else could see was there to be made. At its best sport reminds us what we are, what we can be, and that what we are includes unimagined possibilities.

This is at odds with the soullessness of soulless capitalism. Good sport wakes us up, invigorates, makes us wonder. Yes we (merely) spectate, but that's what you do with art. And yes, even in the best of all possible worlds there will be more bad plays than good. Many more. But the experience needn't ever be soulless. It needn't be completely passive. We can respond emotionally to what we see.

The soulless capitalist model of sport is not like this. If the crowd does not cheer or sing loudly enough, music and even singing noises will be piped in. Fans must not get so excited that they stand up (Manchester United fans in particular get in trouble for this). Everything that can be sponsored will be sponsored. And, of course, winning is all that matters. There are exceptions to all these rules, but this is the pattern. Fans are consumers, there to be managed and milked of their money. Individuality is bad for business. You are supposed to buy and wear the team shirt, eat your prawn sandwich, and then go home. The same as everyone else. And like them you are supposed to focus on the lowest common denominator, the result.

All of that is bad. But the enemy isn't sport. Bill McKibben says in his article on global warming that "we have met the enemy and they is Shell." In football the enemy is the Glazer family, Sheikh Mansour, and Roman Abramovich. In general the enemy is big corporations and their power over ever more areas of our lives. Because of this power there is little anyone else can do except vote for whichever politicians seem most likely to restrain their power. We can also, though, battle the mindset that favors, and is therefore favored by, corporations: the desire to turn people into sheep or machines, something obedient and predictable; the value-system that puts success (understood in simple consequentialist terms) above everything else; and the blind faith that huge, private corporations are necessary and even good.

The love of sport allows people to see what damage is done by this kind of soulless capitalism. Anything that brings true joy is the enemy of soullessness. That might not be Andy Murray, but I wouldn't reject all professional tennis, or football, or the Olympics because of the worst aspects of contemporary sport. Fun and games are not yet incompatible.

Pictures

I've been thinking about pictures a lot recently, partly because I saw a lot of pictures on vacation that I wished I knew more about, and partly because I've been thinking about metaphors, secondary sense, and pictures in language. If I insist on using the word 'brown' to describe a voice, or 'yellow' to describe a vowel, then why do I want this word here? Because of its meaning, we might say, but not really because of its use in the language, or its normal use. Isn't it more because I want to evoke a certain picture, to sound a certain note on the keyboard of the imagination? The words 'brown' and 'yellow' don't usually work like this. They don't mean what they mean by popping the lid off a mental paint can labeled 'brown' or 'yellow' as Descartes (roughly speaking) thought. Meanings ain't in the head, and if when Madonna sang that "cherish is the word I use to remind me of your love" she meant to imply that language generally works by summoning up private memories and associations then she is wrong.

But it is something along these lines that people seem to be doing when they use 'yellow'  in songs like "Yellow" by Coldplay or "Bright As Yellow" by the Innocence Mission. They want the listener to picture the color yellow in her mind as she hears, and to understand what is said in light of this (which means something like side-by-side with this image). Maybe that's not quite right. But some association is being used or counted on, and the association with 'yellow' (not a very complicated metaphor) is surely likely to be something like an after-image or vague thoughts of lemons and sunshine. It's almost as if the kind of philosophy of language that Wittgenstein rejects is true of metaphorical language. (Or: when I try to philosophize about language on my own I repeat the mistakes of philosophers who have not learned from Wittgenstein. I'm not sure. The way to work this out is to go in deeper.)

Because of this interest in pictures I'm reading Gombrich's The Story of Art. He writes:

Everyone knows that Egypt is the land of the pyramids, those mountains of stone which stand like weathered landmarks on the distant horizon of history. However remote and mysterious they seem, they tell us much of their own story. They tell us of a land which was so thoroughly organized that it was possible to pile up these gigantic mounds in the lifetime of a single king, and they tell us of kings who were so rich and powerful that they could force thousands and thousands of workers or slaves to toil for them year in, year out, to quarry the stones, to drag them to the building site, and to shift them with the most primitive means until the tomb was ready to receive the king. No king, and no people would have gone to such expense, and taken so much trouble, for the creation of a mere monument. In fact, we know that the pyramids had their practical importance in the eyes of the kings and their subjects. The king was considered a divine being who held sway over them, and on his departure from this earth he would again ascend to the gods whence he had come. The pyramids soaring up to the sky would probably help him to make his ascent.

This strikes me as both true and false. It is true that "No king, and no people would have gone to such expense, and taken so much trouble, for the creation of a mere monument." But medieval cathedrals, Stonehenge, and the pyramids all suggest that it is perhaps only for monuments that people will go to such trouble. If asked why, they might be likely to offer the kind of practical purpose that Gombrich describes. For the sake of eternal life it makes sense to work hard before we die. And yet people don't readily give up smoking or eat more healthily or exercise more for the sake of longer life. And this is despite evidence that doing so will help, which is quite lacking in the case of the belief that "pyramids soaring up to the sky would probably help him to make his ascent" (even if 'probably' is not part of their belief but is rather Gombrich's judgment on the plausibility of his hypothesis). 


People will make incredible sacrifices and efforts for religious purposes that they will not make for secular purposes, even if they think of the two as being the same. It isn't what they think, in other words, that really matters. The difference shows up in what they do. This might be guided by pictures. Perhaps it has to be, perhaps it would never work without some pictures, and these might have to be of a particular kind. But it is the effect of these pictures, or the use to which they are put, that really matters, not the pictures themselves (e.g. pictures of living on after death). It seems to be important that the pictures are not thought about too much, are not investigated. They might need to be thought about in the sense of being kept in mind, but wondering about cause and effect (as in Fyodor Karamazov's wondering about the hooks in hell) will tend to undermine their efficacy. 


Monuments are objects that we literally live by (i.e. near to), and they are, presumably, meant to influence how we live as well. So they function like pictures or metaphors. We live, if not in their light, then in their shadow. They also express beliefs or attitudes. (At least monuments like ancient pyramids do. Others might express nothing but a desire to build something large or monumental.) But this expression is not statement. There's a difference between crying and saying "I am sad." I think it's easy to misinterpret expressions if we take them as instruments (even though they might be instrumental in some ways). But they aren't (always) just expressions either. They can be intelligible, articulate. 


I don't know whether I've got this right or said anything new, but this is probably long enough for a blog post in which I'm really just thinking out loud. Please feel free, as ever, to correct any errors.

Loving dung

In her paper "On the Very idea of a Form of Life" Lynne Rudder Baker quotes Stanley Cavell saying that when we think of forms of life as conventional "the array of 'conventions' are not patterns of life which differentiate human beings from one another, but those exigencies of conduct and feeling which all humans share." According to Raimond Gaita (according to Drew Carter) it is part of our form of life that one cannot love cow dung. But some human beings do love cow dung, so what should we believe?

Perhaps I should first make my case that some people love dung. They don't fall in love with it, of course, but they value it highly. Cow dung is used as a building material and as something to burn. People who regard cows as sacred also value cow dung. In the BBC series "Extreme Pilgrim," Pete Owen-Jones is brought gifts of cow dung to burn by Hindu villagers who regard him as a holy man. It doesn't smell bad, he reports, and it is meant as a respectful gift. So I think it isn't too much of a stretch to say that some people might love cow dung, at least as much as anyone might love any natural material that they work with (and perhaps more, given the religious aspect).

Carter's point is to get across a distinction made by Gaita, a distinction between conceptual or grammatical claims (such as "one cannot love evil") and merely factual claims (such as "one cannot love cow dung"). The latter, not the former, are supposed to relate to our form of life. In Carter's view, "the central question to ask of all Wittgensteinian moral philosophy" is "Why do there exist no moral "mere facts," defining our form of life?"

I'm not sure about any of this, partly because I'm not sure what kind of love is involved in each case. People can relish evil. Does that count? Think, for instance, of the young Augustine delighting in stealing, or some kinds of sadism (the kind where part of the goal is to be as bad, or bad-ass, as possible). It would be hard to love all evil, especially evil done to you, but it can be hard to love all good too. No one loves paying their debts. Still, I think I agree with Gaita on this. Evil means bad, to love is to see as good, and good is the opposite of bad, hence you cannot love evil. Loving dung is not like this. It's an accident (of sorts) that we don't like its smell or taste.

So Carter's question might mean: is there anything morally good or bad that is accidentally so? Could ethics be empirical? Could it turn out that this or that was right or wrong? And I think the answer to that has to be No, although I'm not sure why. Certainly it could turn out that something had been a bad idea, but this wouldn't be a moral failing in itself.

(Chris Ofili uses elephant dung in his paintings. I don't know whether he loves it, but it seems possible that he might.)

Is Morrissey racist?

Yes.

You could read his remark that "You can't help but feel that the Chinese are a subspecies" as a description of unwanted feelings that arise when you think about the abuse of animals in China (his remark came after these words: "Did you see the thing on the news about their treatment of animals and animal welfare? Absolutely horrific"), but he has refused to distance himself from the feeling he described, and he has a history of this sort of thing. There's not much else to say except a) we probably all have racial prejudices of some kind, at some level, b) at least he denies being a racist rather than proudly or defiantly insisting on it, and c) the whole thing reminded me of "Curtain" by Chinese artists Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, which consists of "400kg lobsters, 30kg bullfrogs, 30kg snakes, 20kg eels, and iron wire." The animals were impaled live on the wire and left to die. But, of course, this is two people, not the whole nation of China, and other artists, from other countries, have done similar things. Yuck.

Don't let yourself be consoled

I suppose there are exceptions, but crowds generally seem like a bad thing. Perhaps there is something to be said for transcending egoism by merging with a mass of people, but losing yourself is usually losing yourself in something, and what this is matters (it seems to me). So waving a lighter while singing along with thousands of other people to "Free Bird" or "Sunday Bloody Sunday" can't be good, even though those aren't bad songs. If you're going to give up yourself it should be for something better than that. This has something to do with integrity or honesty. Roughly: you should sing your own songs.

The idea of a non-conformist crowd is absurd. So this story about political slogans at a football match seems to miss the point. Fans holding up banners that read "The Truth Is Always Revolutionary" and "There Are No Idols" are not being political so much as absurd. Art doesn't make football political. It makes politics absurd. This in itself could be political, puncturing overinflated myths perhaps, but obscure, arty slogans are quite different from the more common, thuggish politics associated with, say, Lazio (nicknamed Nazio by some because of their fondness for fascist salutes and banners).

So I like the 'philosophical' banners as a kind of joke, but I don't expect them to change the world.