Sally Rooney's Intermezzo

Sally Rooney’s new novel is possibly her best yet. It’s hard for me to judge, since it’s so relevant to topics I have a special interest in, which makes it appeal to me in ways it might not to others.

I take Intermezzo to be primarily about what to do concerning sex (and religion) in this age that might seem to lie between the age of Anscombe’s Catholic Christianity (at least in Rooney’s Ireland) and whatever is to come. It could also be read as a consideration of the differences between Anscombe’s traditional views on sex and religion and Wittgenstein’s still demanding but much less traditional views. He believed in God in some sense and was a Christian, at least in his own mind, in some sense, but he was nowhere near as orthodox or clear in his views as she was, and he considered Anscombe to be narrow-minded. He was somewhere in the LGBTQIA+ realm, especially the G, B, and A parts of that ballpark. 

Why call the novel Intermezzo if that is what it is about? One of the main characters in the book, Ivan Koubek, is a chess-player.  Ryan Ruby points out that intermezzo has a chess-related meaning in his review here.

Wikipedia explains this meaning as follows:

The zwischenzug is a chess tactic in which a player, instead of playing the expected move (commonly a recapture), first interposes another move posing an immediate threat that the opponent must answer, and only then plays the expected move. It is a move that has a high degree of "initiative". Ideally, the zwischenzug changes the situation to the player's advantage, such as by gaining material or avoiding what would otherwise be a strong continuation for the opponent.

 

This kind of move is also called an intermezzo or an in-between move. More commonly, ‘intermezzo’ means a short dramatic composition or piece of music that comes between two other, longer pieces. It sounds to me as though it could refer simply to something that comes between two other things or, in chess, to the messy period in dialectical progress that comes before what will later be evident progress.

So what does this have to do with Anscombe? I have mentioned Ivan Koubek already. His brother Peter and his ex/girlfriend Sylvia Larkin are two more major characters. Peter’s and Sylvia’s relationship is complicated, originally because of an accident she suffered a few years earlier. An overheard conversation between doctors includes this information:

 

History of chronic refractory pain following traumatic injury. Road traffic accident. […] The old life of pleasure gone and never returning. (p. 14)

 

The “old life of pleasure” that has gone includes her sex life.

Compare this with the ending of Anscombe’s paper “You Can have Sex without Children: Christianity and the New Offer” (in her Collected Papers Volume III, pp. 82-96). Speaking of sexual intercourse with the intention not of performing “a generative type of act” but for one or both of the people involved to achieve orgasm, she asks:  

 

if it is indeed all right to do this for good ends, then it is excessively difficult to see why after all the act need closely resemble a normal complete act of copulation; supposing that to have been made very difficult, say by a crippling accident to the wife, why should the couple not achieve sexual climax by mutual stimulation, rather than hold themselves obliged to a heroic degree of continence?  

 

A large part of what Intermezzo is about is what Peter and Sylvia, or any couple in this situation, should do. Since they are not already married, my understanding is, the Catholic view is that they should not get married.

 

Code of Canon Law in section 1084:

 §1. Antecedent and perpetual impotence to have intercourse, whether on the part of the man or the woman, whether absolute or relative, nullifies marriage by its very nature. (Quoted from https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/why-the-church-cannot-marry-the-impotent)

 

They should either stay single, holding themselves to what might be considered a heroic degree of continence, or Peter should find someone else to marry.

This is roughly the position taken by Sylvia. Her relationship with Peter will not work, she believes, so he should find someone else. She says this not on religious grounds, although those might be lurking in the background, and not really sincerely. In reality, they both still love each other and want to be together, although their lives get even more complicated when Peter falls in love with one of the other women he dates. What to do about this (kind of) situation is another big question that the novel raises without really answering.

Philip Larkin is quoted in the novel early on, and Sylvia’s sharing his last name is probably not just a coincidence. The quotation is from “Church Going,” a poem about an atheist’s feeling the pull of religion, or at least a church. Here’s how it ends, including the bit that Rooney quotes:

 

[…] though I've no idea

What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,

It pleases me to stand in silence here;

 

A serious house on serious earth it is,

In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,

Are recognised, and robed as destinies.

And that much never can be obsolete,

Since someone will forever be surprising

A hunger in himself to be more serious,

And gravitating with it to this ground,

Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,

If only that so many dead lie round.

 

Ruby writes:

 

Rooney’s engagement with Christianity in her fiction is less-often remarked on, but far more prevalent [than Marxism in her fiction]. Sylvia has a ‘sincere and transcendent love of Christ’, which is sometimes also a ‘terrifyingly real and serious fear of Christ’. Margaret ‘seems to feel obscurely that the day she met Ivan, they brought into existence a new relationship’, and that, ‘in the eyes of God’, her loyalty to this new ‘way of being’ may demand sacrifices of her, including ‘her pride, her dignity, her life itself’. When she asks Ivan if he believes in God, Ivan articulates a theory of divinity as a kind of aesthetic principle.

 

Beauty, or at least beauty of a certain kind, Ivan explains, makes him think there is a meaning behind everything. He connects this with belief in God.

Near the end of the novel Peter and Ivan each describe themselves as trying to believe in God.

Ruby also quotes a character (it’s Sylvia as registered in Peter’s consciousness, I think) referring to the “Sense that nothing can mean anything anymore, aesthetically.” Anscombe says something very similar. I have in mind especially things she says in an unpublished document which I don’t have permission to quote here, but also her claim in a 1972 letter to The Human World that, according to contemporary literature, “we are all crawling around in shit, that all is hopeless and absurd.” Sylvia is a bit like Anscombe, but not exactly like her. She doesn’t believe what Anscombe believes, and is at least somewhat open to possibilities that Anscombe rejects.

Rooney does not preach, but she does suggest some options to consider. One of these is that we do not yet have the concepts we need to think very well about all this. Perhaps our ideas of God will do, but our ideas about love and sex might need some revision. Here Rooney sounds a bit like Paulina Sliwa. Sliwa introduces the notion of what she calls hermeneutical inquiry, which she characterizes as making sense of the situation one is in. (See Paulina Sliwa “Making Sense of Things: Moral Inquiry as Hermeneutical Inquiry” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 2023, pp. 1-21.) For instance, a woman who has been raped (the example Sliwa focuses on) might take some time to realize this. Partly this could be because one is reluctant to acknowledge such a repellent truth, but it might also be because one associates certain ideas with rape (a stranger in an alley or overt threats of violence, for instance) and one’s own case might not match these stereotypes.

 

This is not simply a matter of working out “how to conceptualise one’s experience” though, Sliwa argues. Rather, it is a matter of trying to find a perspective on one’s experience:

 

A perspective is a complex set of interconnected cognitive, affective, and motivational dispositions: dispositions to find salient, to be moved by, to see as explanatorily or morally significant, to see a situation as similar to or different from another. A perspective is thus a way of making sense of a situation. (p. 2)

 

The confused rape victim does not lack the word or concept ‘rape’. Nor is it that she suffers from “uncertainty about which option from a menu is the correct one” (p. 5). Rather, she is confused and needs to find “a different way of looking and feeling about the subject matter at hand” (p. 5). The idea that what has happened to her is rape might not occur to her until some way into her attempt to make sense of things. And when that idea does occur to her, it might well not be immediately obvious that ‘rape’ is the right word to use. So she isn’t simply at a loss for words. She is engaged in an intellectual process that will, if successful, result in her learning something about her situation.

What she needs is to find the right, most apt, perspective, Sliwa says. Perspectives are not just words or concepts, but they are expressed by words. For instance, one perspective on what has happened is expressed by the words “dealing with an asshole” (p. 12). Another is expressed by “rape.” I think this point might be expressible in terms of conceptualization, but, if so, Sliwa is surely right that this is not a simple matter of hitting on the right word.

 

Rooney has a similar idea about choosing a name for something from a given assortment of options. She talks about what Peter and Sylvia are as:

 

A philosophical problem. When they go out together, to be mistaken for what they aren’t. Or rather: to be mistaken for what they are. And how is that possible. To see a man and a woman walking together: to name in the mind their relationship to one another, as it were automatically. Which is to select from the assortment of existing names the one that seems appropriate to the particular case. To say to oneself that in relation to the man, this particular woman must be a friend, or else a girlfriend, or a wife, or sister. An act of naming which stands open to correction, but correction only in the form of replacement: that is, the replacement of one existing name for another. If you are mistaken in thinking this woman my friend, that means merely that you have chosen the wrong term from the assortment, and therefore that I can correct you by supplying the appropriate one in its place. The decisive movement in the conjuring trick has been made, says Wittgenstein, and it was the very one that we thought quite innocent. Because the name you give to a presumed relation between a man and woman may be both correct and incorrect at once. Each name including within itself a complex of assumptions. (p. 400)

 

Rooney quotes Wittgenstein here, but she might equally have quoted Iris Murdoch (who, like Anscombe, was also born in Ireland). Murdoch writes:

 

if we consider what the work of attention is like, how continuously it goes on, and how imperceptibly it builds up structures of value round about us, we shall not be surprised that at crucial moments of choice most of the business of choosing is already over. (“The Idea of Perfection” in Existentialists and Mystics, p. 329.)

 

Contemporary sexual ethics seems to be a bit of a mess, in the sense that a lot of people seem to be unhappy about what is expected or what actually happens or both. Women continue to be treated badly. There is a lot of involuntary celibacy. More people seem to want to get married than actually manage to do so. Dating is often said to be an unpleasant or disappointing experience. Whether we would do best to go back to traditional values or press on with the current ones or find something new seems to be a live question.

What we need might be new names or new complexes of assumptions. Which, as Rooney (or Peter) notes, is a social as well as a philosophical problem. And for that we would need to pay attention, thinking both carefully and imaginatively. In the meantime, in this intermission between the moral world that Anscombe (and most of Ireland) lived in and some possible new one that might be to come, we have to struggle to make sense of how we live and ought to live, including what to call things. (Assuming, that is, that we don’t simply agree with Anscombe. But Rooney seems to take this for granted.) Rooney’s contribution to the struggle is bringing up the apparent need for it, and getting us started on exploring some options, drawing the attention that is needed to at least some of the places where it needs to go.

Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé and others on literature after Wittgenstein

Another Zoom symposium on a Wittgenstein-related book, this one featuring Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé, Marjorie Perloff, et al.   

Thoughts from Camus

I'm reading The Plague. Here's the most interesting bit so far:

[T]he narrator is inclined to think that by attributing overimportance to praiseworthy actions one may, by implication, be paying indirect but potent homage to the worse side of human nature. For this attitude implies that such actions shine out as rare exceptions, while callousness and apathy are the general rule. The narrator does not share that view. The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. 

[...]

Those who enrolled in the "sanitary squads," as they were called, had, indeed, no such great merit in doing as they did, since they knew it was the only thing to do, and the unthinkable thing would then have been not to have brought themselves to do it. These groups enabled our townsfolk to come to grips with the disease and convinced them that, now that plague was among us, it was up to them to do whatever could be done to fight it. Since plague became in this way some men's duty, it revealed itself as what it really was; that is, the concern of all.

So far, so good. But we do not congratulate a schoolmaster on teaching that two and two make four, though we may, perhaps, congratulate him on having chosen his laudable vocation. Let us then say it was praiseworthy that Tarrou and so many others should have elected to prove that two and two make four rather than the contrary; but let us add that this good will of theirs was one that is shared by the schoolmaster and by all who have the same feelings as the schoolmaster, and, be it said to the credit of mankind, they are more numerous than one would think, such, anyhow, is the narrator's conviction. Needless to say, he can see quite clearly a point that could be made against him, which is that these men were risking their lives. But again and again there comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death.

The schoolteacher is well aware of this. And the question is not one of knowing what punishment or reward attends the making of this calculation. The question is that of knowing whether two and two do make four. For those of our townsfolk who risked their lives in this predicament the issue was whether or not plague was in their midst and whether or not they must fight against it.

Anthony Fauci knows that two and two make four, and of course he has received death threats for saying so.

New books

My summer reading pile is already probably too big, but here's more to add to it. 

Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé's A Different Order of Difficulty: Literature After Wittgenstein asks:

Is the point of philosophy to transmit beliefs about the world, or can it sometimes have higher ambitions? In this bold study, Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé makes a critical contribution to the “resolute” program of Wittgenstein scholarship, revealing his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus as a complex, mock- theoretical puzzle designed to engage readers in the therapeutic self-clarification Wittgenstein saw as the true work of philosophy. Seen in this light, Wittgenstein resembles his modernist contemporaries more than might first appear. Like the literary innovators of his time, Wittgenstein believed in the productive power of difficulty, in varieties of spiritual experience, in the importance of age-old questions about life’s meaning, and in the possibility of transfigurative shifts toward the right way of seeing the world. In a series of absorbing chapters, Zumhagen-Yekplé shows how Kafka, Woolf, Joyce, and Coetzee set their readers on a path toward a new way of being. Offering a new perspective on Wittgenstein as philosophical modernist, and on the lives and afterlives of his indirect teaching, A Different Order of Difficulty is a compelling addition to studies in both literature and philosophy. 

Rupert Read and Samuel Alexander's This Civilisation is Finished: Conversations on the End of Empire -- and what lies beyond is a pay-what-you-like ebook (also available in paperback). Here's the blurb:

Industrial civilisation has no future. It requires limitless economic growth on a finite planet. The reckless combustion of fossil fuels means that Earth’s climate is changing disastrously, in ways that cannot be resolved by piecemeal reform or technological innovation. Sooner rather than later this global capitalist system will come to an end, destroyed by its own ecological contradictions. Unless we do something beautiful and unprecedented, the ending of industrial civilisation will take the form of collapse, which could mean a harrowing die-off of billions of people.  This book is for those ready to accept the full gravity of the human predicament – and to consider what in the world is to be done. How can humanity mindfully navigate the inevitable descent ahead? Two critical thinkers here remove the rose-tinted glasses of much social and environmental commentary. With unremitting realism and yet defiant positivity, they engage each other in uncomfortable conversations about the end of Empire and what lies beyond.

The meaning of Iris Murdoch's work

Philosophers were invited to write on a postcard (to be sent to a randomly chosen fan, I think) what Iris Murdoch's work means to them. The answers are available to read here. Some of my favorite philosophers are there, and it's interesting just to read all the answers as a kind of summary of what Murdoch has to offer.

The Burrow

Anscombe was a big fan of Kafka's short story "The Burrow." Unfortunately, I don't know why. She said she didn't understand it at first, so my working hypothesis is that she came to think that she did understand it and that she liked it because of what she took its meaning to be. But what was that?

Coetzee also seems to be a fan, and has a lot to say about time in the story. (In case that link doesn't work for you, the paper is "Time, Tense and Aspect in Kafka's "The Burrow"," in MLN Vol. 96, No. 3, April 1981, pp. 556-579.) A few quotes from this paper might give some idea of what the story is about, and hence of what Anscombe might have taken it to be about:

The state in which Kafka's creature lives is one of acute anxiety (one would call it irrational anxiety if there were any reliable opposition between rational and irrational in his universe). His whole life is organized around the burrow, his defense against an attack which may come at any moment and without warning. (p. 574)

Time in "The Burrow" is discontinuous in a strictly formalizable sense. Any moment may mark the break between before and after. Time is thus at every moment a time of crisis (from Greek krino "to separate, to divide"). Life consists in an attempt to anticipate a danger which cannot be anticipated because it comes without transition, without warning. The experience of a time of crisis is colored by anxiety. The task of building the burrow itself represents a life devoted to trying to still anxiety, naturally without success; for without warning "the enemy" is in the burrow. (p. 575)

What we have in "The Burrow", rather, is a struggle--not only the representation of the struggle but the struggle itself--with time experienced as continual crisis, and experienced at a pitch of anxiety that leads to attempts to tame it with whatever means language offers. (pp. 576-577) 

I don't know whether, or why, questions about tense and time would have interested Anscombe especially (although of course they might have), but I wonder whether it's too fanciful to see a connection with some of what Father Zosima says here (from The Brothers Karamazov):

To transform the world, to recreate it afresh, men must turn into another path psychologically. Until you have become really, in actual fact, a brother to every one, brotherhood will not come to pass. No sort of scientific teaching, no kind of common interest, will ever teach men to share property and privileges with equal consideration for all. Every one will think his share too small and they will be always envying, complaining and attacking one another. You ask when it will come to pass; it will come to pass, but first we have to go through the period of isolation.”

“What do you mean by isolation?” I asked him.

“Why, the isolation that prevails everywhere, above all in our age—it has not fully developed, it has not reached its limit yet. For every one strives to keep his individuality as apart as possible, wishes to secure the greatest possible fullness of life for himself; but meantime all his efforts result not in attaining fullness of life but self-destruction, for instead of self-realization he ends by arriving at complete solitude. All mankind in our age have split up into units, they all keep apart, each in his own groove; each one holds aloof, hides himself and hides what he has, from the rest, and he ends by being repelled by others and repelling them. He heaps up riches by himself and thinks, ‘How strong I am now and how secure,’ and in his madness he does not understand that the more he heaps up, the more he sinks into self-destructive impotence. For he is accustomed to rely upon himself alone and to cut himself off from the whole; he has trained himself not to believe in the help of others, in men and in humanity, and only trembles for fear he should lose his money and the privileges that he has won for himself. Everywhere in these days men have, in their mockery, ceased to understand that the true security is to be found in social solidarity rather than in isolated individual effort. But this terrible individualism must inevitably have an end, and all will suddenly understand how unnaturally they are separated from one another. It will be the spirit of the time, and people will marvel that they have sat so long in darkness without seeing the light. And then the sign of the Son of Man will be seen in the heavens....   

If a whale could speak

Melville:

Furthermore, as his windpipe solely opens into the tube of his spouting canal, and as that long canal- like the grand Erie Canal- is furnished with a sort of locks (that open and shut) for the downward retention of air or the upward exclusion of water, therefore the whale has no voice; unless you insult him by saying, that when he so strangely rumbles, he talks through his nose. But then again, what has the whale to say? Seldom have I known any profound being that had anything to say to this world, unless forced to stammer out something by way of getting a living

Seeing the world aright

[What follows is little more than a bunch of quotes strung together. But they are good quotes.]

The desirability of seeing what is under our noses and thereby becoming free is a bit of a theme in 19th century European thought.

Here's Father Zossima, a favorite of Wittgenstein's, in The Brothers Karamazov (emphasis added):

Brothers, have no fear of men's sin. Love a man even in his sin, for that is the semblance of Divine Love and is the highest love on earth. Love all God's creation, the whole and every grain of sand in it. Love every leaf, every ray of God's light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love. Love the animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled. Do not trouble it, don't harass them, don't deprive them of their happiness, don't work against God's intent. Man, do not pride yourself on superiority to the animals; they are without sin, and you, with your greatness, defile the earth by your appearance on it, and leave the traces of your foulness after you—alas, it is true of almost every one of us! Love children especially, for they too are sinless like the angels; they live to soften and purify our hearts and as it were to guide us. Woe to him who offends a child! Father Anfim taught me to love children. The kind, silent man used often on our wanderings to spend the farthings given us on sweets and cakes for the children. He could not pass by a child without emotion. That's the nature of the man.

This advice (there is more in the surrounding pages) is given as an alternative to the (allegedly) false wisdom of the day, which sounds very similar to today's dominant ideology:

The world has proclaimed the reign of freedom, especially of late, but what do we see in this freedom of theirs? Nothing but slavery and self-destruction! For the world says:

“You have desires and so satisfy them, for you have the same rights as the most rich and powerful. Don't be afraid of satisfying them and even multiply your desires.” That is the modern doctrine of the world. In that they see freedom. And what follows from this right of multiplication of desires? In the rich, isolation and spiritual suicide; in the poor, envy and murder; for they have been given rights, but have not been shown the means of satisfying their wants. They maintain that the world is getting more and more united, more and more bound together in brotherly community, as it overcomes distance and sets thoughts flying through the air.

Alas, put no faith in such a bond of union. Interpreting freedom as the multiplication and rapid satisfaction of desires, men distort their own nature, for many senseless and foolish desires and habits and ridiculous fancies are fostered in them. They live only for mutual envy, for luxury and ostentation. 

Plato might have agreed with this, too, so perhaps the 19th century has nothing to do with it, although the emphasis on perception seems very post-Kantian. Speaking of Plato, here's Schopenhauer:

Plato often says that men live only in a dream; the philosopher alone strives to awake himself.

And here is Schopenhauer again, sounding a bit Zossima-ish:

[W]hen 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 will-less knowledge, and as such they are both taken out of the stream of time and all other relations. It is then all one whether we see the sun set from the prison or from the palace. 

Forgetting all individuality also sounds a bit like Zossima, who says:

My brother asked the birds to forgive him; that sounds senseless, but it is right; for all is like an ocean, all is flowing and blending; a touch in one place sets up movement at the other end of the earth. It may be senseless to beg forgiveness of the birds, but birds would be happier at your side—a little happier, anyway—and children and 
all animals, if you were nobler than you are now. It's all like an ocean, I tell you. Then you would pray to the birds too, consumed by an all-embracing love, in a sort of transport, and pray that they too will forgive you your sin. Treasure this ecstasy, however senseless it may seem to men.

Nietzsche, too, believed in something like objective perception of reality, although he seems to deny the possibility of any such thing. Nevertheless, he opposed the "narcotics" of alcohol and Christianity. Marx wanted to replace false consciousness with (true) consciousness. But that's all fairly familiar. Less familiar to me until recently is Tolstoy on a similar theme, talking about causes in history. The whole chapter (Book Nine: 1812, Chapter 1) is worth reading (along with the first chapters of the next two books, not to mention the whole novel), but here is one highlight:

To us it is incomprehensible that millions of Christian men killed and tortured each other either because Napoleon was ambitious or Alexander was firm, or because England’s policy was astute or the Duke of Oldenburg wronged. We cannot grasp what connection such circumstances have with the actual fact of slaughter and violence: why because the Duke was wronged, thousands of men from the other side of Europe killed and ruined the people of Smolénsk and Moscow and were killed by them.

To us, their descendants, who are not historians and are not carried away by the process of research and can therefore regard the event with unclouded common sense, an incalculable number of causes present themselves. The deeper we delve in search of these causes the more of them we find; and each separate cause or whole series of causes appears to us equally valid in itself and equally false by its insignificance compared to the magnitude of the events, and by its impotence—apart from the cooperation of all the other coincident causes—to occasion the event. To us, the wish or objection of this or that French corporal to serve a second term appears as much a cause as Napoleon’s refusal to withdraw his troops beyond the Vistula and to restore the duchy of Oldenburg; for had he not wished to serve, and had a second, a third, and a thousandth corporal and private also refused, there would have been so many less men in Napoleon’s army and the war could not have occurred.

Tolstoy suggests that there is no one right way to understand what caused what, but he also raises the possibility of seemingly inevitable (and bad) events being prevented by ordinary people's refusing to go along with them. If we just realized this, and acted accordingly, how much better the world might be.

The big sky

I'm only now getting around to reading War and Peace, but I'm glad I am. Here are some good bits that I came across recently:

"That's a fine death!" said Napoleon as he gazed at Bolkonski.

Prince Andrew understood that this was said of him and that it was Napoleon who said it. He heard the speaker addressed as Sire. But he heard the words as he might have heard the buzzing of a fly. Not only did they not interest him, but he took no notice of them and at once forgot them. His head was burning, he felt himself bleeding to death, and he saw above him the remote, lofty, and everlasting sky. He knew it was Napoleon- his hero- but at that moment Napoleon seemed to him such a small, insignificant creature compared with what was passing now between himself and that lofty infinite sky with the clouds flying over it.

[...]

Though five minutes before, Prince Andrew had been able to say a few words to the soldiers who were carrying him, now with his eyes fixed straight on Napoleon, he was silent.... So insignificant at that moment seemed to him all the interests that engrossed Napoleon, so mean did his hero himself with his paltry vanity and joy in victory appear, compared to the lofty, equitable, and kindly sky which he had seen and understood, that he could not answer him.

Everything seemed so futile and insignificant in comparison with the stern and solemn train of thought that weakness from loss of blood, suffering, and the nearness of death aroused in him. Looking into Napoleon's eyes Prince Andrew thought of the insignificance of greatness, the unimportance of life which no one could understand, and the still greater unimportance of death, the meaning of which no one alive could understand or explain. 

Here's another bit:

Just as in a clock, the result of the complicated motion of innumerable wheels and pulleys is merely a slow and regular movement of the hands which show the time, so the result of all the complicated human activities of 160,000 Russians and French- all their passions, desires, remorse, humiliations, sufferings, outbursts of pride, fear, and enthusiasm- was only the loss of the battle of Austerlitz, the so-called battle of the three Emperors- that is to say, a slow movement of the hand on the dial of human history.

No doubt this is irrelevant, but the buzzing fly in the first of these passages reminded me of this by Schopenhauer:

[C]ast our glance forward far into the future, and seek to present to our minds the future generations, with the millions of their individuals in the strange form of their customs and pursuits, and then interpose with the question: Whence will all these come? Where are they now? Where is the fertile womb of that nothing, pregnant with worlds, which still conceals the coming races? Would not the smiling and true answer to this be, Where else should they be than there where alone the real always was and will be, in the present and its content?—thus with thee, the foolish questioner, who in this mistaking of his own nature is like the leaf upon the tree, which, fading in autumn and about to fall, complains at its destruction, and will not be consoled by looking forward to the fresh green which will clothe the tree in spring, but says lamenting, “I am not these! These are quite different leaves!” Oh, foolish leaf! Whither wilt thou? And whence should others come? Where is the nothing whose abyss thou fearest? Know thine own nature, that which is so filled with thirst for existence; recognise it in the inner, mysterious, germinating force of the tree, which, constantly one and the same in all generations of leaves, remains untouched by all arising and passing away. And now, οἱη περ φυλλων γενεη, τοιηδε και ανδρων (Qualis foliorum generatio, talis et hominum). Whether the fly which now buzzes round me goes to sleep in the evening, and buzzes again tomorrow, or dies in the evening, and in spring another fly buzzes which has sprung from its egg: that is in itself the same thing

The buzzing fly echo might be pure coincidence, but Schopenhauer is far from irrelevant to Tolstoy. In the year War and Peace was published (1869), Tolstoy wrote:

Do you know what this summer has meant for me? Constant raptures over Schopenhauer and a whole series of spiritual delights which I've never experienced before. ... no student has ever studied so much on his course, and learned so much, as I have this summer 

I don't know when he first read Schopenhauer ("some time in the 1860s," apparently) but if there was no Schopenhauerian influence on War and Peace then there is at least fertile soil there for a Schopenhauerian seed. The idea of the insignificance of greatness, of course, reminds me of the end of The World as Will and Representation: "to those in whom the will has turned and has denied itself, this our world, which is so real, with all its suns and milky-ways—is nothing." Perhaps Prince Andrew would seem likely to deny that the "lofty infinite sky" is nothing, but he continues: "All is vanity, all falsehood, except that infinite sky. There is nothing, nothing, but that. But even it does not exist, there is nothing but quiet and peace. Thank God!" And perhaps this sounds nihilistic, but he goes on to want nothing but to be brought back to "life, which seemed to him so beautiful now that he had today learned to understand it so differently."

Wittgenstein's interest in aspects surely must (although those words sound an alarm) have something to do with this kind of idea. There is something a bit ugly, though, in Schopenhauer's and Tolstoy's ways of making their point(s). "[T]his our world, which is so real [...] is nothing" is paradoxical, and so either mystificatory or cheaply clever. (I'm exaggerating the ugliness or cheapness or whatever we want to call it, but I think it's there. Or is my criticizing not just Schopenhauer's and Tolstoy's writing but some of their best writing a sign that I've gone off the rails?) And Prince Andrew leaves much unexplained when he both says, "There is nothing [...] but that. But even it does not exist..." and longs to live although "[T]here is nothing but quiet and peace." How does an enthusiastic desire to live square with the quasi-Schopenhauerian insight that "there is nothing [...] Thank God!"? And what are we to make of the idea that there is nothing but the sky and even it does not exist? The contradictions feel like a prelude, like something to be moved beyond. Which is what Schopenhauer and Prince Andrew intend, of course, but it means that the last words are far from being the conclusion. What matters is not the thought that expresses enlightenment (if that's what it is) but the life lived afterwards. And this means that the intellectual or theoretical route to this life cannot be the only possible one, cannot be essential. At this point, I suppose, you throw away the ladder and go and work in a garden. Whether any of this is helpful for understanding Wittgenstein's later philosophy, though, seems doubtful. 

Kafka and Wittgenstein II

Remember this? Rebecca Schuman's book is now available to order, and Paul Johnston has a short ebook on Kafka out too (which does not mention Wittgenstein, as far as I know, but you can't have everything).

The uselessness of humanity

There is a lot of wisdom and sense in Tal Brewer's essay on the value of the humanities (and the future of higher education, and politics, and economics, and the meaning of life), but I think I disagree with a key part of it. Tal rejects the idea that the humanities are useful because they are beneficial economically or politically, but he also rejects Stanley Fish's view:

that the humanities are their own reward, and that they can be justified only in terms of the special pleasure they afford their initiates, and that humanities professors should be pleased to admit their uselessness since this is tantamount to insisting on the autonomous and intrinsic value of their pursuits.

He doesn't reject it outright, but he does reject it:

The humanities really can be pleasurable, they really are intrinsically rewarding, and it would be a serious mistake to turn to them solely because of their usefulness. Yet in my view, Fish takes insufficient care to distinguish between the truth that the humanities are not to be used and the falsehood—I want to say, the slander—that they are useless. To say they are useless is to say they bring nothing of value to our lives beyond the transient pleasure of engaging in them. But this is surely wrong.

Here we get into what I am coming to think of as Wittgenstein territory, that is, the distinction between the animal and the ritual, which can also be thought of as the distinction between the pragmatic and the ethical, the trivial and the significant, the scientific and the transcendent, the factual and the valuable, the worldly and the unworldly. Attributing this distinction to Wittgenstein is not really important, but the distinction itself (which is also, in various forms, in Schopenhauer, Kant, and Plato, among others) is. It's closely related, also, to Mill's distinction between lower and higher pleasures.

Not wanting to accept Fish's claim that the humanities are useless, Tal says things like this about the value of the humanities:

they deepen virtually all of the activities of those who permit their psyches to be reshaped by sustained engagement in them. They deepen friendships; they deepen neighborly social relations; they deepen loves and marriages and parent-child relations, walks in the woods, idle musings, creative and expressive activity, and contemplation of the creative and expressive products of others.

The main opportunities for exercising the sort of understanding inspired by close reading of Marcel Proust and James Joyce seem to lie not in the political forum but at the café, or over the dinner table, or perhaps in the bedroom (where it greatly multiplies the menu of available pathologies!).

The humanities are, more accurately, a gateway to and instigator of a lifelong activity of free self-cultivation. The changes they provoke in us are not always for the happier, or the more remunerative, or the more civically engaged, but when things go passably well, these changes are for the deeper, the more reflective, and the more thoughtful. The humanities connect our lives with a human vocation that is different in kind from, and potentially more meaningful than, commerce or politics 

I don't know what 'deepen' means, and suspect both that it has no clear meaning and that things very different from the study of the humanities can do whatever deepening is just as well. Sex, for instance, might deepen love, and the sincere love of God might deepen a walk in the woods. Wanting to improve, or pathologize, one's sex life is not a good reason to read Joyce. Nor, really, is wanting to improve one's conversations over dinner. Not that sex and conversation are unimportant, but these benefits of reading good books carefully seem no more relevant than the alleged economic and political benefits that Tal rightly looks past. The third passage I've quoted seems better, but again we have the idea of depth, which I can't understand as anything but enrichment, which in turn means little more to me than improvement. Books don't make us more thoughtful than business problems and opportunities, for instance, do. They make us thoughtful in a different way. This way is better (or deeper, if you prefer) but saying so is a rather empty endorsement. Metaphorical language about gateways and cultivation obscures this emptiness but does not remove it. These passages all come from the part of Tal's essay before he has fleshed out his argument, though, so no wonder it seems a little thin at this point. Let's move on.

Here's something like the heart of the last part of the essay:

The ideal teacher of philosophy is not someone whose opinions are to be accepted, but someone whose form of thought is worth emulating. The Socrates we know is a dramatic persona Plato puts forward as worthy of emulation. I believe that such emulation consists in serious-minded lifelong engagement (engagement “unto death,” as Plato wishes to make clear in the Phaedo and Crito) in the activity of self-articulation, which is to say, the activity of bringing oneself into a more determinate form by bringing oneself into words. Here “articulation” is meant in both of its common senses: We give a more fine-toothed and determinate shape to our views about important matters (i.e., give them greater articulation) by bringing them into the space of words (i.e., by articulating them).

No doubt much could be said about this idea (and Charles Taylor has said much of it, as Tal acknowledges), but it seems at least roughly right. But is bringing oneself into more determinate form useful? That doesn't seem the right word. It is not thereby useless, but that slightly shocking way of putting its non-usefulness helps, I think, to make the point that the value of the humanities and of growing up in the way they help us to do is utterly different from the kind of value recognized by people whose minds are wholly of the world, wholly practical. This, I take it, is Fish's point. The study and practice of the humanities is work in being human or grown-up. The humanity that they help us acquire is not good because it is useful, but it is certainly good. That they help us acquire something good is Tal's point, and I suppose I agree with it. But I prefer Fish's way of putting it.

[Hat-tip to the Daily Nous.]

Rhetoric again

We had an interesting discussion of rhetoric on Friday with all the rhetoricians and philosophers at the school plus some others trying to explain and understand what it is that the discipline of rhetoric takes itself to be. I'm not sure how far we got. Here are some points that the rhetoric people seemed to agree on:

• the goal of teaching and studying rhetoric is to achieve social harmony, specifically the avoidance of world wars and genocide but also lesser evils such as government shutdowns
• rhetoric is the art of persuasion, and studying it enables you both to persuade and to detect when others are trying to persuade you of something
• it is founded on a belief in relativism that rejects the idea of "truth with a capital T" 
• it is a habit of mind, something active that is never still and can never be pinned down or really defined
• it is also interested in human relations and power structures in something like the way that sociology is interested in such things

I don't know how all this is meant to go together, but it is quite possible that the subject doesn't see itself as having an essence that ties its various aspects together. My questions, still, would be something like these:

• if it is deeply relativistic, how can it also stand for good and against evil? what does it take 'good' and 'evil' to mean?
• if it is a kind of tool for non-violent combat, or simply persuasion, why should we expect this to lead to agreement rather than victory for one side or the other? or is agreement achieved through non-violent persuasion regarded as inevitably or necessarily harmonious? 
• if so, what reason is there to believe that the good guys will always win, or that the bad guys (or others) won't resort to non-rhetorical means when they sense that they are losing the rhetorical battle? 
• how does awareness of attempts to persuade lead to harmony rather than suspicion?
• if it really is about what actually persuades people (rather than, say, what ought to persuade people), why aren't empirical studies of the kind psychologists conduct a bigger part of the discipline?  
• if nothing really ties the parts of the subject together then how does one progress within the discipline from introductory to intermediate to advanced? and if one doesn't, or can't, do that, then is it really an academic discipline in which it makes sense to have students major, or would it better as a supplement to other majors?

I think that the questions about relativism, world peace, and whether something so diverse can be a real discipline are probably best regarded as red herrings. What remains seems strikingly close to the idea of the hermeneutics of suspicion (an approach to reading and interpretation that brings together ideas from Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud). So how might a course of study be built on this idea? 

I think you would need to know some of the history of philosophy before you could understand Nietzsche, so you would probably start with a couple of courses in philosophy. Perhaps one course dealing with ethical theories from Plato to Mill, and another focusing on modern philosophy from Descartes to Kant. Some Schopenhauer would be handy, too, and some political philosophy wouldn't hurt. Next would come Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, either together in one course (which sounds like a lot, but might be possible) or else in three separate courses (ideal but perhaps not practical). Then you could finally get to the business of reading and interpretation, probably looking at both classic works of literature and art and contemporary 'texts' that can usefully be interpreted in this kind of way. For the latter I would think that literature and art would be less appropriate choices than political slogans, journalism, various forms of popular entertainment, and so on. 

You would need philosophers to teach the foundational philosophy courses, philosophically literate professors of literature and art to teach the classics, and some people (probably rhetoricians) to cover the contemporary stuff, although I don't know how much help, i.e. how many courses, students would need in this area. If you can read Shakespeare and Melville through Marxian, Freudian, and Nietzschean lenses then you probably don't need a lot of help doing the same with much simpler material. There wouldn't be much pure rhetoric in there, but then rhetoric doesn't seem to be pure so much as it is the application of certain philosophical ideas to literary (and other) criticism.

This could be quite a good program, although I don't know how different it would be from a fairly standard English curriculum with a more than standard philosophy requirement. I'm also not sure that the special promotion of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud is justified. It wouldn't be likely to be all that popular, or to lead directly to a job. But it would be interesting. 

Kafka and the incarnation

Reading Rebecca Schuman's entertaining review of two new Kafka-related books I was struck by what she quotes from "The Metamorphosis":

A weakly thrown apple grazed Gregor’s back but skidded off harmlessly. But another one, thrown immediately thereafter, drove hard into Gregor’s back. Gregor wanted to drag himself away, as if he could make this surprising and unbelievable pain disappear with a change of location; alas, he felt instead as if he were nailed to the floor, and lay stretched out in complete confusion of all his senses.

The apples already had me thinking of Adam and Eve, then Gregor's being stretched out and nailed made me think of the crucifixion. And of course he has already been transformed to a lower order of being, rather like God becoming a human being.

Then I remembered this.

Growing up

I would like to write a sort of mini review of three books I've read or started reading lately, but that's not what this is going to be. The books are Wittgenstein's Nephew by Thomas Bernhard, Witold Gombrowicz's Diary, and Coetzee's The Childhood of Jesus. OK, here's a mini review: I don't get the first of these at all, but the other two are great. Bernhard's book is full of repetition, which did nothing that I could see except irritate, and occasional bits of what seem like attempts at humor. The part of the book I find hardest to forget is the repetition of the names of two building, the Ludwig Pavilion and the Hermann Pavilion. Bernhard never seems to use a pronoun instead of proper nouns (I assume the problem exists in the original and not just the translation):

While I myself saw Professor Salzer at least once a week, though at first only through the crack of the door, my friend Paul, who was after all his nephew, never saw him once during all the months he spent in the Ludwig Pavilion, although Professor Salzer certainly knew of his nephew's presence and it would have been the easiest thing in the world, as I thought at the time, for him to walk the few yards from the Hermann Pavilion to the Ludwig Pavilion. I do not know what reasons he had for not visiting Paul; perhaps they were weighty reasons, or perhaps he simply found it too much trouble to visit his nephew, who had frequently been a patient in the Ludwig Pavilion, whereas this was my first visit to the Hermann Pavilion.

That might not be enough to make the point, but I found the repetition painful and pointless. Is it meant to be making some clever point about language? It doesn't do so as far as I can see. And then there are (what I take to be) jokes like this:

He had in fact two passions, which were at the same time his two main diseases—music and motor racing. In the first half of his life it was motor racing that meant everything to him; in the second half it was music. And sailing.

This reminded me of something out of Monty Python, except that they did it earlier and better. I feel as though I'm missing the point of the book, but the reviews I've read shed no light on what is supposed to be good about it.

But here's what I really want to say. Gombrowicz's diary (warning: I'm less than a hundred pages in) strikes me as marvelously grownup. It isn't written well in the sense of being full of memorable phrases, although if I kept a commonplace book I think I would have copied out about one part per page for the first fifty pages or so. (It goes a little downhill after that, it seems to me.) And it's not that what he says seems so true. A lot of it is about Polish literature that I haven't read, so it's not that I agree with him about it. But he sounds perceptive, as though he is actually seeing things and calling them as they are when no one else is. Like a rock that is not carried by the current of the stream. I wonder how you get like this.

Coetzee's novel is one of his best (or so it seems after one reading and very few days of digesting it). It's full of Wittgenstein references too, including Cavellian vertigo. And it's about growing up, among other things. The boy at the center of the story isn't like other boys, or other people. What's obvious to him is not obvious to us, and vice versa. He does not react to the methods of teachers as most of us do. But the people of this world are not quite like us either. They are blandly good, and have no sense of irony. The book feels like a riddle but I doubt there is any solution to it, some idea that, once had, acts like a key to open up the book's secret meaning. I certainly hope it isn't a puzzle like that.

Part of growing up, in the sense that Gombrowicz strikes me as grownup, is learning to see through or past the conventions that both guide and pass for thinking in most people's cases. (I'm not claiming to be grownup myself, at least not in any infallible way. Maybe I think of myself as one of the less deceived, but then anyone who thinks does that.) And learning to see these conventions as conventions, not necessities or falsehoods. But it seems as though you have to be able to succumb to these conventions in the first place to get anywhere. Coetzee's boy (he isn't called Jesus in the novel) almost doesn't get an education because he is so difficult to teach. To grow up, or to be a grownup (is it something one grows into?), you have to be different but not too different. Or maybe not really different at all until later. So it's a bit mysterious how one would either acquire this differentness or else maintain it, protect it, through all the years of socialization and education (which doesn't only draw out in a Socratic, midwifing way but draws us into a set of more or less fixed ways of doing things and of thinking). It almost seems as though philosophy is a recipe for growing up, since it teaches us to question conventional wisdom. But I doubt Gombrowicz needed philosophy to think as he does. And it's hardly as if every philosopher is self-aware or genuinely unconventional. Nor as if all questioning of conventional wisdom is wise or mature.

What's needed is a kind of intellectual virtue, it seems to me, combining the ability to sniff out cant and bullshit with the courage or obliviousness that it takes to speak honestly. The kind of philosophy that focuses on language and texts (as in primary sources expressing the author's own views, not as in "everything's a text, if you think about it") could help a lot with the former, I think. The kind of philosophy, that is, that focuses on what people say and mean rather than on problems that are no one's in particular and then tries to solve these problems in a quasi-scientific, methodical way. (I'm not saying that that kind of philosophy is necessarily useless, only that doing it is not especially likely to make anyone better at detecting bull.) Some kinds of literature would probably help as well. The kind that uses language carefully or that draws attention to bullshit and bullshitters. (So not the kind, for instance, that aims at sounding good without having any precise meaning, or that aims at telling a ripping yarn without much concern for wording, or that aims to be a fictional version of journalism or sociology, or that aims to raise and explore impersonal philosophical questions. Again, not that there's necessarily anything wrong with that kind of thing in itself. I like a ripping yarn.) How you learn courage or independence is beyond me though. Perhaps by being surrounded by people who are bravely independent. That would be a good education for grownups, I think.        

Men can achieve greatness only by surmounting their own littleness.

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Object-oriented ontology

Posts like this from Jon Cogburn have made me interested in object-oriented ontology (and speculative realism), despite my general lack of interest in ontology (and philosophical speculation). Now he's co-written a paper with Mark Ohm that explains what it's about in a very accessible way, and makes it sound quite intriguing:

Besides a deep fondness for H.P. Lovecraft, perhaps the only non-trivial belief held in common by the original four speculative realists (Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, and Quentin Meillassoux) is the Hegelian conviction that metaphysics buries its own undertakers.

I'm no Hegelian, but I do like Lovecraft. And Cogburn and Ohm go on to say other things to which I'm sympathetic, such as this:

Until very recently nearly every English major in the United States was subjected to a “theory” class where students worked through Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory: An Introduction. Assignments invariably involved writing different interpretations of random texts according to whatever hermeneutic of suspicion was being covered at the time: Freudianism, Marxism, Structuralism, Deconstructionism, etc. Now that “theory’s empire” has begun a period of decline in literary study, the benefit of hindsight reveals what was lost during its ascent.

            Simply put, such approaches systematically robbed their practitioners of  the ability to say anything illuminating about specific texts. This is because the central idea of theory was to mine the hermeneutics of suspicion so as to give critics general procedures to unmask “what is really going on” in any given text. But when applied to works of art the effect is too often that of wearing blue tinted glasses and then saying that everything is blue, or evidence of class struggle, the will to power, castration anxiety, the failure of the metaphysics of presence, phallo-logocentrism, etc., etc., etc. But what really happened is that one too often either cherry picked works that could easily be read in terms of one’s hermeneutics, or one ignored everything about a work that did not validate the story. The end result is that there are no longer any textual objects, but rather just an encompassing textuality equally present in Dr. Seuss and the Constitution of the United States.

Which is similar to Rebecca Schuman's claim that in graduate school:

you’ll never have time to read books, and when you talk about them, you’ll mostly be using made-up words like “deterritorialization” and “Othering”—because, as Ron Rosenbaum pointed out recently, the “dusty seminar rooms” of academia have the chief aim of theorizing every great book to death

I like the anti-theory elements of all this, anyway. Cogburn and Ohm offer a fictionalist reading of the Bible, which is interesting but leads to some odd claims (along the lines of "it's fiction but it's true"). Fictionalism in ethics and religion seems to me to be a step in the right direction (depending on where you're stepping from, obviously), but not the whole truth. Not that I can say what the whole truth is myself. Mostly I just want to encourage people to read Cogburn and Ohm's paper, and Rebecca Schuman argument against getting a PhD in literary studies. Or to say 'Like' to both of them, at least.