Gravity

Gravity is good. I'll try not to spoil it in what follows, but I can't promise anything. Before I saw it I had heard from friends that it was a great spectacle but ultimately empty and that it was really about God. Both are partly right. Whether they are all intended or not (and I suspect that most of them are) the movie points to several things outside itself that help give it meaning.

For one thing there's the title. 'Gravity' means both seriousness and what brings us down to Earth. It's also the force that makes things come together (which might make us think of The Beatles and Primal Scream, but that's probably just me). The movie is a plea for seriousness, for a fantasy-free vision of what matters (especially our planet and life itself) and what we are doing to it (especially through violence and disregard for the environment), and for a sense of international unity. The life-threatening problems faced by astronauts Sandra Bullock and George Clooney are caused by the shooting down of a spy satellite creating a domino effect with other junk in space breaking up and smashing into still more satellites and debris. Hope comes (practically) in the form of the Americans' being able to use Russian and Chinese spacecraft, and (spiritually) in the form of Jesus and the Buddha. We all need to help each other despite national differences, in other words, and a little faith wouldn't hurt.    

Secondly there's Clooney himself, who starred in the re-make of Solaris. Of course Gravity isn't as good as the Tarkovsky original, and the reference to a cover version of one of his films only emphasizes the point. But still, the fact that Clooney is there in space makes you think of Solaris and therefore of both the mysteries of Tarkovsky's film and the inferiority of the Clooney version. The deep and the second-rate, the artistic and the commercial. Like it or not, the film calls these thoughts to mind (unintentionally, I would think, although maybe it's a brave confession that it is all these things).  

Third, Clooney's character is called Kowalsky. So we're in Vanishing Point territory--the individual versus the world (or at least the man), the quest for freedom, "the last American hero." He is heroic and American, but the reference doesn't do much except give the character what little bit of a third dimension he has. (It might make you think of Primal Scream again, but I doubt that's intended.)

Finally, The Smiths. In a moment of despair Bullock's character (Ryan Stone, presumably meant to be as generic a name as could be found) asks someone to "sing me to sleep." (I assume this is a deliberate reference, but who knows?) There is some treatment then of the ethics of giving up, the problem of evil, etc. Against the pain of pointless suffering is weighed the beauty of the Earth. Beauty wins.

And that's about it. It's a nice-looking film, with fun 3-D effects, and a very noticeable soundtrack. It gets loud right at the end, but mostly it sounds like the kind of orchestral sound you get on some Spiritualized songs. Which is kind of appropriate.

Papineau on Ramsey

David Papineau's review of a book about Frank Ramsey has been getting attention and praise. But it isn't all good. Papineau says the following about Wittgenstein:

Ramsey’s death coincided with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s return to Cambridge after his reclusive years in the Austrian Alps. The cult surrounding Wittgenstein quickly caught fire, and for the next fifty years dominated philosophy throughout the English-speaking world.

Philosophy throughout the English-speaking world was dominated by a cult for fifty years? Bollocks. Surely not. And then:

Wittgenstein’s first book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, added a powerful dose of mysticism to his analysis of language, and this gnostic strain became even more pronounced in the neo-idealism of his later philosophy. Ramsey, by contrast, saw the world through the lens of mathematics and fundamental physics. For Wittgenstein, science was an enemy that threatened to coarsen the human spirit.

Wide of the mark again.

It must be possible to praise Ramsey without trying to do so at someone else's expense. And it doesn't help to make Ramsey seem under-appreciated if he is praised by way of false claims about Wittgenstein. Having made this appeal for our all getting along and being nice it is inappropriate of me to include the following video of someone spectacularly messing up twice. It's not a fair comment on Papineau, but it is funny.

The invisible boot

Adam Smith has been something of a hero of mine ever since I read Samuel Fleischacker's book on distributive justice. Not because of his famous idea that selfish actions by the rich result in a beneficial trickling down of wealth to the poor but because he was among the first people in the West to recognize and promote the fact that poor people are human and deserve help. (I suppose Jesus and others had similar ideas, but they do not seem to have caught on as much as one might have hoped. In Fleischacker's story Smith is a key player.)

But what about that invisible hand? As I understand it, the idea is roughly this. If I buy a laptop, for instance, then although I am only interested in myself I accidentally pass on some of my wealth to the employees of the laptop shop, some shipping company, people who manufacture laptops, people who make or mine laptop components, and so on. Mostly this is a good thing. But some of those components come from mines run by gangsters and warlords. The same invisible hand that helps some workers also encourages rape and slavery (or at least forced labor and extortion, which sounds like the same thing to me). I don't deny Smith's insight, but the fact that the invisible hand gives the finger to so many should not be ignored either.

And I always link this in my mind with George Orwell's essay on politics and language. Orwell writes that:

In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualizing you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations.

This is questionable, of course, but the idea that honesty and clarity are related to concreteness seems important and true. When someone is suspected of speaking bull it can be very useful to try to trace their words to some concrete particular to which they refer. This is a lesson from Hume, I suppose, and it's one I think of when I think about Frege and Wittgenstein, even if Orwell, Hume, Frege, and Wittgenstein don't exactly say the same thing. They all favor clarity of meaning in their various ways, and connect this with distinguishing what only superficially appears to have meaning from the genuinely meaningful, as revealed by deeper investigation. It's hard to make Wittgenstein sound as though he belongs in the same camp as Hume and Orwell on this, but morally he does, even if his philosophy of language is very different. In a word what they all oppose is bullshit.

In the cases of both words and objects one can, and should, dig a bit, or think a bit, or do whatever it takes, to see their true meaning, their place in the workings of human life. Like language, bullshit is things we do. And when we see these workings clearly, when we achieve an overview of the whole machine, as it were, there are some things we will not say. And some things we will not buy or perhaps even use. The point seems obvious to me, and I wouldn't be surprised if it had been made before and often, but I don't remember coming across it. Not the point that consumption should be ethical, that is, but the point that exposing and avoiding bullshit involves not only analysis of language but analysis of economics, politics, and, in short, behavior. I should probably read Gavin Kitching's and Nigel Pleasants' book (actually there's no 'probably' about it), but if anyone in that collection makes the point I haven't heard about it. And it seems like the kind of thing that ought to be huge: that what (good, Wittgensteinian) philosophy aims to do with/for language (clarification through analysis of use, roughly speaking) could and should be done for economics. This isn't what I understand economists or sociologists or political theorists to do, but maybe outside what I know as the mainstream there are great things being done.  

It's (perhaps not really) surprisingly hard to find information about what our purchasing choices mean on the ground. Occasionally you hear that buying drugs helps fund terrorists or that there are sweat shops in Asia or that animals are badly treated on factory farms, but it seems to me that all this information and more ought to be gathered together and publicized widely. Perhaps even studied in schools and colleges. Is anyone doing this? Are there books or websites I should know about? I hope so. There are organizations and publications like Ethical Consumer, but their work seems a little haphazard to me. A quick look at their website shows that they don't like corrupt banks and they do like badgers, but I don't see anything that would help prioritize these matters. Where is the most harm being done? If I have limited outrage or limited patience for researching the ethics of consumption, where should I focus my energy?
     
Let me say in more concrete terms what I have in mind. I'm looking for the following kinds of information:

• in what industries (the biggest ten or twenty, for instance) is most money made and are most people employed?
• what are the benefits and harms, the pros and the cons, of these industries?
• what can we do to reduce or remove the worst harms?

That's really about it. A lot of effort has been put into identifying the most worthwhile charitable organizations to give to. I'm looking for something similar as far as politics and economics goes. What are the most important companies to boycott and, at least as importantly, to support? That all sounds very utilitarian, but a question that seems related to me is: why aren't there more papers like Cora Diamond's "Eating Meat and Eating People"? This is a defence of vegetarianism at least in part on the basis of pointing out "a kind of inconsistency, or confusion mixed with hypocrisy [...] in our ordinary ways of thinking about animals..." There is, I think, a lot of inconsistency like this. Maybe not of the kind that takes sophisticated thinking to bring out, but inconsistency that could do with being brought out all the same. So I might be asking for better journalism, not more Cora Diamonds. Is it too clunkingly practical to want a list of the worst inconsistencies, and to want this list made very prominent along with practical advice about what one can do about it? I'm sure these things can get very complicated, but that's not an excuse for doing nothing.     

Apparently it's very hard to say what the biggest industries are because "biggest" can refer to profits or turnover or number of employees, and doubtless other things too, and there are questions like whether a gas station is part of the retail industry or the oil industry, and so on. But we surely could agree on some reasonable if imperfect standard if we wanted to. And people often do want to make claims about what the biggest industry in the world is, or what the top ten are (especially if they want to claim that some illegal industry is one of the top ten, for instance). So why not agree on some standard and go from there? At the moment people seem to choose arbitrarily to get worked up about, say, the environment or Wall Street or drugs or the sex industry, or try vainly to battle every evil in the world simultaneously. No doubt there is some vague feeling that it's arbitrary which causes one chooses to champion, but we ought to (and do really, I think) care about which causes are more important than others, which affect more people more seriously.

As silly and superficial as my desire for rankings might seem, or be, another way to say what I mean is to talk about depth or thinking things through. We might know about blood diamonds and avoid buying them, but many people don't. And does anyone (including me) seriously consider going without electronic devices because of the conflict minerals most of them include? It's easy to avoid blood diamonds if gemstones don't regularly feature on your shopping list, but give up my iPod? No way. And yet we claim to care about human rights a lot, as if nothing matters more. Why isn't our hypocrisy pointed out more loudly? Because it's boring, I suppose. What does that say about us?

I could go on. People disagree about whether drugs, or which drugs, should be legal, but why so many people take drugs in the first place seems to be largely ignored. Is it just because it's hard to answer the question? Or do we not want to think about despair? It's not so much the digging that I think we're reluctant to do. It's the hardness of the reality we would find if we dug deep enough. But aren't we ashamed of this cowardice/dishonesty?

We have a market for news and opinion, and bad news doesn't sell. What I'm asking for is basically a more nagging kind of NPR or PBS. It's no mystery why we don't have that. But it still seems symptomatic of something bad that we don't have it, and I think there really would be a market for practical advice about the biggest problems facing the world and what consumers can do to help. Maybe I should start up a website called "Degrees of Obscenity" that would rank the worst evils encouraged by our way of life and suggest practical steps we could take to reduce them.

I feel as though this is all half-baked but I haven't posted anything for a week so maybe it's time to hit 'publish' and see what happens.     

Sketches of blurred landscapes

I'm off to the 5th Annual Regional Wittgenstein Workshop today, where I'll be presenting this paper.  It's about ethics in the Philosophical Investigations, and relates what Wittgenstein says to Aristotle, Moore, Sidgwick, and Brentano.  I ended up writing it in a bit of a rush, so it's roughly the quality of a long blog post rather than a polished paper, but I don't see any harm in linking to it as long as everyone is forewarned.

Read at your peril. Comments welcome.

Asian philosophy

A couple of interesting articles: this, on a course at Harvard on Classical Chinese Ethical and Political Theory, and this, which I've only skimmed, on whether Buddhism is a religion or "a philosophy." I don't agree with it, but I'm glad that the Guardian is doing a series on the subject.

I was surprised to see one reason for the Harvard course's popularity with students:

Why are so many undergraduates spending a semester poring over abstruse Chinese philosophy by scholars who lived thousands of years ago? For one thing, the class fulfills one of Harvard's more challenging core requirements, Ethical Reasoning. 

Doesn't Sandel's course do that? Yes it does. It seems worth noting that perhaps large numbers of students are not turned on by his approach to ethical and political theory. I quite like Sandel's stuff myself, but I would far rather take a course on Daoism and Confucianism. Good to see I'm not alone.

How to get a job in philosophy

This information about philosophy programs' placement records has been getting attention. I was surprised to see that my alma mater, the University of Virginia, comes second (behind CUNY) in the category "Which school's graduates work in academic philosophy the most upon graduation?" That's pretty impressive. 

There are all sorts of questions about the data so far, which might mean that UVA (currently ranked 37 in the Philosophical Gourmet Report, which is slightly higher, I think, than it used to be) should really be nowhere near second place in this category but if it does belong near the top, why might this be? I can think of a few possible reasons:

1. luck (if this can count as a reason)
2. the weight of a few big names--specialty rankings seem to matter, and UVA might not have the highest overall ranking but it does have, and has had, some great individual professors. His time at UVA (1982-1997) probably means he didn't affect these figures much (the report is based on data from 2000 on), but I'm sure having worked with Richard Rorty helped some people get jobs. (I worked with a brilliant philosopher, but her name meant nothing to the non-philosophers who hired me. It may have helped impress my predecessor, though, and his recommendation would have counted for something.)
3. being in a state with other good schools--I don't know how many UVA PhDs have jobs elsewhere in the state, but I'm sure I'm not the only one. And I (think I) know that I got my job partly because I got my PhD in this state. The head of my department when I was hired wanted to hire someone solid rather than flashy (Harvard PhDs need not apply) perhaps because he was afraid of hiring someone who might then leave for greener pastures and certainly because he thought a real egghead would not be able to relate to our students. He also thought, incorrectly, that someone from UVA would have heard of VMI and so would know about its unique qualities. All three of the short-listed candidates had a UVA connection (two of us got our PhDs there and the other had been a visiting professor there, if I recall correctly). I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of CUNY PhDs get jobs in New York for similar kinds of reasons, i.e. they are considered local (which is a consideration as far as "fit" goes) and good enough without being off-puttingly fancy. Hiring locally also makes it cheaper to bring in candidates for interviews.   

First of all I should say that I don't think this kind of reasoning is good. Smart people can relate to less smart people. Graduates of "solid" PhD programs can be quite brilliant. "Fit" is a very suspect notion. But some people do reason in this kind of way, and this makes a difference to who gets hired where. If most jobs are at non-fancy places, it really might be an advantage to get a PhD from somewhere perceived to be non-fancy. Especially if, unbeknownst to the general public, that non-fancy place actually has a surprisingly good philosophy department or specialty in your area.

Then again, philosophy jobs in general are seemingly drying up. The more this happens the fewer people are likely to get PhDs. Then there won't be so many people qualified to be TAs or adjuncts or graders for MOOCs. I don't know what will happen to liberal arts education then. Probably it will partly go away and partly just get worse. There will be a few superstar types, many more low-paid MAs and failed superstars, and not much in between. And for the low-paid MOOC-grading MAs a "solid," regional school is probably either the best bet or at least good enough. 

In short: aim low. Or at least, don't aim too high in terms of programs with Leiterific rankings.

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.