Thursday, March 29, 2012

Nothing useful is of lasting value

I've just discovered a new poet (new to me, of course): A. R. Ammons (1926-2001). The title of this post is a line from his poem "Conserving the Magnitude of Uselessness." Here are two more that I like:

Cut the Grass
The wonderful workings of the world: wonderful,
wonderful: I'm surprised half the time:
ground up fine, I puff if a pebble stirs:

I'm nervous: my morality's intricate: if
a squash blossom dies, I feel withered as a stained
zucchini and blame my nature: and
when grassblades flop to the little red-ant
queens burring around trying to get aloft, I blame
my not keeping the grass short, stubble

firm: well, I learn a lot of useless stuff, meant
to be ignored: like when the sun sinking in the
west glares a plane invisible, I think how much

revelation concealment necessitates: and then I
think of the ocean, multiple to a blinding
oneness and realize that only total expression
expressed hiding: I'll have to say everything
to take on the roundness and withdrawal of the deep dark:
less than total is a bucketful of radiant toys. 


This Bright Day

Earth, earth!
day this bright day
again--once more
showers of dry spruce gold,
the poppy flopped broad open and delicate
from its pod--once more,
all this again: I've had many
days here with these stones and leaves:
like the sky, I've taken on a color
and am still:
the grief of leaves,
summer worms, huge blackant
queens bulging
from weatherboarding, all that
will pass
away from me that I will pass into,
none of the grief
cuts less now than ever--only I
have learned the
sky, the day sky, the blue
obliteration of radiance:
the night sky,
pregnant, lively,
tumultuous, vast--the grief
again in a higher scale
of leaves and poppies:
space, space--
and a grief of things:
motion: standing still.

Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Far-fetched examples in applied ethics

Not many philosophy papers could be called lovely, but I felt like writing a fan letter to Timothy Chappell after reading his review of Derek Parfit's On What Matters this lunchtime (maybe it was the sunshine and the carrot cake). Not only does he quote this from Simone Weil:
The distinctive method of philosophy consists in getting a clear conception of insoluble problems in their insolubility, then in contemplating those problems without anything else; fixedly, tirelessly, for years, without the least hope, in a state of waiting.
He also says this:

What M'Choakumchild [in Dickens' Hard Times] finds in the child Sissy Jupe – and labours, indeed, to choke – is a natural propensity for open rather than closed deliberation. In analytic moral philosophy classes all over the world right now, that same propensity is being carefully drilled out of students by their tutors' expositions of trolley problems, cave problems, transplant problems, rescue problems and the rest of the usual applied-ethics diet of hard-case thought experiments. Few philosophers are explicit or self-conscious about this, but Peter Unger is:

Toward having the puzzle be instructive, I'll make two stipulations for understanding the examples. The first is this: Beyond what's explicitly stated in each case's presentation, or what's clearly implied by it, there aren't ever any bad consequences of your conduct for anyone and, what's more, there's nothing else that's morally objectionable about it. In effect, this means we're to understand a proposed scenario so that it is as boring as possible. Easily applied by all, in short the stipulation is: Be boring! [Peter Unger,(Oxford UP 1996, pp. 25–26].

Is this a good thing that we who teach philosophy are doing to our students? There seems to be a danger that what we are offering them is a training in the failure of their imaginations and of their natural human sympathies. The typical philosophical use of the “thought experiment” in ethics is not just not to take students of ethics in the same direction as they go in when they read fictional narratives, towards wide-ranging, lateral-thinking, unpredictable, creative explorations of the indefinite possibilities of human life and action. It is to take them in exactly the opposite direction: to channel them down an ever-narrowing modal funnel within which all possible readings of a schematically described situation except for one or two are remorselessly eliminated. This is indeed a training to which the injunction “Be boring!” is apposite. And the normal penalty for failing to be boring in the required way is the same for our students as it was for Sissy: it is a Fail.

There is much more besides this. All books should be reviewed so well.

I haven't read it yet, but Jakob Elster's "How Outlandish Can Imaginary Cases Be?" also looks worth reading. Here's the abstract:
It is common in moral philosophy to test the validity of moral principles by proposing counter-examples in the form of cases where the application of the principle does not give the conclusion we intuitively find valid. These cases are often imaginary and sometimes rather ‘outlandish’, involving ray guns, non-existent creatures, etc. I discuss whether we can test moral principles with the help of outlandish cases, or if only realistic cases are admissible. I consider two types of argument against outlandish cases: 1) Since moral principles are meant for guiding action in this world, cases drawn from other worlds are irrelevant. 2) We lack the capacity to apply our intuitive moral competence to outlandish cases. I argue that while the first approach is importantly flawed, the second approach is plausible, not because our moral competence is limited to cases from this world, but because we lack the capacity to imagine outlandish cases, and we cannot apply our moral competence to a case we fail to imagine properly.

Anscombe in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

My article is up now, at least provisionally (the bibliography is awaiting a correction), here. It starts like this:
Elizabeth Anscombe, or Miss Anscombe as she was known, was an important twentieth century philosopher and one of the most important women philosophers of all time.  A committed Catholic, and translator of some of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s most important work, she was an influential and original thinker in the Catholic tradition and the Wittgensteinian manner. Although she worked in almost every area of philosophy, she is best known to philosophers today for her work on ethics and the philosophy of action. Outside of philosophy she is best known for her conservative views on sexual ethics, which have inspired a number of student organizations, calling themselves the Anscombe Society, promoting chastity and traditional marriage. She is also well known for her opposition to the use of atomic weapons at the end of World War II.
In ethics, her most important work is the paper “Modern Moral Philosophy.” Contemporary interest in virtue theory can be traced directly to this paper, which put forward three theses: that all the major British moral philosophers from Henry Sidgwick on were essentially the same (that is, consequentialists); that the concepts of moral obligation, the use of the word ought with a special moral sense, and related notions, are harmful and should be dropped; and that we should stop doing moral philosophy until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology.
Her work on action, found mostly in her short book Intention, was a step in the direction of such a philosophy.

Table of Contents

  1. Life
  2. The First Person
  3. Causation
  4. Intention
  5. Consequentialism
  6. Moral Obligation
  7. Military Ethics
  8. Sexual Ethics
  9. References and Further Reading
    1. Primary Works
    2. Secondary Works

Monday, March 26, 2012

Proof that it is impossible to write

I always remember Kafka's subtitle "Proof that it is Impossible to Live," but not any proof that his story contains. It came to mind again when I read James Wood saying this about Michel Houellebecq's latest novel:
Is Houellebecq really a novelist, or is he just a novelizing propagandist? Though his thought can be slapdash and hasty, it is at least earnest, intensely argued, and occasionally thrilling in its leaps and transitions. But the formal structures that are asked to dramatize his ideas—the scenes, characters, dialogue, and so on—are generally flimsy and diagrammatic. “The Map and the Territory” can’t quite decide what kind of novel it is going to be, and moves around restlessly, picking up subjects and briefly favoring them, before returning them to their lightly disturbed corners. Nothing is systematically or rigorously examined—which is to say that nothing is subjected to the longevity of narrative.
This is about right, I think, but it also kind of misses what I take to be the point. The novel ought to be of interest to readers of this blog. Houellebecq mentions Wittgenstein and Heidegger in it, and discusses architecture, nature, and modern culture generally. I doubt it's intentional, but the title could almost be a reference to Iris Murdoch's Under the Net, in which:
The "net" in question is the net of language. In Chapter 6, a quotation from Jake's book The Silencer includes the passage: "All theorizing is flight. We must be ruled by the situation itself and this is unutterably particular. Indeed it is something to which we can never get close enough, however hard we may try as it were to crawl under the net."
Houellebecq suggests that the map (or net) is more interesting than the territory, although in the end he seems happy enough that everything man-made ends up being reconquered by nature. Perhaps there's more to life than being interesting. So if we take the map (or net) as language, and the territory as the world it describes, then language is (it is claimed) more interesting than the world, but somehow inferior to it, in both power and value, nevertheless. That sounds as though it might be true.

So why is Houellebecq's novel such a mess? Why does it lack rigor and system? I think it lacks much in the way of characters, dialogue, etc. because that's the way Houellebecq is; his interests are more philosophical than those of most novelists, and he is diagrammatic when that is all he needs to be. It's his personality and his ideas that you read him for, not his characters or plots. The closest writer I can think of is Martin Amis, although Amis has nothing interesting to say (just a style of his own, which is no small achievement), but Houellebecq is something like a cross between Shaun Ryder and Dostoevsky (which means he's no Dostoevsky, of course, but still). Another way in which the book is a bit messy is that it's very hard to read. At least I found it hard to read more than a few pages at a time, but I don't think this is a fault.

What keeps interrupting the flow of the book is the commercial language of technical specifications and branding. No one just drives anywhere, they drive in a particular make and model of car, with particular features that might appeal to a consumer, both those involving engineering and those that reflect a certain lifestyle. Houellebecq gives his take on the demographics, simultaneously buying into the marketing language, mocking it, and staring at it in horror. It is there, after all, so you can hardly ignore it. And it is not something wholly outside us. We all want nice cars, cheap wine, fancy cameras, or other things of this sort. The gods may have flown but the fetishes are snugly entrenched. What we might think of as human life (i.e. a certain romantic ideal of what that naturally means) is constantly attacked or blocked by these artificial interventions. They are more interesting in the sense that they stimulate us, attract our attention, and give us something to talk and think about. But they are less real and less valuable than natural things. They are less satisfying. Houellebecq is not satisfied and seems to write from an unsatisfied desire for something that doesn't exist in our world, or for a world that is different, something like the kind of world that Tolstoy or Dostoevsky wanted, although Houellebecq knows as well as anybody that he is not from their world, nor does he try to write as if he were. On the contrary, there are suggestions that parts of the novel are copied from Wikipedia, which is about as this-worldly (this time, this space) as you can get. The language of inauthenticity speaks us, if you like.

The last third or so of the book is reminiscent of a Fred Vargas novel (to be precise, An Uncertain Place), but it is the very end that I liked the most (as well as the earlier discussions of architecture, which after all has a relation to philosophy, as David Cerbone has noticed--see the end of this interview, which I just discovered). Here's the last paragraph of the novel, describing the videos that the artist protagonist Jed Martin has taken to making at the end of his life:
The work that occupied the last years of Jed Martin's life can thus be seen—and this is the first interpretation that springs to mind—as a nostalgic meditation on the end of the Industrial Age in Europe, and, more generally, on the perishable and transitory nature of any human industry. This interpretation is, however, inadequate when one tries to make sense of the unease that grips us on seeing those pathetic Playmobil-type little figurines, lost in the middle of an abstract and immense futurist city, a city which itself crumbles and falls apart, then seems gradually to be scattered across the immense vegetation extending to infinity. That feeling of desolation, too, that takes hold of us as the portraits of the human beings who had accompanied Jed Martin through his earthly life fall apart under the impact of bad weather, then decompose and disappear, seeming in the last videos to make themselves the symbols of the generalized annihilation of the human species. They sink and seem for an instant to put up a struggle, before being suffocated by the superimposed layers of plants. Then everything becomes calm. There remains only the grass swaying in the wind. The triumph of vegetation is total.        
There are certainly echoes of Houellebecq's own work in this very novel here. It's both a nostalgic meditation on the perishable and transitory nature of any human industry and an uneasy and desolate portrait of  life. But it isn't that desolate. The triumph of vegetation sounds at least somewhat desirable. The grass swaying in the wind sounds nice, even if it is the grass growing on our graves. The central idea seems similar to John Betjeman's at the end of "Beside the Seaside":
And all the time the waves, the waves, the waves
Chase, intersect and flatten on the sand
As they have done for centuries, as they will
For centuries to come, when not a soul
Is left to picnic on the blazing rocks,
When England is not England, when mankind
Has blown himself to pieces. Still the sea,
Consolingly disastrous, will return
While the strange starfish, hugely magnified,
Waits in the jewelled basin of a pool. 
Similar too is the idea of stopping one's diary in Larkin's "Forget What Did":
And the empty pages?
Should they ever be filled
Let it be with observed

Celestial recurrences,
The day the flowers come
And when the birds go. 
Tarkovsky's Stalker also celebrates a victory of nature over violence and the power of human will in general. There are other examples (Coetzee's Michael K., for instance) of this kind of quasi-Buddhist, quasi-Christian (or post-Christian) ideal of a return to an unspoiled garden. It's rather Schopenhauerian. But Houellebecq puts it in a (to my mind suitably) cynical 21st century idiom.

Friday, March 23, 2012

Melancholia

Lars von Trier's Melancholia reminded me of The Tree of Life. It's long, ambitious, vaguely philosophical, and features wordless shots of planets while classical music plays in the background. In this case the music is Wagner, who is not really my cup of tea. [Autobiographical side-note on Wagner, which you might want to skip: in my early twenties I bought a cassette tape that had highlights of Tannhรคuser and Lohengrin on it. I loved this tape and used to take very hot baths while listening to it and drinking a glass of Scotch (one glass per bath, that is, not one glass stretched over several baths). I've tried since to find a CD that I would enjoy as much, without success. So I own and have listened to a bunch of Wagner's music, and I'm capable of enjoying it, but I don't know it very well because I have never found a recording that lives up to my expectations. I can't find that tape on CD either. And long baths in the afternoon are not part of my lifestyle anymore. The last time I tried to listen to Wagner I laughed involuntarily at what I think I struck me as its pomposity. So I'm not a fan, but this isn't pure philistinism on my part.]

The film is in two parts, each focusing on one of two sisters, each of whom is depressed for different reasons and, as a result, in a different way. One has a kind of Antichrist view, according to which life is evil. (Actually she specifies that life on Earth is evil, but she also says that this is the only life there is.) Mostly what we see, though, is various ways in which she feels trapped. She is surrounded by people who let her down: bickering, divorced parents, a bitter and pessimistic mother, a drunken and stupid father, a selfish employer, an uninspiring boyfriend, a judgmental sister, and no one who seems like a real friend. Her job seems meaningless, and she is apparently unenthusiastic about the prospect of marrying her boyfriend (the movie begins with them arriving very late to their wedding, and she shows no sign of wanting to hurry things along or avoid further delays). She is depressed about life. The other sister is depressed about death, or about the prospect of life coming to an end, and, presumably, the meaninglessness that this might seem to bring to everything we do. The first sister seems somehow more insightful or intelligent, but also nastier. Neither can resist showing kindness in adversity to a child though.

This fact reminds me of my take on Cormac McCarthy (that his stories tend to be about man handing on the torch of faith to his sons, no matter what hardships may come [gender-specific language intentional]), but McCarthy treats the gift of hope as a good thing, while in Melancholia it is clearly dishonest. Faith is bad faith in this world. But perhaps necessary all the same, for the sake of the children. Honesty here would be unthinkably cruel.

It's worth seeing, but I was disappointed. For one thing, it seems to want to say something about life generally, rather than America (as in Dogville) or one particular, mentally ill woman (as in Antichrist), which seems over-ambitious. I was also distracted by some oddities of the story. One sister looks German and has an American accent, the other looks French and has an English accent. Of course it is possible for sisters to differ in these ways, but it's never explained (unless I missed something) and it came across as symptomatic of laziness in casting. The house where the film is set at times seems to be a hotel and at other times as the home of the French-looking sister and her rich husband. Maybe I missed something again, or perhaps these inconsistencies are supposed to tip us off to the fact that none of the events portrayed are real. Perhaps it's all in the minds of the sisters, or some kind of metaphor for depression. But do we need a whole, long movie for that, however tastefully done? And if it isn't meant to express a depressed view but simply the truth about life, then isn't it dishonest? Life just isn't that bleak.

Oh well. It is all well done, the theme of what to tell the children is an interesting one, and the film reminded me of Cranach the Elder's painting of melancholy, which I like (just imagine the blue ball the size of a planet):

            

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Our Father, which art in secret

It's not an obscure verse, but I was struck nonetheless when I read this at Jon Cogburn's blog:
5. And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites [are]: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.  6 But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly. 7 But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathen [do]: for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking. 
I had forgotten the bit about God being in secret. Other translations confirm the basic correctness of the King James version, it seems to me.

I was reminded of this when I read Camilla Kronqvist's paper "Lost and Found: Selfhood and Subjectivity in Love" (forthcoming in Philosophical Investigations). She quotes a character from a Paul Auster novel:
By belonging to Sophie, I began to feel as though I belonged to everyone else as well. My true place in the world, it turned out, was somewhere beyond myself, and if that place was inside me, it was also unlocatable. This was the tiny hole between self and not-self, and for the first time in my life I saw this nowhere as the exact centre of the world.
I don't know that there is a connection between these passages, but I'd like to make one. The tiny hole, the exact center of the world, the unlocatable place that is beyond myself and inside me, that is discovered through love, is something that I would like to associate, if not identify, with the God who is not the God of the politically conservative Christians. A tiny God, the hole in the mint of life, is one I could almost believe in. (I'm sure he'll be thrilled to know.)

It's world poetry day

So says the United Nations. So here are two:


Two Deer

Between our house and the Tschantzes’,
Near the corner of the patch that we hardly ever mow
Where we never mow,
Came two deer,
A buck and a doe,
Down the hill then over the creek and off.

A stream of unmowed lawns and untrimmed hedge
Still springs from chores undone
And runs for the running
Of the wild life that remains.

One day I will do those chores
And block up those holes in the roof
So nothing will fly through our property.


A Confession

In this garden there could be gods—
A Gormley Christ, a laughing Buddha,
Mohammad uncomplaining,
Saving a girl from being buried too soon—
But it’s all too obvious.

Instead I could paint or scratch their names
On the underside of rocks
And hide them around the place,
Under a tree or by the stream,
Places of holy power.

But imagine yourself carving
Rock like a bronze-age scribe—
Better to think the places where the gods would lie,
Or better yet to leave them out
And write the gods in a poem about the garden.
But imagine yourself writing
A poem about the hidden gods—
This poem too should be unwritten.