Schopenhauer on relative and absolute good

The following are selections from §65 of Volume I of The World as Will and Representation.

First, however, I wish to trace back to their real meaning those conceptions of good and bad which have been treated by the philosophical writers of the day, very extraordinarily, as simple conceptions, and thus incapable of analysis; so that the reader may not remain involved in the senseless delusion that they contain more than is actually the case, and express in and for themselves all that is here necessary. I am in a position to do this because in ethics I am no more disposed to take refuge behind the word good than formerly behind the words beautiful and true, in order that by the adding a “ness,” which at the present day is supposed to have a special [solemnity], and therefore to be of assistance in various cases, and by assuming an air of solemnity, I might induce the belief that by uttering three such words I had done more than denote three very wide and abstract, and consequently empty conceptions, of very different origin and significance. Who is there, indeed, who has made himself acquainted with the books of our own day to whom these three words, admirable as are the things to which they originally refer, have not become an aversion after he has seen for the thousandth time how those who are least capable of thinking believe that they have only to utter these three words with open mouth and the air of an intelligent sheep, in order to have spoken the greatest wisdom?

The above sounds like the kind of thing the later Wittgenstein, at least, might have agreed with. 

We now wish to discover the significance of the concept good, which can be done with very little trouble. This concept is essentially relative, and signifies the conformity of an object to any definite effort of the will. Accordingly everything that corresponds to the will in any of its expressions and fulfils its end is thought through the concept good, however different such things may be in other respects. Thus we speak of good eating, good roads, good weather, good weapons, good omens, and so on; in short, we call everything good that is just as we wish it to be; and therefore that may be good in the eyes of one man which is just the reverse in those of another. The conception of the good divides itself into two sub-species—that of the direct and present satisfaction of any volition, and that of its indirect satisfaction which has reference to the future, i.e., the agreeable and the useful.

Compare Hume: "personal merit consists altogether in the possession of mental qualities useful or agreeable to the person himself or to others" An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, 9.1

This idea of good seems very much like Wittgenstein's idea of relative goodness or goodness in the relative sense.

It follows from what has been said above, that the good is, according to its concept, ["something belonging to the relative"]; thus every good is essentially relative, for its being consists in its relation to a desiring will. Absolute good is, therefore, a contradiction in terms; highest good, summum bonum, really signifies the same thing—a final satisfaction of the will, after which no new desire could arise,—a last motive, the attainment of which would afford enduring satisfaction of the will. But, according to the investigations which have already been conducted in this Fourth Book, such a consummation is not even thinkable.

Wittgenstein might sort of agree with this, seeing as he thinks talk of anything absolutely good or good in an absolute sense is nonsense. But he does not say that goodness is essentially relative, nor that absolute good is a contradiction in terms. He focuses, rather, on what people who use such words are trying to say.

If, however, we wish to give an honorary position, as it were emeritus, to an old expression, which from custom we do not like to discard altogether, we may, metaphorically and figuratively, call the complete selfeffacement and denial of the will, the true absence of will, which alone for ever stills and silences its struggle, alone gives that contentment which can never again be disturbed, alone redeems the world, and which we shall now soon consider at the close of our whole investigation—the absolute good, the summum bonum—and regard it as the only radical cure of the disease of which all other means are only palliations or anodynes. 

Here Schopenhauer too adopts the words "absolute good" for a kind of metaphorical use. That much is a bit like Wittgenstein in the Lecture on Ethics. But Schopenhauer relates the absolute good to the denial of the will, which Wittgenstein doesn't talk about.

Schopenhauer

Some popular philosophy by me is available here.

Character and personal relationships

Schopenhauer thinks, if I'm remembering correctly, that if you are a hard determinist then you will find it easier to get over the bad things you have done in the past, since you will believe they were inevitable. Presumably, and perhaps he says this too, you might also forgive others more easily.

On the other hand, if you believe in character, as Schopenhauer does, then you might be less likely to forgive and forget, because a person's actions, as you see it, reveal something about their nature. So while a kind deed might prompt you to think of them as nice, a cruel deed might strike you as showing what a nasty piece of work they really are. It's hard to forgive an action if you see it as evidence of something else, some underlying, and probably ongoing, problem.

Perhaps, then, we might all get along better if we think of actions as isolated incidents that reveal nothing at all about anyone's character. Perhaps we would be better off not believing in character at all. But it's very hard to do that. Sartre's view, for instance, strikes me as being the opposite of Schopenhauer's. It takes everyone to be 100% free and to have no character except in retrospect, this character being created by one's choices, not revelatory of any pre-existing condition. So if you have been kind to me a thousand times I have no reason to expect you to be kind again, or to think of you now as a kind person (rather than one who has been kind in the past). Which means that liking you (as opposed to something like being grateful to you) is likely to seem irrational to me, or at least a-rational.

Probably the best view to take is neither Schopenhauer's nor Sartre's, but the issue seems interesting to me. Something like it is raised by Nafsika Athanasouli's question:   

Does anyone know of a non-dispositional account of friendship? I am thinking here of philosophers who argue that evidence from psychology shows there is no such thing as character (or, if it exists, that it is not the kind of collection of dispositional traits some philosophers assume it to be). Some of these philosophers go on to give accounts of morality without relying on character (e.g. John Dorris), but does anyone try to give an account of friendship without dispositions (or character if you prefer)?

Fountain

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

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

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

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

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

Then there's Kraus (writing in 1913):

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

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

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

OK, back to grading papers.

They tell one themselves

Here's a nice passage from Anscombe:

So far as I know, the only places where Wittgenstein considers the expression itself to be what it expresses are aesthetic. A musical phrase, a bed of violets: such things may strongly give one the impression that they tell one something. What is it that they tell one? They tell one themselves, not something else.

(from "Frege, Wittgenstein, and Platonism", p. 163 in the electronic version of From Plato to Wittgenstein: Essays by G. E. M. Anscombe).

Compare Schopenhauer's idea of all phenomenal things as embodied music (that perhaps sing or dance themselves), and Larkin's "The trees are coming into leaf/ Like something almost being said."

World Congress of Philosophy

One of the high points of the recent World Congress of Philosophy in Beijing was hearing Hans Sluga talk through the PowerPoint slideshow I blogged about here. Unfortunately I didn't get to ask him any questions, but I did have a couple of new thoughts about it. On slide 19 he talks about metaphysics as a "stage of development" that is to be overcome, according to Schopenhauer. I don't know of anyone else who reads Schopenhauer like this, but it's an exciting suggestion. (Reminiscent of j's suggestion here, if I'm remembering correctly, that the four books of The World as Will and Representation might correspond with the four noble truths of Buddhism. These aren't just (meant to be) truths, they are something like stages on life's way. If Buddhism is right then we escape the first truth (suffering) and end up in the fourth (Nirvana).) I hadn't really noticed this before.

My second new thought is about the idea of a world ethics (see slide 41). Since the world is not (at all) the same thing as the planet, I don't quite see how we get from a world ethics to environmental ethics. It feels as though there could be a route from one to the other, but I'd be interested to know how far Sluga has mapped this. After all, say my world ethics is that whatever happens I should accept it, letting God's will be done. Then if the planet is destroyed this will be just another thing that I (believe I ought to) accept. A world-accepter will not be likely to destroy the planet, but also won't have any obvious reason (qua world-accepter) to try to prevent environmental destruction. So it looks as though there is work to be done here.

After Sluga's talk was one by Ruth Chang on three dogmas of normativity. I'm not quite sure how to characterize the second dogma, but the three dogmas are something like this:

1. goodness is a property
2. all states of affairs are comparable with regard to their goodness, so that each must be as good as, worse than, or better than any other. Incomparability (with regard to goodness) is not an option
3. values are discovered, not created

I think what I've written for 1 and 3 are direct quotes (albeit from a talk rather than from a fully polished written work), but I'm not sure about 2. Anyway, Chang (if I understood her rightly) rejects all three. Very interesting stuff.

Sluga on Wittgenstein and Schopenhauer

Here, pointed out by Daniel Lindquist, is a PowerPoint slideshow by Hans Sluga on Wittgenstein and "the world" in the Tractatus.

Some thoughts:

On slide 9, Sluga quotes Wittgenstein saying that he "could now just as well start [the] Tractatus with a sentence in which 'lamp' occurs, instead of 'world'." This reminds me of the following remark in Wittgenstein's Notebooks:

If I have been contemplating the stove, and then am told: but now all you know is the stove, my result does indeed seem trivial. For this represents the matter as if I had studied the stove as one among the many things in the world. But if I was contemplating the stove it was my world, and everything else colourless by contrast with it.

It also makes me think of remarks about this kind of idea in Eli Freidlander's paper "Missing a Step Up the Ladder," including passages like this:

I take Wittgenstein’s claim in 6.421 that “Ethics and Aesthetics are one and the same” to suggest that works of art readily provide us a model of this dimension of experience [i.e., the "experience of the particular thing as significant in itself"]. Let me briefly suggest features of the aesthetic that echo our attempt to clarify the dimension of agreement as such. We tend to speak of beauty as a field of significant experience, or experience that in itself presents a face of value. It gives us a way to conceive of the experience of significance as pertaining to a particular (or as concentrated in a particular place), while at the same time all-encompassing. Even if there are many paintings I appreciate, I do not appreciate a painting as one among many. My aesthetic judgment does not involve choice or comparison to other objects under a common concept. Rather, a work demands my undivided attentiveness. Arguably also, the field of aesthetic experience is not partitioned by a contrast between the valuable and the valueless. Weak aspects of a painting will make it weak and would not coexist in our experience with what is valuable. And a judgment which appreciates a work does not do so by setting the positive in it against the negative in that very work. We do not judge a work by eventually recognizing that, all in all, it has more of the good in it than of the bad. Finally the activity of judging is not preparatory to enjoyment of the work. In it we come to agree with the work. Such atunement is its own reward and one’s obtuseness to the work is in itself punishment. 

In the Notebooks Wittgenstein pursues the connection between ethics and aesthetics in the following terms: “The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis; and the good life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis. This is the connection between art and ethics” (N, 83). The expression “seeing something sub specie aeternitatis,” is notoriously mysterious, and tempts us to various pictures of a God’s eye view of things. But, Wittgenstein really rehearses the distinction between seeing something in the midst of others, and seeing it as a unique, i.e. as a world: “The usual way of looking at things sees objects as it were from the midst of them, the view sub specie aeternitatis from outside. In such a way that they have the whole world as background” (N, 83). When we consider objects from the midst of them, we conceive of them as comparable to one another, thus as things among others. But seeing something with “the whole world as background” is agreeing with it as such, whatever or however it is.  

That is (among much else that is said here), an object (e.g., a lamp) can be seen as a world. Compare Schopenhauer, according to whom in aesthetic experience:

we no longer consider the where, the when, the why, and the whither in things, but simply and solely the what. Further, we do not let abstract thought, the concepts of reason, take possession of our consciousness, but instead of all this, devote the whole power of our mind to perception, sink ourselves completely therein, and let our whole consciousness be filled by the calm contemplation of the natural object actually present, whether it be a landscape, a tree, a rock, a crag, a building, or anything else. We lose ourselves entirely in this object, to use a pregnant expression; in other words, we forget our individuality, our will, and continue to exist only as pure subject, as clear mirror of the object, so that it is as though the object alone existed without anyone to perceive it, and thus we are no longer able to separate the perceiver from the perception, but the two have become one. … What is thus known is no longer the individual thing as such, but the Idea … at the same time, the person who is involved in the perception is no longer an individual, for in such perception the individual has lost himself; he is pure will-less, painless, timeless subject of knowledge … It was this that was in Spinoza’s mind when he wrote ‘mens aeterna est, quatenus res sub aeternitatis specie concipit’ (Ethics, V, prop. 31, schol.) (WWR vol. I, pp 178-79)

On slide 24 Sluga lists "A sense of feeling guilty whatever one has done" as one of the three main experiences that Wittgenstein writes about in the Lecture on Ethics. I think he only mentions feeling guilty, though, rather than feeling guilty no matter what one has done. This might not matter, but Sluga goes on (in slide 25) to link Wittgenstein's three experiences with key Christian beliefs, in this case belief in original sin. And he contrasts Wittgenstein's alleged Christianity with Schopenhauer's Buddhism. But I think Wittgenstein is less Christian than this suggests, and Schopenhauer is more Christian. Sluga summarizes Schopenhauer's belief with the slogan "I am Thou", but this doesn't seem so different from Wittgenstein's ethics. To live with the world seen sub specie aeternitatis seems to require agreement between self and other. (This might not be un-Christian, but it doesn't seem particularly Christian rather than Jewish, say, or more Christian than Schopenhauer is.)

On slide 41, Sluga writes that, "Wittgenstein, together with Schopenhauer, shows us that ethics in [the] broadest sense calls for philosophical reflection on the world or rather on how we see the world, what picture we have of it and our place in it. He contrasts this view of ethics with ethics concerned with the self, with interpersonal relations, and with social and political ethics.

Here's an example of what I think is the Wittgenstein/Schopenhauer kind of ethics. In M. O'C. Drury's recollections of conversations with Wittgenstein (p. 143 of Rush Rhees, ed. Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections), Drury reports:

This morning the local fishermen had landed on the pier a large catch of mackerel. The usual brilliant colouring of fish just out of the sea, some of them still half alive.

WITTGENSTEIN: (in a low voice) "Why don't they leave them in the sea! I know fish are caught in the most horrible way, and yet I continue to eat fish."

Wittgenstein himself did not live up to his ideal, but this seems like a fairly clear case of what that ideal implies. That is, Wittgenstein appears to be confessing to a failing or imperfection in his own behavior, at least as he sees things. The fish should be left in the sea. Not because they have rights or because they suffer when caught or because the sight of their being caught is ugly. Perhaps there is no because. To the extent that there is, it is because their being caught (at least in the way that they are caught, dragged out of the sea en masse in a net) is manifestly horrible (and unnecessary). I realize I am not really showing how I think one gets from what Sluga and Friedlander say to not eating fish, but I do think this is where one would end up if one followed Wittgenstein's thinking on ethics all the way.

Schopenhauer on women

I have four things to say about Schopenhauer's essay (it's really a collection of remarks) "On Women."

1. The version of the essay in the Penguin Classics Essays and Aphorisms is abridged, leaving out the last remark and the words "The Mormons' standpoint is right" at the end of the penultimate remark. In what follows, nevertheless, I will use the numbering from the Penguin edition and hope that this is not misleading
2. It is possible, even likely, that Schopenhauer really does mean the misogynistic things he seems to be saying
3. Even so, his remarks are not all misogynistic. His first remark says that "the right point of view for the appreciation of women" is shown by Jouy's words, "Without women the beginning of our life would be deprived of help, the midst [of our life would be deprived] of pleasures and the end [of our life would be deprived] of consolation," and by similar thoughts of Byron's. The fourth remark implies that nature equips all creatures with what they need to survive, suggesting a kind of equality of value. In the fifth he writes that, "women are more sober in their judgment than [men], and [...] they see nothing more in things than is really there." In the sixth he claims that, "they live more for the species than for the individual, and in their hearts take the affairs of the species more seriously than those of the individual." This might sound bad, but Schopenhauer argues that the species is far more important and valuable than any individual, which would make women's hearts wiser than men's, in his view. The eighth remark sounds particularly bad (it includes, for instance, the claim that "They are the sexus sequior, the second sex in every respect"), but is in part an attack on the idea of the lady, which many feminists would also reject. 
4. I want to explore the possibility that his apparent misogyny is ironic, and that what he means is therefore not nearly as bad as what he appears to be saying. Consider this paragraph, which is the last one in the Penguin edition:

"It is useless to argue about polygamy, it must be taken as a fact existing everywhere, the mere regulation of which is the problem to be solved. Where are there, then, any real monogamists? We all live, at any rate for a time, and the majority of us always, in polygamy. Consequently, as each man needs many women, nothing is more just than to let him, nay, make it incumbent upon him to provide for many women. By this means woman will be brought back to her proper and natural place as a subordinate being, and the lady, that monster of European civilisation and Christian–Teutonic stupidity, with her ridiculous claim to respect and veneration, will no longer exist; there will still be women, but no unhappy women, of whom Europe is at present full. The Mormons’ standpoint is right."

Assuming his readers are mid-nineteenth century German men, how would they be likely to react to this argument? Not very happily, I would think. They are accused of polygamy, which is associated with Mormonism. In his MA thesis "The Mormons in Wilhelmine Germany 1870-1914: Making a place for an unwanted American religion in a changing German society", Michael Mitchell writes (p. 1) that: "Mormonism had officially come to Germany in 1850 but opposition there was ubiquitous and conversions few." So recommending the Mormon standpoint could not be expected to be popular. Nor would Schopenhauer's reference to "Christian–Teutonic stupidity". The accusation of polygamy also seems unlikely to win him friends. Especially since, as I read the essay, he is talking about men hiring prostitutes, whose lives he describes as being "as joyless as [they are] void of honour." Nor do I imagine his readers would enjoy thinking that their wives are not ladies. And, finally, I doubt they would like the suggestion that it be made "incumbent upon [them] to provide for many women." It is not especially attractive women that Schopenhauer is talking about here but, on the contrary, all the women who are not chosen to be gentlemen's wives in the current system, including "old maids," prostitutes, and other working women. All women are to be taken care of by men of means under Schopenhauer's proposal. (Which presumably also means that all other men are left with neither wives nor prostitutes.) 

It is indeed a terrible idea. But it is so terrible that I wonder whether all that comes before it should be taken not at face value but as part of a kind of joke, whose punchline is this terrible enforced polygamy policy proposal. In other words, maybe this whole essay is really a kind of reductio ad absurdum. 

That's what I was going to say, anyway. Then I read the last remark (excluded from the Penguin edition), which ends:

That woman is by nature intended to obey is shown by the fact that every woman who is placed in the unnatural position of absolute independence at once attaches herself to some kind of man, by whom she is controlled and governed; this is because she requires a master. If she is young, the man is a lover; if she is old, a priest.

Perhaps this is some sort of joke at the expense of priests, but it hardly supports my Schopenhauer-as-feminist idea.So maybe I'm just completely wrong about that.

Orwell and Wittgenstein again

When I'm not taking a day off, my plan from now on this summer is to do something Schopenhauer-related every day. Mostly this will be writing in the form of blogging, although I doubt I'll actually post every time I write. And the plan itself could change, of course.

John Holbo's dissertation is Schopenhauer-related, and that's my starting point. Here's a quote in it from Wittgenstein (LC, p.2):

If I had to say what the main mistake made by philosophers of the present generation is...I would say it is that when language is looked at, what is looked at is a form of words and not the use made of the form of words.

This strikes me as an important thought to keep in mind if you're ever tempted, as I am, to see Wittgenstein as a kind of ally of Orwell's on questions of politics and language use. Orwell does talk about the uses made of forms of words, but he also seems to think that if only we get the forms right then the uses will take care of themselves. I do think there is something to this idea. Simple words and sentences can make evil and stupidity harder to hide. But it's not a particularly Wittgensteinian idea. 

Schopenhauer

If I had time one of the things I would most like to do is write a book about Schopenhauer, possibly relating his thought to that of Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Anscombe. So I might blog about him, especially The World as Will and Representation, from time to time. Here are some interesting bits of the preface:

I propose to point out here how this book must be read in order to be thoroughly understood. By means of it I only intend to impart a single thought. Yet, notwithstanding all my endeavours, I could find no shorter way of imparting it than this whole book. I hold this thought to be that which has very long been sought for under the name of philosophy

According as we consider the different aspects of this one thought which I am about to impart, it exhibits itself as that which we call metaphysics, that which we call ethics, and that which we call æsthetics

no other advice can be given as to how one may enter into the thought explained in this work than to read the book twice, and the first time with great patience, a patience which is only to be derived from the belief, voluntarily accorded, that the beginning presupposes the end almost as much as the end presupposes the beginning, and that all the earlier parts presuppose the later almost as much as the later presuppose the earlier.

the first perusal demands patience, founded on confidence that on a second perusal much, or all, will appear in an entirely different light

The second demand is this, that the introduction be read before the book itself, although it is not contained in the book, but appeared five years earlier under the title, “Ueber die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde: eine philosophische Abhandlung” (On the fourfold root of the principle of sufficient reason: a philosophical essay).

But the same disinclination to repeat myself word for word, or to say the same thing a second time in other and worse words, after I have deprived myself of the better, has occasioned another defect in the first book of this work. For I have omitted all that is said in the first chapter of my essay “On Sight and Colour,” which would otherwise have found its place here, word for word. Therefore the knowledge of this short, earlier work is also presupposed.

Finally, the third demand I have to make on the reader might indeed be tacitly assumed, for it is nothing but an acquaintance with the most important phenomenon that has appeared in philosophy for two thousand years, and that lies so near us: I mean the principal writings of Kant

He likens reading Kant to having cataracts removed and to being reborn. And yet he does not seem to think that Kant has yet done enough.

There is also quite a bit of Wittgenstein-ish stuff like this (from the second preface):

anything true one may have thought, and anything obscure one may have thrown light upon, will appeal to any thinking mind, no matter when it comprehends it, and will rejoice and comfort it. To such an one we speak as those who are like us have spoken to us, and have so become our comfort in the wilderness of this life.  

Compare the first words of the Tractatus' preface:

This book will perhaps only be understood by one who has himself already at some time thought the thoughts that are expressed herein – or at least similar thoughts. –It is therefore not a textbook.—Its end would be reached if it gave pleasure to one person who read it with understanding.

In general there seem to me to be quite a few similarities to the early Wittgenstein here, even if they turn out to be only superficial.

Schopenhauer, optimist

Here's an old letter in the New York Times:

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. 

Saying the same thing

Tommi Uschanov points out that in his 1930 "Sketch for a Foreword" Wittgenstein says that he is "not interested in constructing a building, so much as in having a perspicuous view of the foundations of possible buildings" but then goes on, after this sketch, to say that:

Each of the sentences I write is trying to say the whole thing, i.e. the same thing over and over again; it is as though they were all simply views of one object seen from different angles.

There seems to be a tension here, as Tommi notes. Does Wittgenstein want to see the multiplicity suggested by his reference to "foundations of possible buildings" or the unity of "one object"? He goes on to say the following:

the place I really have to get to is a place I must already be at now. Anything that I might reach by climbing a ladder does not interest me.

     One movement links thoughts with one another in a series, the other keeps aiming at the same spot.

     One is constructive and picks up one stone after another, the other keeps taking hold of the same thing. 

You could free associate until you were blue in the face here. Talk of the same thing over and over reminds me of what Wittgenstein said he wanted to be given to eat when he visited Norman Malcolm (but presumably that's at least mostly irrelevant). Talk of one object seen from different angles reminds me of Wittgenstein's remarks on aspect-perception and on thinking about a stove. Getting to a place you are already at sounds like T. S. Eliot (in 1943, so not what Wittgenstein had in mind). The ladder surely is the ladder mentioned at the end of the Tractatus. The series of linked thoughts also sounds like the Tractatus, while the picking up of stones sounds a bit like Wittgenstein's builders.

The stove passage is from October 8th, 1916:

       As a thing among things, each thing is equally insignificant; as a world each one equally significant. If I have been contemplating the stove, and then am told: but now all you know is the stove, my result does indeed seem trivial. For this represents the matter as if I had studied the stove as one among the many things in the world. But if I was contemplating the stove it was my world, and everything else colourless by contrast with it. (Something good about the whole, but bad in details.) For it is equally possible to take the bare present image as the worthless momentary picture in the whole temporal world, and as the true world among shadows. 

As David Stern says, this is a Schopenhauerian idea.

If Wittgenstein were to say one thing, what might we expect it to be? Here are some candidates:

• Wow! (Since wonder at the existence of the world is the experience par excellence)
• It ain't necessarily so (or some kind of liberating word to free us from the grip of some picture) 
• Try looking at it this way (instead)

The last two of these could go together, and then the result might be the first. Perhaps. It would not obviously be a case of wonder at the existence of the world, but it could involve a sense of liberation and revelation. And when something is revealed to you in a new light you might see it as if for the first time, and so with fresh wonder.

At the BWS meeting in September Chon Tejedor quoted Wittgenstein's saying to Paul Engelmann in 1918 that: "When a man wants, as it were, to invent a machine for becoming decent, such a man has no faith." This machine could be the ladder (the Tractatus) and the remarks from 1930 would be a rejection of any decency (or anything else) that might be gained by climbing this ladder (or using this machine). The problems with the ladder/machine seem to be these:

1. it takes you to a different place rather than where you already are
2. it involves a serial movement instead of focusing on one thing
3. (perhaps) it does (too much of) the work for you

If that is a bad way to attempt to achieve decency then perhaps a good way would:

1. start and finish where you, in some sense, are already
2. focus on one thing
3. make you do the work

Wittgenstein's work early and late makes the reader do a lot of work and thereby in some sense starts and ends with the reader. He doesn't tell you what to think in the manner of a sermonizer or textbook-writer. The Tractatus attempts some leading, though, in a way that perhaps the Investigations does not. The Investigations moves criss-cross over and through the landscape, in a somewhat arbitrary (is that the word?) way. It does not appear to focus on one thing, but it is not a series of remarks that construct anything. It might aim at the same spot from different angles, although what that spot is is not so easy to say. And it might require even more work of the reader than the Tractatus does. Certainly there is no revelation in it of the kind found in Tractatus 6.54 ("Here's how my sentences elucidate: ..."). You might be able to stop reading the Tractatus whenever you get what it is trying to help you see, but you also reach an end point that feels like a conclusion. The Investigations, on the other hand, has no conclusion. Its not being finished doesn't feel entirely coincidental. How would you end a book like that?

But what about the Sketch for a Foreword? Does Wittgenstein say there that he wants one thing or many? It sounds like one thing: to have transparently before him the foundations of possible buildings. Of course, though, there is multiplicity inherent in the idea of possibility, as well as in the plural foundations of buildings that he says he wants to see. Each sentence he writes can perhaps be thought of as an invitation to free oneself. In that sense they are all the same. But freedom implies options (plural), so there is multiplicity too. And what one is freed from might not always be the same thing, even if it is always a prison.

(As you may have noticed, what I've written here is basically just notes. That's blogging for you. It might be interesting to work this out more though, to see where I've gone wrong and where I've got it right, and how it all ties together.)

Facebook failures

The line between what belongs on a blog and what belongs on Facebook can be hard to discern, but I've been neglecting this place a bit lately and some things I have posted to Facebook have been more or less ignored, so I'll try them here. One's an essay by Schopenhauer, one's a New York Times story that raises issues about politics, religion, and psychology, and one is just a cool video (but, as I recall, it is very cool).

Here's Schopenhauer, which I found via Brain Pickings, although now I suspect I have read it before. His views are similar to Orwell's, and I wonder whether Wittgenstein read this essay. Here's the bit that stood out to me:

[...] Goethe’s naïve poetry is incomparably greater than Schiller’s rhetoric. It is this, again, that makes many popular songs so affecting. As in architecture an excess of decoration is to be avoided, so in the art of literature a writer must guard against all rhetorical finery, all useless amplification, and all superfluity of expression in general; in a word, he must strive after chastity of style. Every word that can be spared is hurtful if it remains. The law of simplicity and naïveté holds good of all fine art; for it is quite possible to be at once simple and sublime.

Here's the Times story. Unfortunately it's presented as a story about those crazy foreigners, but there's far more to it than that. This will hopefully give a sense of what it's about:

These days, when neak ta [local guardian spirits] appear on the factory floor — inducing mass faintings among workers and shouting commands at managers — they are helping the cause of Cambodia’s largely young, female and rural factory workforce by registering a kind of bodily objection to the harsh daily regimen of industrial capitalism: few days off; a hard bed in a wooden barracks; meager meals of rice and a mystery curry, hastily scarfed down between shifts. These voices from beyond are speaking up for collective bargaining in the here and now, expressing grievances much like the workers’ own: a feeling that they are being exploited by forces beyond their control, that the terms of factory labor somehow violate an older, fairer moral economy.  

Finally, here's the time-lapse video of Earth as seen from space:

Cynicism plus

Two pieces on cynicism remind me of a theory I vaguely started to bake (I'm not sure I got as much as halfway) recently. The first is Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster on self-help and New Age spirituality. The second is Julian Baggini praising cynicism. Critchley and Webster make a lot of unsupported claims, or claims for which they provide no evidence (perhaps because this is The Stone and not anything more scholarly), such as this:

With the rise of corporations like Google, the workplace has increasingly been colonized by nonwork experiences to the extent that we are not even allowed to feel alienation or discontent at the office because we can play Ping-Pong, ride a Segway, and eat  organic lunches from a menu designed by celebrity chefs. 

This is probably true in the sense that the amount of Segway-riding at work has increased from none to some, but surely the kind of work environment described here is still extremely rare. Most of what they say feels true, albeit not entirely surprising. Does New Age spirituality need any more bashing? But there's some better stuff in there too:

A naïve belief in authenticity eventually gives way to a deep cynicism. A conviction in personal success that must always hold failure at bay becomes a corrupt stubbornness that insists on success at any cost. Cynicism, in this mode, is not the expression of a critical stance toward authenticity but is rather the runoff of this failure of belief. 

Cynicism, they imply, has at least two modes, one good one bad. It can express a critical stance toward the cult of authenticity (good) or be the mere runoff of a failure of belief (bad). The bad kind of cynicism is complacent, dishonest, and uncharitable. The good kind asks questions and evaluates, but is not purely negative.

Baggini focuses on what is good about cynicism. As he says: "The cynic, after all, is inclined to question people's motives and assume that they are acting self-servingly unless proven otherwise," and "They [i.e. cynics] are realists who know that the world is not the sun-kissed fantasy peddled by positive-thinking gurus and shysters." He acknowledges that one can take this too far, but defends the tendency of cynicism to help us avoid cons and fantasy. Fair enough.

I see cynicism as coming in many forms. The whole of economic theory seems basically cynical: people are all basically self-interested and motivated by desire for profit. That's a cynical view. And if it turns out that people don't behave so as to maximize their profits, then profit is reinterpreted as utility, and it is posited that whatever they did must have been done in an attempt to maximize their utility. That's a pretty cynical move. Marx is cynical about religion (among other things). Schopenhauer is cynical about love. Nietzsche is cynical about morality. Freud is cynical about motivation generally. All reductionism is a form of cynicism. And all of these forms of cynicism appeal to us (including me) partly because there seems to be so much truth in them.

But none of them seems wholly true. And it's the exceptions that are interesting. Human life would scarcely be worth thinking about if the cynics were completely right. We have to acknowledge the truth in what they say if we are to avoid naivete and fantasy. But everything really valuable and interesting seems to me to belong to the extra part of life, the part that resists reduction, the non-self-interested, the non-rational, the non-consequentialist, the non-biological or mechanical. And I suppose it's just that kind of gooey sentiment that is perhaps most likely of all to breed cynicism. Oh well.     

Oslo, August 31st

About as cheery as Grave of the Fireflies but very much worth watching is this film by Joachim Trier. At one point the main character, Anders, gives as an example of a typical contemporary magazine article a Schopenhauerian take on Sex and the City. If you've seen it, it's then hard not to think of Alain de Botton's piece on Schopenhauer and nightclubs:

According to de Botton, people who think they are going to nightclubs just to dance, drink, and have fun are actually unconsciously driven by the will to live to seek opportunities for reproduction. The women in Sex and the City are presumably in the same boat. They all seem to want a man in some sense (perhaps just sex, perhaps just a friend (male or female), perhaps a husband, perhaps some other variation on this theme, depending on the character and her mood at the time), but never seem quite sure what it is that they want. The Schopenhauerian view, I take it, is that this quest is all quite pointless but more or less inevitable given our nature. We are driven by forces that we rarely see clearly and that are themselves blind. So we don't know what is going on, what we are chasing, except in vague terms. The underlying, meaningless truth is veiled from us.   

Anders takes a similar kind of view. Married life does not appeal to him, not surprisingly given the view of it that is presented to him. And endless casual relationships seem pointless. So he's stuck. Can art provide a way out? Well, he doesn't have much faith in either journalism or his chances of making it as a journalist. And he doesn't seem to consider other kinds of writing. What about movies? He doesn't try to make one, but if he did I imagine it would be rather like this one, the one about him. It doesn't seem nearly as superficial as the magazine articles he mocks, but it is apt that he might think of it that way. Everything's meaningless when you're in despair. 

That's a bit obscure, so here's another version. In this movie the idea of an essay on how Schopenhauer might regard Sex and the City is presented as a joke, but if you think about what such an essay might say it's actually pretty close to this movie itself. And that is not an indictment of the film but one of the things that makes it so neat.

To Rome With Love

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A bit of singing and dancing

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

On the commercial corruption of 'sport' he writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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