The red and the black

Samuel Fleischacker's Divine Teaching and the Way of the World: A Defense of Revealed Religion sounds like one for the summer reading list:

Fleischacker argues that religion provides something that secularism fails to offer successfully -- what he calls "ethics," a telos for the moral life, that which makes living the moral life and life itself meaningful and worthwhile. [...] Fleischacker comes to the following strong conclusion: "If we must accept a secular approach to worth, we will have no reason to think that any life -- religious or secular -- is worth living, while on religious accounts, some, many, or even all human lives will be worth living." (p. 168)

[...] Specifically, we are to rationally justify adopting a religious text as a revelation on telic grounds alone, science and morality assumed already in place. To Fleischacker, one is impressed by the telos of a text by features such as its fascination and beauty, by its demanding the highest ideals of morality, indeed by its going further than morality demands and by its providing a "path," a sound set of practices for the implementation of its values. (pp. 280ff.) [...]

To say a revelation is "true" for Fleischacker, therefore, is not to refer to its historical reliability or its sound moral teachings. (p. 67) Rather, it is to express trust in one's telic expectations of it. The text satisfies one's "telic yearnings." (p. 308) When a text strikes a person as revelatory, he then has reason to believe in God, for belief in God as the source of the revelation can give the best metaphysical account of the telic truth existing in the text [...]

Here, Fleischacker has brought to our attention an important mode of justification, that of making sense of telic convictions, generally ignored in discussions of epistemic justification. When we have compelling empirical experiences we might not have an explanation for their occurrence. The situation might demand positing entities for that explanation. Thus can empirical experiences form the basis, and properly so, for scientific theorizing and metaphysical ontologizing. Just so, we could have an attitude toward the world and toward ourselves that was no less compelling, or maybe even more compelling, than a sense experience. By analogy to compelling empirical experiences, the natural question to pose would be: What would have to be the case for this attitude to be correct, that is, for it to be appropriate to reality? Positing a metaphysical ontology in reply could be as well based as ontologizing for empirical experiences. An attitude or value can be so basic, so pervasive, and so convincing that it demands a correlative ontology to adequately account for it. Fleischacker concludes that it is rationally justified to believe in God as a metaphysical account of the telic truth existing in the text.

This all sounds good to me (apart from the idea that without religion we have no reason to think any life worth living and with it we do have such reason) so long as: a) such a religious text really is both necessary and available (Fleischacker argues that the Torah is such a text, his reviewer has doubts), and b) "positing a metaphysical ontology" doesn't mean what I think it means.

A genuinely compelling attitude should (surely) be one that we are compelled to take, that we find ourselves in, whether we like it or not. And we should, in some sense, like it. That is, we should not think it would be better if we had some other attitude. For instance, I might feel guilty about something, and not enjoy this feeling, but if an attitude of guilt toward my past deeds is compelling then I won't believe that it would be better if I didn't care what I had done. (I'm thinking of Wittgenstein's example from the Lecture on Ethics, but also the novel Sorry by Zoran Drvenkar, which takes guilt and its avoidance as the theme for a murder mystery.) Perhaps it is true that "the natural question to pose would be: What would have to be the case for this attitude to be correct, that is, for it to be appropriate to reality?" But I have to ask whether it is natural to pose any question at all in a case like this. Why not accept the guilt, or the wonder, or whatever it might be?

One answer might be a felt need to find a way to express it. If this need is genuine then the attitude will be expressed, one way or another. One way might be through language, and this language might turn out to be religious (in the obvious sense of including words like 'God'). And then this religious language might be more or less important to your life. You might only shout "God!" or "Damn!" when you drop something or get hurt, or you might find yourself caught up in much more complicated forms of language, in much more seriously or fully religious ways of thinking, talking, and behaving. In the latter case I imagine you would be religious. But that doesn't mean that you will be positing a metaphysical ontology in any straightforward sense. Faith is not positing. Or so it seems to me. The attitude involved in positing an ontology in order to make sense of some experience sounds like a scientific or philosophical attitude, not a religious one.

This all strikes me as being related to some things Robert Gay says, which I wanted to blog about (or at least quote) anyway.  Here is Gay on "Bernard Williams on Practical Necessity" (Mind Vol. 98, 392, October 1989, pp. 551-569):

[S]uppose that someone, seeing another person dying, has a sense that human life must be respected, and tries to give voice to this by saying that human life is sacred. We surely should not suppose that he is expressing a conscientious 'sense of duty', ready to summon up efforts of will. Rather, the person's mind may be entirely occupied by his imaginative echoing of the person's fear and his struggles to live, and by his own regret at what is happening. And, if he is entirely possessed by these, there will be no gap for the motivation of effort to fill, nor even the idea of a gap for the motivation of effort to be 'in the offing'.

We may be reminded of Ryle's argument that the enjoyment of, say, a game of tennis cannot be the experiencing of sensations of pleasure, because the more one is enjoying the game, the more completely one's attention is occupied by it, and sensations of pleasure would have to enter one's awareness and distract one from the game. In the same way, this sense that human life must be respected cannot involve the 'sense of duty', because this sense of the sacredness of life involves being entirely possessed by certain thoughts, and if one's mind is filled by those thoughts there is no room for the 'sense of duty', which only occurs to supply deficiencies. If we may picture the 'sense of duty' as black, and the other feelings and thoughts as, say, red, then we should colour the whole of the subject's consciousness at that time red, without any black patches or even a black nimbus around the edges of the red. The 'must' of practical necessity will have to be expressing nothing distinct, but rather (if I may pursue the metaphor one step beyond my explanation of it) the compelling brightness of this red. 

I see the 'must' of practical necessity as related to the compelling attitude toward the world and ourselves that Fleischacker (or his reviewer, Jerome Gellman) refers to. If we are entirely possessed by it then there is no gap to fill, the whole picture is red. And we will have no call for ontological positing. Only for showing the brightness of the red in whatever way we can or must.

Zona

This is not a book review but just notice that an interesting book is out there to be read. I've wanted to read some Geoff Dyer ever since reading this recommendation by Cora Diamond, and now it turns out he has written a book about one of the greatest films made by one of my favorite directors, Tarkovsky's Stalker. 

You can watch the movie free online (the link is here), but watching the DVD presumably provides better quality and allows you to see it on a larger screen (if you've got one). That's important, I think. According to the New York Times review of the book, Tarkovsky called making films "sculpting in time." I think of it as telling stories with light, but perhaps that's the other side of the same coin. Anyway, whether you think in terms of sculpting or light, you want to be able to get a good look at it. As Monty Python put it, "the film ends mostly visually," and that goes for the beginning and the middle too.

Pinzauti on Mounce on Winch on Anscombe

Perhaps not for much longer there is a paper available free here (at least to me when I'm at work) by Piero Pinzauti that is curious and worth reading. The paper is a response to an earlier one by Howard Mounce, which I have already discussed. Pinzauti makes some controversial claims, e.g. the suggestion that there are:

horrors caused by the existence of many conflicting religions and by rendering our moral perceptions dependent on all sorts of religious interpretations.

As I read this passage, it says that treating morality as dependent on religion, as Mounce (and allegedly Anscombe) does, partially causes all the horrors that can be blamed on religion, including "no end of wars against one another and against entire populations, including invasions, oppressions, inquisitions and torture." This, it seems to me, is going a little far.

But along the way Pinzauti raises interesting questions about humanity and about the relation between morality and religion. He talks, as Peter Winch does, about the good Samaritan seeing the humanity of the wounded man whom he stops to help. But I find this talk obscure. For instance, Pinzauti says that if the Samaritan explains why he has interrupted his journey to help a stranger by referring to the fact that the wounded man will die otherwise, then this reason

refers directly and solely to the wounded man's human characteristics and needs, and to nothing else external to them. And here, Winch invited us to notice that the Samaritan's behaviour and his relationship to the victim is complete in itself, and no further reason is required to make it immediately intelligible and to make sense of it; therefore, we can completely dispense with God and with His divine law to this effect.

What is obscure to me is the meaning of the idea that the Samaritan's behavior is "complete in itself" with no further reason required to make it intelligible. I agree that no further reason is required, but surely this behavior depends on something for its intelligibility. On some shared idea about what kinds of behavior are intelligible, for instance. I'm not sure that anything is simply intelligible "in itself." (Although, not being sure what this means, I can't really deny it.)

Here's another example of the obscurity I'm trying to bring out. According to Pinzauti: "we may see a wounded man half dead in the street but do not “see” him as one to be taken care of and as demanding our attention." I assume that the word 'see' is in quotation marks because it is a matter of seeing as, which is not regular seeing. Just as (or at least somewhat as) there is seeing and seeing, so too there is humanity and humanity, it seems to me. That is, there is understanding that someone or something is a human being and that it will die if not cared for in certain ways, but there is also knowing that something is "one to be taken care of." This distinction is only hinted at by Pinzauti, so it isn't clear to what extent he is aware of it (although he is surely at least dimly aware of it).

Here's a third and final example. In section 3 of the paper, Pinzauti writes that in a certain case, "the victim's human characteristics would have no reality in and of themselves, and would become a mere means for the Samaritan to obey the law." This Kantian language ("reality in itself") is obscure, especially given the earlier references to human-needs-and-nothing-else-beyond-them, which sounds much more naturalistic than Kant.

Pinzauti moves on to this conclusion:

On the basis of this approach Winch thinks that – to put it with Mounce –“the background of divine law is irrelevant to the parable  . . . we do not need divine law in order to understand the modal form ‘I can't leave him’.”

But I don't think it has been shown at all what background may or may not be necessary to make sense of the distinction between seeing a human being with needs (which an animal might do, after all) and seeing something as a human being with needs, as one that is to be taken care of (which only a fellow human being is likely to do). I don't know what we need in order to understand "I can't leave him," but it doesn't follow from the fact that he belongs to the species homo sapiens that he is one to be taken care of. Seeing the former as the latter involves some sort of background, context, or perspective. One is a point of data, or at most a flat expanse--call it a circle--of the given, the other is larger, richer, and caught up with the sphere of action. The larger of the two is something like a conception of the smaller concept, and this relates, I think, to conceiving as imagining, as when you're given some description and then find that you can or cannot conceive of such a thing. Conceiving here means giving life in imagination to the idea, growing it and putting it into some kind of motion. And these conceptions, at least sometimes, are shared. (One of the objections to a male logic professor posing for sexist photographs is that doing so might further entrench harmful conceptions of logic (as being for men) and of women (ditto). It doesn't change the concepts of logic and women.)

When I was an undergraduate I picked up the anti-foundationalist slogan "philosophy is flat" (I think this comes from P.M.S. Hacker, but I could be wrong. I remember it as a theme in Paul Johnston's work (but I could be wrong about that, too).) In the spirit of this slogan I would deny that morality depends (vertically) on religion. But whether we can really have ethics without religion, whether the two can be wholly separate, seems to me to be an open question. Who knows what concepts we might find ourselves needing? Who knows what we can cut off and what will remain clinging to our thoughts, conceptions, behavior, etc.? Religion is no foundation though. Nothing that surpasses understanding can be the logical (or epistemological) basis of anything else. We can never comprehend any such limit, plumb any such depth.

So if the taste is for grasping, and for what can be grasped, we might be better off not even going there,as they used to say. We might be best stopping right away, at what can be grasped, at the man lying wounded on the ground. Then we could say with Pinzauti that "the essential characteristics of the victim's humanity" are "his injuries, his need for care and the danger that he may die" and leave it that. We don't then go looking beyond the physical facts into the murk of ethics, but the ethical is contained (unutterably, as Wittgenstein put it) in the physical:

And this is how it is: if only you do not try to utter what is unutterable [das Unaussprechliche] then nothing gets lost. But the unutterable will be -- unutterably -- contained in what has been uttered! (Memoir p. 82-85 [4 September 1917 (Letter No. 6)]) (copied from here) 

(I sometimes wonder whether Davidson could be read this way when he talks about reasons as causes. That is, he might be re-enchanting our idea of a cause rather than disenchanting the idea of a reason, as he is usually taken to be doing.) But then you're leaving everything unexplained, treating everything as given. Perhaps then the given (what we start from as we set out to solve a problem) becomes the gift (what we accept, perhaps as a task, but not as something to solve). I don't know how that can be done by anything short of dying though. Correction: it shouldn't be that hard. Things can still be explained. All you have to stop doing is looking for the wrong kind of explanation, looking in the wrong place. That might not be easy, but it isn't impossible.

This post is probably already too long, but I think it's pretty hard to follow, too, so I'll try a little more. It's tempting to think we know what bare facts are (and it helps to foster this sense of understanding if we use Latin words such as data) and that we understand the difference between description and explanation, and between the positive and the normative. But when we explain we come to an end, which is usually a description of something. That's just how it is. And when we justify or explain, much the same kind of thing happens. We end with a statement: that is unacceptable, that hurts, that makes me happy. We begin and end with statements. Of course sometimes it helps to give additional statements, but sometimes it is unnecessary. Why did the Samaritan help? The man was dying! What more is necessary? If philosophy demands more, then perhaps there is something wrong with philosophy. How can a mere fact (the man was dying) be normative?

Can I get away with saying this: "Don't think, look!"? Probably not. Another paper in the same issue of Philosophical Investigations (by Drew Carter) addresses this issue, so I'll return to it soon.

The Oscars

Time for my grumpy and ludicrously ill-informed assessment of the year's best films.

I don't care who wins the Oscars, but it's hard to ignore the whole business completely. Titanic won the Oscar for best film and it is my standard for the lowest possible rating to give to movies. 5 stars = I would happily watch again, 4 stars = exactly my kind of movie, 3 stars = I liked it OK, 2 stars = turned it off before it was over, 1 star = as bad as Titanic.

This year the nominees for best film are: 

• The Artist: I haven't seen it, but from the preview it looks terrible--smug and whimsical 
• The Descendants: pretty good, but more 3 stars than anything else. Worth seeing, but forgettable. 
• Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close: not very good, according to David Denby 
• The Help: not something I want to see 
• Hugo: nice to look at, and interesting history of the movies, but pretty thin really, and the early scenes of the trendy-looking kid laughing at the fat man and the crippled veteran are a bit uncomfortable 
• Midnight in Paris: "lightweight but fun, and features lots of very appealing views of Paris," as I said when I saw it  
• Moneyball: pretty good. Another 3 star movie, really, telling an interesting story well without creating any really memorable characters, scenes, or lines (except maybe at the end, which is sweet). 
• The Tree of Life: "it's got a lot going for it. But it also seems often like an extended music video for church music." Possibly the best movie on this list, but could fairly be called pretentious bull too. As JEH Smith says: "I respond well to Malick's vision of the world. But I wish he could get it across without the voiceovers, without the Rockwellian kitsch, and without the glossiness and unctuousness of the big-name, big-budget spectacle."    
• War Horse: the play was supposed to be good, but from what I've seen it's a horse in a war. World War I, of course, so that everyone can wring their hands and shake their heads over the senseless slaughter and how bad war is, without ever taking a stand on anything controversial, like current wars and uprisings. I think I'll pass.

My vote goes to Tree of Life, but it's a winner in a slow race.

Personhood

It's often tempting to think that philosophy is more or less irrelevant to real life, but there are times when I wonder whether the opposite is true. That is, sometimes it seems as if everyone is pretty much going with the flow while the flow in question has its origin in the intellectual sphere. Ideas slowly trickle down to teachers and preachers, not to mention politicians and journalists, hence to children, and what was once a controversial new thesis becomes common sense. Something like Schopenhauer's view of life as an essentially meaningless struggle to survive and reproduce, for instance, seems to be very widely accepted. Isn't this the basic idea of evolutionary psychology, after all? Obviously Darwin is relevant too, but why do people like his ideas so much? And Schopenhauer comes up in other ways too. When will Nietzsche's criticism of Schopenhauer arrive? And then what?

The latest philosophical notion* to have reached street level is personhood. Virginia's HB 1 declares:

Rights of unborn children.  Provides that unborn children at every stage of development enjoy all the rights, privileges, and immunities available to other persons, citizens, and residents of the Commonwealth, subject only to the laws and constitutions of Virginia and the United States, precedents of the United States Supreme Court, and provisions to the contrary in the statutes of the Commonwealth.

Gone are the good old days (of 1972) when Elizabeth Anscombe could write that:

some may doubt (it's a rather academic question, I think, an intensely academic question) the good sense of calling a fertilized ovum a human being. 

One nice thing about Anscombe's paper is that she makes it clear how fundamentally Christian her position is:

Christianity taught that men ought to be as chaste as pagans thought honest women ought to be; the contraceptive morality teaches that women need to be as little chaste as pagans thought men need be.

And if there is nothing intrinsically wrong with contraceptive intercourse, and if it could become general practice everywhere when there is intercourse but ought to be no begetting, then it's very difficult to see the objection to this [i.e. the pagan, contraceptive] morality, for the ground of objection to fornication and adultery was that sexual intercourse is only right in the sort of set-up that typically provides children with a father and mother to care for them. If you can turn intercourse into something other than the reproductive type of act (I don't mean of course that every act is reproductive any more than every acorn leads to an oak-tree but it's the reproductive type of act) then why, if you can change it, should it be restricted to the married? Restricted, that is, to partners bound in a formal, legal, union whose fundamental purpose is the bringing up of children? For if that is not its fundamental purpose there is no reason why for example "marriage" should have to be between people of opposite sexes.  

The purpose of HB 1, of course, is to impose a Christian morality on people. Its backers, though certainly lacking Anscombe's intellectual firepower, are to some extent aware of the logic of her argument. They see a clash of value systems and want to go as far as they can toward enforcing theirs on everyone else. It's understandable that a Christian would want everyone to live according to Christian morals. But there are (at least) three problems with this proposal, as I see it.

1. The language of personhood is quasi-technical, philosophical language. It is not the same as Anscombe's talk of "human beginning." It is a legalistic term that does little to help either side in the debate about the ethics of abortion, as Ronald Dworkin and Judith Jarvis Thomson (who I would guess had Anscombe in mind when she wrote her defense of abortion, with its echoing reference to acorns and oak trees) have shown. Arguably the best (non-religious) pro-life argument, that made by Don Marquis, does not involve the question of fetal personhood. There is no good reason to think that talk of personhood will help honest thinking about abortion.

2. The First Amendment. The people who talk up the US Constitution when it suits them cannot in good conscience seek to establish their religion by law.

3. It is un-Christian to try to instill shame in people through humiliation. A companion bill, HB 462, requires all women seeking abortions, for whatever reason (including rape), to undergo an ultrasound. This procedure is presumably intended to make women feel guilty about having an abortion. And that seems incompatible with sincere belief in Matthew 7:1 ("Judge not") and Romans  3:8 (true Christians do not do evil in order to bring about good). "Judge not" is an easy line to trot out, of course, but I think this effort to shame is noticeably less Christian than simply banning abortion would be. That might be tyrannical, but it isn't manipulative exactly.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of abortion, this legislation is philosophically unsound, un-American (insofar as it's good to be American), and un-Christian (if there is such a thing as a good kind of Christianity). It's anti-women, too, of course. But apart from that, just fine.

*I hope it's a legal notion of personhood that's really to blame, but maybe the philosophers can ride to the rescue. Not that I would count on any but a political defense in response to this kind of attack.

This is less obviously relevant but comes to mind because of the lines "Tell me where it all went wrong" and the one about acting like a man who's cross with every woman he's never had:

"Does he have to like the...?

...Jesus and Mary Chain!" is a line from the song "Do You Want a Boyfriend?" by the Tender Trap. (It's a good song, but the video is self-consciously amateurish, featuring people my age pretending to be teenagers, so it's a bit uncomfortable.)

There's another reference to the Jesus and Mary Chain in "We Looked Like Giants" by Death Cab for Cutie ("Do you remember the JAMC?"). They (the JAMC) were my favorite band for a while in high school. I used to listen to "You Trip Me Up" and "Never Understand" getting ready for school in the mornings (12" singles--do they still exist?). The band was famous for causing riots by playing for only 15 minutes when people had paid money and maybe traveled miles to see them live. Comparisons were made with the Sex Pistols. Apparently they are still iconic or considered representative of some age or mindset (I almost wrote "vibe").

Their look is very 1980s (especially the hair), combining 1960s elements (I waited every year for the always-predicted psychedelic revival that never came) with goth-y black. And the sound is presumably inspired by the Velvet Underground: '60s innocent niceness plus feedback and lots of noise. Everyone in those days copied the Velvets in one way or another, because they were about the only band from before 1977 that you could admit to liking. (That probably sounds like an exaggeration, but as I experienced it punk happened almost literally overnight and changed completely what was socially acceptable in clothes and music. I was only about ten, and not exactly hip, but even I noticed it.) It's the noise that I'm interested in right now.

Dave Maier has an essay on noise music here. He's talking about this kind of thing:

Unlike the Jesus and Mary Chain, I can't really see this being used in a romantic Hollywood movie. Philip Larkin judged music by this criterion: "As it enters the ear, does it come in like broken glass or does it come in like honey?" (All What Jazz, p. 28) The JAMC deliberately went for both (as, I think, do The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, although they blend the two, while the JAMC gave you one in one ear and the other in the other). Noise music, as far as I can tell, wants to be like broken glass. I vaguely approve of this, but I can't honestly say I like it. There's a grumpy Larkin in me that rejects it, and a skeptical Wittgenstein, the Wittgenstein who wonders what Europeans who claim to appreciate African art could say about it except "How charming!" Would they, for instance, be able to offer critical suggestions while such a work were being made, telling the creator to add more here or take some off there? If not then it all seems a bit shallow. And I feel that way (I emphasize 'feel' as opposed to, say, 'judge after much careful thought') about noise music.

I'll try to let a series of quotes from Maier explain what the point of noise music is meant to be. He begins with a paraphrase of an argument by Nick Smith:

According to Adorno, language, art, and philosophy are all manifestations of underlying sociocultural phenomena.  Everything Adorno deplores – the economic inequality and social oppression which he sees as the inevitable result of capitalist economies based on the principle of abstract exchange-value – can thus be diagnosed in the analogous ills afflicting the corresponding spheres of culture, including philosophy itself. The engine of capitalist culture is instrumental rationality, which abstracts from individual things and persons for the purposes of economic and social efficiency

Adorno sees art's [...] independence from conceptual understanding as a possible way to resist the cultural hegemony 

Unfortunately, as Adorno recognizes, this role for art is futile from the beginning.  First, there is an irresolvable tension in using art as a tool to combat instrumental rationality. Similarly, even to the extent that it succeeds, art is in constant danger of succumbing to its own success, which commodifies it and subjects it to the same concept of exchange-value that it was its cultural task to overcome.

All that art, even the best art, can do is to mourn the loss of meaning to those who are capable of mourning with it (that's us), and to dramatize the current desperate situation in the vain hope of shocking the rest of us out of our complacency and complicity with the system. 

If this is right, then the mourning seems to have some possible value, but the attempt to shock seems like more instrumentality. Maier goes on:

If there is to be effective resistance to the pop-cultural juggernaut, it must be sought in a different place. Smith locates the contemporary battlefront at the interface of music and noise.

Like Adorno – on Smith's interpretation, anyway – Smith seems to assume that only in total subversion of traditional aesthetic standards can the virtuous resistance to commercial culture take its (here regrettably final) stand, and that every other kind of music (except perhaps those few dogged academic serialists?) is fatally complicit with ruling-class ideology and thus aesthetically worthless (and vice versa).

One thing I don't get here is how virtuous resistance to commercial culture (and nothing else) can be one's reason for putting on some music. Why bother? The JAMC approach makes sense to me: you listen for the nice tune, the horrible noise makes it culturally palatable. But why would anyone choose to listen to just the noise (except to annoy their parents, impress their peers, etc.)? But wait.

Smith’s picture is much more pessimistic than Adorno’s, essentially conceding defeat by the forces of consumerism.  However, his conception of the aesthetic significance of noise is neither sufficient as it stands nor shared by all noise artists.

Spanish sound artist Francisco López [says]: “I think this [listening to a waterfall or radio static, "sounds that initially appear as a solid mass but slowly reveal themselves to be made up of myriad micro-particles"] is actually completely different from the traditional conception of listening to music, in which you want to listen to melody or rhythm or whatever.  What I want to do is something that is more blurred, something that does not have a definite structure.  But it has some inner richness that you can appreciate, if you listen carefully.  If you do this, you’ll discover many things there.  This is a question of going really deep into the listening experience.’ 

After we become accustomed to the necessity of listening in more than one way at once, this experience itself becomes a single, expanded way of listening.  Such expansion results in greatly expanded possibilities for the pointed disruption of interpretations-in-progress.  Our concepts need not be overwhelmed by an object for dislocation to occur, but simply eluded, if this can be made to happen in an appropriately subtle way – and thus by sounds potentially quite unlike those made by that unfortunate cat with his tail in the blender.  

There are a few issues here. One is the problem of instrumental thinking again, but I think this is not fatal. If artists aim at creating disruptive or dislocating works, or if consumers of such work consume in a conscious attempt to achieve disruption or dislocation, then the kind of instrumental thinking that is meant to be avoided has not been. But if people make or listen to this stuff just because they like it and the reason why they like it is its liberating or dislocating effect, then that seems OK. The remaining questions that occur to me (apart from whether the Adorno/Smith thesis is right in the first place) are whether that is why people like this stuff (and they aren't just being fooled or fooling themselves) and then the practical problem of how one gets to like it in the first place. I would much rather listen to rainfall than noise music inspired by the experience of listening to rainfall. This could get boring, of course, but a walk is usually more pleasant if you (i.e. I) turn off the iPod and listen to the birds instead. But there's no reason why you couldn't do that and then go home and listen to noise music, if that's your cup of tea.

Yet more philosophy football

Belated congratulations to Alice Crary for beating the combined forces of Putnam, Cavell, and co. in the Super Bowl. She did have help from Simon Critchley and Dave Maier, but it was impressive all the same.

One of the highlights of the spring is creating your fantasy Major League Soccer team, just about the only way to generate the necessary interest in MLS to get you through the summer. So I've just created a Philosophy Football division at mfls.com, which everyone is free to join (until it gets full).

And as if that weren't enough, philosophy graduate student Michael Regan and I have a Philosophy Football division in the Fantasy Premier League. The code to join is 86816-575291.

(I know, I should be doing something more constructive, like listening to Steely Dan. Better blogging will resume one day.)