tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83715937108780175782024-03-13T08:57:43.173-07:00Elastic SteelThoughts Philosophical, Moral, Political, and Literary
Contributors: Robert C. Miner and Margaret WatkinsRobert Minerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02230724650025013746noreply@blogger.comBlogger39125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8371593710878017578.post-12768409118797765302020-03-12T10:09:00.000-07:002020-03-12T17:24:16.706-07:00Of Fear, Violence, and VirusesOn September 11, 2001, I was scheduled to fly from South Bend, Indiana, to Augusta, Georgia for my grandmother's 80th birthday celebration. I was driving to the airport when the world changed. I headed to the University of Notre Dame campus instead, where I was a graduate student, and slowly realized that no one would be getting on a plane for quite some time.<br />
<br />
My mentor encouraged me to get in my car and drive instead. Somewhere along the way I picked up two small American flags and attached them to my windows. I did so in spite of my growing discomfort with conspicuous patriotism in light of all I had learned about my country's history and the way that the rest of the world perceived us. I did so out of solidarity. As I drove south and east, truck drivers honked and gave me the thumbs-up, and I felt reconnected to the blue-collar segment of the population I had grown up in and among. There were dire predictions of shortages and price-gouging, but all I encountered along the way was communal caring, suffering, and consolation.<br />
<br />
I remember feeling like the world was upended, and that nothing would ever be the same again. I remember being comforted by my father, who himself remembered World War II, the upheavals of Vietnam, and a time of public assassinations. We will go on; life will resume.<br />
<br />
During the two days of that drive, and the ensuing time with my extended family, it was easy to believe that in our sorrows we would find the best part of ourselves, that we would reach out to and take care of each other. And to some degree we did. But then violence always begets violence, and we are all still suffering from the effects of our own violence in the face of intense, all-consuming fear.<br />
<br />
We are now facing another crisis, of a quite different sort. The aggressor is a pathogen, and we have no idea what to do with our fear of it. It is easy to minimize the importance of this violent emotion, but it has been behind so much destruction, so much suffering, and so much failure to make reasoned decisions in the face of dire need. It seems to me that we all need to be attending to three of its particular effects right now.<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>Xenophobia: </b>It is not surprising that with a microscopic enemy, we look around for a bigger one. But the novel coronavirus is not a "Chinese" virus, nor an Asian virus. It is just a virus--one of nature's marvels, in a way. It is an equal-opportunity pathogen, and we have no time or energy to waste fearing the other or stigmatizing whole groups of people who may in fact be our fellow citizens and are most definitely our fellow human beings. We are all equally vulnerable and equally responsible for doing whatever we can to mitigate the damage, without adding to the suffering through ignorant cruelty.<br />
<br />
<b>Exponential Burdens on the Already Burdened: </b>Threats to physical health and the health of the economy are both harder on those whose lives are already hard, especially the poor. When those of us who are relatively privileged find an empty space on a grocery shelf, we probably still have enough food in our cupboards to keep our families well-fed for weeks. But what is this like for the family buying just what they can to get by, day by day? When colleges and universities send their students home, it is the socio-economically disadvantaged students who cannot access online learning or sometimes familial support to continue their education at a distance. When we shut down public events and spaces, it is the workers without steady salaries or benefits who lose not just recreation but livelihood. Of course we may still need to shop for emergency supplies, move away from face-to-face instruction, and limit public gatherings. But we must do so with full awareness of these costs for those for whom the costs of living are already so high, and try as best we can to stitch together a safety net that we have failed to plan for.<br />
<br />
<b>Trauma to the Constitutionally Vulnerable</b>: Fred Rogers is famous for telling children that in moments of crisis they should "look for the helpers." His idea was not that adults would have all the answers, but that children needed <i>not</i> to be responsible for taking care of themselves, improving the situation, or processing it alone. We need to remove this burden for our children, let them talk about their fears, and do our best not to increase them. We also need to pay special attention to those with anxiety disorders, and those whose age, health, or other circumstances make it impossible for them to exercise agency in response to this crisis.<br />
<br />
Of course, as we are all human, we are all constitutionally vulnerable. But some of us won the lottery by being safe and protected as children and by remaining healthy as adults. We can afford to take some of the weight from our neighbors' shoulders.<br />
<br />
Yet we should also, I think, resist the temptation of the strong to overestimate their strength. We are being encouraged to distance ourselves socially for the common good. But we can mostly still hug those closest to us, and if our need to protect ourselves or them precludes even this, tell them of our continued love. These small gestures are great and powerful weapons against the most intimate fears, which remain some of the most dangerous. They can still help us access the best parts of ourselves, enable us to take care of one another, and provide a small glimmer of hope in the face of our stubborn refusal to learn from history.<br />
<br />Margaret Watkinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17961859357182716047noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8371593710878017578.post-13637712154368023812017-08-20T11:44:00.000-07:002017-08-20T11:47:08.337-07:00Speaking Truths to Ourselves--On Charlottesville<div class="MsoNormal">
I have hardly been able to look at the images from my home
state this last week. I grieve for what we have become, and I don’t understand
how we have gotten here. I could tell a story about that path, but there are
too many stories, and this is not a moment to get lost in the multiplication of
complexities. Fifty years after the height of the Civil Rights Movement, we
have somehow reached a place where the ugliest ideas of the past centuries have
a renewed following that we can no longer ignore.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
W.E.B. DuBois once described Atlanta as “south of the north,
yet north of the south.” This has seemed to me an apt description of Virginia,
especially Richmond, where I was born and raised. I have grown tired of
explaining to people that it had never occurred to me to think of myself as anything
other than a Southerner. This was the milk on which I was nursed, the roots
that I could never deny, however my sentiments shifted about them over the
years. Behind all of my ambivalence, I fear there was always a kind of pride. I
was taught that there was a Southern ethos, a delicacy, something lilting in
our mode of life that put Yankees to shame. But we did not, natives of the
Commonwealth, share in the distaste for learning or the scorn for nobler things
that we saw portrayed in caricatures of Southerners in national media. Southerner
I always was; redneck or Bible Belter, never.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It took me far too long to see that the stories of heritage
were at best self-deception and at worst downright lies. That you cannot
separate a flag that waved over those who fought for their right to trample on
the rights of others from that ugly history, that disposition to tyranny. That
no matter what ideals individual people might associate with that flag, black
Americans could not but associate it with fear, hatred, and centuries of being
treated as subhuman. No person’s heritage or ideal could possibly make up for
so much pain. It is an insult to even place it in the balance. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I fear that the pictures of
angry, pathetic white men brandishing torches are distracting us from some difficult truths. This is not aberration. It is an extreme version of something that
some of us can usually ignore from day to day: the ongoing, systematic oppression
of a whole group of people whom we categorize by the myth of separate races. It
is an oppression that has been carefully documented with statistics and
powerfully portrayed in film. But its counterpart, perhaps its source, lies
within the breast of many individual people, most of whom would swear that they
are not racists.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Moral indignation at being accused of racism is the order of
the day among a certain set. Ironically, there is considerable overlap between
this set and those who make fun of others for being offended by vulgar
stereotypes and the languages of shame. In response, others have tried to point
out that one can very well be racist in subtle ways, and that we may have
racist attitudes and not even be aware of them.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The indignant often respond with questioning the testing,
about which there are some real scientific problems, that seeks to quantify
this “implicit bias.” These same problems do not affect numerous other data
sets that show, for instance, that you can change an applicant’s interview
chances simply by changing the name at the top of a resume to something that
sounds like it might refer to a non-white person. But I don’t need implicit
bias tests anyhow. All I need to frighten myself about my own attitudes is an
old-fashioned—indeed, ancient—method. It is the method of self-reflection, part
of the way in which some of us try to obey the adage to know ourselves.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In implementing this method, I have caught myself with
passing sentiments of frustration based on the race of the person before me. I
have seen myself noticing “patterns” that the wiser, more scientifically-minded
part of myself knows are not there. We are not natively good at noticing
patterns. We see them too quickly, and we infer things from them with far, far
too little warrant.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This self-reflection is a tiny, pathetic first step. It is
nothing by itself, except a caution against hubris. But it is an absolutely
necessary first step for those who are quite sure that they are not racist.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There is a deeper level of reflection that is called for,
which asks questions about our explanations for real patterns. We know that
there is a socio-economic gap between the races: how do we explain this? Do we
think it’s likely that “biological differences” explain this gap? Then we are
racist, because we believe that one race is naturally inferior to another.
Those who like the biological difference explanation may well throw John Stuart
Mill at me and demand that I exercise my mental capacities by considering every
possible argument, however disgusting I may find it. But as much as I admire
Mill, I fear this ideal fails to take some important factors into
consideration. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Our commitment to freedom of speech demands that we not
imprison people for considering such arguments, or even for defending them
vociferously. But it does not demand that we take all arguments equally
seriously. That first step of self-reflection ought to teach us that we are
likely to find some arguments more attractive than others. They serve our lower
needs better. Why have I been so fortunate while others have languished?
Because I have worked hard and they are lazy/incompetent/not quite as smart? It
is such a beguiling answer. And precisely because of this, we ought to work as
hard as we can to find another. Plenty of alternative answers are readily
available, each too simple to explain the whole. But when we are engaged in
this search, it is a moment for multiplying complexities.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But there is another level of mendacity here, more brazen
than the squirrely self-deception involved in never paying attention to
fleeting racist thoughts or reaching for the most flattering explanation for
social inequalities. And here is where I must return to that bizarre world in
which I was raised, south of the north, yet north of the south.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
As I child, I heard many adults tell me that they were not
racist, and even that racism was wrong. And then they told me what sort of
people to avoid, and why it was still unwise for nice white girls to date black
boys. They made jokes using the n-word and wrung their hands when black
families moved into their neighborhoods. In the Southern world, people have
long known what they could get away with saying in public and what they could
say among themselves. Not all of my Southern friends and family were like this.
Some were as disgusted by it as I should have been then and now am. And many of
those who were like this were also capable of loving-kindness and noble acts;
some even fought for civil rights for all. But their privately-public racism
was the edge of an angry cancer. We are now seeing that cancer break out of its
previously-contained bonds. What happened in Charlottesville is not only a
Southern problem; would it be wrong to wish it were? But we lie to ourselves
again if we pretend that we Southerners have not nourished that problem with
our own special food for many, many years.<br />
<br /></div>
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And so I grieve for my state, for the university I didn’t
attend but always admired, and for the raw wounds that all of this inflicts on
so many who are so much more affected by it than I am. This is a time, above
all, to speak truth to power—to tell our children and our fellow citizens that
there is no moral equivalence between Nazi ideology or white supremacy and the
ideals of Heather Heyer and her brave partners in protest. But is also a time
to speak truths to ourselves. We can no longer afford not to.<o:p></o:p></div>
Margaret Watkinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17961859357182716047noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8371593710878017578.post-27938519596366213692015-05-08T07:22:00.000-07:002015-05-08T07:24:57.553-07:00Some Thoughts about Anger and Oppression<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia;">"Male and female stand opposed within a
primordial <i>Mitsein</i>, and woman has not broken it. The couple is a
fundamental unity with its two halves riveted together, and the cleavage of
society along the line of sex is impossible." (Simone de Beauvoir,
Introduction to <i>The Second Sex</i>)</span><span style="font-family: Times;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia;">Lately, a few unrelated causes have made me think
about gender issues in the academy and the workplace in general. Beauvoir makes
the above claim to explain why women have, for millennia, not rebelled
against oppression. As I understand her, she is <i>not</i> advocating that
we attempt to break the community between men and women, or even lamenting that
such a cleavage is impossible. She is simply observing that some of the means
available to other oppressed groups have not been available to women.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia;"> I agree, but I am worried today about a less
dramatic cleavage--the cleavage that might occur when women (or members of any
underrepresented group) become frustrated, angry, and finally exasperated at
the barriers they still face working on equal footing with men. Let me be
very clear from the beginning: I believe anger can be a healthy, appropriate
response to injustice, and I have zero interest in denying the validity of such
anger.</span><span style="font-family: Times;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia;"> That said, I also worry about anger, for three
reasons. First, expressing it can hurt our cause. It is, unfortunately, still
true that women who express anger in the workplace are more likely than men who
do so to be perceived as emotionally overreactive and irrational. (And
yes, that is infuriating. You see the difficulty here.) Second, anger takes a
toll on the person bearing it. People have different tolerances for negativity,
and I can't speak for others. But my own tolerance is pretty low. I don't
like how I feel or act when I'm angry. After the fact, the expression rarely
seems to have been worth it. Finally, anger distorts. It narrows our vision and
primes us for confirmation bias, which means that when we are angry, we risk
being unjust ourselves. Raw skin inflames at even a gentle touch.</span><span style="font-family: Times;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia;"> So what can we do? I suggest the following strategies,
but I'd love to hear others' ideas for more.</span><span style="font-family: Times;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; mso-pagination: none; tab-stops: 11.0pt .5in; text-autospace: none; text-indent: -.5in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Times;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">•<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: Georgia;">We can try to remember that we are guilty too.
Oppression is about power, and anyone in a position of power over anyone else
is in danger of abusing it. Nietzsche was probably right, moreover, that people
who feel weaker than others can be particularly aggressive when the tables are
turned. I want to become more aware of any tendencies I have to lord power
over my students, for example. Moreover, men are not uniquely guilty of bias
against women. How many women undermine all of us by tearing down other
women? And even if we avoid such explicit expression, we may
still have sexist (or racist) attitudes of which we are unaware.
(Harvard's implicit bias tests can be a helpful exercise in self-knowledge: <a href="https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html">https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html</a>.)
Any part of our anger mixed with self-righteousness should probably not survive
self-exploration.</span><span style="font-family: Times;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo2; mso-pagination: none; tab-stops: 11.0pt .5in; text-autospace: none; text-indent: -.5in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Times;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">•<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: Georgia;">We can direct our energy to helping others who
experience discrimination. We can mentor our juniors, search with hope for
young people who need encouragement, and support their efforts with
enthusiasm. Here we may be able to counteract the negativity I spoke of above
with one of the best kinds of pleasure.</span><span style="font-family: Times;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-list: l2 level1 lfo3; mso-pagination: none; tab-stops: 11.0pt .5in; text-autospace: none; text-indent: -.5in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Times;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">•<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: Georgia;">We can speak publicly, calmly, and generally
about the real problems still facing underrepresented groups. If we feel
destructive anger taking over and becoming bitterness, it might be that we
have been holding in too much. Of course, oppression makes one afraid of
speaking truth to power. But we can overcome some of this fear by remembering,
again, that many men (and women) are simply unaware of these issues as they
play out in day-to-day life and would by no means want to contribute to the
problem if they were aware. Since no one likes to feel attacked or accused,
general and public statements may be more effective than private conversations.
If someone brings a problem to my attention in a public forum, I feel much
freer to consider whether or not I am among the sources of that problem than if
that same person accuses me individually.</span><span style="font-family: Times;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-list: l2 level1 lfo3; mso-pagination: none; tab-stops: 11.0pt .5in; text-autospace: none; text-indent: -.5in;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia;">Again, these strategies may be too little in some
cases, and I cannot speak for what might work for minority groups or
people in different environments. Nothing I say here seems to have any
relevance for people whose safely or lives are in danger because of their
race, gender, or religion. </span><span style="font-family: Times;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia;"> In other situations, however, women are
surrounded by both men and women who sincerely want to nurture Mitsein--that
"being-with" that means that we cannot deny that our own flourishing
is inseparable from that of others with whom we live and work. They may still
be completely clueless about how to promote that flourishing, and again, that
can be infuriating. Sometimes anger is all we have, and it can be powerful.
Given its potential dangers, however, I want to be very cautious about
drawing the conclusion that any particular moment is one of those times.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia;"> </span><span style="font-family: Times;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Margaret Watkinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17961859357182716047noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8371593710878017578.post-31423476099107467692014-12-18T17:32:00.000-08:002014-12-18T17:32:01.001-08:00Can we be sad anymore? "Sorrow is the ultimate type both in Life and Art. Behind Joy and Laughter there may be a temperament, coarse, hard and callous. But behind Sorrow there is always Sorrow. Pain, unlike Pleasure, wears no mask." (Oscar Wilde, <i>De Profundis</i>)<br />
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I am wondering--in this cold, comforting winter evening--if we know how to be sad anymore. A strange question, that. Are we not a nation, a people, a world--in the grip of an epidemic of depressive disorders? Have we not stared into the face of existential angst and grinned, spat, screamed, and run away? Do we not have a severely over-taxed social services system trying and failing to deal with the sadness of millions and their consequent "coping" behaviors?<br />
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But I am not talking about clinical depression or philosophical anxiety. I am talking about being sad--sadness that is not floating free but is a direct and reasonable response to loss, disappointment, or wounding. This is a passion, among the many passions we flash all over social media, that seems shameful. We hide it; we sublimate it; and we joke about it. Thus, those "coping" behaviors are actually evidence that I am onto something.<br />
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I have no studies to cite nor even explanations to offer. I only notice that the Hebrew Bible saw fit to include a book of Lamentations, perhaps so that people had some words in which to address their sorrow to the Divine, amongst their fellow sorrowers. And we have Facebook. I see far more people joking about needing another drink, or a weapon, than I see people honestly saying, "I am sad." Speaking out of the ugly roots of my own experience, I fear that this is how we deal with sadness now. Perhaps we seek medication or therapy, or perhaps we medicate ourselves. Or perhaps we stuff it all down into the narrow little pressure cooker that is anger. The first solution can be appropriate, in certain contexts and for certain disorders. Sorrow, however, as a response to a reasonable cause, is no disorder. Yet even of this sorrow, I fear, we run away in fear.<br />
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Spinoza defined sadness as the passion by which the mind passes to a lesser perfection. When we are sad, he believed, we feel our power of acting decreased. This is undoubtedly true: to be sad is to feel weak and vulnerable, as if the hard shell of armor one has spent a lifetime building has been ripped away by violence. Here, perhaps, is an explanation of our fear. But if the armor can be ripped off--and this must be possible if one is to be human--then it was really illusory to begin with. Sadness therefore shows us something profound and true about ourselves, and about those other people we have been protecting ourselves against. Invulnerability in human life is a lie, and its sentimental accoutrements are more often than not cruel. In embracing sorrow, we embrace an emotion that the youngest children and oldest survivors share. Mass hiding of a feeling does not make it disappear. So, passing through sorrow--feeling its wounding, crippling attack--might actually increase our power of acting in the long run, insofar as it brings us closer to that most helpful of creatures--other human beings.<br />
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I take it this was part of Wilde's point. "Clergymen," he says, "and people who use phrases without wisdom, sometimes talk of suffering as a mystery. It is really a revelation. One discerns things that one never discerned before. One approaches the whole of history from a different standpoint. What one had felt dimly through instinct, about Art, is intellectually and emotionally realized with perfect clearness of vision and absolute intensity of apprehension."<br />
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Such apprehension is precious. Perhaps we ought to resist the urge to flee from it. It is not really so frightening. Sorrow has a natural lifespan. As Montaigne says, "evils have their life and limits, their sickness and their health." Should sorrow attempt to usurp the time of our whole lives, that is when to seek help of a different kind. But it is not in itself an illness, and it will not alone destroy us. It may be time to step out of costume, and let ourselves feel an emotion that wears no mask.<br />
<br />Margaret Watkinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17961859357182716047noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8371593710878017578.post-50476470937432868262014-04-12T06:48:00.000-07:002014-04-12T06:48:08.901-07:00An Exquisite Contradiction“He burns with spiritual intensity—and he desperately wants to be something in the eyes of the world. An exquisite contradiction, because what lurks near the center of his spiritual life, but without actually living there, is the thought that he should desire and expect to be nobody and nothing to the world.”<br />
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In my experience, this quotation fits nearly everyone* who teaches at a church-related university, or preaches to a public, or posts about faith on Facebook, or blogs about it. I make no exception for myself.<br />
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Fellow teachers, preachers, posters, and bloggers, I would love to know what you think. If you're moved to post in the comments here, or on your own preferred forum, you will have my admiration—and I do <i>not</i> mean that ironically.<br />
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*There is a class whom the quotation does <i>not </i>describe. This is the cynical "pragmatist" who burns with no spiritual intensity at all. But he has learned that if he simulates such a person, playing a role, he can acquire power for himself by exploiting
those who do feel the contradiction.<br />
<!--EndFragment-->Robert Minerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02230724650025013746noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8371593710878017578.post-15314205500806813662014-03-21T11:55:00.001-07:002014-03-21T12:03:46.549-07:00On Speaking in CodeI recount to you a fable, told me lately by a friend.<div><br></div><div>The meeting had been called to discuss a Technique. Strictly speaking, techniques serve external ends, and this was no exception. Alasdair MacIntyre wrote in 1981 that participants in the dominant culture avoid evaluating ends, knowing only how to reason about means. Over Three decades later, we have overcome such thinking, having now figured out how to avoid evaluating means as well. It is so simple. We just designate them "best practices." Like any good candidate for a term with mesmeric force, this one has long outlived its roots, which no doubt fed in a soil of rigor, scientific study, and dedication to efficiency.</div><div><br></div><div>So, the people came together to discuss the Technique, which they were sure was a Best Practice, well designed to achieve its Ends. But it turns out that the attendees also had ends of their own.</div><div><br></div><div>After long discussion, a young woman offered a contribution. She was frustrated with the Technique, she said. She had never been wholly satisfied with her attempts to implement it, and she felt that perhaps it did not serve its Ends very well. </div><div><br></div><div>An older man volunteered a reply, in a congenial tone. "Do not worry, Young Woman. After years of implementing the Technique, I too have had frustrations. You must have confidence that, in time, and with practice, your use of the Technique will improve."</div><div><br></div><div>The young woman failed to switch codes. As a result, two people did not achieve their ends.</div><div><br></div><div>Hers included: (1) arguing that the Technique should itself be questioned, or perhaps even abandoned, and (2) accomplishing (1) without offending her colleagues. She succeeded with the second part of (2)<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue Light', HelveticaNeue-Light, helvetica, arial, sans-serif;"> but only at the expense of failing completely with (1). Although she had said that the Technique might not serve its ends, her senior colleague had fixated on her expressions of frustration and humility, and he had assumed that she was in distress, asking for help.</span></div><div><br></div><div>His ends included (1) helping a junior colleague in an empathetic way, and, presumably, (2) not sounding condescending. His is the tragic case: he failed in both.</div><div><br></div><div>It was at some point in graduate school that I realized that I spoke in a code that my male peers did not understand. Any expression of self-doubt, or hesitation, or polite demurring--they took to be expressions of incompetence or ignorance. Few of these men were jerks. They just had never learned the code that women use so naturally (though it be our second nature) with one another. And to be fair, we didn't know their code either. We assumed that their expressions of self-confidence were signs of insufferable arrogance, when they were more likely just moves in an intricate game.</div><div><br></div><div>At the peak of my frustration over the obstacles meeting women in a male-dominated field, I was advised repeatedly not to write about such things--at least not yet. And I sympathized with the advice. Not only did I see the ways in which such writing might keep me from being "taken seriously," I agreed with Simone de Beauvoir that the topic of women can be irritating, especially to women.</div><div><br></div><div>But watching interactions that resemble my friend's familiar fable have convinced me: <i>charity</i> requires speaking out about such things. Otherwise these poor people will never understand, will remain forever blind, will never achieve even the noblest of ends.</div><div><br></div><div>If women are to play the game with those who cannot hear us, we must, at least in limited contexts, learn to codeswitch, even if I much prefer the gentler tenor of our own code. But many men can and truly want to hear us. To effect this end, the codes cannot remain secret, and women cannot remain silent about themselves. Understanding silence, after all, itself requires immersion in the most advanced of codes. It is often too much to ask.</div>Margaret Watkinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17961859357182716047noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8371593710878017578.post-76084369878489368672013-10-26T17:09:00.000-07:002013-10-26T17:09:04.356-07:00The Quantified Self: Some Thoughts from the 17th Century<br />
We geeks love to track stuff, and put numbers on the stuff we track. We humans love to think about ourselves. So, it should be no surprise that human geeks have invented the "quantified self" movement, which promises to improve our health, our self-control, and our very lives, by making us aware of every aspect of what we are doing every moment of the day and night.<br />
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First, let me be clear: tracking information about the self certainly has its benefits and its place. Self-monitoring makes us aware of habits we would love to ignore, which is invaluable if we have a habit we need to overcome. And it can reward us for overcoming: there is something bizarrely satisfying about writing down a success, however small. Some of us are not above writing things on a to-do list that we've already done, just for the pleasure of checking it off.</div>
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But notice the funny mixture of reason and absurdity here: we may reasonably track our exercise habits, for instance, to serve an important and attainable health goal. But we are not above playing silly tricks on ourselves to encourage this reasonable enterprise.</div>
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When I started running, I put gold stars on a calendar every time I made it out the door for a run.</div>
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I was an adult.</div>
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Thus we come to Pascal, expert on dualities of reason and absurdity. Lest we think that we have finally invented something new under the Sun, it is worth noting that a contrary Frenchman diagnosed all of the central problems with self-quantification in the 17th century. To wit:<br />
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<i>Its Conceit: "</i>Because they failed to contemplate these infinities, men have rashly undertaken to probe into nature as if there were some proportion between themselves and her. Strangely enough they wanted to know the principles of things and go on from there to know everything, inspired by a presumption as infinite as their object. For there can be no doubt that such a plan could not be conceived without infinite presumption or a capacity as infinite as that of nature" (Fragment 199).<br />
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Again, we can learn much about ourselves through tracking our vital statistics, but we may become far more ignorant in a Socratic sense, as we proceed to convince ourselves that we know things that we cannot possibly know. There are apps, I understand, that actually presume to tell their users <i>when they will die.</i> Putting aside the misleading implication that medical science has evolved to a state at which it is able to predict life expectancy with such precision, fortune has a nasty way of giving the lie to these kinds of predictions. The healthiest of habits are tragically no match for drunk drivers, new diseases, or acts of violence.<br />
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<i>Its Obvious Danger of Producing Anxiety: </i>"Thinking too little about things or thinking too much both make us obstinate and fanatical" (Fg 21).<br />
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Those who ignore reasoned medical advice, who never think about how their behavior affects their well-being, indeed play a silly roulette with their lives. But those who have experienced serious illness--or who have feared that they or a loved one might be experiencing such an illness--know all too well the danger of believing that information can cure. The relentless search for information, without experience or wisdom to help one process it, is a very bad healer. It is excellent, however, at exponentially increasing one's misery, as the pleasures life still has to offer fall victim to its imaginary, specter-like predictions, fears, and insistent drive to feed on itself; which brings us to . . .<br />
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<i>Its Excellence at Diverting One from Life: "</i>We never keep to the present. We recall the past; we anticipate the future as if we found it too slow in coming and were trying to hurry it up, or we recall the past as if to stay its too rapid flight. We are so unwise that we wander about in times that do not belong to us, and do not think of the only one that does; so vain that we dream of times that are not and blindly flee the only one that is. The fact is that the present usually hurts. We thrust it out of sight because it distresses us, and if we find it enjoyable, we are sorry to see it slip away. We try to give it the support of the future, and think how we are going to arrange things over which we have no control for a time we can never be sure of reaching. . . . Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so" (Fg 47).<br />
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Once again, I am sure there are people involved with the quantified self movement who manage to track all their information, put it in a little box, and move on with their productive, well-adjusted, and optimized lives. But the details of <i>what</i> one can track are a little disturbing. Evidently, it is now possible to analyze your own excrement, electronically inform your computer when you are having sex, and moreover publicize this information online for the world to see. This is all, of course, evidence of our own brilliance--not only in inventing the devices that make such things possible, but in doubling and trebling our experiences into the moment, the record of the moment, and its faint, eternal, electronic trace. Unfortunately, we have not yet invented a device that allows us to do this without sloughing off the intensity of the original. This is a marvelous anesthetic if one does not wish to <i>feel</i> life very intensely, but the fulfillment of such a wish can only be a sadly mixed blessing.<br />
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One might well reply that Pascal himself was no happy character--that he was tortured, obsessive, and no model for the flourishing life. With this retort, I cannot disagree. But what does this mean? That he knew suffering profoundly, from the inside, and knew very well what did not cure it. To read Pascal in a time of despair is to lift the veil of isolation and destroy the infinity between one and none that Nietzsche found between having one friend and utter solitude. It is to know, in other words, that no human being must suffer alone, because at least one other has suffered from the very depths. This sort of consolation, so much worth seeking, cannot be quantified. We need not share all of Pascal's commitments to find in him this kind of friend, and to suspect that, particularly in his gentler moments, he had some insight to share.</div>
Margaret Watkinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17961859357182716047noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8371593710878017578.post-79168228610739685162013-10-04T16:13:00.000-07:002013-10-04T16:13:37.479-07:00A Little Story About HumilityNot long ago, while visiting a friend in Denver, I came across this charming anecdote in Goethe's <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Italian-Journey-Goethe-Collected-Works/dp/069103799X/">Italian Journey</a></i>. It's stuck with me, so I thought I would post it. "Neri" is St. Filippo Neri (1515-1595), founder of the Oratorians.<p>
[Neri] happened to be nearby when the pope was informed that a nun in the vicinity of Rome was attracting attention because of her many remarkable spiritual gifts. Neri was commissioned to investigate the validity of these tales. He immediately mounted his mule and, in spite of very bad weather and roads, soon arrived at the convent. On being admitted, he conversed with the abbess, who was thoroughly convinced of these tokens of grace, and gave him all the details about them. The nun was summoned and entered, but his only greeting was to extend his muddy boot to her, indicating that she should pull it off. The pure, holy virgin started back in horror, and with angry words expressed her resentment of this impudence. Neri rose quite calmly, climbed back on his mule, and returned to the pope much sooner than expected; for Catholic confessors have very precise, significant precautionary measures prescribed to them for the testing of such spiritual gifts. While the church concedes that such spiritual favors are possible, it does not admit their authenticity without the most punctilious examination. Neri briefly communicated the result to the astonished pope: “She is no saint,” he cried, “she performs no miracles! For she lacks the main attribute, humility.”<P>
Naples, Saturday, May 26, 1787<P>
(From Goethe’s <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Italian-Journey-Goethe-Collected-Works/dp/069103799X/">Italian Journey</a></i>, tr. Robert R. Heitner, ed. Thomas P. Saine and Jeffrey L. Sammons [Princeton University Press, 1989], pp. 259-260.)
Robert Minerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02230724650025013746noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8371593710878017578.post-43102488325689338412013-08-07T15:37:00.000-07:002013-08-07T15:37:01.093-07:00On DisillusionmentCan a state of disillusionment ever be coherent?<div>
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As a feeling, it is difficult to experience as anything but painful. It seems defined with the bad: it is a poignant sorrow, arrived at only when one realizes that a previous pleasure--or a previously pleasant part of one's life--has passed, and can only be partially recaptured at the expense of intellectual or moral honesty.</div>
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Yet such honesty itself requires us to appreciate being set free from an illusion. We cannot but feel, after such an experience, that having seen that illusion from both in front of and behind the curtain, we are now competent judges, in John Stuart Mill's sense. Knowing both sides, we have moved beyond an immature stage. This is progress, and it is to be celebrated.</div>
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Aside from such vague dissonance, however, disillusionment occasions a new problem, when we encounter those who have not yet seen behind the curtain: do we attempt to rip it aside, or not?</div>
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If we are at our best in such moments, we want to help, to offer the benefit of our experience to others. Yet this is a path--well, not really a path at all. It is a wall topped with razor wire, and it's not clear what's on the other side.</div>
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To tell a story of one's disillusionment is, very likely, to tell a story of one's failures. (For I have sworn thee fair, after all, and thought thee bright, who art as black as hell, as dark as night.) Such a story is a gracious offering. At the beginning of his essay on discussion, Montaigne notes that he learns better "by counter-example than example," and offers his own reflections on his imperfections in hopes that he "may teach someone how to fear them." But he also, too truly, notes that "when all has been said, you never talk about yourself without loss: condemn yourself and you are always believed: praise yourself and you never are."</div>
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More importantly, life in front of the curtain feels comfortable for those who are living there. Efforts to tear it away can fail, and they can fail badly. One attempting the operation may well do more harm than good.</div>
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I struggle with this every once in awhile, particularly since my job and other aspects of my life bring me often into contact with young adults--many of whom have and are about to act on the same illusions I once had and once acted upon. And I don't have any great ideas about how to handle such situations, but here is a proposal for three rules of thumb. I truly welcome additional suggestions:</div>
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1.) <i>Do your best to know your own motives.</i> In these situations, I know mine are often mixed. The thing about which I am disillusioned, after all, is something or someone who has <i>hurt me.</i> That means that I might be making a little speech to myself about looking out for this young person's good, when in fact I want the pathetic revenge that comes from trash-talking a perceived enemy. If that's the dominant feeling, everything else I'm trying to do is suspect. Good advice, it seems to me, is more likely to come from a soul at peace with itself.</div>
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2.) <i>In addition to suspecting your motives, suspect your experience at both the widest and narrowest margins</i>. Your disillusionment about something as broad as, say, marriage, is unlikely to provide good guidance to anyone in a particular situation that does not resemble yours in <i>numerous </i>respects. (In other words, it's probably silly to be disillusioned about something this broad.) Likewise, your disillusionment about a single person may really be about your problems, or your problems in that relationship, rather than the other person's. (Remember this is a rule of thumb; I do not mean this to apply to anyone's disillusionment with any genuine abuser or other social monster.) Disillusionment about cliques of people, or institutions of various sizes, on the other hand, may well be instructive.</div>
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3.) <i>If you really know that the "illusioned" person cannot hear you, or if this is really the kind of lesson one must learn for oneself, it is probably best to curtail the attempt.</i> I think we probably know this more often than we like to admit, because we like to believe that we have more power over people than we do. But if you just met someone, and she has stars in her eyes over some institution that is woven into the fabric of her life, chances are that you cannot help. And if you know that the person you're advising has little respect for your opinion, chances are that you cannot help. And if you've offered the same caution before, and it has fallen on deaf ears, chances are . . . .</div>
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But it is difficult. Because at least sometimes, one really wants to help.</div>
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Margaret Watkinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17961859357182716047noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8371593710878017578.post-7585642147426911342013-08-04T14:13:00.000-07:002013-08-04T14:19:57.751-07:00A Love Letter to Brasil (and Brasilians!)A week has passed since Margaret and I were in Brasil. To convey what it was like is not possible—but a failed attempt strikes me as better than none at all. Before the trip, I had absolutely no expectations. Which is funny, since as a small child, I would check out books about S. America and imagine what life in the continent must be like, gazing at pictures of mountains, rivers and jungles. But adult life came perilously close to destroying my capacity for such wonder. So my attitude was "another plane trip, another conference." I had no idea what I was in for.<p>
What was so striking about Brasil? First, the sensation of being in a land with very few English-speakers. Had we gone to Rio or São Paolo, things might have been different. But the site of the conference was Belo Horizonte, in the state of Minas Gerais. BH (bay-ah-GAH, as the locals call it) is Brasil's third largest city, but not exactly a tourist destination. Because of this, I hazard that BH gave me something more akin to "the real Brasil," as distinct from the side of the country carefully prepared for tourist consumption. Not that I exactly blended in. That my dress and my demeanor screamed "Americano!" from miles away, I have no doubt. ("You'll be marked as a tourist the moment you get there," an old friend of Peruvian heritage assured me.) And my Portuguese has very little going for it, beyond my general willingness to take some risks and make a fool of myself. (The <i>brasileira</i> at the airport thought I was trying to buy chocolate on credit, rather than proposing to use my credit card. The fault was certainly mine...) But the locals were so warm and so receptive to my bumbling efforts, that after a while I found myself spontaneously exclaiming "<i>Amo Brasil!</i>" This had the double merit of being true and being ingratiating. When the true and the useful coincide in this manner, one can only feel grateful.<p>
Another unforgettable thing about Belo Horizonte—the sidewalks. Here in the States, or at least where I live, the sidewalks are mostly charmless paths of dull and drab concrete. In Belo Horizonte, they were typically colorful mosaics, with fascinating and unpredictable patterns. I wish I could describe these better. One of the more remarkable patterns was a hopscotch (see photo below).<p>
Quite a large proportion of the local buildings, as well as the streets, are named after famous writers. On the first day, I found Montaigne and Stendhal. The last day presented me with a building calling itself "Edifício Montesquieu." There was also a condo (I think) sporting the name "Federico Fellini," as well as a salon called "Nixon," which I can only assume was not named after the former U.S. President. But it's difficult to be sure.<p>
Anyone who appreciates food should certainly try the Brazilian cuisine. The buffets are generally much better than the typical American buffet. Our second night, Margaret and I went to a restaurant called "Amadeus." In addition to offering all the cheeses, fruits, and meats we could dream of, as well as the most splendid array of desserts I'd ever seen, Amadeus featured a wine cellar that we were able to personally inspect. Perhaps my favorite type of Brazilian restaurant is the <i>rodizio</i>. A <i>rodizio</i> invariably begins with an antipasto bar, full of olives, fruits, cheese, nuts and other delectables. Here the trick is to eat about half as much as you'd like to, since you need to leave room for the main courses. These consist of "endless meat." The server brings one kind of meat after another, about every seven minutes, and carves it for you at the table. He does not stop visiting your table, armed with juicy meat begging to be consumed, until he is explicitly instructed to do so. The rodizio we visited was a Lebanese place—"Vita Araba." I managed to stay just this side of the famous "meat coma."<p>
Scenery, architecture, food—such are the standard fare of travel writers. No experience of travel should be without them. But how to write about them vividly, with imagination and flair? Obviously, I've got no idea. My strategy in the above paragraphs was to pick relatively two non-obvious items of interest—buildings with strange names and sidewalks with strange patterns—before debauching into the usual discourse about food. It would be a mistake, however, to leave you with the impression that scenery, architecture, food were what made Brasil for me.<p>
What did make Brasil for me, if not the impressive scenery, buildings and cuisine? The answer: <i>its people</i>.<p>
I love Brasil—but what I really love are <i>brasileros</i> and <i>brasileiras</i>. In every location in which I encountered Brasilians—whether at the conference, restaurants, shops, museums, gelaterias, or the airport—they were some of the warmest and most welcoming people whom I've ever met, in any country. They were so willing to converse with a none-too-impressive American who tried, however poorly, to speak their language. Seeing my somewhat confused look in a bookstore, an employee approached me. After we talked a little, partly in English and partly in Portuguese, he led me to two sections. "Here are some classics in Portuguese!" he said proudly. "And here are some books"—gesturing to another shelf—"in your language." When I (sincerely) told him I was far more interested in the former, he looked at me with a mixture of surprise and respect, and proceeded to ask me where I was from and what my name was. After purchasing an inexpensive Portuguese edition of Nietzsche's <i>Beyond Good and Evil</i>, I decided it was time for some chocolate. The chocolate was fine. But what I really remember was the woman behind the counter beaming when I told her that her English was good, after she had asked me which state I was from. When I give a true answer to this question (i.e. "Texas"), I am no longer surprised when I receive a look of contempt. None of the Brazilians whom I encountered exhibited any such small-minded nonsense. They are not so provincial as to believe that Texans are just one thing.<p>
My encounters with brasileros and brasileiras on the streets and in the shops were a daily source of joy. I should add that the Brazilian academics at the Hume Society conference were equally lovely. Professor Livia Guimarães, of the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG), did an excellent job coordinating the conference as a whole. Though I had met her only once, Livia remembered me and embraced me (literally) as if we were old friends. Particularly memorable was the Hume Society's banquet, held the last night of the conference. I was quite fortunate to be seated next to two Brazilian academics, Luiz Eva and Cecília Almeida. Margaret and I had met Luiz the day before, and so knew that he and I both love Montaigne. Luiz spoke excellent English, and in a distinctly American accent, perhaps because he spent half a year at Johns Hopkins on a post-doc. Now he teaches at the <a href="http://www.filosofia.ufpr.br/">Universidade Federal do Paraná</a>. We spoke about everything from the style of philosophy most influential in Brasil, to why more people don't fathom that Montaigne is a philosopher, to why Hume remains a figure of interest and fascination, to the impossibility of translating the Portuguese term "saudade." After a while, Cecília joined our table. From what I gather, Luiz and Cecília had both studied philosophy in São Paolo. Cecilia is also interested in French skeptical writers—she specializes in Pierre Bayle—and recently accepted a position in the <a href="http://www.fil.unb.br/">philosophy department at the Universidade de Brasília</a>. In addition to encouraging my fledging efforts at Portuguese—her English was so much better than my Portuguese!—she gave me invaluable advice about where to travel next time we're in Brasil. (Not trusting my own ability to remember, I asked her to write it down, which she did.) Cecília also mentioned the prospect of yours truly coming to Brasilia to give a lecture. This I did not get in writing, but I am optimistic that it will happen. In any case, Margaret and I will be making another trip to Brasil.<p>
In conclusion … but I won't conclude, since my time in Brasil has hardly concluded. In lieu of a conclusion, here are some photographs.<p>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-UGnEBiwP9qc/Uf7AndroLxI/AAAAAAAAAFU/qrV9bNyZIzo/s1600/IMG_3222.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-UGnEBiwP9qc/Uf7AndroLxI/AAAAAAAAAFU/qrV9bNyZIzo/s320/IMG_3222.JPG" /></a><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-UT6VQkdzyo0/Uf7BHJajuKI/AAAAAAAAAFc/dmJQvWk1IGM/s1600/IMG_3224.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-UT6VQkdzyo0/Uf7BHJajuKI/AAAAAAAAAFc/dmJQvWk1IGM/s320/IMG_3224.JPG" /></a><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-K6k3d03SEHs/Uf7BLM05ILI/AAAAAAAAAFk/4KUGulastyk/s1600/IMG_3233.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-K6k3d03SEHs/Uf7BLM05ILI/AAAAAAAAAFk/4KUGulastyk/s320/IMG_3233.JPG" /></a><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-cgQF7nTYkWQ/Uf7BOOzxJnI/AAAAAAAAAFs/5xlm_D6xTO0/s1600/IMG_3285.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-cgQF7nTYkWQ/Uf7BOOzxJnI/AAAAAAAAAFs/5xlm_D6xTO0/s320/IMG_3285.JPG" /></a><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-JgvNW0CKCbU/Uf7BSCAhilI/AAAAAAAAAF0/SxjDGin-kJw/s1600/IMG_3303.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-JgvNW0CKCbU/Uf7BSCAhilI/AAAAAAAAAF0/SxjDGin-kJw/s320/IMG_3303.JPG" /></a><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-NVTWhFupPNo/Uf7BVqkxvGI/AAAAAAAAAF8/yMjWG3lgFXc/s1600/IMG_3269.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-NVTWhFupPNo/Uf7BVqkxvGI/AAAAAAAAAF8/yMjWG3lgFXc/s320/IMG_3269.JPG" /></a><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-juEtFmGoLiM/Uf7BZJNrhXI/AAAAAAAAAGE/y-hkqxlut6s/s1600/IMG_3275.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-juEtFmGoLiM/Uf7BZJNrhXI/AAAAAAAAAGE/y-hkqxlut6s/s320/IMG_3275.JPG" /></a><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-PPInUnLpBso/Uf7BdJZcJeI/AAAAAAAAAGM/W90EcgEWo0E/s1600/IMG_3282.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-PPInUnLpBso/Uf7BdJZcJeI/AAAAAAAAAGM/W90EcgEWo0E/s320/IMG_3282.JPG" /></a><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-qbdsn_2m7ZQ/Uf7BgoOA7PI/AAAAAAAAAGU/ouT8OZxyddM/s1600/IMG_3297.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-qbdsn_2m7ZQ/Uf7BgoOA7PI/AAAAAAAAAGU/ouT8OZxyddM/s320/IMG_3297.JPG" /></a>
Robert Minerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02230724650025013746noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8371593710878017578.post-51465176513743804832013-07-22T09:00:00.004-07:002013-07-22T09:00:46.168-07:00Regarding What We Do on Airplanes<span style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(130, 98, 83, 0.0976563); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(191, 107, 82, 0.496094); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969); -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 24px;">This morning's reflection on Martha and Mary acquainted me with an idea that, I confess, was wholly new to me--that the story is in fact controversial, that some find the praise of Mary, at the apparent expense of Martha, unfair and dismissive of the contributions of women to hospitality and domestic life. Given my profound ignorance of this debate, I cannot presume to adequately represent the nuances of this criticism. But I would like to consider one version of it, which I take to reflect a nearby complaint that I can certainly understand.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Let us suppose that the complaint goes something like this: Martha's activities in this story reflect true charity. In keeping with her role in this society, and reflecting a deep commitment to neighbor love, she works to prepare her home as a welcoming haven for an honored guest. Meanwhile, Mary selfishly lets her sister do all the work of this preparation, while delighting in the company of this guest. Martha sacrifices for others; Mary satisfies her own desires. Why, then, has Mary chosen the better portion?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Does this gripe sound familiar? Does it not ring the note of <i>ressentiment</i> that we all sometimes feel as we work to maintain our homes, our workplaces, our cities, while others engage in activities that we claim we would like to be doing--as soon as that work is done which is never done? </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The problem with this other-self interpretation of Martha's story, however, is that Mary is not actually focusing on her self. She is listening to a beloved friend, soaking up in rapt attention what he has to teach her, perhaps simply marveling at the peace that he seems to carry with him. This friend tells Martha, in response to her complaint, that she is fragmented by many things. Mary, on the other hand, has focused on the one necessary thing.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Might part of the point be that Mary is focusing on <i>one</i> thing?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Perhaps the divergence here is not between selfish isolation and altruistic sociability, but between dedicated vision and anxious fragmentation. Such fragmentation can make one feel alone when engaged in social activities, or destroy the genuine goods of solitude. Often, in solitude, we can hear the better voices in our heads, or access the well of our creative potential, or feel the resonance of the call of something higher than ourselves. We consume those opportunities when we fragment all our time alone, whether by our electronics, our busy work, or our anxieties. It is like setting fire to what Virginia Woolf called 'a room of one's own.' We must protect such rooms, even if doing so means leaving other rooms untidy on occasion.</span></div>
Margaret Watkinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17961859357182716047noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8371593710878017578.post-7963114432773868382013-07-06T09:53:00.002-07:002013-07-06T09:53:55.857-07:00On Not Thinking About Beauty EnoughIt is somewhat silly to express surprise at contradictions within our culture--as if any polity has ever enjoyed a perfectly unified conception of their common good--and as if one could expect anything approaching such unity in a polity as large as ours.<br />
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Yet one can occasionally learn a thing or two from reflecting on these contradictions, so forgive me for spending a few minutes on the bizarre and inconsistent ways in which we contemporary Americans relate to beauty.<br />
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Here is what I have in mind: a certain segment of us--perhaps all of us, some of the time--scorn any time spent thinking about beauty. We sneer at those who expend effort beautifying their persons, their houses, or their yards. We dismiss as superficial any effort to surround oneself with objects or cloak oneself in attire that others might find attractive. Those of us in the grip of this mood might shun shopping at Walmart--but only because we suspect that these goods were not created under humane conditions, not because we find them tasteless and plain.<br />
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And then there is another segment--again, perhaps all of us, some of the time--who obsess about our physical world and our appearance within it. The same woman who laughs at her friend who wasted $20 on a manicure during the day may crumble into a depression as she accidentally glimpses herself naked in the mirror that evening. And she may well find herself with renewed determination to beautify herself and her wardrobe in the future--and if she is successful, she will receive ample commendation from those happy that she is finally "taking care of herself."<br />
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Given the latter obsession, it is furthermore strange that so many people who spend extraordinary efforts on physical beauty end up with results that are so <i>ugly.</i> I will certainly not name names here, but consider what happens when an older man attempts to dress like a teenage boy, or the disastrous effect of too much makeup, too much cosmetic surgery, and too much too much everything.<br />
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One is tempted to think that the problem is not that we think about beauty too much. One is tempted to say that perhaps we do not think about it enough.<br />
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Consider this funny asymmetry: a beautiful exterior can quickly vanish when one discovers an unattractive interior. So as not, as Hume would say, to draw our philosophy from too profound a source, consider what we might call the <i>White Christmas</i> effect, when Bing Crosby's character withdraws, repulsed, from a lovely young woman's nasal, "<i>Mutual, I'm sure.</i>"But the reverse does not hold: a physical deformity does not destroy the beauty of a lovely character. On the contrary, we tend to reinterpret the exterior when we come to find someone's character, mind, or heart lovable. Anyone who has ever fallen in love must know this phenomenon. Perhaps you found your partner quite dashing from the beginning, but it is only after one has fallen in love that one starts thinking that no one has ever had earlobes quite so charming . . . .<br />
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This transformation of the outer by the inner, which we do violence to by interpreting as mere self-deception, cannot make sense if beauty is a superficial, external value. If it is something worth dwelling on, living with, and offering a common account of, so that physical beauty is merely one instance of an enormously significant aspect of human life, then perhaps we can begin to make sense of such things.Margaret Watkinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17961859357182716047noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8371593710878017578.post-72473152297941205012013-02-17T12:59:00.000-08:002013-02-17T12:59:42.659-08:00A Bitter PsalmistThe Psalms are sometimes described as comforting--recommended to those wrestling with dark nights of the soul. Reading over the past few days' Lenten Psalms, I'm afraid that any general recommendation of this kind strikes me as careless. For every Psalm 23, with its shepherding Lord leading us beside still waters, there is a Psalm 35, with its bargaining voice bitterly begging the Lord to put enemies to shame and violence in return for the promise of later praise. "Take hold of shield and buckler, and rise up to help me! Draw the spear and javelin against my pursuers . . . ." The psalmist's resentment is matched only by self-righteousness: "But as for me, when they were sick, I wore sackcloth; I afflicted myself with fasting. I prayed with head bowed on my bosom, as though I grieved for a friend or a brother; I went about as one who laments for a mother, bowed down and in mourning."<br />
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As material for worship, I do not claim insight into how to handle such a text. But reflection on this public confession of anger, weakness, and desperation did make me think about an apparent paradox of our broadly self-disclosing culture. That we have such a culture should be obvious to anyone who has a social media account, or anyone who has heard a politician or celebrity criticized not so much for engaging in shameful behavior, but for being unwilling to "share" with the public her feelings about such behavior. On the one hand, we make extensive demands on people to unveil their inner lives. We do so both in our relation to public figures and in our friendships and intimate relationships. Nietzsche diagnoses this tendency as another kind of bargaining: "People who give us their complete trust believe that they therefore have a right to our own. This conclusion is false: rights are not won by gifts."<br />
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On the other hand, we often have very little patience for disclosures when they are offered. We require public confessions to end with expressions of renewed self-resolve ("I'm just excited to move on to the next phase of my life") or the kinds of promises that are almost impossible to keep ("I'm just so sorry I let down my fans, and I will never let that happen again.") Of course, that we have such requirements does not mean that we always want people to satisfy them, which would take away the fun of excoriating those who fail to do so. Indeed, one suspects that the opportunity for such judgments may be the real good sought by far too many hearers of confessions, both public and private.<br />
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The illusion of public openness encourages forgetfulness of one of Christ's most pervasive messages--that we have no standing on which to judge the hearts of others. It is so, so easy to forget.<br />
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I should know better. Having been painfully shy since I was a very small child, I had the blessing of turning painfully awkward in adolescence and being the subject of psychological and, less often, physical bullying. Being a false master of instrumental reasoning even back then, I decided to stop looking so awkward as quickly as possible, and set about reading and applying the relevant tomes. My reward for this, since it did nothing, of course, about my natural shyness, was that my new high school classmates decided that I must be a horrible snob. They had no way of knowing that I was really a nerd in hiding.<br />
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As an adult, a bout with a chronic but invisible illness showed me how quick people can be to attribute any failings to motives that are easily available to them, when they have no access to the real ones. Pain that is not seen cannot explain impatience with colleagues or struggles in relationships, and people will fill in what they cannot explain.<br />
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These are relatively easy examples to share, but I am not claiming to be self-disclosing. The point is--I should know. But I forget. Indeed, this tendency is perhaps the besetting sin of shy people: we are constantly presuming to understand other people's reactions to us, as if we are uniquely capable of seeing disdain in the face of others.<br />
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Any such presumption fails profoundly to respect the differences between persons as well as the vexed problems of self-knowledge. None of us either owns or fully understands a single human being--least of all ourselves. The presumption that we can, and that we can make judgments on the basis of such knowledge, results in some of the subtlest and therefore most painful forms of cruelty available to otherwise civilized people.<br />
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Any confession of pain or weakness therefore demands the utmost compassion. We cannot purge our discourse of "offensive" language, since the number of offenses is infinite. But we can take seriously, and charitably, claims that one has indeed been offended, even if the source of that offense has been a source of joy for us. The practices and institutions that nourish one person always have the potential to wound someone else. That is how human power works.<br />
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So I will endeavor to be grateful to the psalmist, who had the courage to record resentment, despair, and unabashed demandingness of God. This courage enables us to speak these feelings aloud, under the protection of corporate recitation of scripture. And they can perhaps remind us that those beings of otherness to whom we pass the peace may truly be in need of it. As are we.<br />
<br />Margaret Watkinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17961859357182716047noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8371593710878017578.post-49680865288959279862013-02-02T11:17:00.000-08:002013-02-02T11:18:21.191-08:00On Plump Berries and Cruel Winters: Some Reflections on the Truths and Lies of Hedonism"Why does everyone desire pleasure? We might think it is because everyone also aims at being alive." (Aristotle)<br />
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If it makes sense to speak of the expertise of a culture, and if our culture is expert at anything, it may appear that it must be expert at the pursuit of pleasure. In addition to all the traditional bases of sensual gratification--food, sex, mind-altering substances--we spend much of our time inventing new ones. Poor Aristotle never knew the joys of millions of musical pieces available at the touch of a button, or yelping one's way through a foreign city in search of exotic delights, or luxuriating in awe-inspiring cinematography. And I'm pretty sure that he never tried Scotch.<br />
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But if Aristotle is right--and on this I think he is--that desiring pleasure is essential to life, then we are all linked by this single interest, with one another, with our fellow citizens of whatever origin, and even with ancient Greek philosophers. Wouldn't it be reasonable, then, to evaluate our options, public and private, by considering how much pleasure they produce?<br />
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This simple logic is the logic of one form of utilitarianism. Its very simplicity holds out the promise for easy-decision making, fairness, and harmony among humankind, but unfortunately, it has a fatal flaw.<br />
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Our pleasures are not static. And they are not all equal, even when it comes to their capacity to sustain pleasure.<br />
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Indulge me in two examples. Sometime in the mid-aughts, I decided that it might be time to reconsider the eating habits that had just barely gotten me through part of my first three decades on earth, but which promised to make later middle age little fun indeed. I honestly don't remember what I was in the habit of eating for breakfast at this time, or even if I ate breakfast at all. But what would have sounded lovely to me, had I the time to prepare it, would have been a homemade buttermilk biscuit, with plenty of butter tucked inside of it to melt on the spot. But I soon learned that in the new, healthier language I was speaking, just a teaspoon of that butter would cost me as much as a whole cup of blueberries, or even more strawberries, raspberries, or blackberries.<br />
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I started eating a lot of berries. And I fell in love with them.<br />
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This was not a wholly new love, and it took little work to achieve. I had picked berries in Southern summers as a child, and I knew the joys of eating them straight off the vine or bush. But I had never before appreciated the way in which they pair beautifully with any number of other foods, the way in which they seem to capture the fire and the consolation of the sun, or the way in which they have what I called, in a whimsical moment, "plump beauty."<br />
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That biscuit with melted butter still sounds good to me, but there is now no way that I would choose it over a bowl of fresh berries.<br />
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The second case was more difficult. I have been running since my junior year in college, almost twenty years now. And for most of those two decades it has been a chore. Sometimes the chore has been rewarding: during a long struggle with chronic pain, the discovery that I could still run brought me a moment of exultation during a very dark time. But it has long been primarily duty that has forced me out the door.<br />
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Then, one day last year, I found myself in the park near my house in Southwestern Pennsylvania, slogging up the beginnings of the difficult hill that ends my running route, <i>smiling</i>. Somehow, gradually, this had become not just a duty, but a pleasure. I can say something about the nature of that pleasure--how it relates to the intimate connection with nature that one finds at certain odd hours of the day, how it arises from the playfulness of feeling one's body move rhythmically, how it sets one's thoughts free to wander in directionless yet productive patterns. But none of this would be sufficient. This pleasure is its own feeling, not to be defined in terms of other goods. And it is this pleasure that now takes away (at least most of) the resentment that I would otherwise feel at leaving the house when the wind chill is in the single (sometimes negative) digits, as it has been so often lately.<br />
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The intensity of both of these pleasures was a new discovery for me. How much more impoverished, then, are we choosing to make our lives, when we take our given pleasures to be determinative? Or when we focus on pleasures that everyone can share innately, because that seems easy or more marketable? Or when we take those pleasures simply for what they are in their most childish form, for much the same reason? No mature adult approaches the table with the same tastes that she had as a child or even adolescent; why would we approach music, art, reading, or even sex that way? We cannot truly be experts at pleasure if we assume that everyone is born with the relevant expertise. On such a paradigm, "expertise" becomes what Thomas Hobbes would call insignificant speech.<br />
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Aristotle knew this, of course. He goes on to discuss the way in which the activities we love will determine which pleasures we seek, and how pleasure will loop back onto those activities, reinforcing our love even more. Some of these activities promise short bursts of pleasure, some produce quick pleasure followed by enduring pain, and some offer sustained, joyful satisfaction. The path to the latter may be arduous, but the determined hedonist cannot be deterred by such inconveniences, when there is so much promise of plump beauty at the finish. Margaret Watkinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17961859357182716047noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8371593710878017578.post-56220243443373586332012-09-25T20:08:00.002-07:002012-09-25T20:13:53.191-07:00Five stages?<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 14px;">"One begets the idea, another is godfather at its baptism, the third begets children by it, the fourth visits it on its deathbed, and the fifth buries it."</span><br />
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So writes G.C. Lichtentberg in notebook H, aphorism 24, printed in the collection titled <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Waste-Books-York-Review-Classics/dp/0940322501/"><span style="color: #1636ee; text-decoration: underline;"><i>The Waste Books</i></span></a>. As Roger Kimball says in a <a href="http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/G--C--Lichtenberg--a--ldquo-spy-on-humanity-rdquo--1963"><span style="color: #1636ee; text-decoration: underline;">good appreciation of the man</span></a>, he is not a household name, but something rarer: a writer loved by those who are household names. The latter would include Goethe, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Karl Kraus, Wittgenstein, Oakeshott. Often it's difficult to hear Lichtenberg well, for a reason given by Kraus: "Lichtenberg digs deeper than anyone ... He speaks from the subterranean depths. Only he who himself digs deep hears him."</div>
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The fivefold scheme given by Lichtenberg seems implicit in the "ideal eternal history" proposed by Vico in 1725, in the first version of the <i>Scienza Nuova</i>. This ideal history is traversed in time by every nation in its "rise, development, maturity, decline, and fall." At times, Vico is no less aphoristic than Lichtenberg. He too is not a household name, and probably never will be. </div>
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As I was thinking about this fivefold scheme, a section of Nietzsche's <i>Twilight of the Idols</i> came to mind: "How the 'Real World' at last Became a Fable." Nietzsche gives us five stages that seem related to those of Lichtenberg and Vico.</div>
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1. The real world is attainable to the wise. "Plato" - the philosopher who is also a creator par excellence, begetting the idea. </div>
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2. The real world is unattainable for the moment, but is promised to the wise. "It becomes Christian" -- Plato baptized, made more enticing, more appealing, but perhaps also more incomprehensible.</div>
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3. The real world is unattainable, but it's consoling to think about, and we have a duty toward it. "Königsbergian." A Copernican revolution in thought, with plenty of heirs. </div>
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4. The real world is unattainable and unknown, so that it gives us nothing, either by way of consolation or obligation. "Cockcrow of positivism." The real world is dying, but it's not quite dead. The voice that speaks the world <i>sub specie quantitatis</i>, without quite abolishing the real world.</div>
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5. The "real world" -- useless, superfluous, worthy of abolition. "Free spirits run riot." To bury something that has been dying for quite a while -- this <i>can</i> be an occasion for cheerfulness, as it so clearly is in some moods. The real world having been abolished, so too is the apparent world.</div>
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Where next? Are we at the end of history? Or is there a sixth age? Nietzsche thought there is, or at least he did when he was still communicating with us. He presumes to mark it by the fateful words "Incipit Zarathustra." Would such an age be something new? Or would it be a return to the first? The safest answer is probably "yes." Zarathustra is not entirely new, so far as he is an archetype of the wise old man, as Jung points out. What from one perspective is a radical break, is from another perspective a return to something old.</div>
Robert Minerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02230724650025013746noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8371593710878017578.post-32556801116044172452012-09-03T09:06:00.001-07:002012-09-03T09:11:35.964-07:00Art Garfunkel Wrestles with Plato?<a href="https://www.npr.org/2012/09/01/160387900/garfunkel-defends-his-art" target="_blank">Garfunkel Defends His Art</a><br />
<br />
In the <i>Apology</i>, Plato has Socrates offer the following dim report of his encounter with the poets:<br />
<br />
"I am almost ashamed to speak of this, but still I must say that there is hardly a person present who would not have talked better about their poetry than they did themselves. That showed me in an instant that not by wisdom do poets write poetry, but by a sort of genius and inspiration; they are like diviners or soothsayers who also say many fine things, but do not understand the meaning of them."<br />
<br />
This brief interview (see link above) with Art Garfunkel presents a nice challenge to the suggestion that artists are unlikely to comprehend--let alone articulate--the meaning of their art. Of course, Simon was arguably the poet behind Garfunkel's most famous work. But it hardly makes Garfunkel's insights less impressive to note that he was the voice, not the wordsmith.<br />
<br />
Part of what is nice about the interview is that it belongs to a genre we are seeing more of these days: the reconciliation story of parties to a once-acrimonious musical divorce, who have gained the maturity that sometimes comes with age. But beyond this sentimental comfort, we find some genuinely reflective insights.<br />
<br />
Consider, for instance, Garfunkel's description of the power of collaborative friendship:<br />
<br />
"How about the very mentality of Paul Simon? This is a very interesting Paul Simon with a mind that can reach into the future, and I am a spiritual partner. When you sing with a partner and he has a very pleasing sound, and he's your friend and you laugh a lot, you soon start making music with the heads very close to each other, the noses almost touching. And you study the diction, and you create over your two heads a little bubble of reality and sound. When I work with Paul, I go into that dome, that invisible, small circumference dome. And when you visit that place, it's apart from life on Earth, it's its own very pleasing soundscape."<br />
<br />
One might have to go back to Montaigne to find a better description of the way that friendship, through intense intimacy that might appear small, can actually offer a magnanimous gift to the world.<br />
<br />
In another link with Plato--here, the Plato of the <i>Symposium</i>--we find the suggestion that there is some relationship between eros (broadly understood), friendship, and beautiful productions: recording by oneself is not the same. "You miss the electricity that lights up the recording session and makes it all fun and games and makes the night go on for many extra hours because partnership is juicy."<br />
<br />
Or how about this description of singing itself?<br />
<br />
"To me, the act of singing is an expression of love. You form it in the vocal cords. When you love your song and you lose yourself into the song . . . it's very tough to analyze the act of singing."<br />
<br />
Here we have intensely <i>personal</i> love giving rise to that unique <i>overcoming of the person</i> as self-consciousness: the song expresses the love, and the love allows oneself to let go of the self. And there is even a Socratic recognition that the topic is difficult to understand--worthy of contemplation, but resisting analysis.<br />
<br />
But what struck me most about this conversation was Garfunkel's unabashed ambition for excellence--and for recognition of his excellence. He is not satisfied with being known as "the guy with the silver voice." He wants to be "a virtuoso singer," and to be <i>seen</i> as a virtuoso singer. And he wants people to remember that they were good--the "real thing"--that they "recorded as if a record was an important thing," a thing that, when done well, was a masterpiece. He wants, he says, "to be in that world of a real artist."<br />
<br />
Perhaps this is also a challenge to a Platonic thought. One can glean from some of Plato's dialogues that, while one ought to strive for excellence, one should scorn the opinion of the masses who presume themselves to be good judges. This thought offers something important and useful. But how are we to inspire a generation to fight and claw for greatness, if we are ashamed to say that we want to be great ourselves? Garfunkel does not seem to desire recognition for the sake of the goodies it brings--fame, money, etc. He seems to desire it as a kind of assurance that he has achieved some of what he strives for. And that, I think, is an innocent and admirable desire.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Margaret Watkinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17961859357182716047noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8371593710878017578.post-28975190313668978342012-07-11T15:45:00.001-07:002012-07-11T15:50:34.102-07:00What One Learns in loco parentis.<style>
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George Eliot’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Silas
Marner</i> is in part the story of a broken man, repaired by love of a child.
From the moment that these two “lone things” find one another, the spidery
existence of the miser expands as she forces his vision out and forward, warms
“him into joy because <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">she </i>had joy.” </div>
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It is a beautiful story, though parts of it seem wildly
implausible to me. But I am interested in this benign portrait of a kind of
stepparent—a man who takes care of little Eppie simply because she is there,
and because they both need love. For Eppie and Silas, there are no “real”
parents in their story, at least not for quite a while. Yet Silas is still in
that odd boundary position that we stepparents know too well: loving without
the biological ground of love, without the recognition of bonds afforded to
other parents, and without the security of the indestructible love that most
children naturally feel for the parents they have known since birth.</div>
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Those of you who are parents of transitional children—those
strange beings on the cusp of adulthood that we too innocuously call
“teenagers”—may question that last part. Attempting to love these sometimes moody and narcissistic little beings can feel like a thankless, hopeless task. But—to
generalize irresponsibly from my own and a few other cases—I can say that these
little beings still love their parents, even as they are saying and doing
things that break the parents’ hearts. And there is even hope that they may
grow up, remember those ugly moments, and feel truly remorseful and grateful
that you put up with them nonetheless. The tragic case of abused children who
still cling to their abusive parents shows the power of this love. This is a
horrible basis for security, but I maintain that there is security there to be
had.</div>
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Such security is less available to a stepparent. Not only
must she fight against the lack of early bonding, she must also overcome a
cultural history full of stories of wicked stepparents, and perhaps the
hostility that often results from divorce and remarriage. She must love in full
knowledge that the love may never be returned. There is consolation in one’s
spouse of course—who, if he is worth loving, will love you all the more for
loving his children. Nonetheless, the stepparent’s love can never be rooted in
the promise of strict reciprocity.</div>
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And now that I have mentioned the difference, I wish to do
it away. The truth is that no parent’s love should be rooted in such a promise.
It simply is not good for the parent, who is in a position of greater strength
and therefore must exhibit greater magnanimity. We must love because we have
the strength to love, and because others have given us that strength through
their own love. This, I believe, is called grace.</div>
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So does this let those of us who were or are narcissistic
little beings off the hook? By no means. As I recall from somewhere, the proper
response to grace is unceasing gratitude. Expressing it is an excellent way to
enlarge one’s own soul, thus making future magnanimity possible. We were all
once lone things: if someone saved you from that, you owe them everything—at the
very least the acknowledgement of their gift.</div>Margaret Watkinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17961859357182716047noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8371593710878017578.post-77917886339501176532012-05-01T21:08:00.002-07:002012-05-02T15:45:23.434-07:00On "spirit" and "spirituality"<div class="MsoNormal">
One hears a lot of talk—a lot of loose talk—about the "spirit" and "spirituality." But such loose talk may be indispensable. Certainly it's preferable to one way of dismissing the spirit. This is the brutal attempt to reduce everything worth talking about to a mechanism. Such a reduction is <i>tasteless</i>, because (as Nietzsche says) it betrays the wish to “divest existence
of its <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">rich ambiguity</i>” (more
literally, “its multi-aspected character” [<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">seines
vieldeutigen Charakters</i>]). Nietzsche invites us to imagine
a critic who judges a piece of music according to how much of it can be
counted, calculated and expressed in formulas. What would such a critic grasp in the piece? “Nothing, really nothing of what is
‘music’ in it.” Similarly, those
who try to grasp a person purely in terms of mechanism will grasp an aspect, but
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">only</i> an aspect, of the human
being. Like existence itself,
human beings are multi-aspected. If
the facets in human beings that do not reveal themselves to mechanistic analysis
are to be seen, we must continue to use categories that are not at home in materialistic
natural science. To suppose
otherwise—to think that everything “real” about human beings can be understood
mechanistically—is a “faith with which so many materialistic natural scientists
rest content nowadays.” To call it
a faith is not a compliment (at least, not from Nietzsche). The
faith’s directive to permit “counting, calculating, weighing, seeing, and
touching, and nothing more” is, Nietzsche says, “a crudity and naiveté,
assuming that it is not a sickness of the spirit, an idiocy” (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Gay Science </i>373).</div>
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It is vital to see that Nietzsche has no interest
in making the world safe for the “materialistic natural scientist.” Equally important is to grasp that he
is not a dualist. We should
continue to speak of “spirit”—but not as though it names an entity that exists,
or can exist, apart from the body.
When Nietzsche speaks harshly of “spirit,” he means to criticize a
particular notion of “spirit.” He
means spirit conceived as disembodied, a ghostly thing that hovers above the body. For this idea of
spirit, Nietzsche has nothing but scorn. “Pure spirit is pure lie,” he says in one place. But spirit is not “pure spirit.” The despisers of the body speak of
“spirit.” They do not succeed in
speaking of spirit. What, then,
does Nietzsche understand by spirit?
If spirit is not to be confused with “pure spirit,” what is it?</div>
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<br /></div>
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To tackle this question swiftly, to quickly get
into it and then out again, one cannot do better than to examine two aphorisms,
both from the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Gay Science</i>. Aphorism 329 begins by noticing the
“breathless haste” with which Americans work. This haste, the “distinctive vice of the new world,” has
“begun to infect old Europe with its ferocity and is spreading a lack of
spirituality (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Geistlosigkeit</i>) like a
blanket. Even now one is ashamed
of resting, and prolonged reflection almost gives people a bad
conscience.” To rest and to
reflect are two activities proper to spirit. Rather than genuinely reflect on a
question, giving it as much time as it requires, “one thinks with a watch in one’s
hand.” Instead of resting with
companions over a well-prepared dinner, “one eats one’s midday meal while
reading the latest news of the stock market.” If one is drawn to these counterfeits of rest and reflection,
it is because “one lives as if one always ‘might miss out on something.’” Those dominated by such anxiety simply
have no time or energy “for ceremonies, for being obliging in an indirect way,
for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">esprit</i> in conversation, and for
any <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">otium</i> at all.” Moreover, the time-crunched chase for
gain does not promote genuine virtue: “Virtue has come to consist of doing
something in less time than someone else.” Nor does it reward honesty: “hours in which honesty is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">permitted</i> have become rare.” When efficiency trumps virtue and
honesty, the natural consequence is a deflation of the spirit, notwithstanding any corresponding inflation of bank accounts and multi-story houses. “Living in a constant chase after gain
compels people to expend their spirit to the point of exhaustion in continual
pretense and overreaching and anticipating others.” Such a life, while perhaps diverting, cannot be called
joyful. Those educated to excel in
the chase are becoming “increasingly suspicious of all joy! More and more, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">work</i> enlists all good conscience on its side; the desire for joy
already calls itself a ‘need to recuperate’ and is beginning to be ashamed of
itself. ‘One owes it to one’s
health’—that is what people say when they are caught on an excursion in the
country.”</div>
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From Aphorism 329, one learns what Nietzsche
deems bad for the spirit, along with he takes to be good for it. Here's a quick table. On the left, the good; on the right, the bad.</div>
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<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Leisure Exhaustion</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Reflection Thought
bound to a schedule</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Ceremony Dismissal
of ritual as “pointless” </div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Indirect
helpfulness Restriction
to what is obviously of service<br />
Conversational
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">esprit </i>Plain,
witless speech</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Honesty Pretense</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Contentment Overreaching
and anticipating others (cf. <i>pleonexia</i>) </div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Desire
for joy Temporary
respite from weariness</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Good
conscience about joy Bad
conscience about what is useless for gain</div>
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</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
This table does not pretend to be exhaustive. It could be expanded by analyzing other
aphorisms that use “spirit” as a key term. It suffices, however, to show that when Nietzsche speaks of
“spirit,” he talks about nothing detached from the body. He intends, rather, to convey something
about the activities and qualities of embodied human beings. Those who despise the body, but claim
to value spiritual activities and qualities, can be reminded that we never do
encounter these activities and qualities in separation from bodies. Against the reductive mechanist or
materialist, we can observe that these qualities and activities are but minimally illuminated by approaches that reduce body to what can counted,
calculated and expressed in formulas.</div>
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</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Nietzsche picks up the intrinsic connection
between the spirit and joy in Aphorism 359. “There is a human being who has turned out badly, who does
not have enough spirit to be able to enjoy it but just enough education to realize
this.” Such a human being, who is
“fundamentally ashamed of his existence,” is joyless and therefore less
spiritual than his joyful counterpart with a good conscience. He will at some point seek “revenge
against the spirit.” He will seek
“to give himself in his own eyes the appearance of superiority over more
spiritual people and to attain the pleasure of an <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">accomplished revenge</i> at least in his imagination.” By what means? By morality—not higher morality, but
exploitation of the “big moral words.”
Nietzsche lists “justice, wisdom, holiness, virtue." To this list, we can and should add “spirituality.” Those who love
to describe themselves as “spiritual” tend to have little of what Nietzsche
would regard as genuine spirit.
More likely they are “born enemies of the spirit”; they fear genuine
spirit and seek to revenge themselves against it. Even philosophers are subject to this harsh judgment. It applies particularly to the kind
of philosopher who continually speaks about “wisdom.” To talk about wisdom about the time will perhaps impress
the inexperienced as “spiritual.”
The more experienced, however, will not be misled. All too often, the rhetoric of wisdom functions
as a kind of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">screen</i>. It is a “screen behind which the philosopher
saves himself because he has become weary, old, cold, hard.”</div>
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<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
The aphorism concludes with a question:
“Wisdom as a screen behind which the philosopher hides from—spirit?” This ending strikes me as brilliant. It suggests what I've discovered from my own experience. The very people who are quickest to
attribute spirituality to themselves, who most pride themselves on
spirituality, are actually the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">least
spiritual, </i>at least in any sense that counts.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
Or it seems to me at the moment. I'm in the middle of working on a chapter, and I would love to hear your criticisms and insights.</div>Robert Minerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02230724650025013746noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8371593710878017578.post-64676082879417411952012-04-20T16:07:00.000-07:002012-05-01T21:26:59.284-07:00The Psychology of Conviction<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
"What's wrong with our politicians
these days," one hears often, "is that they have no <i>convictions."
</i>This familiar complaint gets at a real problem. So many
politicians are unprincipled, in the sense that what drives them is exclusively
their own short-term interest. They will say anything to get
elected, no matter how outrageous, or how little they believe it themselves. We
can and should detest this.<o:p></o:p></div>
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We should not, however, let our justified
indignation mislead us into thinking that we simply want politicians who are
"principled." Why not? It's easy to think of people who
are sincere and "principled" in a sense, but who hold utterly wacky
views, and refuse to subject these views to examination and evidence. Such
types might in fact be <i>more</i> dangerous than their unprincipled
counterparts. <o:p></o:p></div>
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"After all, it is putting a very high
price on one's conjectures to have a man roasted alive because of them." This
line from Montaigne should not be forgotten. Nor should these ironic
words from C.G. Jung: "Even the holy Christian church, which is the
incarnation of divine love, burnt more than a hundred thousand of her own
children alive." There is little or nothing admirable about the
mere fact of having convictions. The problem with Anders Breivik is not
that he has no convictions. It is not that he is unprincipled or
insincere. Nor is it that he is insane, in the clinical sense (if there
is such a thing). That's an extreme example, but it illustrates the point
well. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Nietzsche speaks to the issue: “This is <i>our</i>
conviction: we confess it before all the world, we live and die for it. Respect
for all who have convictions! I have heard that sort of thing even out of
the mouths of anti-Semites. On the contrary, gentlemen! An
anti-Semite certainly is not any more decent because he lies as a matter of
principle." One might take Nietzsche's point to be that content is
more important than sincerity. Someone who does something good, whether
on principle or out of expediency, is preferable to someone who does something
wicked but on principle. Sincerity, if it is a virtue at all, is not the
highest virtue. Insincerity, though almost certainly a vice, is yet not
the worst vice.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Nietzsche’s emphasis, however, is a little
different. He seems to think that one can be fully sincere, fully
convinced or “convicted” (as some like to say), and yet fundamentally
dishonest. For Nietzsche, honesty is not really a function of subjective
sincerity. It has to do, rather, with one’s willingness to resist not
only deceiving, but also <i>being deceived</i>. Positively, it requires
one to continually ask hard questions and to subject one’s answer to those
questions (and indeed, one’s formulation of the questions themselves) to the
most probing tests. No matter how sincere the anti-Semite is in holding
his anti-Semitism, he is guilty of a fundamental kind of dishonesty, because he
is lazy with himself. He is willing to deceive and to be deceived. He
holds anti-Semitism out of conviction, but <i>not</i> out of intellectual
honesty.<o:p></o:p></div>
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What's the alternative? Something
like this: views based on an examination of things which proceeds according to
what Nietzsche calls the “intellectual conscience.” (See the second
aphorism of the <i>Gay Science.</i>)<o:p></o:p></div>
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Nietzsche combines an attack on the “psychology of conviction” with a
strong affirmation of the intellectual conscience and its attendant virtue,
honesty or probity (<i>Redlichkeit</i>) That alone prevents him, I
think, from approving of politicians who are simply unprincipled. It also
enables him to distinguish between the ersatz honesty of subjective sincerity
and the genuine article. </div>Robert Minerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02230724650025013746noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8371593710878017578.post-46018421067890554852012-04-16T17:10:00.013-07:002012-04-16T21:17:11.476-07:00Should we chase superstition and fear from our hearts?"We should chase superstition and fear from our hearts, if we're going to survive and take levels of sanity higher." This won't win any prizes for beautiful poetry, though it does scan perfectly well when sung by Andy Partridge. At any rate, as I was listening to "Merely a Man" the other day (it appears on XTC's 1989 double-LP <i>Orange and Lemons</i>), I started to think less about the music (not their best, not their worst) and more about the sentiment expressed.<br />
<br />
These questions took hold of me and refused to let go: Why does this sentiment seem particularly associated with self-proclaimed atheists and "free-thinkers"? Why do we so rarely hear it expressed by the self-identified religious?<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"> <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">One possible answer: Religious folks share the sentiment, but simply don't think it gets at a serious problem. While superstition and fear are not good things, godlessness and atheism are much worse. We don't need to worry too much about the superstitious and fearful. We can assume they're OK, as long as they're saying their prayers, receiving the sacraments, or whatever. Even those who have a bad diet overall simply can't help but provide themselves with the nutrition they need for the general well-being of their organism. Superstition and fear, while not exactly praiseworthy things, pose no real threat to spiritual well-being. The intellectual conscience is fine for those who want it. But ultimately, it's optional. It's not integral to piety.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">This answer strikes me as hard to defend. Consider the analogy to bodily health just invoked. To slowly poison yourself through bad food and drink means that you will not feel as good as you should feel. It entails that you will probably die an earlier death than you would like. In matters of the spirit, things are much worse. Any approach to God infected by superstition is likely to be a form of idolatry. It will cause one to miss the mark altogether.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">Some penetrating religious observers see the point. Pascal, for one, insists that genuine piety is different from superstition. He notices that there are many who claim to believe, but do so out of superstition. Indeed, he does not merely notice this, but uses it to support his claim that "there are few true Christians." Or, as Nietzsche says in one place, in every religion the religious person is an exception.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">So Pascal and Partridge agree (if only on this): we should chase superstition from our hearts. But my original questions seem to re-emerge: why do religious folk seem generally <i>not</i> to be inspired by the sentiment? Why do we so rarely hear it coming from them? Why might an impartial observer conclude that those who concern themselves with superstition and fear <i>as problems</i> are more likely to be anti-religious than religious?<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">A second, darker answer suggests itself. Many religious folk have a bad conscience about the whole matter. In their quiet moments, they suspect that their own faith adds up to little more than fear and superstition. The cry to "chase superstition and fear from our hearts" does not resonate, because it would mean to empty their own hearts. Easier to go after other people, rather than worry about one's own darkness.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">Is this answer correct? I don't know. Perhaps it applies to all of us some of the time, and some of us all of the time.<br />
<br />
Here's a third possible answer (really a variant of the first): smart religious folk don't think too much these days about superstition, because they see that the alleged imperative to rid ourselves of superstition and fear is a bit old-fashioned. However worked up those quaint Enlightenment folks might have been, we occupy a different historical moment. For the most part, we've managed to let go of the worst superstitions, including the superstition that reasoned opposition to superstition will produce a more humane society. As for the superstitions that remain, what harm do they do? It's nice to have a bit of enchantment in our lives. The real threat to our humanity, in any case, does not come not from the superstitious. It arises from those who would mercilessly debunk anything and everything.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">The last strand of this answer derives from a certain reading of C.S. Lewis's <i>The Abolition of Man</i>. Lewis is right, I think, to take aim at a certain kind of "debunker" who, whatever his intention, does not exactly succeed in producing better thinkers or better human beings. Moreover, when Lewis calls for the "irrigation of deserts" against the tendency of the debunkers, he does not mean to suggest that deserts should be watered by superstition. I can follow Lewis a good way down this path. Nonetheless, the sense that in our present times, credulity and superstition are not much of a problem strikes me as mostly an error. We have little interest in chasing superstition and fear from our hearts. But is it <i>really </i>because there is nothing to chase away?<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">I don't pretend to have exhausted the possibilities. I'm still wondering. Feel free to wonder with me in the comments...</div>Robert Minerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02230724650025013746noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8371593710878017578.post-25903652094542795572012-02-28T11:30:00.011-08:002012-02-28T12:40:21.935-08:00Snobbery and Playing GodRick Santorum has accused Obama of snobbery for wanting every American to go to college. Much of the negative response concerns his rhetoric. The governor of my home state reflected the general mood with his "I wish he'd said it differently."<div><br /></div><div>Perhaps, but I'm more interested in asking about the matter than the manner of what he said. Is it snobbish to want everyone to go to college?</div><div><br /></div><div>Obama's plan for universal higher education would have been unthinkable in past centuries--for many reasons. Among those reasons was the widespread belief that not everyone belonged in the university, because it was in people's best interest not to quit the sphere into which they were born. Pretending that this system promoted a separate-but-equal system would be the height of bad faith, as separate-but-equal claims generally are. If any views about higher education qualify as snobbish, this one certainly does.</div><div><br /></div><div>For the most part, such views are--thankfully--no longer live options. But how could their apparent opposite--the idea that everyone belongs in college--then be snobbish? </div><div><br /></div><div>Because the truth of the matter is that some people go to college and some do not, and the desire for everyone to do so seems to imply that the first group, at least at the completion of their formal education, is somehow better or better off than the second.</div><div><br /></div><div>By some standards--particularly those that are easy to measure--it is clear that college graduates are better off. Their lifetime earning is higher; their rate of unemployment is lower. Because these goods appeal to everyone, their value is difficult to question. But we do run into dangerous territory if we mean that college graduates are morally better, more excellent human beings, or members of a higher class defined by something other than earning potential. </div><div><br /></div><div>Obama attempted to respond to this criticism by insisting that he did not mean that everyone needs a four-year degree. He intended his remarks to apply to technical training as well--the kind that might help those "decent men and women who go out and work hard every day," in Santorum's words, earn and keep gainful employment. He did not mean, in other words, that everyone needs the traditional liberal education associated with the four-year degree and that earlier, snobbish class system.</div><div><br /></div><div>Fortunately, one is increasingly unlikely to acquire a liberal education at most four-year colleges.</div><div><br /></div><div>It is worth asking, however, what such an education might liberate one from. At its best, it might liberate one from the kind of sentiment expressed in Santorum's following sentences, much neglected by the news reports:</div><div><br /></div><div>"Oh, I understand why he wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you in his image. I want to create jobs so people can remake their children into their image, not his."</div><div><br /></div><div>This religious allusion is particularly odd. If we are already made in God's image, as I presume Santorum believes, do we need remaking in the image of fallen human beings instead? Putting that aside, ought parents to see their goal as reproducing images of themselves? Isn't the more loving and properly humble thing to hope and strive that your children might overcome your weaknesses, escape your faults, and excel your achievements? </div><div><br /></div><div>Certainly, it is frightening to allow one's children to learn. Hoping for and encouraging their education raises the very real possibility that they may come to believe and embrace things that are foreign or even anathema to their parents. </div><div><br /></div><div>There is nothing wrong with wanting your children to share your standards and convictions. There is something wrong with prioritizing sameness in itself over their development, or with closing oneself off to the possibility that they might grow to teach you that your standards and convictions are misguided. There is something more wrong about resenting your children if they choose to follow those standards in ways that you did not. The child of a lawyer may choose to pursue justice by living with the poor, and the child of a steel worker may choose to mold the world through the quite different honest hard work of a heart surgeon. Neither child would be the image of the parents. But if either parent responded to this situation by resenting her child's choices, the accusation of snobbery would be apt indeed.</div><div><br /></div><div>One does not, indeed, need a formal education to come to these insights about human development. My father, who does not have a four-year degree, possesses them to the highest degree of anyone I have ever known. But again, liberal education at its best makes such insights available to some not so parentally blessed. Can everyone benefit from such an education? Is everyone capable of it?</div><div><br /></div><div>This is a genuinely difficult question. I can only respond with the remark of one of my students on this topic: </div><div><br /></div><div>"We have to hope so."</div><div><br /></div>Margaret Watkinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17961859357182716047noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8371593710878017578.post-394582968753312052012-02-22T11:39:00.001-08:002012-02-22T11:55:45.355-08:00On Lenten Observance and the Labyrinth of the HeartIn Nietzsche's too-neglected essay, "Schopenhauer as Educator," he observes that "wherever there has been tyranny, there the solitary philosopher has been hated; for philosophy offers an asylum to a man into which no tyranny can force its way, the inward cave, the labyrinth of the heart."<div><br /></div><div>This is a mournful, beautiful sentiment. Here is a man who knows that philosophy can indeed console--and a man whose forced solitude has often made consolation necessary.</div><div><br /></div><div>It is, perhaps ironically, a sentiment appropriate for Ash Wednesday. Christ offers us the deepest consolation--a joy that can only be had after the cutting engagement with sin. And, at its best, the church provides the means for such consolation--forms and rituals that help bring our hearts, minds, and bodies into the necessary receptive stance.</div><div><br /></div><div>I grew up in the Baptist church, and there are many things about that formation for which I will always be grateful. But my worship experience as a child lacked a deep sense of such rituals. And it lacked altogether a sense of the liturgical year beyond Christmas and Easter. Advent was a children's game involving calendars and festivity, and Lent was missing entirely.</div><div><br /></div><div>Like many with this formation, I have treasured coming to know more liturgical traditions. The liturgy, at its best, provides words when words fail us. It is a sanctuary in the true sense--an asylum into which tyranny cannot force its way.</div><div><br /></div><div>At its best. But it is all too easy to forget--perhaps because it seems so obvious--that forms can also be empty shells. Worse still, they can be sources of pride, thus contradicting everything this day is supposed to remind us of. Those of us walking around with ashes on our foreheads must ask ourselves: is this really humbling, or do I want people to know that<i> I </i>have observed the appropriate ritual today? </div><div><br /></div><div>The form, the asylum, the sanctuary are all open spaces with walls--or perhaps cradles--around them. They are nothing unless filled with the inwardness of the labyrinthine hearts who realize how much they need them.</div>Margaret Watkinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17961859357182716047noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8371593710878017578.post-84310798270390378252011-11-15T21:32:00.000-08:002011-11-16T10:45:36.457-08:00Anti-Gingrich Linguist Speaks Well. But Is He Smart?<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: #343434;">"Gingrich's patterns of speech are largely analytically acute, and sometimes aesthetically interesting, but substantively, they are very often lacking," the linguist John McWhorter opines in the <i>New Republic </i>(<a href="http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/97429/newt-gingrich-smart" target="_blank">"Words, Mere Words: Newt Gingrich Speaks Well. But Is He Smart?"</a>) Why does McWhorter say that Gingrich's patterns of speech" are "very often" lacking? Why not simply "often"? I am suspicious of a linguist whose use of "very" is so manifestly hackish.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: #343434;">And just what does it mean for speech <i>patterns</i> to be "substantively lacking"? An <i>assertion</i> or <i>claim</i> can be "substantively lacking" in several ways. A partial catalogue: (1) The claim is a tautology; (2) The claim cannot be falsified; (3) The claim involves circular reasoning; (4) The claim asserts that something is the case, when it is patently not the case; (5) The claim is a contradiction. But in what sense are "patterns of speech" substantively lacking? Speech patterns can be annoying, confusing, pedestrian, varied, pretentious, repetitive, etc. But "substantively lacking"? What's substantively lacking is that which is being patterned, not the pattern itself. (Here I'm speaking with McWhorter, granting him his distinction between "substance" and "package," or what would more standardly be called "content" and "form." In fact, the distinction's meaning and application is far from clear.) <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: #343434;">McWhorter continues: "Gingrich is sometimes so pleased with his uninterrupted stream of words, that he mistakes it for an actual flow of ideas." That one can use many words to say little is evident. But does Gingrich characteristically say nothing? Or is it that he says plenty of things, many of them objectionable? Does he have no ideas? Or does he have bad ones? I suspect that McWhorter wants to have it both ways. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: #343434;">McWhorter is right to say that slangy talk may contain "sober reasoning." But the example that he gives (taken from W. Labov) does not establish the point. Far from containing "clear formal lines of logic," it's a morass. Consider the reconstruction: <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: #343434;">1. Everyone has a different idea of what God is like.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: #343434;">2. Therefore nobody knows that God really exists.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: #343434;">3. If there is heaven, it was made by God.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: #343434;">4. If God doesn’t exist, he couldn’t have made heaven.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: #343434;">5. Therefore heaven does not exist.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: #343434;">6. Therefore you can’t go to heaven.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: #343434;">(1) is questionable on two grounds: (a) That "everyone" has a different idea of what God is like is not plausible. Suppose there are multiple ideas. But one per person ("everyone")? There are 6.8 billion people on the planet; there are not 6.8 billion ideas of God; (b) It's not even clear that there are multiple "ideas of God." There may be ideas that purport to represent God. But are they actually ideas of <i>God</i>? Or are they ideas of something which is taken to be God, but which is not God (rather, some idol)? I am inclined to say that properly speaking, there are <i>no</i> "ideas of God."<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: #343434;">(2) is a gross non sequitur. To begin a sentence with "Therefore" has no tendency to ensure that it follows logically from the prior sentence. Even if (1) were true, (2) would not follow. Why should everyone having the same idea of God be a condition of knowing that God exists? Not everyone has the same idea of Newt Gingrich, but we know that he exists. In fact, there are plenty of people who have no idea of Newt Gingrich at all.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: #343434;">(3) is problematic, since it assumes that heaven is a "thing," something akin to an artifact. More seriously defective is the antecedent of (4). The claim "God doesn't exist" is flown in, as it were, with no justification at all. Even if (1) were true, and (2) were to follow from (1), the claim "God doesn't exist" is independent of (2). Why? Because (2) is a claim about the status of our knowledge, not about existence. What's needed is an additional claim about existence. Something like:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: #343434;"> (4a) God doesn't exist.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: #343434;">If (and only if) this is granted, then what follows from (4) and (4a) is (by modus ponens):<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: #343434;"> (4b) God couldn't have made heaven.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: #343434;">Now we can use (4b) or an implication thereof, e.g. (4c) "heaven wasn't made by God" to perform modus tollens on (3), proving (5). But (4a) is crucial. Its gratuitous assumption shows that the argument does not operate along the "clear formal lines of logic." It is not, as it stands, an instance of "sober reasoning." On the contrary, it is both unsound and invalid. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="color: #343434;">Back to McWhorter. He is clearly upset about Gingrich's disparaging comments on bilingual education. That Gingrich's comments on this topic might be unsubtle or ill-informed is entirely possible. I suspend judgment, at least for now; McWhorter himself acknowledges there is room for critique ("bilingual ed programs in the United States have not always been good"). But what explains McWhorter's willingness to perform induction on a sample of one? Suppose Gingrich is wrong about the particular issue of bilingual education. Does that establish that he <i>generally</i> "interprets his academic training as a way primarily to burnish his own ego—to confuse supporters into following him, rather than to clarify matters of importance"? It does not. My impression is that Gingrich commands an impressive amount of substantive knowledge in a range of policy domains, foreign and domestic. In my own observation, he's deployed that knowledge in attempts to clarify matters of importance, more so than most politicians. Do his attempts succeed? That's another question. But how should we react when a writer who uses his academic training to make a name for himself in popular journals of opinion presumes to accuse another person of using his academic training to "burnish his own ego"? My own reaction: laughter.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: #343434;">Laughter aside, a serious question remains. Is Gingrich ultimately just another ego-ridden demagogue who cares nothing for truth? Perhaps. I've been depressed about the leading lights of the GOP for some time now. But McWhorter's smug hit piece is poor evidence for the claim that Gingrich is "not smart."</span></div>Robert Minerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02230724650025013746noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8371593710878017578.post-9263945120243755402011-10-06T02:07:00.000-07:002011-10-06T02:07:34.415-07:00Review of a new biography of NietzscheYoung, Julian. <i>Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography</i>. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, xxxii + 649 pp.<br />
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A massive effort that combines biographical narrative with textual interpretation, Julian Young's new work on Nietzsche demands attention. This is due partly to the importance of its subject, and partly to the impression of thoroughness conveyed by the book's length. Though not without its flaws, Young's biography is worth reading for anyone who wants to enter more deeply into Nietzsche's life and work. <br />
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What makes Young's biography worth reading? It is written in an unpretentious style, refreshingly free from academic jargon. It contains a wealth of small but telling details about Nietzsche's life that, while not unattested by previous biographies, deserve to be better known than they are. For instance, after winning in 1885 a court settlement against his publisher and paying off his debts to bookstores, Nietzsche purchased and designed his father's tombstone, with a verse from 1 Corinthians inscribed on it ("Love never faileth") (9). This happened thirty-six years after his father died. Young admirably brings out Nietzsche's dedication to teaching his students, his determination to become (as he put it in a letter to Erwin Rohde) a "really practical teacher" (68). We learn that he even offered them five-course dinners at the end of the semester (102). One imagines that he cooked well; in 1876 or 1877, while living in Sorrento, he learned how to make risotto (293). Despite the blasts in his autobiography against coffee, he apparently frequented the Venetian open-air cafés in St. Mark's Square, where he "discovered Italian coffee to be the best in the world" (291). Writing from Sils Maria, Nietzsche asked his mother to send him a needle and thread, implying, as Young says, that he could "sew as well as cook" (317). Neither his disdain for the English nor his experimentalism stopped him from being brand-loyal to Horniman's English tea (454). He appears to have delighted in fan mail sent to him from Baltimore (322). In company he read aloud short stories by Mark Twain (166), whose "craziness" he professed to love "more than German cleverness" (236). Young's book is rich in such details. They serve to humanize the alternately forbidding and buffoonish figure that emerges from Nietzsche's autobiography.<br />
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Another primary strength of Young's book is its attention to the role of music in Nietzsche's life. Nietzsche loved music—to hear it, to compose it, to improvise at his piano. Months after his collapse, he continued to play beautifully, according to his friend Heinrich Köselitz (551-52). Though Nietzsche is often considered a poor composer, Young shows that the truth of this evaluation is hardly self-evident. It derives, he argues, in no small part from Hans von Bülow's graceless conjecture that Nietzsche's music was a joke, perhaps intended as a parody of "so-called music of the future" (154). Was von Bülow right about Nietzsche's lack of compositional talent? The reader can judge for himself, since Young provides not only his own assessment, but also links to recordings of Nietzsche's music on the book's Web site. While devoting appropriate attention to Nietzsche's conflicted relations with Wagner, Young shows that his musical horizons extended further. Nietzsche thought highly not only of Haydn, Beethoven, Mozart, Handel, and Mendelssohn, but also of his contemporary Brahms. As Young shows, he sought (fruitlessly) to convince Wagner of his validity and sent Brahms a copy of his "Hymn to Life." Brahms did not reciprocate Nietzsche's interest. Despite the extension of his interests beyond Wagner, Young concludes that Nietzsche was dominated by an "innate musical conservatism" (37, 496). Only a handful of composers were able to give him what he sought from music, "the experience of self-transcendence" (459).<br />
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The chapter on "Nietzsche's Circle of Women" is among the most valuable in the book. Young spends due time on his problematic relationships with his mother, his sister, and Lou Salomé. Going beyond these well-known figures in his life, Young shows that despite his anti-feminism, Nietzsche surrounded himself with a number of "feminist friends." To one such friend, Resa von Schirnhofer, he chose to communicate orally, in a manner she found "alien" and "terrifying," the doctrine of the eternal return, before resuming (as she says) "his normal way of speaking and usual self" (389). Beyond its amusement value, the vignette shows that in spite of his more notorious remarks, Nietzsche's emotions toward women were not confined to fear, anger and contempt. Well after he was rejected by Lou Salomé, Nietzsche actively sought women as interlocutors. Young shows in admirable detail the importance of von Schirnhofer, Malwida von Meysenbug, Helen Zimmern, Meta von Salis, and Helene Druskowicz for Nietzsche's life. Perhaps most important, Young concludes, is Cosima Wagner, his "ideal woman" with whom "four-handed piano playing and long metaphysical conversations were major elements in their relationship" (399). Given Nietzsche's love for Cosima to the very end, what explains his later tendency to emphasize his anti-feminist side? Young concludes that while Nietzsche treasured the company of educated, intelligent women, "what terrified him was women's access to power" (400). But why? Young's explanation seems less to solve the problem than to reinforce its difficulty.<br />
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As a guide to the events and people in Nietzsche's life, Young's book is reliable. Its interpretations of Nietzsche's texts are necessarily more controversial. Some of its attempts to describe and adjudicate controversies in Nietzsche interpretation are valuable. For instance, Young's assessment of Nietzsche's "perspectivism" and what it implies—and does not imply—is clear and balanced (473-76). Even if it unlikely to convince readers inclined to the "postmodern Nietzsche," it stands as a worthy contribution. Occasionally, however, the book proposes summaries that will leave serious readers unsatisfied, regardless of where they fall in the usual interpretive divides. Understandably enough, Young wants to give the reader new to Nietzsche an idea of each of his published works. Yet if there is any author whose writing defies brief summary, it is Nietzsche. This is particularly true of the middle period works, dominated by the aphorism. Young proposes to reduce the "central argument" of <i>The Gay Science</i> to "three stages" (327). The first stage Young describes as a "general theory of cultural 'health.'" Ought we to assume that such a general theory is possible? In Aphorism 120 of <i>The Gay Science</i> Nietzsche claims "there is no health as such, and all attempts to define a thing that way have been wretched failures." A reconstruction that begins with an assumption explicitly rejected in the very text under reconstruction is not promising. Perhaps one can point to other loci where Nietzsche accepts, or appears to accept, the assumption. Yet it remains antecedently improbable that the 383 aphorisms of the <i>Gay Science</i>, bookended on each side by a beguiling collection of rhymes, can be reduced to a tidy three-stage argument.<br />
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Fortunately, Young does not spend the bulk of his work trying to reduce labyrinthine works of aphorism to simple structures. Sometimes he attempts the course, potentially less hazardous, of interpreting a single aphorism. Though his comments are frequently insightful, he does not always escape the snares of superficial interpretation. Consider (for example) his handling of the difficult aphorism 344 of The Gay Science ("How we, too, are still pious"). Among the questions provoked by this aphorism are the following. If truth proves to be more harmful than useful, do we abandon truth, preferring what serves life? Or do we heroically strive after truth, whatever the disadvantages for life? Throughout his corpus Nietzsche raises this problem in a dozen ways. Does he resolve the problem? As far as I can tell, he does not draw any definitive conclusions. Yet Young finds in aphorism 344 of <i>The Gay Science</i> a neat solution to the problem. "Truth 'at any price' gives way to truth 'when the price is right'" (443). Truth only when the price is right? Surely this is more Bob Barker than Nietzsche.<br />
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Young performatively demonstrates the difficulty of interpreting Nietzsche's texts within the confines of a biography. He is typically on stronger ground when narrating Nietzsche's life, though not without making the occasional questionable inference. Addressing Nietzsche's descent into madness, Young admirably presents the traditional diagnosis of syphilis, along with a series of objections to the diagnosis. He then presents Leonard Sax's alternative diagnosis of a brain tumor on the right optic nerve, as well as some pointed objections to Sax. So far so good. But he proceeds to claim that since these two diagnoses are uncertain, "the most plausible conclusion appears to be that Nietzsche's madness was, in fact, a purely psychological condition" (562). Are no diagnoses other than these two possible? And just what would "purely psychological" mean to an author for whom the physiological and psychological are so deeply entwined? Of course Young is free to reject Nietzsche's own conception in favor of "pure psychology" divorced from anything bodily. But does this not amount to a rejection not only of Nietzsche, but of modern neuroscience? Certainly the latter would be puzzled by Young's idea that Nietzsche's condition, though plausibly described as "bipolar disorder with, in its later stages, psychotic features" (560), lacks any physiological basis.<br />
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That any book as long and ambitious as Young's would be entirely free from mistakes is unlikely. Many of these are minor, though the cumulative effect is one of annoyance. Some examples: misuse of the word "prevaricate" (258, 360); attribution of the words "adultery of the heart" to Jimmy Carter, as though Matthew 5:28 did not get there first (258); the "abolition of the metaphysical word" (242); the confusion of "venal sin" with "venial sin" (572). These small mistakes can be corrected in a second edition. Also requiring correction, as Young himself has acknowledged, is insufficient citation of a previous Nietzsche biography. Like many other biographers of well-known figures, Young depends on the work of writers before him. In a non-trivial number of places, Young's structure and wording are remarkably similar to passages in Curtis Cate's 2002 biography of Nietzsche, as Mark Anderson has documented in detail (<i>Journal of Nietzsche Studies</i> 42 [2011]). Young has replied to Anderson, admitting to "scholarly lapses" which he promises to correct in the next edition. Certainly Young's explanation of the lapses is plausible. Nonetheless the magnitude of his dependence on Cate's work, together with the lack of proper acknowledgment, must be noted as a defect of the book in its present state. <br />
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The complexities of Nietzsche's life and writings, not to mention the multiple relations between the life and the writings, render any biography of the man intensely problematic. Young's effort is no exception. It contains some superficial interpretations, questionable attempts to make Nietzsche timely, insufficient acknowledgment of a key source. Nonetheless, the book's virtues are sufficiently numerous and robust to make it well worth reading, despite its flaws. Any student of Nietzsche will want to own Young's book.Robert Minerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02230724650025013746noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8371593710878017578.post-63924445367602100542011-09-07T21:36:00.000-07:002011-09-07T21:49:59.671-07:00Some impertinent and irresponsible observations on the GOP debate• Props to Rick Perry for giving Obama a sliver of credit in the death of Bin Laden. Except Perry doesn't know how to pronounce the word "props"! When he uttered the words "I give more props to those Navy Seals," he said "propes"—long <i>o</i>. The rest of the world says "props"—short <i>o</i>.<br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal">• The volume of applause for the large number of executions in Texas was just creepy. One need not be universally opposed to capital punishment to find the applause level weird.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">• Speaking of weird, I think the prize must be given to Ron Paul, at least in terms of self-presentation. Did the stuff about the "fence" being used to "keep Americans in" come from left field? I'm inclined to think it came from no field at all. His performance confirmed that his candidacy is marginal and that he's a little nuts. (For what it's worth, I don't think one should judge libertarianism by Ron Paul.)</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">• Speaking of marginal candidates, there were no howlers from Michele Bachmann. I was hoping that she would say something comparable to her remark about our alleged fear of the "rise of the Soviet Union." I was disappointed.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">• When I was in high school, I used to watch Newt Gingrich on C-SPAN give rousing speeches on economic policy to the camera. (Yes, that's the type of thing I did in high school, as those who knew me then can confirm.) I sort of miss old Newt. He ain't dumb. But he's not a serious candidate, though he is undeniably responsible for one of the best comic moments in contemporary politics. I mean, John Lithgow's <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/20/colbert-lithgow-give-newt_n_864580.html">ultra-dramatic reading of a press release</a> from the Gingrich campaign.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">• Jon Huntsman's experience with China is not trivial. I'm glad he brought it up. He struck me as sane, sober, reasonable. And he likes <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Beefheart">Captain Beefheart</a>! Your mileage might vary, with both Huntsman and the Captain. (Though you can't really deny that the latter's a genius.) </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">• About Mitt Romney, it was often quite difficult to see his eyes when he was speaking. More often than not, Romney works hard to connect what he says with the question that is actually posed. I admire this. I doubt it will play in Peoria. Perry is savvier, I think, in taking the question as an occasion to say whatever he wants to say, in the manner that he wants to say it. One might think that avoiding questions is cowardly. But machismo suffices to override the perception of cowardice, even as it confirms its reality.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">• Perry understands little about the practice of natural science. There is a sense in which he is correct to say that with respect to global warming, the "science is not settled." Natural science is never settled in any absolute sense. It is fallibilist. It is perpetually open to new findings, new evidence, new results, no matter how certain present claims may appear. (As my old professor Alasdair MacIntyre once said in class, if you want to study something that is really conclusive, go with trinitarian theology or art appreciation.) Moreover, if the term "settled" is to have any meaning at all in natural science, it does not mean "absolute unanimity." Natural science neither has nor demands total agreement. There should always be contrarians to raise questions and push inquiry further. The term can only mean "substantive or overwhelming consensus" among natural scientists who are currently at work on the topic(s). Is there such a consensus among current scientists about global warming? That's the question—an empirical question which Perry notably avoided. It has nothing to do with whether "the science is settled" according to some fantastic standard to which practicing scientists never appeal.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">• Perry understands even less about the history of natural science. The appeal to Galileo was inept and ignorant. Was it an off-the-cuff remark? A scripted line? The fruit of Perry's reading about the Galileo episode? (OK, I think we can eliminate that last option.)</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">• Perry has not an inkling of what the word "philosophical" means. But neither do the moderators. On this point, they're just as bad, and perhaps more damnably, since they are (one presumes) better educated. They seem to think that "philosophical" is a synonym for "general." It was amusing to hear them bat the word around.</div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">• Summary judgment: Perry did plenty well for himself in this debate, if the criterion is appeal to the base. Those who think Perry "performed poorly" are using a criterion in which Perry himself has no interest.</div>Robert Minerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02230724650025013746noreply@blogger.com0