Mark Hoobler

Cartesian doubts

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Hoobler) — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 08:01:00 +0000

Editing chapter IX of Hobbes’ Leviathan [On the Classification of the Sciences] Edwin Curley lets us know of his surprise at Hobbes’ inclusion of astrology as one of the sciences; Hobbes was skeptical of ‘judicial astrology’ - “the attempt to predict the future of individual humans from the motions of the stars” - but not1 astrology “in general” (“the theory that celestial events exercise some2 influence on terrestrial events”) An astute reader would notice that professor Curley let ‘sciography’ (“Consequences from the light of the stars. Out of this, and the motion of the sun, is made the science of...”)3 off with no editorial comment. Who decides what constitutes a science versus a newspaper4 column?

For many, if not most, moderns, that distinction is awarded to Rene Descartes, Jesuit thinker and philosopher, lover of doubt, oversleeping, and mathematics (and clearly and certainly, not in that order).

[[I don't know what else to say!!! How do you tell someone that the experience of existence cannot be reduced to mathematics!! - and yet this response would get an 'F' from our modern scholastics.]]

¹ The italics, are mine.

² Here the modern reader is meant to think of the tides, etc.

³ Leviathan ed. Curley (Indianapolis, 1994)

⁴ A transitional print medium between the book and the internet.

⁵ “In September 1649 Descartes left Holland for Sweden in response to the pressing invitation of Queen Christina who wished to be instructed in his philosophy. The rigours of the Swedish winter, however, coupled with the queen’s practice of expecting Descartes, who was accustomed to lie for a long time in bed, engaged in reflection, to come to her library at five in the morning, were too much for the poor man, and he was not strong enough to withstand an attack of fever which developed...” Frederick Copleston, History of Philosophy, vol. IV Descartes to Leibniz. (London, 1958)

A Sociologist at Halloween

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Hoobler) — Sat, 27 Oct 2012 21:39:00 +0000

A human being opens her door in late October to find another human being wearing a political t-shirt and carrying a clipboard.
"What are you supposed to be?" she asks.
"I am a rational social agent engaged in a normative practice. Now give me some goddamned candy."

An Index for your Thoughts

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Hoobler) — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 22:45:00 +0000

If a new ‘scholarly’ work is published in ‘your field’, - be it philosophy, sociology, history, politics, or one of the natural sciences - when you first come upon it, if you have been previously unaware of it, one of the very first things you are going to do is check the index and bibliography. (Although the purer the science - the less the bibliography. Descartes knew that intuitively.) You scan for quick information about how much space is devoted to a topic or theme or concept or event or person. An index or bibliography will disclose precise information about an author’s influences, presuppositions, prejudices, culture, etc. A bibliography even moreso, sometimes even more succinctly, if the writer has ‘padded’ it for political purpose (consider a book that listed Thomas Kuhn or Leo Strauss excessively in proportion to how often they, or their ideas, are discussed or treated in the book proper.) This can certainly be dispelled or re-woven once the book is actually read and comprehended, but no one would deny that some of it will stay, and that this information aids you in many instances in ‘understanding the author’s position’, or in the language of commonsense psychology, ‘where they are coming from.’ (And in philosophy, in particular, it comes down quite often simply to position, where someone can be fixed on the ontological spectrum, even if the book is not ‘about’ ontology.)

This is, of course, a relic of an earlier age. It is going to go away, and further, due to the rapid and accelerated nature of this media change compared to previous ones, it is going to go away quite quicky. You will probably be able to ‘watch’ it go away, if you have not been already.

[Compare, just as books, Descartes' slim volume of Meditations against the first volume of Jonathan Israel's trilogy, Radical Enlightenment. Israel's book makes it abundantly clear that Descartes had to understand the environment he was writing in, even if it is a commonplace of modern anglo-american philosophy to treat the Seventeenth Century as hopelessly back-water place, full of superstitious people that could have no comprehension of the advanced philosophy that would be presented to the public in the Twentieth or Twenty-First Centuries. The players in the Seventeenth Century were fully aware - one might even argue more fully aware -of the questions at stake, and Descartes no less than any other. And I do not think Searle or Dennett, etc. have added anything at all new to the conversation.]

Blumenberg on Descartes: Some 'Taxing Vigilance' for the Philosophical Reader

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Hoobler) — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 02:56:00 +0000

"But precisely this ancient way out [philosophical atomism], into the moderation and un-molestedness of adult self-possession, was closed during the decline of the Middle Ages; the pressure of putting in question had penetrated too deeply into the makeup of self-consciousness and man's relation to the world. The more indifferent and ruthless nature seemed to be with respect to man, the less it could be a matter of indifference to him, and the more ruthlessly he had to materialize, for his mastering grasp, even what was pregiven to him as nature, that is, to make it 'available' and to subordinate it to himself as the field of his existential prospects. I have been aided in grasping the specific difference in the historical presuppositions [of the respective ages] by a remark made by Heisenberg in comparing ancient atomism and modern physics: 'The statements of modern physics are in some way meant much more seriously than statements of Greek philosophy.' If this is taken literally, then for the philosophical reader, who is inclined to take the claim of truth as a constant of the philosophical tradition, it is at first glance a provocative assertion; but the more one tries to grasp its possible justification, the more instructive and apt it seems to be. It really is a new sort of 'seriousness' that marks the modern will to knowledge and links it to the elementary concern for self-assertion. The characteristic liberality and non-bindingness that one notices in Epicurus's atomistic physics and that exempts it from insistence on verification is due precisely, as I mean to show, to the intactness of a 'residual order' by which the existential problematic of man remained beneficently concealed and theory did not yet need to be made graspable as the instrument with which to make oneself master of the world. The new seriousness imposed on man by the late-medieval situation consists in the constant and unrelieved pressure of confirming a relation to the world that is established within the horizon of metaphysical conditions that leave no way out, neither outward nor inward.
The new exertion that was required in this situation was called by Descartes a laborisa vigilia, a taxing vigilance. The last section of the first of his six Meditations, in which this expression is contained, provides at the same time the most extreme level of the doubt that he intensifies step by step and from which he derives the necessity for a new and unconditional guarantee of knowledge: this is the level of doubt that follows from the idea of the genius malignus, that all powerful and cunning world spirit who is intent on misleading man by appealing to his constitutional credulity - an appeal against which man can at least oppose the one effort inherent in his freedom: his ability to withhold judgement. Descartes' Meditations have not only the function of presenting a theoretical thought process in which specific difficulties are removed by argument and eliminated once and for all; rather they tend to develop by exercise of the habitual attitude of the obfirmata mens (steadfast mind), the inability to forget how the human mind is endangered by its liability to judgement and prejudgement. The goal of this exercise is a condition of the mind in which it makes use of its own freedom (mens quae propria libertate utens); it is not the beginning, posited once and for all, of a new philosophy and a new idea of science that by 'settling' a catalog of methodically introduced uncertainties could lay the foundation for a theoretical step forward guaranteed for all future time.
The artificial order of the stages of doubt in the first Meditation strengthens the impression that Descartes seeks to arouse in his whole work, namely, that as though with one stroke he had easily put aside the traditional opinions and prejudices and by himself had methodically created the authentic radicality for his new beginning."
- Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, MIT Press, 1983, pp 182-183. Translated from the German by Robert Wallace. Transliterated from the book to the blog by M. Hoobler with one addition, and one differing rendering of the German word geist, following Findlay.

Cartesian Meditations 2.0

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Hoobler) — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 19:21:00 +0000

"The presence of the large dinosaurs constituted good luck

for the evolution of the mammals"

- Cynthia Stokes Brown

One of the clearest and distinctest attributes of Descartes’ place in the history of ideas or philosophy is that his ‘philosophy’ is treated with much greater respect in English-speaking lands than on the continent, or even I think, strangely, in France. (The dominant influence on recent French thought for at least the last one hundred and fifty years, is, of course and quite oddly, German.) Descartes undoubtedly provided the foundation for a new type of thinking about thought, but this 'foundation' is not metapyhsical per se (although it can certainly be made to fit into a more rigid metaphysical analysis than in the sloppy, gossipy narrative form* that Descartes uses in the Meditations; Frederick Copleston’s long face-value treatment of Rene’s metaphysics in Copleston’s great multi-volume history of philosopy is a clear and distinct example of this tendency to take Rene at his literal word) as much as it is psychological-rhetorical: Descartes re-weaved the web of our ‘beliefs and desires’ at a much lower level in the public sphere than previously possible (printing press, etc.): he was preaching the gospel of rationalism. What he seems not to have understood - despite the presence of Hobbes to rub him in the face with the relevant historical information (the Republic of Letters! It cuts both ways!)- was that he was repeating or reoccupying a very specific cultural role or process (Die Entzauberung der Welt) first occupied by our eternal friends The Greeks thousands of years before Rene even thought about upsetting the existing intellectual order by writing in the vernacular about the properties of wax.

*"The Meditation of yesterday has filled my mind with so-many doubts, that it is no longer in my power to forget them." (Meditation II: On The Nature of Human Mind; and that It is More Easily Known that the Body)
Are you fucking kidding me? If you were assigned to write a short paper for any philosophy class - and you threw in a sentence such as "After the devastating refutation of ideas I accomplished in that first paragraph I am not sure I will be able to continue my argument. I may need to take a moment to adjust my cognitive faculties, I am so overpowered. Ok, breathe deep. Alright, let's continue to the next few pages where I will demonstrate some universal and conceptual truths in words.", do you think the Professor is not going to call you on it? Descartes got a pass from most people (but God bless you, Thomas Hobbes!) only due to the new structure of the public sphere. He was playing to a new audience. Taking it to the people, as it were. He became conscious of a change in media in the same way the Greeks did: History was being recorded. People were writing this shit down for future people. Winners and losers, not just in political history, but also in intellectual history, we being sorted out. And now these writings could be easily and quickly mass-produced. It was as if he had his own blog, and he could publish whatever he wanted, old cranky Schoolmen be damned!

Epistemology: A Detective Story.

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Hoobler) — Sun, 23 Sep 2012 17:36:00 +0000

A philosopher witnesses what he thinks may be a murder in the house across the street, does not immediately react, but narrates what happens in his life for the next five days or so as he tries to 'solve the crime'. Elements of his personal life intrude. A week or so later he calls his friend, a cop, who tells him that they have the murderer. Caught it all on film. Murdered with a book from “the 12th-18th Centuries, sometime in that medieval age,” the cop tells him. Could be either the Summa Theologica or Principia Physica; the boys in the lab cannot tell from the physical evidence left. At the end of the story, the cop tells him: “Your account is liable to bias anyway, would be thrown out of court, and you just muddled things up actually. But I cannot stress this enough,” the cop tells him, “you did not need to write any of this down.”

Two Types of Functionalism, Their Discontents, and a Wish for the Future

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Hoobler) — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 20:27:00 +0000

For your reading enjoyment. My homework, slightly re-mixed for public consumption.

Two Types of Functionalism, their Discontents, & a Wish for the Future

“For the moment,

the important point is that the position in logical space

occupied by the functionalist should be clear”

- Bermudez, p. 54

How does functionalism ‘function’ in the philosopher’s and psychologist’s respective logical space? The genealogy from Ryle and behaviorism is relatively easy to trace: Behaviorism - while avoiding the metaphysical entanglements of previous psychologies (be they Descartes’, Hume’s or Freud’s) and giving a third-person account of actions - also seemed to allow no room for any type of intentional motivation on the part of our hero, who sometimes seems to us to be both narrator and protagonist of its own drama, the rational human social agent. Functionalism sought to fill that gap without dragging in the phenomenal/subjective, which sometimes seems to the objectively-minded (other people besides you, for instance) to be what Fodor, in a slightly different context, calls “Christmas in Dickens, ontologically speaking.” Functionalism stated that mental states cause action. The mental state that propositions its respective owner with the information that it is raining will cause the behavior of reaching for his Regenschirm (if you are German and male).

Linking the causal role of mental states in the individual’s mental economy with his behavior allows a foothold into solving Bermudez’s interface problem: “Commonsense psychological explanations are a species of of causal explanation.”

The distinction between personal and subpersonal, beloved of the autonomy theorist, is collapsed.

At least for the philsophical functionalist. For the philosophically-minded theorist, the causal link of mental states with behavior is explanatory. For the psychological functionalist, things do not go so easy. One ‘realizer’ may not be enough. It seems too simple. Bermudez quotes William Lycan who contrasts our scientific way understanding of nature to that of philosophy, which tends to stick to the very abstract. A philosopher may be happy with monism (or may not), but even the a priori gift of monism, should it be under our Christmas trees this year, does not give us a scientific understanding of nature; we still need recourse to multiple levels of explanation (physical, chemical, biological, etc) long before we get up the chain to the animal that psychology studies. Explanations may need to nest within nests at many levels within the nervous system (from the molecular to the atomic or perhaps even subatomic, for example.) He or she may point, in fact, to the dearth of laws within the discipline of psychology itself. Further, a cognitive scientist may not be even be interested at the level of human behavior, so to speak. He or she are likely to be more interested in how just the brain qua brain behaves, in the basic structure of cognition proper. (In articulating this distinction, Bermudez may be unaware of the ideological implications; to play devil’s advocate, so to speak, the disembodied immortal soul of Karl Popper might use this somewhat Kantian distinction against its inventors to argue that all the empirical work at the ‘psychological’ level can never equate with metaphysically identifying neural states with mental states: that metaphysical work is the job of the philosopher-ontologist upon which the psychologist has no methodological right to trespass. Actually that argument sounds more like Searle than Popper...)

So the psychological functionalist will tend to be more skeptical about the nature of the laws of common-sense psychology and how they ‘translate’ or ‘realize’* in the human nervous system. Perhaps to counter this sort of criticism, Cummins goes after the Deductive Nomological model of subsumption under natural law posited by the logical positivists in the 20th Century. Cummins argues that laws in psychology tend to be more like explanandum that explanans, that they are things that need to be explained, rather than the things that do work of explanation. “In psychology, such laws as there are are almost always conceived of, and even called, effects.” Scientific or cognitive psychology or neuroscience tend not to produce laws, per se, but effects and to study psychological ‘capacities’ such as imagination or reason by breaking them down into their functional parts. How is imagination or reason built or structured in the brain? Cummins sees these faculties as kinds of “complex dispositional properties” that can be further broken down or taken apart at the psychological level into their constituent parts - which may not be wholly linear or compatible. Here Cummins gives the example of solving a multiplication problem in two very different ways; Bermudez gives the example of a gyroscope in a aircraft that can be constructed in a very different manner yet produce the same effect. It is interesting, to me at least, that Cummins’ example deals with abstract concepts that take place in the mind (addition, multiplication) while Bermudez cites a physical object that can literally be taken apart in physical space; the concepts of number and multiplication admit of no physical decomposition. I think we are tempted to say it is the capacity of reason that solves mathematical problems, but here it seems like it would always be more reasonable to take the shorter path (standard partial products algorithm) as opposed to the path of successive addition, which functions just as well when we look at the results, but expends more time at least, if not mental energy, in the process. Cummins thinks this is to confuse the concepts of ‘effects’ and ‘capacities.’

For a solution to this, of course, we cannot count on the philosophers and psychologists to come to any accord of their own. We have seen this problem before in history. We must eagerly but patiently await the inverted apocalypse of The Completed Neuroscience wherein a debased and disgraced psychological language will either be thrown out the door entirely, or isomorphically and unambiguously mapped unto the mind!

* Or, I guess, ‘realise’ if you are British. Would a British speaker have a different neural correlate for ‘realise’ than the American speaker/hearer for ‘realize’? If you are German, then there is a good chance you will not even go in for this sort of thing, so you do not need to worry about it.

The Hedgehog and the Fox 2.0

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Hoobler) — Sun, 16 Sep 2012 18:41:00 +0000

The Fox knows many things about the neural correlates of experience.
But the Hedgehog knows there is no goddamned soul.

The Dark Knight Rises (Lord Christopher Nolan, 2012 Anno Domini)

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Hoobler) — Sat, 21 Jul 2012 21:15:00 +0000

Nope. This one is for the religiously anxious masses, and Nolan throws most Western, and some Eastern, myths - is that the Dalai Lama in the Platonic cave prison with Batwayne?? - into the dark blender of his apocalyptic cinematic soup. It would be hard to deny Nolan his technical competency, but since his impressive debut films, he has traded art for a cinematic political rhetoric that preys on the insecure and anxious beliefs of modern life. After a very good start to the trilogy, each successive film has been mired down with self-conscious self-importance. A baroque totalitarian mess that only incidentally thrills. Chase with all the Kenneth Lonergan films you can.
DKR

Liberty in Translation

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Hoobler) — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 00:31:00 +0000

Reading John Stuart Mill for class, and realizing that it is not so much that Mill rarely uses metaphysical concepts it is that he simply does not have the vocabulary. There is a certain amount of empiricism built right into the English language. In German, they have one word that means something like 'the-feeling-you-get-of-an-approaching-thunderstorm.'

Initial Impressions upon Viewing Michael Winterbottom's "The Trip" (2010)

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Hoobler) — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 00:29:00 +0000

"I think anyone over 40 still doing impressions, needs to take a long, hard look in the mirror" - Coogan, to Brydon.

At the end of The Trip, another and undoubtedly the funniest excursion with Mssrs. Winterbottom, Coogan, and Brydon, Rob Brydon’s wife, or rather the actress who plays his wife, asks him how Mr. Coogan was on the trip. Mr. Brydon, tells her “He was his usual self.” And here he raises his own baby - again, actually really just a baby actor - above his head, coos, laughs, mimics faces with the child, and repeats again, “He was his usual self.”
You may already be familiar with the relationship between Mr. Coogan and Mr. Brydon, - or at least their onscreen personas who bear the same names - if you have had the good fortune to see Mr. Winterbottom’s Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, a 2005 cinematic take on Sterne’s decidedly literary 1759-1767 experiment (Not unlike the film under consideration here currently, Sterne’s book as we know it today was originally serialized. The Trip originally appeared as a six-part series on BBCDeux, and has been edited down for theatrical release, thence back to television again in the current form, on disc or streaming from servers to us. Commerce, Technology & The Arts: A very strange menage a trois indeed). At any rate, the most memorable and, in fact, the best moments from the 2005 film was the improvised banter between Coogan and Brydon. Their chemistry was and is infectious, and both of the films, this one I think moreso, are genuinely and very honestly hilarious. But, as the old guy who lives and loves alone in an apartment in the midwest of America, or if you prefer the more politically correct term, Cultural Critic (young adults, think of Philip Seymour Hoffman in Almost Famous), I think there is more going on here than just good yuks. Winterbottom works hard, sometimes actually too hard, as Manhola Darghis points out in her review, to fill the film with as much romantic (or Romantic) melancholy as he can. The film, seems to me, to be about the failure of people to connect through ‘everyday’ language which I will call nonartistic, as opposed to their ability to connect through art, be it of a very debased kind.

http://youtu.be/ZRwcnYn5uhI

Winterbottom is one of the more interesting filmmakers whose films actually make it past the gatekeepers of what might still be called, for the next few years anyway, the motion picture industry. His films, by normative standards, are all over the place. He works in many genres. He is as concerned with form, if not moreso, as with content. As it should be, he is a filmmaker not a writer. In fact, no writer is even proffered in the credits for The Trip. Not even a story credit. It will be obvious to most viewers, I think, that the film is mostly improvised by Rob and Steve. But we all need a story to tie things together. And here is what he have: The actor Steve Coogan (played by Steve Coogan) is asked by a UK newspaper to go on a week-long foodie tour of restaurants in North England. He and his current partner Misha (played by Margo Stilley, and you can see much more of her in Winterbottom’s 9 Songs) are currently estranged. So at the last minute, Steve asks his best friend but bete noire Rob Brydon to come along. And so this Hope and Crosby show is on the road.

There are two distinct types of celebrities mentioned, recited, and parroted throughout the film. The first and most frequent are primarily British male actors; Michael Caine, Sean Connery, Anthony Hopkins, James Mason, but there are also a couple trips across the improv pond for the inescapable Mr. Al Pacino, and probably my personal favorite Woody Allen. The second type of celebrities are also mostly white males, but this time wholly British through and through, Wordsworth, Coleridge, the British Romantic poets. The latter wrote their own stuff, the first group (I guess with the exception of Allen) made their celebrity reciting others’. One thing the film is about is about how we relate to people by the mimic of others, be they the Romantic poets or Michael Caine.

If you had not thought about it yet, Coogan and Brydon are actors playing actors playing at acting like other actors.

Develop on the subject of repeated viewings of Michael Mann’s Heat for male communication; cite personal experience with this one. This metaphor has a got a great ass, and I have got my symbolic head all the way up it.

http://youtu.be/NWLBEm3dV9w

There is no small amount of the theme of people not being able to really communicate with each other, without acting out other preordained or preapproved scripted social roles. When Rob calls his wife from the road, he has to do Hugh Grant. Steve’s cellphone conversations with his ex-wife, current estranged girlfriend, and British and American agents are exercises in banal small talk - autoscripted as contrasted with improvised, more science than art -whether about love, jealousy, celebrity or career. No one’s heart seems to be in these performances. We all know the script here far too well. To contrast this, everytime the conversation starts off with discussion of any typical subject (Misha, women, the food) it quickly veers into the men doing voices, singing Abba songs, or just doing the sound of sonar in a submarine. Even at the end of the film, when Brydon returns to the warm comfort of his hearth (contrasted with the cold interior of Coogan’s flat) over dinner, he is back to doing impressions again. Winterbottom grabs a bit of honest sadness in the actress’s face and eyes as she reacts to this; more acting at his age. We are definitely meant to think she has heard this one before. Of course, it could just be that if we actually just filmed a couple documentary style, it could be pretty boring. Or, perhaps more likely, as Voreblog has pointed out, there would be too many ‘in-jokes’ that we would not get.

Develop on the theme of Rob alone with women, as opposed to Steve alone with women. Is he really any ‘better’? Even with his wife?

Talk about how Rob’s wife is more like a mother to him, the extreme maternal image of her on his lap at the end of the film.

http://youtu.be/YWXMFWox3Bw

In my opinion, a prime key to decoding Winterbottom’s work here, or ‘climax for the critic’ in old-timey criticism language, is the conversation Steve and Rob have pretty-much exactly halfway through the film as they are leaving one of their hotels the morning after the second evening in one week of awkward one-night Coogan sex. I think this is as close as they get to honest real communication. In the old-fashioned sense. Well, either that scene or the one between Steve and his pretend son.

When Rob lifts the baby over his head in the scene mentioned in the first paragraph above, are either of them doing impressions? How many levels of acting are there?

I am glad my last name is not "Winterbottom". Eack. "Hey Michael! Your friends Sunnytop and Springforth are outside! Why don't you go out and play?" I wouldn't want to be that guy. Not for a million dollars.

http://youtu.be/8v5n_puetK4

Use the movie/cultural mirror metaphor you’ve used before.

They go to visit Steve’s parents and all that happens is more Rob impressions.

This movie may actually be too Romantic (or conscious of its self, which is the same thing), if you come to think of it. But maybe you should not think about it. Maybe you should watch it.

I hope I have not ruined this film for you. Sometimes it is really best just to let something wash over you, and feel the primal emotions derived from contact with art, - commercial or otherwise - even if you may lack a proper vocabulary to analyze it. You may not need to analyze it. It may not actually make you any the wiser to translate the experience into a 'something else', or worse, to force your interpretation on someone else. When we analyze a thing too much, there is a tendency to neutralize it, to scatter its parts, to ‘unweave the rainbow’ as someone else said, to kill it a little bit, right? But come, come, Mr. Bond. You derive just as much pleasure from killing a joke as I do.

Putting the Judeo-Christian Tradition to Work

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Hoobler) — Sat, 07 Jul 2012 22:14:00 +0000

I met some friends after their work for drinks yesterday. One of them is a manager at the customer service arm (''call-center") of a local financial firm. There was discussion of managing difficult people. This emerged among many other tales: An employee requests off for both Jewish and Christian holidays. They give their religion as "Judeo-Christian".

Hermann Broch's Journey to America

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Hoobler) — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 04:06:00 +0000

“Me, Myself and I

Are all in love with you

So if you pass us by

Three hearts will break in two”

- Billie Holliday

What follows is the verbatim precis from the table of contents of Paul Michael Lutzeler’s biography of the thinker Hermann Broch. It summarizes the first chapter of the book.

Part 1: Austria

One: Childhood and Youth in Vienna 1886-1907

Forebears and parents: A story of assimilation. His unhappy relationship with his father, mother and brother. Discovery of his ego. Primary and secondary schooling. Fellow pupils Egon Wellesz and Alban Berg. Training as engineer at spinning and weaving schools in Vienna and Mulhausen, Alsace. Journey to America.

What are we uneducated to make of his use of the phrase ‘Discovery of his ego’? We are educated enough to know that Freud is well out of fashion these days and the sentence is, like the architecture of the spare Looshaus at Michaelsplatz, somewhat dated. But if you want to replace the word ‘ego’ with a current equivalent, what would you choose? ‘Soul’? That makes no sense. He would have discovered his soul much too late, even if it was prior to primary school You know about that shit early on. What about discovery of his ‘self.’ That also seems strange, although less strange. Would you ever say ‘he discovered himself (or ‘his self’) before primary school’ I think we associate that with a much later age. I mean in personhood, not in history. Although it seems like in Western Industrial History it is taking longer and longer for people to discover their selves. (But I have no statistics to back that up.) Can you substitute ‘consciousness’? “Discovery of his consciousness’? Does that not happen pretty much right away? Immediately? Or am I confusing consciousness with self-consciousness?

Has the question been begged anyway? Of course we cannot translate the sentence into current American social-science terminology; it is overtly Freudian! Hell! Look at the sentence right before it! But it seems like we should be able to, right? An old-timey metaphysical vocabulary would speak of discovering a ‘conscience’, I think. How do you translate ‘conscience’ into current American psychology? Could either Steven Pinker or Eric Kandel translate it into another term of their respective ideas of their psychology (I mean the discipline they are engaged in; not their own psychical makeup), or could they not work with it ‘as is’? What is wrong with the word? Is it just its association with the metaphysical tradition? I think we may still lack a vocabulary that is even close to describing human emotional development!

(But between us in these parentheses, I have a confession to make. I have been disingenuous with you. Dr. Lutzeler took his paraphrase of Broch’s youth from Broch’s own paraphrase (He called it a ‘Psychological Autobiography’) written by Broch, his self, in 1942, and in somewhat very late-Platonic language. Because of this recent advance in your knowledge (provided free-of-charge by my self), you can say the discovery of Hermann Broch’s ego officially took place in 1895, anno domini. Now we just need to learn how to translate it into the American. If anyone should ever ask, that is. And would they ask in a psychology class or a literature class? Also, Billie Holliday did not write the music quoted above. She just sang it.)

Hermann Broch's Poetry and Prose, or Words, Words, Words.

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Hoobler) — Tue, 03 Jul 2012 19:56:00 +0000

"Oh sweetest Ophelia
Don't you see that rhyme is nothing but a symbol
For woman and the spirit of the poet.
They pair and kiss, intertwine their limbs;
Even in prose the content rhymes
Becoming a symbol of Form.
Therefore the poet is shameless
For whatever he unfolds
Whether rhyme or prose, is always rhyme and this rhyme his very self.
The poet is a woman confined to bed dreaming all life through of love."

- Hermann Broch,
'A Hamlet Commentary', circa 1920
(tr. Paul M. Lutzeler; I have no idea whether it rhymed in the German...)

Either/Or

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Hoobler) — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 17:14:00 +0000

If you are out in public and you go up to another person and say Wow, today is really kicking my ass. I would really love some good old-fashioned angry sex. How about you?, and the other person says Wow, that sounds fucking amazing. And frankly, a lot better for us than drugs, alcohol or television! We might even burn some calories. Meet you at my place at 9. Is that behavior either immoral and/or illegal? What if it takes place, either at a local tavern, or at the workplace? Does that make any moral difference? And why should it? Do you need more 'context' for the question? Imagine it takes place in real life. Now imagine it takes place in a 19th Century Russian novel (but substitute 'art' - or maybe 'gambling' - for 'television') on a shiny black iron locomotive steaming into old St. Petersburg, white clouds of ejaculated steam bellowing like empty thought bubbles out of its metal head.

Carlin Romano 'persuades' Knopf to publish his book, America The Philosophical

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Hoobler) — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 02:26:00 +0000

Carlin Romano persuades Knopf to publish his book America the Philosophical

[“America does not repel the...”]

AN OFFICE IN A SKYSCRAPER IN MANHATTAN

“Thanks for coming in, Carlin.”

“You are looking great Alfred! How is old Thomas Mann?”

“My name is George and I am 28 years old. Alfred A. Knopf died. Along with old Thomas Mann. Some time ago.”

“Damn! I am sorry to hear that. They went together? Were they sic- -er, nevermind. George, it is good to finally meet you in person after so many missed tweets!” [shakes hands firmly]

“Thanks Carlin. Absolutely no idea what you are talking about, but that brings us up to date. I did try to read a good deal of the book..”

“Awesome! What did you think?”

“Well, let me ask you a question. Who do you know here at Random House?”

“Oh, I’ve got connections, you know. You know, in America, it’s not what you now, it’s who you know!”

“Do you think we could call the book that, perhaps? Anything but America the Philosophical”?

“Oh, no. Gotcha, though. I make that joke right at the beginning! Can you even imagine what the French reviewers will say, ell-oh-ell?” [slaps his knee and laughs.]

“Do you mean ‘publish’, ‘write’, or ‘say’?”

“Oh, I was using them all interchangeably”

“Yes, there is a bit of that in the book”

“Well, what did you think of the book?”

“Pretty Catholic”

“Uh...with a capital ‘c’ or a lower case ‘c’?”

“I am going to have to say ‘upper case’, Mr. Romano.”

“Damn, really?? How did you figure it out?”

“A little reading-between-the-lines.”

“Oh! You are not allowed to do that! Time-out!”

“Speaking of time, remember the time you wrote a review of Catherine MacKinnon’s book of legal theory?”

“The atheist?”

“You cannot say that Mr. Romano.”

“Even here? Just between us adults in a shimmery skyscraper in old New Amsterdam? I mean, I know I can’t say it my book, I use more subtle terms like ‘feminist’ or ‘Heidegger-influenced’.”

“I meant the book review where you raped her.”

“Objection, your honor! Imagined quote in italics unquote raping her!”

“At any rate, I would not describe your work as subtle. By any means. Could we perhaps interest you in the title, America, the Collection of Sometimes Really Out-of-Date Publicity Interviews I Conducted with Writers of Non-fiction Over the Last Three Decades”?

“Oh no, they much prefer the term ‘intellectuals’, sometimes even ‘social-scientists’!”

“You are preaching to the choir, Father. I was making a joke.”

“Oh, I get it. Wow, you certainly must have to read a lot of writing in publishing. I never thought of that before. Jesus! I never even thought of all the writing you have to read and then not publish! People don’t even read that much anymore. Are you sure you guys really read every word of every manuscript that comes your way? That is quite a bit of reading! And reading long manuscripts that will not ev-”

“Touche, I will give you that one. Although I can assure you there are many upon many youngish Americans with liberal arts degrees being somewhat gainfully employed and hard-at-work. For the historical moment, at least”

“Well, I do not think it would fit comfortably on the book jacket.”

“What are you talking about?”

“That title. I know I am not in publishing, but I think it was way too long.”

“I was joking.”

“Oh, I thought you meant you were joking that you did not know that writers of non-fiction like to be called intellectuals. Everybody knows that. I thought we just made that edit together in our minds”

“Only in yours, metaphorically speaking”

“Hey...were you just being hermeneutical back there...?”

“Yes, but ‘Heidegger-influenced’.”

“Damn. You sure it wasn’t ‘Gadamer-influenced’, I mean, did you know he was Heidegger’s pupil? So can’t we just say ‘Gadamer-influenced’? We are totally fine with that.”

“Who is ‘we’?

“Fuck! You are good. You read a lot of non-fiction don’t you.”

“I suppose you could say that, yes. But in my leisure time, of course. Not for work. The writing I read is not, how should we say it - viable? enough to be published by Random House.”

“Is it the damned academic presses? They tell me my work is too ‘journalistic’ and ‘sloppy’.”

“Yes, some of them are published by academic publishers”

“What will happen when Amazon and Apple take over publishing and there is writing, but well, it is not popular enough to be published? Will all writing have to drift towards the popular?”

“That is why God invented the internet.”

“You are a sonofabitch, sir!”

“I am a pragmatic businessman. What would you call yourself?”

“What do you think of the phrase ‘Romano Catholic’?” [ awkward silence ] “Ok, a Catholic who likes capitalism, but in really private, just an American who likes the Tradition”

“Did you use a capital ‘t’ in your mind? And do you mean ‘The Greeks’ by ‘The Tradition’?”

“I feel like I should invoke my fifth-amendment rights, at this point”

“We were hoping you would do that on the tour, actually.”

“So you are going to publish it!”

“You must be having a good deal of sex with somebody or bodies in power here.”

“Yes!” [ jumps out of chair] I fucking love the East coast! Who will edit it?”

“Let’s not be silly.”

“Well, there are some places where I use the same phrase or, well, exact words, over and over again.”

“I am aware of that.”

“What did you think of the part where I used Richard Rorty - who I detest, actually! What an hedonist atheist! I can just see him putting his kids through the liberal indoctrination mills! - to establish the new foundations of persuasion. If epistemology is over, well, then anything goes! Including, thank God, Catholicism! People just need to be persuaded again. Isocrates shows us the way and the light, minor sophist no more, he is our Socrates Who Does Not Ask Too Many Pesky Questions! It took me twenty years to figure that out after I first read Rorty! But better late than never. Philosophy and the Mirror of Culture and Insert Your Own God Here! Thanks, Dick!”

“Have you heard the rumor that Ronald Reagan and Richard Rorty corresponded?”

“Excuse me?”

“Yeah. It’s actually true. Or corresponds to reality, as they say. The Richard Rorty/Ronald Reagan Letters; Twenty Years of Secret Correspondence. We are doing it for Fall 2014. Set in Electra 12pt, deckle edges and all. Chip Kidd may actually work on this.”

“You are fucking with me!”

“You mean raping you?”

“No, I mean joking.”

“No joke. Dead serious.”

What Animals Can Teach Us

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Hoobler) — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 23:17:00 +0000

I think we can learn quite a bit from animals. For example, attention to good external grooming. The correlation between health and appearance, I think, was hurt by tradition. It is harder to see sometimes. In people, I mean. The health and the hurt. Not in all the other animals. But I think that if the animals ever did hold a supreme court to take our questions, I would definitely be all like, "Uh, how in the hell do you manage to mate without language?"

Circles within Circles

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Hoobler) — Wed, 27 Jun 2012 07:06:00 +0000

Who doesn't romanticize their childhood? I actually romanticized my own at the time that it happened. Cocoon of miscommunication that I was, I always imagined myself in little television shows, where as you can imagine I was always the hero and things worked out just fine. My nemesis was one of my teachers. (With the addition of 'evil' before his last name. This was the best grade-school Mark could come up with. "Evil Simcoe" in lieu of "Mr. Simcoe." Yet it did seem to work on the grade-school audience. They knew EXACTLY what I was talking about.) This guy needed to be stopped. Even if it was only on paper, specifically hand-drawn cartoons on index cards that I sold for a small amount of money or offered to the class bully as some sort of comic appeasement. Evil Simcoe eventually confiscated it, showing himself to be the true fascist we all knew he was. And yet, a pretty strange one, when I come to think of it. He taught 'Reading.' One day I distinctly remember him drawing a crude diagram of circles within circles on the blackboard with funny Latin names: Ego, Superego, Id. Could have been Lord of the Flies (Which grade-school Mark did enjoy quite a bit, and so I like to imagine this is the correct memory) or perhaps Glendon Swarthout's Bless the Beasts and Children (Not so much Glendon; this one might not make the canon). I was being taught Freud at a Catholic grade school in Mt. Healthy, Ohio in 'Reading' class. How did that happen? At any rate, it got me to thinking about...well, to be continued on next week's episode.

The Adult Aquatic

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Hoobler) — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 06:59:00 +0000

What is problematic about Life Aquatic? I think it is that everyone is both too infantile - but also too old. There aren't enough children in the film, only adults acting as children. Murray's Zissou is certainly infantile but not child-like (i.e. 'likable') the way Gene Hackman is in Royal Tenebaums. Just adults out to sea with guns in the Italian sunlight. If Anderson can be said to have a dark side, strange as that may sound, this is his darkest vision. Which is, of course, another way of saying it may be Anderson's strongest film.

iPost

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Hoobler) — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 06:22:00 +0000

Today I went to both the MicroCenter computer outlet and the Apple store at the mall. The people who work at the computer outlet look like what you imagine people who spend a good deal of their time alone with computers look like; the people at the Apple store look like what you imagine people look like when you spend a good deal of time alone with your computer.

Prometheus (Ridley Scott, 2012)

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Hoobler) — Wed, 20 Jun 2012 17:11:00 +0000

This whole thing seemed like shipwreck to me. Ridley Scott's visuals could never crawl out from under Damon Lindelof's heavy-handed space-age pop-culture theology (Lost - in Space!). Note to aspiring sci-fi theologists: The cross is the most over-used visual metaphor in the history of eternity. Just having a character wear one is bad enough. That should do it. If you need to write 'dialogue' such as this, "Oh, I see you are still wearing your cross your father [!] gave you as we are discovering that a race of space aliens actually seeded the earth and created man," well, then you have little business being around anything as subtle as art; stick to religion and television. But as more and more of yesterday's failed novelists become tomorrow's screenwriters, you are going to have to sit through quite of bit of over-written films. It is in fact, in the same scene that our sci-fi fake man lets us know that he can see our human dreams. Of course, for about one hundred years now, everyone has gotten to see our dreams, although the dreams of those dreamed in the industrial West have been preeminent on screens. One might even say we are dreaming far too many dreams, shorter and shorter and of less quality all the time...(I would recommend large doses of either vintage Hitchcock or Antonioni to help you cope.) I think it is all Lindelof can do to not put a "Coexist" bumper sticker on the hull of the spaceship. Who knows, maybe it was left on the cutting room floor. As pointed out elsewhere, a much better film could have been made of how cinema crafts our personalities, out of the sandy seed planted with Lawrence of Arabia and our re-Tooled anthropod. I can think of some other films where a character consciously apes a character from another movie-in-the-movie, grooming themselves in the mirror of our culture, but there are far too few. Only Fassbinder - who himself may actually be some sexually ambiguous super actor sent from the future - and to a much lesser extent, Elba, make it out of this mess.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (Un peu de fey cinéma par Guy Ritchie, 2011)

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Hoobler) — Sat, 16 Jun 2012 21:55:00 +0000

It is, in its own simple way, good fun to watch Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law banter about, gender roles be damned. But it is far more entertaining to watch RDJ morph into a more effeminate late-style Al Pacino. Your vicarious enjoyment, however, comes at the expensive cost of the former being intentional and the latter quite accidental. That British guy from Mad Men is in it as well as the bad guy with a decent beard, and there is some sort of not very mysterious mystery afoot. Along with some highly choreographed violence for those who would rather not have their gender roles be damned. And some women who show up now and again only to be quickly dispensed of so Downey and Law LLP can get back to solving their crime.

Concerning Foundations: A Preface to My First Work of Social Science

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Hoobler) — Thu, 14 Jun 2012 19:43:00 +0000

This work, and its presuppositions, rest on two distinct but linked linguistic sources, historical and psychological. For simplicity's sake, the historical can be pragmatically reduced to one contemporary book; The other embraces quite a few more. The historical suppositions rest on the evolutionary theory of history laid out in Gellner’s Plough, Sword and Book. We fully agree with him that “human ideas and social forms are neither static nor given. In our age this has become very obvious to most of us; and it has been obvious for quite some time.” Gellner certainly thinks it has been obvious since the European Enlightenment; We would push it back as far as Socrates and his era, with the tacit understanding that there is nothing more transcendent in the world than the human imagination. A precis of this view was outlined by Vico, but we can understand the undergraduate need for something newer, and the modern suspicion attached to anything of age.
The psychological is is not confined to one work, but deals with the human imagination as it is articulated in history, usually in written language. Although it leans heavily on the psychological labors of certain friends like Freud, Kierkegaard, James, Nietzsche, Emerson, Rousseau - and perhaps on sunny days, even avuncular Augustine, or patriarchal father Plato - it takes the bulk of its psychological wisdom from the tradition in sum as it is manifested in written language. While the persons above named are widely and correctly associated with a view of the world that is overwhelmingly religiously anxious, the idea that works of academic objective rigor (Whether your idea of academic objective rigor be Hegel or Quine, Wittgenstein or Russell, Durkheim or DeBeauvoir or Dennett, or, of course, Gellner himself.) might be subject to the selfsame anxiety is only beginning to occur to a broader population. The idea that the greatest art stems, if sometimes at an acute angle, from the basic existential dilemma belonging to the species, and that you can never fully remove art from language however debased and prosaic and exact the rhetorical art may be, however dry and academic, and that there is an aesthetic element in every work of language was certainly obvious to many Greeks. No doubt changes in technology, not least the technology of the last hundred years or so have hastened this awareness. And so the reader is forewarned - this is a set of ideas in words, essays in the literal sense of that word. Historical institutions such as libraries, universities and bookstores have use for categories such as fiction or non-fiction. We see no easy distinction here that history will not later dissolve. We feel it is with the utmost and earnest confidence that we can assure you Plato thought his writings no less scientific than Richard Dawkins thinks his. Cultures do change, and yes, you can say the vocabularies are incommensurable. Existence involves innumerable translations, not just in language. To paraphrase Mr. James, while you can take the language out of the anxious human animal, you can never take the anxious human animal out of its language. The tail of the human serpent is over all. Everyone has their reasons for their writing; even if they are not always aware of them.

Love & Dogs or 'Trickery or Tragedy'

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Hoobler) — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 06:20:00 +0000

"The dogs were brought to the house, quite by chance, I could not choose them. But the duty to love was there (just as it had been with previous governesses) and I fulfilled my duty so completely that I can still feel pain in my heart when I recall the loss or death of one of them. But it isn't the pain I wanted to talk about, for that was just the same as I felt when the governesses left. The difference here is that I felt myself to be loved by the dogs; that they not only had my love but - at least I was sure this was so - loved me too. The paradox was that the dogs just happened to come to our house, and so every one of them could just as well have had another 'young Master' whom it would have loved as much as it loved me. So it was that at six or seven I already knew that love was fictitious, unreal, and my skepticism about human relationships in general increased. To express it as simply as possible: at about eight years of age I knew that anyone could sleep with anyone and that people would see it either as trickery or tragedy since they could not conceive of a true relationship, that is, one not started purely by chance. I determined not to love again until I had found this true human relationship and decided at nine not to love any of the dogs in the house. But by the time I was ten I had a new favorite dog, Pito."
- Hermann Broch, in a letter to his analyst Hedwig Schaxel-Hoffer, 1940

Midnight in Vienna, or 'Six Dostoyevsky Novels Every Day'

noreply@blogger.com (Mark Hoobler) — Sat, 02 Jun 2012 20:01:00 +0000

"In 1917 there were two women in the cafes who were attracted to Hermann Broch. His restlessness and attentive gaze made an impression on them. The Czech Milena Jasenska and the Austrian Ea von Allesch had renounced the project of founding a family, and had embarked on the adventure of self indulgence. There may have been a touch of cruelty in them, such as is commonly detected in disillusioned women. They were pushing themselves to the limits, as passionate and suicidal as almost all the women who frequented Vienna's cafes in those days.
Hermann Broch met Milena Jasenska in the Cafe Herrenhof on an autumn afternoon in 1917. She was the daughter of a wealthy family from Prague, then years younger than he and married to Ernst Pollak. Pollak was a student of philosophy and a militant in the New Erotic Pathways movement, one that preached absolute sexual liberty for single and married individuals alike. The apogee of this movement turned prophecy, and gospel and Pollak's own brand of redemptive philosophy constituted an ephemeral link between the two that ultimately could only be sustained rather faintly during their sporadic encounters. Milena imparted classes of Czech in Vienna and during the summer she helped transport suitcases at the train station. Pollak studied philosophy at the University and he was interested in the work of the Vienna Circle, but he earned no income.
Broch fell in love with Milena and they lived together for several months. She was a sad woman and had a depressive character, 'as if she were in the habit of reading six Dostoyevsky novels every day,' wrote Franz Blei. Pollak and Broch were dear friends and as time passed he asked Broch to break up with his wife because he was of the conviction that Broch didn't love her. Broch broke off with her immediately without reproaches or accusations. Milena (a name that in Czech means 'lover') became the companion of various writers. In 1920 she fell in love with Franz Kafka. At one point she dedicated herself passionately to journalism. She worked in a Prague daily and between 1931 and 1937 she was a distinguished militant of the Communist Party. Her temperament led her to the defense of the Jews whom she viewed as victims of barbarity. That same temperament, inseparable from her love of the unfortunate, led her toward the end of her life to participate in the resistance at Ravensbruck death camp, where she died in September of 1944. Hermann Broch thought of her often when he was exiled in the United States of America."
- Jose Maria Perez Gay, The Unfortunate Passion of Hermann Broch.