Where most pre-Humean philosophers considered beauty an objective quality in objects that people then can grasp (think about Plato’s equation of the truly beautiful with the good, which can be grasped by someone in the right frame of mind), Hume thought that finding something beautiful was a natural phenomenon comparable to the sense of taste for food and drink. Santayana (who was also very familiar with Kant and Schopenhauer in this area) has a similarly naturalistic approach, but tries harder to be true to the experiences involved and so has a more complex theory.

Santayana was a Spanish-born student at Harvard under William James, who got Santayana to take over his course on Hume and Locke. The second course Santayana taught was aesthetics, as he was pressured to adopt a specialty, and as a poet, this was a natural choice. He wrote the book based on a couple of semesters teaching this course, apparently purely for professional reasons. His interests were considerably wider than aesthetics, and a chief aim of this book is to situation art appreciation in a general picture of epistemology and human nature.

In the first part of the book, Santayana gives his definition for beauty, which he classifies as a species of value. It is “pleasure regarded as the quality of a thing.” As for Hume, for Santayana, all values boil down to individual acts of approval: ethical (and aesthetic) systems come when we then distinguish between different circumstances of approval and qualities of the person doing the approving, e.g. the more carefully considered judgments by the the most experienced people end up having precedence. Since no “ought” is derivable from an “is,” Santayana believes that ultimate ethical principles are actually approved on aesthetic grounds, meaning that we have an immediate sense of pleasure in contemplating them, and no further justification is available. This doesn’t make them arbitrary, as human nature is pretty consistent, and per the above description of how general rules come out of individual acts of approval, the fact that some aberrant perceivers will disagree isn’t an objection to basic ethical or aesthetic principles.

What distinguishes judgments of beauty from other pleasures is that we objectify them: we attribute them to the object, when what’s really happening is that the judgment is a result of the interaction between the perceiver and the object. Beauty is objective in the sense that this reaction is real, and not something we can control (though we can to some degree put ourselves in a different state such that the reaction will change), and that if we do come at an artwork in a grumpy mood or something such that the reaction doesn’t happen, we blame ourselves, not the object. It’s subjective in that of course the subject is one part of the interaction. Pretty much, as one might expect from someone so influenced by William James, Santayana’s presentation demonstrates that “subjective” and “objective” are not the most useful categories to force onto this matter.

The rest of the book analyzes the apprehension of beauty using three traditional categories: matter, form, and expression. The matter of a work is its raw sensual quality, e.g. its bright colors, its sonic texture, the material a statue is made out of, etc. He thinks that unrefined folks focus their appreciation on this aspect, so, e.g. modern pop music is appealing largely for the sounds it chooses, from the tambre of the vocal and instruments to the clear sound quality to the sound of the bright major chords that make it up.

The form is where beauty really lies for Santayana: in perceiving the relation of the parts to the whole. This is an active process, and he uses the Kantian word “apperception” a lot to talk about how seeing these creations is in part a creative act, or at least takes discernment. He gives the example of a landscape: we think of this as a paradigm case of beauty, but really it’s a jumble that we organize in perception, and to perceive it as beautiful, much less to present it in a painting, we have to pick out elements to emphasize and look at their formal relations: the parallelism between the trees, how they stand out to the background, etc. While less reflective folks have to go on vacation to perceive their environment aesthetically, an artistically inclined person understands that any part of our everyday surroundings can be approached in this way.

This is not to say that beauty is everywhere or is entirely a matter of the perceiver’s capacity to apperceive in this way. Santayana wants artists to actually go through the effort to create a perfect, understandable form that we can contemplate, and is critical of romantics who create vague, suggestive works and/or gesture towards an “infinite perfection,” which he thinks is a contraction in terms. A perceived form can strike us as perfect; perfection is something given to us in perception, and gesturing towards something imperceptible in a religious/mystical sense is an artistic failure. It might spur creativity and imagination among astute spectators, but it doesn’t actually display the formal qualities that make a work of art great.

The third element in art that Santayana considers is expression, i.e. when a work connotes or represents some elements extrinsic to itself. So, to return to the modern pop music example, a singer is also appealing because of how he or she comes off in terms of looks and personality: maybe his or her image conveys a dangerous sexiness or something like that. Any time words enter a work of art, of course, there’s tons of expression going on (as opposed to in instrumental music, which may nonetheless connote bring to mind previous works or conventionally express emotions, e.g. minor chords are supposed to be sad). While Santayana doesn’t want to discount this element, and thinks it has a great deal of effect on how we react to a work, he mostly thinks it’s cheap and gimmicky compared to formal elements. So a poorly written movie may still be enjoyable because it uses conventional tropes to play on our emotions and employs attractive actors with pleasant voices and well recorded music, but it would certainly be better if the plot made sense (had a well-crafted form), the dialogue was poetic (well-formed sentences), and if musical and cinematographic effects were used with intelligence and ingenuity (i.e. interacted through interesting formal relations) instead of according to a tired, predictable formula.

Santayana stresses throughout that he’s not about figuring out rules which can then be used to judge whether a new work is good nor not. All artistic rules are just attempts to capture what we find great in individual works. Still, he thinks that this analysis will “have a good and purifying effect” (from the Introduction) on our judgments, get us to stop trying to dogmatically impose our tastes on others, yet allow us to safely discount “aberrations of taste.” Santayana thinks that if you have a positive aesthetic experience of something, you can’t be wrong, as you’ve made a real connection with it and are picking out something. Still, you may be focusing too much on the associations the work brings to you that it wouldn’t to others, or maybe you’re too enraptured by the singer’s sexy voice or some other part of the matter, and aren’t noticing the lack of interesting formal elements in the work. Santayana wants to be pluralistic recognizing what people can appreciate but still insist that some works are superior to others. He still thinks it’s better to have a real appreciation of something in kind of a crude way than to pretentiously praise works that you don’t actually understand and don’t really give you pleasure.

Santayana wasn’t crazy about academia and eventually retired from Harvard at 48 to live in Italy and travel around writing books; he refused positions at Oxford and Cambridge. So he qualifies a Partially Examined Lifer. He was a Spaniard but grew up in Boston and is called by the Stanford Encyclopedia the “foremost Hispanic-American philosopher.” Whether as a result of this, or his artistic temperament, or his status as an secularist who grew up Catholic, or (probably) a closeted homosexual (this from the Standford Encyclopedia), or just due to his being a philosopher (his idol was Spinoza), he pretty much always felt like an outsider, an alien, and the book gives an interesting framework to think about your own, individual approach to beauty, both as spectator and creator of artworks.

Buy the book or read it online for free.

Watch on YouTube.

This combines footage from two stationary cameras plus a couple of iPhones that my friend Glenn walked around with. He did some editing to remove the dead air. The audio is open-air in the club, so it’s not stellar, but you can hear anything, and if your computer plugs into your stereo, you can crank your bass EQ to get a good representation of what it was like there.

The performance was probably our best, though some of the songs are really played substantially faster than I’d like. For somewhere between half and a third of the songs, this was our first time playing them in public, and our first gig in over a year regardless, so it went quite well given that.

-Mark Linsenmayer

Daniel in his native habitat

[editors note:  Daniel was our guest on the Deleuze episode recently and will be posting a bit in our blog over the next couple of weeks]

Since I discovered Deleuze in grad school, he has pervaded in various ways my teaching, writing and thinking. My dissertation proffered a model of rhetoric and specifically the trope; its final chapter focused on Deleuze.

And so when I began teaching the Intro to Rhetoric at at UC Berkeley (where I also earned my doctorate), I delivered a highly Deleuzian view of rhetoric (even though we never read Deleuze in that course —an intro lecture is no place for Deleuze). The texts included Barthes’ “Death of the Author,” JL Austin’s How To Do Things With Words, Nietzsche’s “On Truth & Lie” and Plato’s Phaedrus.  I taught that for the sophist a text is never right or wrong, true or false. It’s our job as readers to maximize what’s interesting in a text, to articulate its performance (not just what it says but how it says). This, alas, is how Deleuze and Guattari argue we should assess philosophical concepts: Not whether they are true but whether they are interesting, remarkable and important.

Here are my Berkeley Rhetoric lecture on iTunes U

Those podcasts put me in touch with various folks including PEL.  After our lively discussion about Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy?, I recorded a podcast just to get all my ideas and rants off my chest. It’s about a 20 minute screed in which, in one great whoosh, I try to explain the book.

My podcast on Deleuze & Guattari’s What is Philosophy? 

Another person I’ve virtually connected with is the writer Doug Lain on whose podcast, Diet Soap, I have appeared a few times, one of which was dedicated to Deleuze.

Me on the Diet Soap podcast talking about Deleuze

When my rhetoric lectures were podcast I discovered a wide world of interested and interesting people. So I left teaching — mostly for financial reasons — knowing that I could still interact with people via the web. I blog about philosophy, film, books, capitalism, tequila, whatever strikes my fancy. But what connects my writing is a rhetorical approach to life which, to me, is a relentlessly critical practice that operates at the juncture of ideas and life, of what it means to lead a life of the mind.

My blog, An Emphatic Umph

Introduction classes, done university style, tend to be selling plugs for the subject as a whole. In true Not School style, our Intros are a bit different. I was very excited by the response to my first class featuring Common Sense (Thomas Paine). It worked as a wonderful platform to dig in to political theory, exploring philosophy from the inside out. Trashing Celebrating the theory, function and design of that piece led to an exploration of common philosophical categories and terms, and a discussion of the key elements in developing our own personal philosophies.

The Not School format is a completely open one. This can seem intimidating, but it leaves an endless potential for learning. To quote Isaac Asimov, “Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.” The Intro groups are a bit more guided than the other study groups, so they are an excellent opportunity to get your feet wet if you’re new, or to hash out personal philosophies and be vocal about your thoughts on the pieces if you’re an old hand at PHI. Great thoughts are welcome, as are terrible senses of humor. (Care to explore this opportunity for tangential learning? Check here and here.)

Not Schools groups are an incredible chance to grow beyond the borders of traditional education. If you haven’t already, head over and join in the Intro Readings group, and spark up a debate, or voice your thoughts. We’re currently reading excerpts from http://18th.eserver.org/hume-enquiry.html” target=”_blank”>Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (focus on II and VII). Our first group meeting is this Saturday… you’re not too late! I look forward to hearing from you.

-Hillary Szydlowski

How is philosophy different from science and art? What’s the relationship between different philosophies? Is better pursued solo, or in a group? Deleuze described philosophy as the creation of new concepts, whereas science is about functions that map observed regularities and art is about creating percepts and affects. Just reading or writing about past philosophers is not enough; you have to actually create concepts, and to create or understand a concept requires a “plane of immanence,” which is something like a set of background intuitions that is not private to a particular mind. Such a plane constitutes an image of what thought is and determines what questions will be considered legitimate, so trying to evaluate a past philosophy without grappling with the plane means you’ll inevitably misunderstand the philosopher and your critiques will just talk past him or her. Likewise, if you yank a philosophical concept out of its plane and try to turn it into a proposition that you can evaluate, it’s inevitably going to seem weak, like “just an opinion,” because propositions are not what philosophy creates. As for a pragmatist, “truth” for Deleuze is something defined within a plane, not some transcendental standard used to judge planes or concepts.

Mark, Seth, and Dylan are joined by “sophist” (PhD in rhetoric) Daniel Coffeen to try to figure this out. Read more about the topic and get the book.

End song: “Tolerated” by New People, the new album Might Get It Right. Read about it.

Please go to partiallyexaminedlife.com/donate to help support our efforts. A recurring donation will gain you all the benefits of PEL Citizenship, including another Deleuze discussion.

Bordwell is first and foremost a historian of film, and so his book takes a historical approach. Looking at both intellectual and social factors, he charts how and why various interpretative methods fell in and out of fashion at the times they did. But he is also a cognitivist, and he organizes his study not chronologically, but rather as a sort of taxonomy of the mental tools that critics use to find patterns, draw analogies, and build interpretations.

He starts by challenging the language we employ when talking about interpretation. We may talk of “uncovering” or “pulling out” meaning. Or we may even make analogy with archaeology, treating a text “as having strata, with layers or deposits of meaning that must be excavated.” Bordwell thinks this way of talking obscures what interpretation actually does. Interpretation is a process of building up, not digging in. “Meanings are not found but made.”

In interpreting a film, the critic essentially reconstructs it, creating what Bordwell calls a “model film” – a mental version which downplays or ignores certain elements while highlighting others, all “unified under a description which organizes those aspects of the film she has picked out and weighted with semantic values.” This may sound dishonest, but it’s really just a more elaborate and self-conscious version of what every audience member does. The difference between a critic and an ordinary spectator is that while the average moviegoer may have a jumble of free floating thoughts and associations, a critic must work to create a thorough interpretation that is convincing according to the tacit standards of the interpretative institution of which they are a part.

The process goes something like this: First the critic picks out “cues.” A cue could be an image, a location, a line of dialogue, a gesture, an entire scene, or an aesthetic element like a camera movement or choice of color – any element of the film, large or small, can serve as a potential carrier of meaning. These will then be “mapped” onto by “semantic fields.” A semantic field is “a set of relations of meaning between conceptual or linguistic units.” These are drawn from whatever fields of knowledge the critic is familiar with as well as from their common sense understanding of the world. They’re typically organized according to one of four basic types: doublets (i.e. nature/culture), clusters (loosely related concepts like race/class/nationhood), hierarchies (i.e. self/family/community/nation), and proportional series (one critic assigns different characters from Alien the labels human/anti-human/not-human/not-anti-human).

My use of temporal language in the last paragraph isn’t completely accurate, however. In reality, there’s no set order to how these processes are used. A critic will probably initially have cues trigger associations with semantic fields almost automatically while they’re viewing. Once they’ve decided that a particular semantic field may be fruitful, they will likely go back through the film (mentally or actually) in search of further cues which they can connect with terms in that field. They may also focus on a cue or set of cues that seem salient without initially knowing how a particular semantic field could be mapped onto them or even what semantic fields would be relevant, trying out mapping different fields in different ways to see what fits and what doesn’t. The entire process is a large-scale act of creative problem solving.

In order to be institutionally acceptable, an interpretation will also want to avoid relationships between cues and fields that appear overly simplistic. To this end, the four structures that organize items within semantic fields can also be used to link the fields themselves, leading to elaborate chains and nesting patterns. By relating semantic fields to one another in complex ways, the critic can create more nuanced interpretations.

We can see how this process works in Lacan’s interpretation of “The Purloined Letter.” His familiar semantic fields are the ones of his own brand of psychoanalysis, and so he is inclined to map “the symbolic order” or “the phallus” onto characters or objects in Poe’s story. Likewise, a Lacanian-feminist film critic might map the binary of “scopophiliac voyeurism” and “narcissism” onto the cues of characters’ “gazes” or the camera’s “gaze.” Simply put, the same concepts we spend time thinking about outside the theater are the ones we are likely to find reflected back at us on the screen.

Although critics who claim allegiance to one interpretative school or another may assert that their method is wholly unique and inherently more sophisticated than prior approaches, Bordwell disagrees. Any given interpretation may be more or less complex or simple, more or less nuanced or clunky, but the underlying processes involved are always drawn from the same relatively small toolbox. He asserts that “when spectators or critics make sense of a film, the meanings they construct are of only four possible types”: Referential meaning refers to the diegesis, the fictional world created by the spectator, including and extending outward from the events we see directly on screen. When we see a character exiting a taxi cab, his action of getting out of the car is a referential meaning, but so is the cab ride itself, which we did not see but can infer and roughly imagine. Explicit meaning is usually what spectators mean when they talk about a film having a “point.” The film is assumed to “speak directly” by, for instance, using stereotyped images such as the scale of justice, or including dialogue that makes clear thesis statements (i.e. “There’s no place like home.”). Implicit meaning, on the other hand, is assumed to be covert or indirect. “Units of implicit meaning are commonly called ‘themes,’ though they may be identified as ‘problems,’ ‘issues,’ or ‘questions.’” The last type is symptomatic meaning, which is said to be divulged “involuntarily,” usually in contradiction to explicit and implicit meaning.

Journalistic or essayistic critics (i.e. non-academic ones) will often focus on creating evocative descriptions of the first two levels. By sticking to the literal, it may seem that these critics aren’t doing interpretation at all. But simply translating an audio-visual experience into words inherently entails the mapping of semantic fields onto cues. As Bordwell reminds us, “perceiving is structural and categorical. Perception is not a mere grasp of abstract shape or a flicker of vivid sensations; it is an ‘effort after meaning’ – though not necessarily implicit or symptomatic meaning.”

Until the late 1960s, “thematic-explicatory” criticism dealing with implicit meaning was the dominant form for essayists and academics of film. This is the type of interpretation we are likely all familiar with from high school and introductory college courses. The analysis done on episode 63 of the podcast is a perfect example: the semantic fields of existentialist philosophy are mapped onto cues from No Country for Old Men. No claim is made that Cormac McCarthy is trying to impart a clear moral or make a didactic statement, only that he “puts philosophies in the mouths of his characters to try them out as world views, to see how they hang psychologically and what fate they lead to, in the author’s best estimation.” It is not even necessary to show that McCarthy has read Nietzsche, or to find an interview where he explicitly discusses the issues at hand (although these might help to make the interpretation convincing). In the mid-20th century the New Criticism school of literary interpretation established that a work could be analyzed as a standalone aesthetic object, independent of authorial intent.

As film criticism increasingly fell under the purview of the academy during the ’60s and ’70s, the explicatory approach began to get edged out by symptomatic criticism. The symptomatic approach has two primary sources: psychoanalysis and Marxism. For years, psychoanalytic film critics drew on Carl Jung’s ideas, seeking out universal cultural archetypes within works of popular entertainment. Jung was eventually replaced by Lacan. In Mark’s words, Derrida’s criticism of Lacan had included an admonition to look beyond mere themes to examine “the technical aspects of the work and how they betray the author to serve up a different message.” Ironically, it was followers of Lacan that most ardently took up this directive and carried it into film interpretation.

The Marxist approach viewed all cultural production as bearing the imprint of its creator’s class interests. As filtered through the Frankfurt school, Marxist theory was used to show that the narrative structures and conventions of representation used in mainstream films reinforced capitalist ideologies by suppressing or distorting social realities. Both traditions relied on a conception of invisible cultural forces that shaped the work without the creator’s knowledge, and during the 1970s, critics began to combine them. Leo Baudry likened watching a film to dreaming, a regression to an infantile state, and used this analogy to claim that film spectators were highly susceptible to ideological indoctrination. Laura Mulvey combined Lacanian categories with feminist theory to claim that the pleasures associated with looking are always politicized. The proponents of “apparatus theory” saw every aspect of a film’s construction, from camera placement to sound recording to editing as shot through with ideology. All of these approaches presumed to unveil a layer of meaning beneath and in contradiction to the filmmaker’s intent. As evidenced by the popularity of figures like Slavoj Zizek, these strains of politicized Lacanianism are alive and well in the interpretation of film.

Bordwell discusses Lacan’s “Seminar on the Purloined Letter” as an “exemplar” – “an essay or book which influentially crystallizes an approach or argumentative strategy.” Lacan was not the first to apply the ideas of psychoanalysis to the interpretation of literature, his interpretation was simply the one that wound up founding an interpretive school. But most critics, academic or otherwise, don’t produce exemplars, nor do they aim to. Rather, they practice what Bordwell calls “ordinary criticism,” a primarily pragmatic enterprise aimed simply at producing novel interpretations of specific films. Early on in the development of a school, critics who claim allegiance to that school may aim to be systematic in how they “apply” their chosen theory. But what those critics call “application” is a far more creative act than the term itself indicates, and the categories being employed are almost always stretched or revised in the process. Novelty and plausibility always trump theoretical rigor. And as new critical schools lose their avant-garde status and become further incorporated into the institution, “there is a slackening of constraints on what will count as acceptable argument within the paradigm. […] Theoretical claims are renegotiated for the sake of practical criticism, even if the revisions in the claims are never acknowledged.” Today it is perfectly acceptable for a critic to toss Lacanian terminology into an interpretation without worrying about whether she’s being faithful to Lacan.

A critic may also claim that in applying a theory to a film, they are testing that theory. But Bordwell rejects this claim as well. He points out that these critics have a built in confirmation bias: “As with any inductive system, the perceiver is ‘set’ for data that confirm rather than falsify the initial hypothesis.” No critic has ever disproved a theory they set out to “test” via interpretation. The mark of a good interpretation has little to do with whatever theories the interpretation draws upon, and everything to do with whether what’s being said is A) interesting, and B) convincing.

“If science aims to explain the processes underlying external phenomena, Bordwell writes, “interpretation does not on the whole produce scientific knowledge. Neither causual nor functional explanation is the goal of film interpretation.” Rather, interpreting a film yields “understanding.” And not simply understanding of the film itself. He describes the value of interpretation this way:

It may be that interpretation’s greatest achievement is its ability to encourage, albeit somewhat indirectly, reflections upon our conceptual schemes. […] The critic who interprets Psycho does not prove that psychic normality and abnormality lie on a continuum, or that the male gaze is a symptom of psychotic repression; no more does the film. The critic and her reader agree to entertain such notions as imaginative possibilities, as intriguing juxtapositions of semantic fields suggested by the film at hand and the critical practices in force. Such juxtapositions can command the reader’s attention because, for a great variety of reasons, people often wish to explore the potential meanings which they encounter in their lives.

If we are convinced by what an interpretation has to say, it doesn’t just allow us see the film in a new light, it provides new connections between familiar ideas and ultimately, a new lens through which to make sense of the world.

However, Bordwell also recognizes the limitations of interpretation and bemoans the fact that the study of film has become synonymous with its interpretation. There are other things to be said about movies besides what they mean. He ends the book with a call for a “historical poetics of cinema.” When looking at particular films, he says, scholars should be asking “what processes brought it into being (for example, to what problems does its composition represent an attempted solution?) and what forces have mobilized it for various purposes.” His approach doesn’t need to run counter to interpretation as an endeavor. More attention paid to how and why films are constructed and what effects they produce can help lay the groundwork for a more informed criticism and act as a corrective to critics’ more outrageous claims.

-Tim Nicholas

I’m also making the album entirely free for PEL Citizens (on the Free Stuff page), so go sign up and you’ll get it and the previous two albums. Yes, you can also get the mp3s on iTunes and CDBaby, and since CDBaby farms it out to Amazon and Spotify and a couple dozen other places, it should be widely findable within a week or two.

However, unless you actually buy it directly from me off of my website, it’ll be months and months before we see only a pretty meager portion of your purchase price, so I encourage you to do that even though it will be SLIGHTLY less convenient than just getting it off of iTunes through your phone or something. For the next week, anyone who buys the new album off the site will also get free mp3s for our first album “The Easy Thing.” Note that when you purchase there, it sends an email to me, who will then respond back within the day directing you to the mp3s (whereas if you become a Citizen then you needn’t wait on me).

These three New People albums represent the only recordings released in my long career that I’ve actually put money directly into (as opposed to merely spending a lot on equipment and recording at home). Not a lot of money, mind you: we still record the main tracks in a basement, so we can take all the time we want with them (We took about a year to record this one, with no gigging to speak of to break up the process, though we were hardly consistent in pushing it forward every week, given the rise of this podcast to take up my time and moreso Matt the guitarist, who spends the most time on his many parts, becoming a new dad pretty recently.), but then we take them into a real studio (Paradyme Productions in Madison) where Jake Johnson, who we’ve worked with on all three albums, spends maybe 3-4 hours on each song editing and tweaking, such that apart from the fact that our mics don’t cost $3000 each, it sounds just as good as if we did the whole thing in the studio. (We actually tested this with the first album, recording two tracks entirely in studio, and they really don’t sound substantially better than the rest of that album.) It helps that we’ve now gotten better at tracking ourselves, as well as at doing a some of the processing (pitch correction, EQing and such) before we send the tracks to Jake.

I’m told that the new album is our best yet, and certainly Matt’s songs (he writes half, I write half) are the most consistently among his output (he’s a long-time musician nearly as old as I am, but this band, started in 2006, was his first real singer-songwriter foray, and he’s really blossomed, whereas I feel like most of my creative evolution happened some time in the 90s). I have no objectivity about my own tunes, but I think this is a pretty good batch too. Among them is actually our only thoroughgoing co-writing effort (as opposed to me just changing some of his lyrics or him adding a chord or two to make one of my songs more interesting), called “Local,” which came out of a session in 2006 before we had a drummer and were just hanging out, which is really the foundation for this band, as opposed to my earlier efforts that had something closer to professional and/or innovative-artsy aspirations. Click here to listen to the song. In that session we came up with main section music and the bridge, which is the turnaround at the very end of the song, then the recording we made at that point with us just singing “la la la” over it sat on my ipod for five years or so before I revived it, wrote some words, haggled more with Matt about the chord progression that resulted in the current chorus and the second half of the verse, and eventually, it became an actual song, one that vents my ongoing resentment about my non-relationship to my local music scene, pretty much whatever town I’ve lived in. Finally, as someone over 40 with any pressure to “make it” all drained out of me, it’s just funny instead of sad. I must credit this podcast, too, for giving me something of a substitute performing/semi-artistic endeavor; throughout my 20s and even some of my 30s, I really thought of myself as a musician first, that this was my mission and the only thing I would really enjoy as a career/life-filler, but now I can comfortably say that the music is something I do, not so much who I am. It’s hard to claim to be a songwriter by profession when for the past decade I only write maybe half-a-dozen tunes a year.

Luckily, I guess, I have enough tunes built up from earlier times, nearly all of which were recorded in less than ideal conditions or often not recorded (or at least finished) at all, that I have plenty to draw on… the song “Celebrity” from our Lucy episode was actually penned back in 1997 (here’s the original, trippy solo recording, and here’s a transposed solo demo from 2009 that I used to pitch it to the band… with rather more elaborate backing vocals than we ended up going with).

The rest are all fairly recent (demos for some are on my samples page). Matt’s tunes are likewise mostly recent, but I did convince him to revive a tune called “Stone” rejected for recording for our first album together. It’s got a heavier, angrier vibe than most of his more recent stuff, and he actually wrote it during college (the lyrics, with lots of angry beach imagery, make this sort of evident), so it’s one of his first songs.

Since we’d not been gigging as much since album #2, some of the songs on this one were from our live set, but some were introduced during the recording process, meaning we rehearsed them together a lot, but they hadn’t been road-tested, and the backing vocal parts in particular (even for the ones we had played live) were written to various degrees while recording. This evolution paralleled our move from album #1 to #2, where Matt decided that he didn’t have to approximately reproduce our live sound and instead could record as many damn guitars as he wanted. Also for the first album, Matt was pretty adamant that we use only the two-part harmonies that we did live, though I managed to sneak in a third part in a couple of places. This rule loosened up a lot for #2 when we added a Nate the singing drummer (you can hear him at the end of ep. 45), but we were often still just recording the now three-part harmonies we did live. For #3, the floodgates opened, and there are a couple of tracks with giant wall-of-sound vocals, some of them initiated by Matt, though I think we only used this effect in places where it was appropriate and still kept to two- and three-part harmonies (or less) in most places; we’re not Queen, after all.

Another innovation for us this time around is that we actually didn’t finish some of the tunes. There are twelve songs on here (which is plenty to sit through, frankly, though I tend toward albums with more like 18), but I swear we recorded drums for #13 that got mysteriously misplaced and we didn’t have time to redo them, and likewise one of Matt’s that was recording parts right on top of a past solo recording of his that also had drums got shelved, and before that another one of my tunes (which has actually already been recorded for two previous albums in the 90s) that’s been in our live set on and off since 2006 got shelved yet again. So wow, restraint: a new thing for me, and not one I’m all that comfortable with yet. Well, we’ve got a jump start on album #4, then, though we’re thinking that the album format may be dead in this mp3 age and may just go for periodic EPs and one-off releases for the immediate future, which is pretty much what my solo recording career has turned into despite my having charted out and even titled a couple of never-released solo records over the last dozen years.

The title “Might Get It Right” is a repeated line in one of Matt’s songs, “Ladder.” In writing the liner notes for the album, I tried to post-hoc invent a theme for the album, which was certainly not put together with any such thematic unity in mind:

It’s about how we the people make ourselves, how we distract ourselves, how we see ourselves. These aren’t songs about hitting rock bottom or partying all night, but about enjoying free moments, passing infatuation, getting nostalgic, indulging petty jealousy… about feeling unappreciated, disappointed, or left adrift. They’re about trying to make yourself live up to expectations, about maintaining your long-term projects: about steadily, or not so steadily, pushing onward and upward.

Nate actually wasn’t so fond of the above, as he’s an engineer and would prefer that I either spelled out what each song was about or didn’t do so at all, rather than pretending that the songs as a group are about this wash of loosely-related themes, but he let me run with it. A big factor in finishing this album up was actually his immanent departure from Madison: he was in grad school (environmental engineering?) and has finally finished his PhD (not a drop out like me!), and is moving to Kentucky for a job, so in fact he was gone all last summer doing an internship or something down there, during which time Matt and I made occasional advances in the guitar and vocal parts. So we’re currently trying to meet new drummers in Madison here (if you know anyone), and are also determined to add a fourth member for some keyboards and/or a second guitar (Matt gets tendinitis, and this having to play every note on every song is hard on him). We may be back up in a couple months with a new gig-ready lineup, or may use remote and/or session guys to be the PEL end-of-episode-recording house band, or who knows…

Thanks for reading, and for your continued tolerance of my putting whole songs at the end of episodes with sometimes little-to-no thematic connection to the preceding discussion (though I’ve been able to find synchronicities more often than not, I must say; themes tend to resonate, whatever the medium… and if we ever do a string of several episodes kvetching about ex-girlfriends, well, damn, I’ll be set to go!).

Best,

-Mark Linsenmayer

The problem can be seen if one looks at the act of assessing knowledge. As a teacher, you’re expected to assess the knowledge of the kid in front of you continuously through the learning process. What does the kid know when he or she comes to you? What do they come to know from your lessons? What do they know at the end of the unit? What do they know at the end of the year? What do they know while walking the stage in their cap and gown? This should all sound familiar. These reflect basic questions of epistemology. What is it possible to know? How do you know? How do you know what they know? How do they know what they know?

Brushing up on your epistemology won’t help. In its most abstract form (if you’re talking about “neutral monism,” for example) epistemology provides no comfort to the teacher trying to determine whether or not the kid in front of her “gets” the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Every teacher knows you can’t directly access the kid’s knowledge. We recognize that typical school tests are a proxy for such direct knowledge. We recognize that with our assessments we are constructing epistemological “if-then” statements. We are setting up a condition with an outcome that would only be possible if the student held such knowledge. If the student can answer questions about the French Revolution on a test, then, it is supposed, they know about the French Revolution.

But we’ve all crammed for a test, and then forgotten it all in the moments following. Or even prepared diligently for a test, passed it, then spent months away from the subject, and needed a complete review in order to get up to speed. In either case, can we be said to know the material? Possibly. The honest teacher will concede that, even assuming it’s a good test, the test elicits knowledge of what the kid knew at the moment they were taking the test.

Call this a straw man. “No educator,” you say, “would argue that knowledge, once achieved, is permanent and immutable.” But the structures of traditional education do exactly that, and many educators accept these structures because … well … what’re ya’ gonna do? Credits are gathered marking the supposedly steady accumulation of knowledge over the course of years. This asserts an epistemological stability that is illusory. If you learn something in class, this structure says, then you can add it to your accumulation of knowledge. You own it forever. Traditionally, decisions about promotion, graduation, and dispersal of resources are made based on exactly this model.

More importantly, the traditional assessment suffers from the problem of the false negative. The proxy/test may be constructed as such: if the  kid answers this question, then that is evidence that the kid knows what I want them to know. But the inverse of that – if they don’t answer this question, then that is evidence that they don’t know – doesn’t scan. Kids don’t answer questions correctly … because they’re hungry. They’re pissed off. They’re indifferent to the material. They’re indifferent to you. They’ve fallen in love. They’ve fallen in love with you. They’ve fallen out of love. They’re sleepy. They’re wired. They’re about to be arrested for possession. Attendance is compulsory and the duty of every prisoner is to attempt escape! Etc. Etc. Etc.

There are many reasons a student might choose not to engage in a compelled behavior (in this case, answering a question on a test), and only one of those reasons is “ doesn’t have the knowledge required.” To assert that such a wrong answer provides sufficient evidence of lack of knowledge is patently unethical. Yet educational structures urge us to do that all the time. Kid’s grades are averaged together, and the wrong answer is not only taken as evidence of momentary wrong knowledge, but that wrong answer contributes to the kid-algorithm as the measure of their knowledge. It becomes a grade, entered into their permanent record, the ultimate epistemological reifier!

Some assessments are better than others. Performance assessment – which was at one time cannily referred to as “authentic assessment” – asserts that, with skills, you can know if someone knows how to do something by watching them do it. And they’re right. If you want to know if a kid knows how to throw a ball, watching them throw a ball tells you that. But the problem of false negatives remains. Watching a kid not throw a ball, or throw a ball badly, doesn’t tell you a thing about how well they are able to throw a ball. Assessment doesn’t measure knowledge. It measures our ability to persuade students to behave in a way that can persuade us that they have demonstrated knowledge.

Does a careful study of epistemology provide a path towards assessing knowledge better, or more accurately? Or is it true that the only thing epistemology has to offer is solace in the form of epistemic humility. The Socratic mark of wisdom – I’m wise because I know I’m not wise – might prompt us to be more thoughtful and compassionate in the construction of our assessments – and in the construction of our relationships with kids. Many, many educators already evince this. Many are pushing to incorporate such humility in the structures of public education. This would be far more valuable than the illusion of certainty our structures currently pretend to.

Gary Chapin

We’re honored that she’s helped us out so much, and she should be getting paid a lot to do this.

-Mark Linsenmayer

Thanks to Peter Hardy bugging me repeatedly about it, I’ve finally set up an affiliate account for us for Amazon.UK as well.So hey, you British ladies and gents, start your purchasing sprees by clicking this hyperlink. Perhaps you could start off with some traditional English vegetarian black pudding or read Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain or order Benny Hill:The Complete 70′s Annual [DVD]. Get cracking now!

You needn’t keep track of this post, of course. We’ve added our sponsor link to Amazon.uk on our shop/donate page.

Thanks to all of you for your continued support.

-Mark Linsenmayer

There are a few proposals on the table, for instance one on Just War Theory, which some of you should definitely commit to joining if you’d like to see that happen.

Firm groups for May are as follows:

1. First off, everyone contemplating some philosophy reading who has yet to really make the plunge should join the Intro Readings in Philosophy group, which established and well praised Hilary Szydlowski will be leading (she ran it in February) to cover Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Sections II and VII. The text is free, the reading is manageable, the instruction will be a bit more hands-on than in other groups (in which there’s really no “instruction” to speak of, this being Not School), so there’s no excuse not to get in there and participate.

2. One on Heidegger’s Basic Writings, starting right now with his essay “The Origin of the Work of Art” and probably working on another essay for mid-month.

3. A new existentialism group intended to be ongoing, I believe starting with the essay “Existentialism is a Humanism” (which will certainly be covered in a PEL episode some time in the next five months). That essay is very breezy, and some of other titles floated there for future coverage include The Stranger, so this sounds like a fun one to get into on the ground floor.

4. Gary’s media ecology group will be moving toward a discussion of semantics, covering S.I. Hayawaka’s Language in Thought and Action. This seems to have been a very fun group for April and is set to continue through the next two months at least.

5. There looks to be a new Levinas group, led by Will Yate who’s also continuing the Merleau-Ponty group. The Levinas group will cover about 10 pages of “God and Philosophy” per week; this should be a great introduction to this difficult thinker. I see there are only a couple of members so far, but Will is a diligent fellow and I’m sure will soldier on regardless, so you should join and glom onto his energy.

Also continuing are the groups on William James’ Essays in Radical Empiricism, Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, the aesthetics group on Graham Gordon’s Philosophy of the Arts: An Introduction to Aesthetics, and the ethics group on Susan Neiman’s Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy. I’m guessing that the philosophy of mind and fiction and philosophy groups are continuing as well but don’t appear to have picked new books for May yet, so you can get in there now to influence their decisions. Or why not go try to revive the philosophy and physics group? Or get some new folks to read Deleuze’s What Is Philosophy? now that the PEL episode on that is immanent? Or go propose something brand new! If you think Continental philosophy is overexposed here, go propose some hard-hitting analytic stuff. If you think some topic has been unfairly glossed over by PEL, having a group on it is just about the best way to convince us that there’s something there we should check out. If you’re just sick of waiting for us to get around to some long-ago announced topic (Ayn Rand, anyone? Rawls and Nozick? Gadamer or Ricouer?), go start reading it now! Go go go!

-Mark Linsenmayer

Zizek! 

This is not an educational film. I probably know as much about Zizek’s philosophy after watching this movie as before, and this is despite the fact that the director intends to be pedagogical. This is because the film’s quick summaries of Zizek’s work are basically just factoids, full of vague phrases that do not accomplish much illumination, like the statement that claims Lacan was considered “a return to Freud.” I have no idea what this means and I feel 99 percent of the people who watch this film will feel the same. For the most part,  Zizek himself struggles to communicate anything of philosophical depth and clarity in the shortish interviews. But this is forgivable because he might be one of the most interesting people alive to observe (he communicates plenty of his salty charisma and humor though). Throughout the film I watched his face, transfixed, asking myself what many people have asked about him: is he on coke? Does he have ADD? Why does he always have phlegm in his mouth?

There is one exception to the general vagueness of the (philosophically-centric) interviews. This is the not altogether expected scene where Zizek gives a spirited description of philosophy while laying shirtless in his bed. I don’t really know what the director was going for, but it ended up being the clearest exposition of thought in the film. Zizek makes clear that, to him, philosophy is a method for asking questions, not solving problems.

So as an informative documentary about philosophy, Zizek! falls a little short of what I was hoping for. Luckily it succeeds on other levels: It informs us about Zizek the person. We see him in his austere apartment, complete with a postcard of Stalin attached to the wall, and get a sense of how meticulous he is. His library contains every thing he has ever written, all neatly arranged on tidy bookshelves. When he finds a journal out of place he actually stops talking for the camera and puts it back where it should go, saying that he “must have order.” We also see his son, who stares at the camera with the type of fascination kids usually have for cameras. Zizek calls it: “narcissistic interest,” which made me wonder what it would be like to have him as a dad. It’s somehow nice to see that he goes to McDonald’s with his son.

One of the things I got from the film is that Zizek is an extremely self-aware person who is at the same time ludicrously not-so-self-aware. On one hand he’s aware that people come to his lectures to hear him “make dirty jokes” and “use examples from movies” just as much as they come to hear his philosophy. On the other hand, when watching a video of Lacan, Zizek makes his trademark erratic hand-gestures while he laments how insincere Lacan’s much more restrained hand-gestures are. I couldn’t tell if Zizek was consciously being hypocritical, or if he thinks his own hand gestures are more authentic (faster equals more authentic, maybe). It would have been interesting if he acknowledged this, because it’s always curious when Zizek turns his critical eye inwards. Case in point is perhaps the most bizarre monologue he gives in the film: He, quite sincerely it seems, talks about how he feels that he isn’t human, but pretends to be.

As you can probably tell, the greatest pleasures in Zizek! are when Zizek is not being philosophical. This is at least how I felt, and it’s probably a symptom of how I watch movies; i.e., I’m not really watching movies to learn anything deep (if that’s even possible with this movie). I just want diversion. Luckily, Zizek is a genuinely diverting character. There are many scenes sure to make people laugh. Two stick out in my mind: one is when a woman asks Zizek for an autograph. He obliges her, she smiles gratefully and walks away. Zizek shudders, telling the director how much he hates attention from his fans. She teases him: “You must like it a little bit.” Zizek replies: “No, people are evil.” Another scene that will be sure to please Zizek fans is one where he gives a detailed play-by-play of how he and his son play with the toys set-up on a big table. He explains the ‘rules’ of his son’s game with as much energy as he explains his philosophy: flailing arms, talking fast, pointing, jumping around, etc

A quote on the DVD says that Zizek is “the Elvis of cultural theory.” I’d rather say he’s the Andy Warhol. Just like that artist, Zizek takes pop-cultural images (from Vertigo to The Dark Knight to Kung Fu Panda) and re-interprets them for a relatively wide audience (relative to the type of attention academics usually get). Even Zizek’s audience reminds me of those people who were crazy for Warhol back in the sixties; i.e., I suspect they don’t know what he’s talking about half the time (the movie shows us a couple of his lectures and they’re respectably full, which makes the cynic in me question whether that many people could really be into an obscure philosophy that mixes Lacan and Marx with a twist of Hegel). They do know he’s popular, entertaining, and seemingly profound, which are admittedly good reasons to see somebody talk. It’s the reason why I watched this movie, after all.

Noah Dunn

More subtle but equally pernicious are the reactions of blogger Andrew Sullivan and political entertainer Bill Maher. While they say they reject Islamophobia and routinely acknowledge that the vast majority of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims are not violent extremists, Sullivan and Maher believe that the left’s defense of Islam from right-wing attacks is overzealous and devolves into “liberal bullshit” at the point where it attempts to deny a) that “jihad” is the primary motivation of the Marathon bombings, and is generally a serious threat; and b) that Islam has certain features that make its religious extremists more violent and dangerous than those of other religions, such as Christianity and Buddhism. These views, they say, are motivated by a dedication to the truth, even when such truth is unpalatable and doesn’t fit well with the bleeding hearts and fuzzy heads of liberals.

While I’m generally a fan of Sullivan and Maher, these positions, far from representing a kind of fearless rationality, are really solid examples of the bullshit they think they stand against. In fact, they’re spectacular attempts to pawn off primitive free association and fuzzy thinking as truth-seeking.

Let’s begin with the idea that the Marathon bombings were caused by “Jihad.” Sullivan does acknowledge, quoting Glenn Greenwald, that the decision of the Tsarnaev brothers to commit their crimes also involved “some combination of mental illness, societal alienation, or other form of internal instability and rage that is apolitical in nature.” But these, according to Sullivan, cannot be the primary motivations for the behavior of Tamerlan Tsarnaev in particular: “Fanatical Islam is the culprit here” and “of course it was Jihad.”

What does “fanatical Islam” mean? In Tamerlan’s case, it cannot mean merely that he identified as a Muslim and wanted to retaliate against the United States for the deaths of innocent Muslims caused by its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. This motive is political, regardless of the fact that it involves Tamerlan defining his political allegiances according to his religious identity. Secular Iraqi, Afghani, or leftist extremists might wish to retaliate based on differing identifications but for what amount essentially to the same political motives. Such motives amount to a form of extremism, in the sense that they take the killing of noncombatants to be justified. But to count as religious extremism they would have to appeal not merely to collective punishment for the deaths of innocent Muslims or Iraqis or Afghanis, but to divinely sanctioned violence against unbelievers: for instance, to the notion that apostates must be killed; or that the only good state is an Islamic state, and that this state must be brought about by any means possible, including the killing of noncombatants.

As Glenn Greenwald points out, the evidence we have so far suggests that Tamerlan’s motives were political in precisely the sense I have described, as were the motives of other recent Muslim terrorists and would-be terrorists. But there is little evidence to suggest that Tamerlan was motivated primarily by “radical Islam,” if we mean by this phrase a belief in divinely sanctioned violence. It’s plausible that Tamerlan was a religious extremist in this sense, and possible that he might not have acted upon his violent impulses in the absence of such a belief. But to say that such a belief was his primary motive ignores everything we know about both his political extremism and his personal life.

From what we know, Tamerlan had personality problems and was violence prone, socially alienated, and unable to find a decent job after the failure of his boxing career. A plausible explanation of his behavior focuses on the intersection of his professed political motives and his obvious personal problems: Tamerlan identified his personal grievances, including his failure to find a home in America, with the grievances of the victims of American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who happen to share his religion. The linchpin in this explanation is the point where the personal meets the political, not the point where a human being is simply overwhelmed by exposure to some religious ideology. For Sullivan’s account to make sense, we would have to believe that even if a large constellation of other causal factors involving character, circumstance, and politics went away, or were significantly decreased in number or intensity – if, for instance, Tamerlan had actually developed a successful boxing career and integrated himself into some community – religious extremism is a powerful force that might nonetheless have intersected his path, infected him in the manner of a virus, and driven him to violence.

That is quintessential bullshit.

If Tamerlan was a religious extremist, this ideology played a supporting role to his political extremism, which functioned in turn to rationalize his personal failures. “Religion made him do it” is about as sophisticated an explanation as a paranoid psychotic’s idea that some of us are subject to mind control by means of satellites. In this sense, Sullivan’s “of course it’s Jihad” is actually closer in spirit to false flag conspiracy theories than to real attempts to understand the phenomenon of terrorism.

The same can be said of the notion there is something special about Islam that makes its fundamentalists more dangerous than those from other systems of belief:  “Islam’s fanatical side – from the Taliban to the Tsarnaevs – is more murderous than most.” Sullivan suggests that Islamic religious fundamentalism is particularly dangerous because it “does not entirely eschew violence (like the Gospels or Buddhism),” and because Mohammed was a military man and political actor. Despite the history of the Christian church as a political entity responsible for a tremendous amount of violence, Sullivan attributes the fact that there is currently more Islamist than Christianist terrorism not to political circumstance but to the restraining effect of Jesus’ pacificism. Echoing Maher, Sullivan also attributes not to an extremist few but to Islam itself the view that “apostates should be killed” and that “negative depictions of the prophet” are “worthy of a death sentence.”

So let’s imagine what would have to hold for all of this to make sense. We would have to believe that while the history of violence associated with the Christian church was a matter of political circumstance overwhelming a pacifist ideology (ignoring the militarism of the Old Testament), violence associated with Islam is primarily a matter of ideology and is allowed to make no such appeal to political circumstance. We’re to imagine that even absent the historical conflict between the West and the Middle East; absent the defeat and partitioning of the Ottoman Empire; absent the Israeli occupation of Palestine; absent the United States’ and Europe’s support of oppressive regimes in the region; absent the military actions by the United States that have killed hundreds of thousands of innocent Muslims and continue to kill more on a regular basis; absent all these factors, we’re to imagine that it’s religious ideology – not actual grievances – that is the primary motivator for Middle Eastern terrorism. We must conclude that Islamic religious fundamentalists are “more dangerous” to Westerners not because of the history of conflict between Muslims and the West and the cycle of vengeance this creates, but because their ancient religious text sounds primitive by modern standards and because Mohammed was a political and military actor.

This is the view that Sullivan advances as a reasonable antidote to “liberal bullshit.”

If Islamic fundamentalism were more dangerous than other forms, we would expect empirical evidence to back this up. But as Juan Cole points out, the number of human beings killed by Christians in the 20^th century dwarfs the number killed by Muslims. I imagine that Sullivan would like to attribute this difference not to Christian theology but to political circumstances. He would be right, but then he should reflect on his willingness to extend a sort of charity to own faith that he is unwilling to extend to Islam. Sullivan might also try to wriggle out of this problem by restricting the domain of the comparison to violence that is religiously motivated terrorism, and restricting the time frame to say the last 30 years. But then we have borderline cases like the war in Iraq, which we know the United States would never have invaded after 9/11 if it were a non-Muslim nation. Once again, the motive here is better described as political (based on group identification) than religious (based on divinely sanctioned violence). But this just goes to show (again) that the same sorts of political considerations apply to Muslim violence as well: you do not get to avoid the accusation of religious motivation for American violence by highlighting the political nature of its motives, and yet avoid doing the same for terrorism by Muslims.

Finally, if the example of Muhammad were in perpetual danger of corrupting Muslims, then Tamerlan Tsarnaevs would not be so rare. But they are very rare, and they are very rare because the perfect storm of psychological and circumstantial forces needed to bring them about is very rare. Among these forces, religious extremism (in the sense of a belief in divinely justified violence) does not stand out as determinative. On this subject Sullivan makes a telling remark, noting that his shrink tells him such incidents are “multi-determined” (or as a shrink would more likely call it, “over-determined”) but that he finds this idea “unhelpful.”

So here’s a little help as to what over-determined means: you do not get to promote to the status of prime mover one of a constellation of causal factors that are in general neither necessary nor sufficient for a certain effect. You may wish that the world were simpler, but it just isn’t. And “of course it was Jihad” is a response by someone interested not in understanding the world, but in simplifying it beyond recognition. The function of that simplification – and the notion that there is something wrong with Islam – is ironically to promote the notion of collective guilt that is often at the core of extremist ideologies. We’ll leave it to Andrew Sullivan to figure out if he is susceptible to such irrational ideas because he was influenced by one of the less savory verses in the Bible, or whether there are more basic political and psychological motivations at work.

– Wes Alwan

The main task of What Is Philosophy?, the pair’s final work together (Guattari died not long after) seems to be setting up a new conceptual framework for understanding what philosophy is and how it differs from science and art. What is philosophy? It’s the creation of concepts, specifically complex and interesting ones, that enable us to see the world in a different way. No concept is simple: each contains as components other concepts, meaning that they tend to be created in batches. It’s a very anti-foundationalist view: concepts are active creations performed on a “plane of immanence,” which you can think of as a pre-philosophical field of intuitions and sensibilities.

I would describe such a plane as a vague “representation of the world,” but Deleuze’s epistemology is radical along the lines of late William James and many post-Kantians, meaning that he doesn’t make a real distinction between the representation and the world; they’re just different aspects of the world (he highly praises Spinoza’s idea of mental and physical aspects of all of creation). So the plane is a plane of immanence precisely because, from the point of view of that plane, there is no outside. The plane is not immanent to anything: it’s not the field of experience behind which transcendent things-in-themselves or God work, and Deleuze even objects to Husserl’s move of finding transcendent objects within experience (i.e. by perceiving one part of an object I posit that there are indefinitely many more unseen aspects, such that the object as a whole transcends my experience).

At the same time, different philosophies employ different planes of immanence, such that it’s sometimes hard when you’re reading different philosophers or even different periods of the same philosopher to figure out whether they’re talking on the same plane. The plane determines what’s going to be considered a legitimate and pressing philosophical problem, which the concepts are then created to articulate and address. This means that for any philosophy, much of the work is actually done pre-philosophically, undercover. The plane is actually part of the philosophy, and emerges more-or-less at the same time as the philosophical concepts themselves, as a necessarily unarticulated “image of thought,” i.e. an idea of what thinking is supposed to really be, what is “due to thought by right.” Is thought remembering, as Plato conceived it, or interpretation of received tradition, or the feigned ignorance and doubt of Descartes, etc. etc.?

The third element of a philosophy is its “conceptual personae,” which are like the characters we see within and “behind” the philosophy. I use the quotes because it’s not a matter of knowing the philosopher’s biography, but of the character the philosopher makes of himself, e.g. the “Idiot” in Descartes who doubts everything. Not all of these personae represent the author, e.g. Plato has Socrates stand in for himself but also created other characters like Callicles that serve as icons for other positions. The personae are what give life and coherence to the philosophical concepts. The concepts to us as “signed” by the author, so that talking about the Cogito without thinking of it as Descartes’s Cogito will only lead to confusion. So creating a philosophy (explicitly creating the concepts) also involves positing the corresponding plane of immanence and imagining and communicating the relevant conceptual personae.

This structure leads Deleuze to characterize apparent disputes in philosophy as typically people not on the same plane talking past each other. Truth itself is an element defined on a plane; there are no standards external to a plane by which to judge a philosophy. Instead of judging whether a philosophy is true, Deleuze thinks the big question is whether it is interesting and important, which is tantamount to figuring out, in part, whether the plane in question is where you’re at given your culture, intellectual climate, and other factors. At the same time, his prohibition of transcendence as somehow contrary to the structure of doing philosophy itself amounts to a strong advocation of a fairly narrow set of philosophical positions, so he’s not all hippy dippy “whatever you think is fine” in the way this might sound. Likewise, he stresses that these planes are not descriptions of an individual’s subjective world-view; like Fregean senses, these planes are intersubjective, which is the same, for these phenomenology-influenced folks, as objective; there’s simply no sense to be made of the term “objective” apart from the fact that different people at different times can go back and verify some alleged event or fact.

Deleuze stresses that these concepts are different than propositions, and you can’t just try to translate the elements of a philosophical concept into propositions without turning them into a bunch of half-baked, insufficiently scientific opinions. Science is not in the business of creating concepts, but of using already created, utilitarian concepts (e.g. a word like “momentum” is shorthand for a bunch of observed phenomena; the scientist needn’t ask what momentum REALLY is in the way that a philosopher would) to track regularities in states of affairs. Art likewise does not create concepts, but creates “percepts” and “affects” (note that these terms, unlike “perceptions” and “emotions” refer to public entities, not to private mental states of individuals).

For the discussion, we brought on longtime Deleuze fan and Ph.D. in rhetoric Daniel Coffeen. To get a sense of what he’s about, go listen to the course he taught in rhetoric at UC Berkeley in 2008. As a self-proclaimed sophist, he provided an interesting foil to our usual method of trying to carefully suss out the meaning of the text and fit its lessons into our analytic frameworks. Instead, he emphasized the life-changing power of being knocked out by a new and powerful philosophical point of view, which is not at all different from discovering a new and visionary artist.

Buy the book.

Several fundamental concepts should guide anti-terrorist policies. When not used as a tactic in guerrilla war, terrorism is essentially a problem for law enforcement and the criminal justice system. Military force should be used sparingly and in support of law enforcement. There is no psychological pattern of a terrorist and no single path to radicalization. Rather, all types of people follow multiple trails to terrorism. One of the best tools in the anti-terrorist arsenal is to develop law enforcement agencies that act as extensions of neighborhoods. These agencies can root out all types of problems before they happen, including terrorism… Finally, it would be helpful if the mass media, especially cable news, would spend time explaining the complex background of modern terrorism. This would be much more responsible than breathlessly awaiting the next stage in a terrorist drama.

Jon was also gracious enough to get permission from his publisher to share about 20 pages from near the beginning of his book Terrorism and Homeland Security where he deals with the definition of terrorism. Note that he does, here, discuss states that use terrorism, and not just individuals. There’s even a section titled “Another Perspective” about Noam Chomsky. Jon gives some historical definitions and then also gives a tactical typology that places various actions on a spectrum from simply criminal activity to political activity with a corresponding type of response (i.e. law enforcement, law augmented with military force, military).

This book excerpt is now posted on the Free Stuff for Citizens. Sign up to go read it.

-Mark Linsenmayer

How should philosophers approach literature? Lacan read Edgar Allen Poe’s story about a sleuth who outthinks a devious Minister as an illustration of his model of the psyche, and why we persist in self-destructive patterns: we are driven by “the symbolic order,” which tells us our place. The letter, which in the story is an embarrassing but unspecified message to the Queen that has been stolen by the Minister and used to blackmail her, is for Lacan a symbol for the power of the signifier, which dictates the roles of the various characters in the story, as first one then another is pushed into a passive, vulnerable state by gaining possession of it, driven by the logic that moves the letter inexorably back to its “rightful place.”

Derrida thought this reading not only imposed a bunch of psychobabble onto the story, but demonstrated that Lacan just didn’t know how to read a text. Per Derrida’s deconstruction, you have to look at not only the themes the author presents, but at the technical aspects of the work and how they betray the author to serve up a different message. Lacan thinks he’s getting at the meaning of the text, but Derrida disavows the whole picture whereby such a meaning, or truth, can be revealed in this way.

As both essays are tremendously obscure, who the hell knows if Derrida’s assessment of Lacan even gets Lacan right, and the other authors in the collection have different takes on whose interpretation holds water, whether the Jacques are really more similar than they admit, and about how weird it is to be pouring criticism onto criticism of criticism. Mark, Seth, and Dylan do their best to wade through this morass and eke out a bit more understanding of Lacan (building on ep. 74), Derrida’s view of language (see ep. 51), and how not to read a text. Read more about the topic and get the book.

End song: “Came Round” by Mark Linsenmayer, from 2010. Read about it.

Please go to partiallyexaminedlife.com/donate to help support our efforts. A recurring gift will gain you all the benefits of PEL Citizenship. Thanks!

Fink deals with this in Ch. 9 of his book “The Four Discourses.” These are:

1. The Master’s Discourse. This is discourse ruled by the master signifier, which has no literal meaning. From p. 131:

The master must be obeyed–not because we’ll all be better off that way or for some other such rationale–but because he or she says so. NO justification is given for his or her power: it just is… The master must show no weakness, and therefore carefully hides the fact that he or she, like everyone else, is a being of language and has succumbed to symbolic castration: the split between conscious and unconscious brought on by the signifier is veiled in the master’s discourse…

2. The University Discourse. Where the master doesn’t care about knowledge, this does; it provides “a sort of legitimation or rationalization of the master’s will.” He doesn’t actually dismiss what he considers genuine science here; that would be in category 3. The bulk of academia will go here, though, and just as for Marx, be used to support the political power structure despite any pretense at objectivity.

3. The Hysteric’s Discourse. From p. 133-4:

The hysteric goas at the master and demands that he or she show his or her stuff, prove his or her mettle by producing something serious by way of knowledge. The hysteric’s discourse is the exact opposite of the university discourse… a hysteric gets off on knowledge… Lacan finally identifies the discourse of science with that of hysteria…. The hysteric pushes the master–incarnated in a partner, teacher, or whomever–to the point where he or she can find the master’s knowledge lacking…

4. The Analyst’s Discourse. From p. 135:

Object (a), as cause of desire, is the agent here… The analyst plays the part of… pure desiring subject, and interrogates the subject in his or her division, precisely at those points where the split between the conscious and unconscious shows through… As it appears concretely in the analytic situation, a master signifier presents itself as a dead end, a stopping point, a term, word, or phrase that puts an end to association, that grinds the patient’s discourse to a halt… it could be… a reference to the death of a loved one, the name of a disease, or a variety of other things… While the analyst adopts the analytic discourse, the analysand is… backed into the hysteric’s discourse… The analyst, by pointing to the fact that the analysand is not the master of his or her own discourse, instantes the analysand as divided between conscious speaking subject and some other (subject) speaking at the same time through the same mouthpiece… Clearly the motor force of the process is object (a)–the analalyst operating as pure desirousness.

In the descriptions above I’ve left out more than I’ve included, and particularly with #4, it’s difficult to understand what kind of discourse it is without having in mind Lacan’s view of how the subject arises through alienation. Basically, there are four elements involved (each of which corresponds to one of the above, in the order I’ve given them): The master signifier (language itself as an agent, as our “self”), the “other” (also, of course, a product of language), the unconscious, and the intervention of an analyst or other individual. One of these being dominant makes the type of discourse what it is. One of the points in laying out these types is to say that there is no “metadiscourse” that escapes the limitations of the four listed. From p. 137: “Psychoanalysis’ claim to fame does not reside in providing an archimedian point outside of discourse, but simply in elucidating the structure of discourse itself.”

We didn’t bother to go into this much on the podcast. I find it not particularly convincing. Whatever the psychological motives behind an utterance, we can’t reduce the meaning to those motives. We can still try to evaluate the content itself, and if somehow our judgment is undermined by psychological and social factors, well, that’s something we’ll have to look out for, but the possibility is not a cause for global skepticism.

For another, probably clearer account of the four discourses, read the Wikipedia entry.

-Mark Linsenmayer

Jacques-Alain Miller once asked asked Lacan, “What is your ontology?” Lacan replied saying that we should read both Badiou and Zizek to find out (guess he deferred to philosophers for ontology). While their ontologies are illuminating, I’ll try here to extract Lacan’s ontology from his own system as much as possible, continuing with Fink’s groundwork in The Lacanian Subject.

Phenomenological Ontology: Subjectivity

Lacan appears to closely follow the Freudian/psychoanalytic concept that the Real represents a psychological time prior to the symbolic (linguistic) order, prior to linguistic consciousness (before language). However, Lacan says that the unconscious is “pre-ontological.” The Symbolic (language) “cuts into the smooth façade of the Real creating divisons, gaps . . . sucking it into the symbols used to describe it, and thereby annihilating it.” (Fink, p. 24) Lacan is presenting the limits of language and experience as symbolic representation in the face of the Real.

The Symbolic–language–thus creates “reality:” “things which had no existence prior to being ciphered, symbolized, or put into words.” “The Real, therefore does not exist since it precedes language . . . it ‘ex-ists.’” “The Real is . . . that which has not yet been symbolized.” It is the analyst’s ability to “put into words that which has remained unsymbolized” that enables the analysand [client] to transform those earlier unspoken never conceptualized or incompletely conceptualized experiences by talking.” “Lacan insists again and again that it is in an analysts’s job to intervene in the patient’s Real, not in the patient’s view of reality.” (Fink, p. 25)

The subject is split by the Symbolic which bars the “Real, overwriting and erasing it: Symbolic/Real . . . We can think of the real as being progressively symbolized in the course of a child’s life . . . less and less of that ‘first’ ‘original’ Real being left behind, though it can never all be… .killed [castrated]… There is thus always a remainder which persists alongside the Symbolic.” (pp. 26-27)

The therapist can help the client come to terms with the Real when “interpretations hits the cause:” it hits that around which the analysand is revolving without being able to “put it into words.” The analyst may be “able to speak the signifier to which her or she as subject had been subjected.” (p. 28).

Happily, “something anomalous always shows up in language, something unaccountable, unexplainable: an aporia. These aporias point to the presence within or influence on the Symbolic or the Real. I refer to them as kinks in the symbolic order.” (P. 30)

“The subject is never more than an assumption on our part.” (p. 35)

“The ego, according to Lacan, arises as a crystallization or sedimentation of Ideal images, tantamount to a fixed, reified object with which the child learns to identify . . . with him or herself.” (p. 36) Objet a, the lost memory of a unity, becomes a structural necessity of subjectivization, the source of the structuring lack itself.

In actuality, the “non-ego or unconscious “discourse interrupts the former –almost saying “No!” in much the same way as does a slip of the tongue . . . or . . . use of ‘but’ –as signifying the speaking or enunciating subject.” (p. 39)

“‘Ne’ [not] and ‘but’ is but the signifier of the Subject” which vanishes beneath or behind the signifier ‘ne.’ (p. 41)

Formal Ontology: Structure

In Lacan’s formal ontology, the subject is born from lack, nothingness, void (at the ontological level). It is the signifier that founds the subject subsequent to alienation and thus has ontic potential as a factual entity. Alienation gives rise to the potentiality of being by marking the subject as set apart from nothingness (from set theory which is considered to deal with pure multiplicity as such and group multiplicities into sets, and grounded on the empty set). The Lacanian Cogito based on the unconscious becomes “I am thinking where I am not, therefore I am where I am not thinking” and thus grounded on the void, on what I am not, and on what is not. Structure emerges from the void emergently from a novel multiplicity in the form of an event, an experience.

Lacan seeks to found psychoanalysis on science, on his definition of structure, such as the unconscious, and firmly found it on symbolic logic (a la Badiou). Badiou seems to have drawn many into his founding of ontology on mathematics as the portal to multiplicities. Lacan thus uses the concept of the symbolic to found his theory, believing that if you bury a symbol for a thousand years, you can dig it up and it will still be true. His ontological theory is thus summarized by the Borromean knot of the three interdependent rings of the Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic (see the image at the top of this post). This is like a Gödelian structuralism which maintains the importance of structure, while pointing out the necessary incompleteness, and impossibility of defining a language (symbolism) within a language (linguistics).

My take-away of Lacan’s approach to reality, is that:

1) We get into delusional and destructive modes of processing the world when in the Imaginary.
2) While we are in the linguistic and symbolic mode of processing reality most of the time, it is nevertheless foundational to maturity and well-being not to mistake the Symbolic for the Real.
3) We need to keep an open mind to knowing that we can never know completely, and through conscious awareness of all three aspects of reality, we can live life more richly with jouissance.

For further reading: The Question of Lacanian Ontology: Badiou and Žižek as Responses to Seminar XI.

-Wayne Schroeder

1. Choose liberty over security.

2. See events like the Boston Marathon bombing — by virtue of their rarity — as evidence of our relative security, not as one more reason to feel afraid.

3. Understand that our relative security is guaranteed on the whole not by guards and guns, but by basic human psychology, which involves the remarkable nonviolence of the majority of human beings in ordinary circumstances. The exceptions to this rule, far from being minimized by repressive or violent acts, will only be multiplied by them.

4. In the name of both liberty and security: Whatever the ideology of the perpetrators of a terrorist act – right wing or left, Islamist or otherwise – do not make one event an excuse to clumsily demonize a large swath of largely peaceable humanity: conservative or liberal, Muslim or other.

– Wes Alwan

Courtesy of neilpostman.org

In the first week of the “Not School” group devoted to Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, it’s clear that a tension runs through the book that – with only a little bit of investigation – can be seen running through Postman’s entire career. It’s a function of what he called the “thermostatic view.”

“In the thermostatic view …  you do not ‘hold’ philosophies. You deploy them.”

On the one hand, Postman is a visionary rhetorician and communications progressive. His ideas are firmly based in Marshall McLuhan and Alfred Korzybski but he synthesizes these and others into the coherent system encapsulated as Media Ecology. On the other hand, Postman is also kind of a conservative crank. He isn’t watching the shift in media from a typographic culture to an image culture with the disinterested fascination of an anthropologist. He’s watching it with the dread of an extremely perceptive and articulate prophet, lamenting the end of typographic days. On the one hand, he revels in the urge of the Enlightenment to construct and discover knowledge via free, clear thinking and promiscuous inquisition. On the other hand, he is appalled by the way in which free, clear thinking and promiscuous inquisition have led to a society that abandons the mechanics – linear argument, typographic culture – which undergird the Enlightenment urge!

This shift from progressive ideal to conservative did not develop as Postman grayed.  This isn’t a case of the young idealist growing up and suddenly noticing the kids on his lawn. The tension was seen as early as 1979, in Postman’s second education masterwork, Teaching as a Conserving Activity. Postman’s first education masterwork was Teaching as a Subversive Activity. Frisson, anyone?

In Teaching is a Subversive Activity, Postman issued his jeremiad (“the survival of our society is threatened”) in favor of radical implementation of constructivist pedagogy in the youth oriented culture of the late 1960s. It’s the adults and adult society who are the problem, educational structures, the locus of expertise, and the utter enslavement of students within the system. The hierarchical elitism of the educational system is neither healthy nor justified nor even helpful.

Teaching is a Conserving Activity is also a jeremiad. Society is still threatened, but this time by the very revolutionaries Postman inspired before. In the prior book, Postman argued that students should be allowed to study what fascinates them. They should have agency in decisions made around their education. In Conserving he argues that a student’s natural fascination (and inclined to explore on their own) is exactly what they should not be studying in school. Why does school need to mirror the puerile fascinations of “culture?” The energies of school should be spent teaching knowledge and skills that students wouldn’t come to naturally through their own interests. In Subversive, Postman rails against the oppressive elitism of educational structures over the students. In Conserving, he argues that elitism is a natural and inevitable – and desirable – quality of the educational project. By definition, educators are saying, “You, student, could stand to be improved, and I’m the one to do it.”

Schools should not, in other words, be responsive, welcoming, or servile in the face of change, but should be bulwarks against it. Schools should be the high point from which to watch the flood. “Progress is not the school’s most important product,” he writes, “Without a counterargument to the overwhelming thesis of change, we can easily be swept away – in fact, are being swept away.”

Is this shift hypocrisy? It doesn’t seem so. After this shift to Conserving, the The Enlightenment continues to run through Postman’s oeuvre as the era sine qua non, but the tension between emulating the Enlightenment and deifying it remains live even in his last book, Building a Bridge to the 18^th Century. It is a tension to be negotiated, not solved.

Postman argues, in Conserving, that the tension is inherent in the conversation of the philosophy of education. The tension, he writes, is the frame through which education philosophy should be viewed over time. He is arguing for the supremacy of context (“from an ecological view, nothing is good in itself”). Schools, he says, should be correctives to society’s normative urges. “Where … a culture is stressing autonomy and aggressive individuality, education should stress cooperation and social cohesion. Where a culture is stressing conformity, education should stress individuality.”

He refers to this as the thermostatic conception of education, and one wonders how it might apply if expanded beyond education to philosophy as a whole. The role of thermostats is to “trigger opposing forces.”  If it’s too hot, a thermostat will trigger cooling. If it’s too cold, a thermostat will trigger heat. “The thermostatic view of education is, then, not ideology-centered. It is balance-centered. It is not so much a philosophy as it is a metaphilosophy – a philosophy about philosophies. Its aim is at all times to make visible the prevailing biases of a culture and then, by employing whatever philosophies of education are available, to oppose them. In the thermostatic view of education, you do not ‘hold’ philosophies. You deploy them.”

Thanks to the Amusing Ourselves to Death ”Not School” group for sparking these thoughts. You folks are fantastic! (New people can still join up!)

Gary Chapin

Courtesy of natureofhumannature

Has science destroyed the dream of philosophy? Was Stephen Hawking correct in claiming,“Philosophy is Dead?” These and a few more questions were raised, or more so alluded to in a recent debate by Paul Horwich and Michael P. Lynch in the Stone in March. The two philosophy professors debated the current state of philosophy using Wittgenstein as a platform.

Horwich went first, focusing on the pessimistic state of Wittgenstein’s later days and his growing disinterest with the potential of philosophy.

Thus, even Bertrand Russell, his early teacher and enthusiastic supporter, was eventually led to complain peevishly that Wittgenstein seems to have “grown tired of serious thinking and invented a doctrine which would make such an activity unnecessary.”

Horwich outlines four claims that he thinks constitute this ‘doctrine’: philosophy is scientistic, the non-empirical nature of philosophy is in tension with former, philosophy is pervaded by oversimplification and a decent approach to philosophy must be ‘therapeutic’ rather than constructive.  He reads Wittgenstein as the “logical” philosopher, one who understands the problems with theoretical philosophy. What Horwich is describing as Wittgenstein’s Metaphilosophy is Wittgenstein’s problems with the way dialogical philosophy is conducted and how he believes it should be done instead. Wittgenstein criticized philosophy “purely descriptive,” unable to attain foundation explanatory answers.

On the other hand, Lynch’s rebuttal gives the reader another interpretation.  Instead of simply overturning Horwich’s reading of Wittgenstein, Lynch accuses Wittgenstein of being prone to overgeneralization. Lynch’s article urges the philosopher to realize the error of science, the error that comes, perhaps, when one tries to oversimplify an argument in search of a ‘grounding’ answer. For example, Lynch argues that Horwich’s Wittgenstein, as he calls it, was mistaken in his attempt to find a unitary nature of truth.  He contests that the option to define truth is singular and posits that it is much more rhizomatic (to use Deleuzian terminology) but that this does not leave the philosopher with anything less than a much more detailed way to explore the very definition of truth.  Lynch sees Philosophy’s strength in searching, producing the effect of a new way of thinking, instead of simply trying to find the end result. He draws a hard line between science and philosophy, claiming each to have their place in the world. 

Compelled by the recent PEL episode and these articles, I, too, have been contemplating the purpose of philosophy. Now, philosophy is regarded by some as the precursor to science, and some may believe that science has dismissed the need for philosophic debate and dreaming, but I tend to lean towards the side of Lynch’s argument. Having a strong bias towards Postructuralist Philosophy, I appreciate the inspiration to think differently. I understand the frustration of Heidegger in his inability to explicate the radical notions he tried to raise in Being and Time. I don’t know if we’ll ever be ready to develop the skills necessary to completely disconnect and reconnect our lens caps, to reveal a new take of the world. But this does not give us an excuse to fail to attempt articulation of these ideas. It only strengthens the value of philosophy and true philosophical debate. It allows the modern day philosopher to understand where we have fallen short, and justifies an even more intrinsic study into the art of philosophy, Socratic debate, and the need for a fresh take on how one participates in the discursive process.

Rian Mitch

-

WonderCat courtesy of cheezeburger.com

In episode 73 the question was of ‘why do philosophy’ was posed. There are many ways to come at this question and in the episode the PEL guys kept coming back to two things: Curiosity and Wonder.  How are these two words linked, if they are, and what is their relation to philosophy?

The essay “Beginning in Wonder: Placing the Origin of Thinking” (in Nikolas Kompridis’s (ed.) Philosophical Romanticism) by Jeff Malpas gives an interesting, Heideggerian, interpretation of this question. Malpas’s position is that wonder, which he traces back to the writings of Plato and Aristotle, must be held distinct from curiosity. Unlike curiosity, wonder cannot be extinguished with an explanation:

A clear demonstration of this distinction is given by the fact that we may be struck by wonder at some phenomenon in spite of being satisfied with our understanding and explanation of it. A rainbow, for instance, can inspire wonder in a way that is quite unaffected by the knowledge that it is produced by the refraction of sunlight through droplets of water in the atmosphere.

It is not that Malpas is arguing that curiosity and explanation are alien to philosophy. Rather, his point is that philosophy cannot be reduced to mere curiosity. That the impulse to philosophize is fueled continually by the wonder which is in excess to our power to explain. Part of the origin of philosophy then is making the ordinary extra-ordinary in the interplay between the transparency of explanation and the opacity in wondering.

One can feel the strong Heideggerian influence here. For Malpas, part of this wondering is connected to always already being-in-the-world. It is in the interplay between transparency and opacity (the revealing and concealing character of aletheia), that our being there is “illuminated”. How is this? Malpas, tells us that it is the opacity in continuing to wonder at a rainbow calls attention to our situated-ness in the world. The only way I can really make sense of what Malpas is trying to get at here is that our wonder – and the opacity that always ‘doubles’ explanation- calls attention to our inability to have a view from nowhere:

Wonder is thus a returning, something with the abruptness of a sudden shock, to the world to which we always, already belong – it is in that return that philosophy begins and to which it must always itself go back.

Although, I find Malpas position interesting and I appreciate the idea that we can remain in wonder at the opacity of the world even after explanation, it does not seem to me that this is the origin of philosophy or answers the question ‘why do philosophy’. This is not to deny that philosophy does not begin in wonder and a sense of opacity – it surely does that for many. But to connect wonder with a situated-ness and a return to the ‘everyday’ does not seem to be the ‘telos’ of philosophy. There are many more questions that can spur philosophizing and there can be more ends as well.

Adam Arnold

One author I recently spent time studying through the Not School philosophy of mind group is Douglas Hofstadter, who I’m here going to call “Doug” so I don’t have to type and potentially misspell “Hofstadter” 30 times. Doug became a big name in philosophy largely due to his very popular Gödel, Escher, Bach, a fat tome that graces many a wanna-be philosopher’s bookshelf (Mine included), likely not too far read. I Am a Strange Loop, which is the one I read, is his more recent work (2007), meant to expand upon the view of consciousness put forward in his earlier work.

He’s trying to explain (contra Searle and others) how it is that the brain, a mass of particles, can be aware of its own experience, and he does this, in part, by telling the story of how Kurt Gödel showed that the system of natural numbers (1,2,3,4…) is rich enough to represent any linguistic system, and thus can have sentences in it about the system itself. This part of the book, though interesting, is not actually essential for making his point: we’re all aware (or should be) of how 0′s and 1′s in computing are sufficient to represent any arbitrary content.

So the idea is that the brain, too, works on the basis of symbols, and not in the sense of symbols that someone is reading (and I’m just not clear whether this concept can be fruitfully connected to Lacan’s notion of symbols in the unconscious), but in the sense that, broadly speaking, if the environment acts on a substance and leaves marks, those marks symbolize that feature of the environment. So in a brain–any brain–repeated stimuli give rise to structures that Doug wants to call “symbols,” and this structure is then reactivated whenever that stimulus comes back. For some very complex beings, one of these structures is “myself,” and once you add the ability to linguistically cognize to the brain, then the number and connections between these symbols get very elaborate, so that our “self” symbol is complicated, and constantly built upon, in that our every experience adds something to it, such that, e.g. if a rude person makes us mad, then part of the sense of self becomes “I’m the kind of person that gets mad at that kind of rudeness.”

Now, quite a lot of this information that feeds the self is publicly observable, and the part that is not is mostly linguistically interpreted (by ourselves), such that we can and often do tell our intimate friends about it (as for Lacan, much of the self is linguistic and thus transmissible). Consequently, the symbol/structure that you have in your brain representing someone else is actually not fundamentally different in kind than the one you have of yourself. It’s just that the “myself” symbol has a lot more data feeding into it, all the time (though of course much of this is redundant in terms of real informational content), so that anyone else’s symbol for you will necessarily be “low-fidelity” compared to your own.

What’s interesting, and not to my mind fully spelled out, in the book is the relationship between consciousness and the self. Sartre, in the book we discussed Transcendence of the Ego, sharply distinguishes between these two: the self is a semi-public creation similar to what Doug describes, whereas consciousness, for Sartre, is a transparent, fundamental part of experience (which he goes on to describe as “nothingness,” but that’s another story). Doug, on the other hand, has a theory of the self, and thinks that this is just the same as talking about consciousness. Note that this concern with consciousness is not the same concern as whether there is a “subject” that “has” experiences over and above the public self; you can believe that talk of consciousness is irreducible to talk of the built self without thereby positing some different, higher self that is the one that is conscious. As Sartre puts it, consciousness is a primary feature of our experience and the self is built later. For Doug, we should consider an animal conscious only insofar as it’s built up this kind of self-symbol. So consciousness will be a matter of degree: there is probably little-to-nothing that it is “like to be” a mosquito, yet certainly a dog has a conception of self, and once you get language in there you get the whole deal.

One of the points of phenomenology Doug dwells on is how we experience people who have died. If you know someone really well, have a really developed sense of them, then you can, in effect, shift your perceptions so you’re thinking about the contents of your experience as (you think) they would. You know what they like, how they judge things, how they react, and the more you’re around them, the more you “absorb” them, the more you yourself not only might come to be like them (altering your own self-structure), but moreover (and even in the absence of your actually changing your self-structure), you find yourself able to shift gears and in a sense be that person, albeit the low-res version. By getting building up someone else’s self symbol, you get the “what it’s like to be” them part of it, i.e. a qualitatively identical (well, similar) though not of course numerically identical consciousness to theirs. And given the arguments from Parfit against robust personal identity, qualitative identity is all there really is.

To be a self, according to this theory, is to have a set of knowledge about yourself, including the way you experience things, and then to have new experiences through those eyes, so to speak. What a personality is is a set of habits: emotional reactions, recurrent thoughts, a “point of view.” This is illustrated through several analogies, including one from Parfit: If you’re teleported, your body at its original position being destroyed and then reconstituted at another location, with all the physical and memory details intact, most of us have the intuition that this describes the same person being moved. Certainly the end person would claim to the be same as the starting person, and with all the evidence on his side. However, what if the original weren’t destroyed, and so we end up with two people, with all the same physical and mental characteristics. According to Doug, these would BOTH be the same person, at least at that moment before the two of them start having divergent experiences. So the personality is portable: it’s a pattern, and hence it’s not crazy to say that when I gain a vivid conception of you, carry you around in my head, have imaginary conversations with you after you die, that I really have some form of you in there.

If it seems obvious that what I have is just a copy of you, then think about what the teleported has in relation to the starting dude, or for that matter what you have now in relation to what you had 10 years ago. You switch out physical matter over time, but are called the “same person” not only for social reasons (you look the same), but because we feel the same.

Doug was the dissertation adviser of David Chalmers, and the book is in part a response to Dave’s The Conscious Mind (which I discussed with the philosophy of mind Not School group; you can hear part of that here). He doesn’t seem to buy what I take to be Chalmers’s claim that the non-scrutability of the mental from the physical is different than making a metaphysical claim about the difference between mind and body. Chalmers argues that given that the laws of nature are how they are, two identical physical systems will have the same consciousness (or lack thereof). Chalmers and Doug on that, and that this correlation is not belied by the fact that as a practical matter, one can’t translate mental talk into physical talk; they’re both functionalists that think that the essence of what determines consciousness is a pattern of elements, which could then theoretically play out on different hardware systems, so we could get AI, or maybe save someone’s consciousness to a computer and have them live on that way, or similar things. For Chalmers, though, the correlation between the functional arrangement and consciousness still leaves something unexplained: even knowing all the functional facts wouldn’t allow us to deduce the fact of consciousness unless we’d already established a correlation through observation of repeated cases. The correlation itself would remain a mystery, and he characterizes that by saying that we can imagine, if the laws of nature were different, that you could have the functional arrangement and not have consciousness: a zombie universe, essentially, where all the behavior is the same and yet there’s no “light on,” no consciousness. Doug has no patience with this kind of hypothetical; it would leave room for a parallel world David Chalmers, arguing for the irreducibility of consciousness while still, himself, not being conscious as all. Admitting that this is even a logical possibility is in essence denying the procedures that we use, right now, to determine that other people around us are conscious.

I don’t feel like Doug has done justice to Chalmers’s position here, and I don’t entirely buy Doug’s idea that the phenomenal is sufficiently explained by the self-symbol. It may well be that growth in the self-symbol correlates to increased consciousness (this seems a very plausible and highly useful result of this book), but I also buy Chalmers’s charge that unless you’ve explained consciousness in the first place, then pointing to self-consciousness is not going to solve the problem. This “higher order theory” of consciousness seemed to me as of our philosophy of mind episode to be the best bet to explain consciousness, but now Wes and Chalmers have just about convinced me otherwise.

Putting aside the question of consciousness, though, I like Doug’s picture of the self as built in this semi-public way, which leaves it an open question how much of the matter of the self gets filled in by how other people treat us (per Hegel), what we figure out ourselves (like during Lacan’s mirror stage, or Ayn Rand, who I’m reading now in preparation for a future episode, is all about this to a pretty silly degree), and what comes to us second-hand through the terms of our language itself (the bulk of Lacan’s account). I think, actually, Doug’s picture defuses some of these conflicts we see in Lacan and Sartre over self-deception. True, I could of course think something like “I’m a great tennis player,” and so thinking that would be part of my self-symbol even while I actually suck at tennis, but something like Sartre’s concern about playing at being a waiter becomes not so pressing. By actually having the job of being a waiter day after day, I either acquire certain habits or I don’t, and if I’m thinking about philosophy the whole time I’m zooming around with trays, then those habits will stick with me too. The self-symbol is not just a self-conception, not an ego-image, but it is actually what the self is. I may not understand myself, and (for all of these thinkers) you as an observer may understand me better than I do myself, but such self-deception doesn’t seem entailed by the self-symbol idea itself.

While bad faith represents the prime ethical upshot of Sartre’s view, for Doug, the ethical comes in this ability to take in others’ selves: to develop robust symbols for other people (and animals, even) that we can then “see through.” With such sympathy comes compassion, and being a “large souled” person would have everything to do not only with acting ethically, but in having developed a certain mental capacity that would allow you to understand and “be in sync with” a lot of other people. This theme is not the focus of the book, and could certainly use more development. For instance, even if I gain such a self-symbol and thus sympathy for many individuals, we’d have to say how and if this would play out into a sympathy with humanity as a whole. Certainly my sympathy with and compassion for a suffering animal doesn’t mean I have a developed symbol for that particular animal.

I also had some issues with how this in Doug’s view played out in the aesthetic realm. For instance, he characterized Bach as large-soul music that only the large-souled can really understand and vibrate with. Fair enough: perhaps the musical geometry involved requires a certain level of intellect to really grasp. But it’s very clear that Doug has no tolerance for rock n’ roll of whatever brainy, emotionally developed variety. By his own theory, I think, this inability to sync with not just some particular objectionable individuals (one shouldn’t necessarily be going around trying to sync with serial killers) but with a whole, quite prominent form of life, should point out some limitation in his soulfulness, not that he’s transcended such things or otherwise locked himself off from them by his sympathy with Bach.

Overall, the book, like his more famous one, moves slowly but pleasantly, and to me reads like an introductory primer to a position than then needs more rigorous, systematic, and footnoted treatment in a more traditionally academic paper, which I of course would then probably not get around to reading. It’s fun and thought-provoking, and not dumbed down so as to leave out what appear to be the detailed limits of Doug’s thoughts on the subject.

-Mark Linsenmayer

1. In chapter 2 about “The Nature of Unconscious Thought,” he concludes (on p. 22) by saying, “Now this way of conceptualizing the unconscious apparently leaves no room for a subject of any kind. There is a type of structure automatically and autonomously unfolding in/as the unconscious, and there as absolutely no need to postulate any kind of consciousness of this automatic movement.” This is all in line with Sartre (at least) and with Lacan’s view of the ego: while there is a self as object (the ego), as social creation that we have beliefs about (our “self-image”) and which exists in a social space, that self is NOT the subject, not the one that does our actions.

2. Ch. 4 is called “The Lacanian Subject,” and Fink distinguishes (on p. 35) Lacan from the structuralists and post-structuralists:

Structure seemed to excluce the very possibility of the existence of a subject… Lacan… maintains and defends both concepts–structure and subject–in a rigorous theoretical framework. Nevertheless, as he strips the subject of so many of the characteristics usually attributed to it in Western thought… it is not always easy to see what role is left to the subject…

Lacan says… “the subject is never more than supposed”… the subject is never more than an assumption on our part. [It's] a necessary assumption for Lacan, a construct without which psychoanalytic experience cannot be accounted for…

3. He then, throughout ch. 4, tells us what the subject is not: it’s not the Cartesian subject, it “is not the subject of the statement,” it “appears nowhere in what is said.” What it is is fleeting (p. 41): “this enunciating subject… only appears when a propitious occasion presents itself… [It] subsists only long enough to protest, to say ‘No.’ Once the subject has said his or her piece, what he or she has said usurps his or her place; the signifier replaces him or her; he or she vanishes… This subject has no other being than as a breach in discourse.” However, immediately after that (p. 42), Fink clarifies that this description “applies.. more specifically to what one might call the ‘Freudian subject’ than to the Lacanian subject.” You can see how this description of subject as breach sounds like the unconscious butting in, but per #1 above, the unconscious has no subject.

4. Still in ch. 4 (p. 43), Fink describes the Lacanian subject as the inverse of the Cartesian subject. By Cartesian subject he’s referring to the “I think therefore I am” formulation, and taking this not as a deductive argument for a persistent subject (as Descartes did) but more in the way Hume and others took Descartes, which is to say that while thinking is going on, there is, at that moment, a subject, immanent in that experience. So the subject doesn’t exist over time, but is just a “point of view” while consciously thinking at a given moment. But according to Lacan, “the subject… cannot take refuge in an idyllic moment where thought and being coincide but is, rather, forced to choose one of the other. He can ‘have’ either thought or being, but never both at the same time.” Why? Well, because, again, per #3, Lacan is concerned with the unconscious: “Lacan thus seems to hold out for us some sort of prospect of a subject with true or real being that would be diametrically opposed to the false being of the ego, but this is not ultimately the case.” So Lacan is like Freud (#3), but yet not like Freud (per #1), and yet there is a subject in some sense (per #2), though it’s not a “substance” like Descartes’s subject, and presumably we can’t just say it’s the body itself either that is the subject, that “does” our actions.

5. “The Split Subject” section (p. 45) says:

The subject is split between the ego… and unconscious…, between conscious and unconscious, between an ineluctably false sense of self and the automatic functioning of language… in the unconscious.

…The subject is nothing but this very split. …A speaking being’s two “parts” or avatars share no common ground… This momentous split is the product of the functioning of language… our alienation in language… While this split has nothing in common with the kind of agency we tend to associate with subjectivity, it is nevertheless already a first step beyond structure. Language as Other does not automatically make a subject of a homo sapiens child; it can misfire, as it does in psychosis… Though the subject is nothing here but a split between two forms of otherness–the ego as other and the unconscious as the Other’s discourse–the split itself stands in excess of the Other… The advent of the split subject signals a corresponding division or breakdown of the Other.

6. “Beyond the Split Subject” (p. 46) elaborates the solution hinted at by the last couple sentences of #4. Lacan wants to retain allegiance to the Freudain quote sometimes translated as “where it was so I will be” (or “where the id was, so the ego will be”):

I must become the place where “it” was or reigned… I here apperas as the subjct that analysis aims to bring forth: an I that assumes responsibility for the unconscious, that arises there in the unconscious linking up of thoughts which seems to take place all by itself, without the intervention of anything like a subject.

This I, or subject of the unconscious, as we might call it, is in general excluded at the level of unconscious thought. It comes into being, so to speak, only momentarily… But while it is just as… short-lived a subject as was that of the interruptions known as slips of the tongue… this specifically Lacanian subject is not so much an interruption as… the acceptance of responsibility for that which interrupts, a taking it upon oneself.

For Lacan claims that “one is always responsible for one’s position as subject.”

Again using Sartre for comparison: Sartre too emphasizes responsibility. You’re in bad faith if you don’t take responsibility for even your implicit (Sartre doesn’t like the word “unconscious;” the thinks that “unconscious thought” is self-contradictory) assessments of the world. We have ultimate control over our own attitudes, which include much of the way we interpret the world, whether we react positively or negatively to things that happen to us. Now, I have serious problems with this claim, but the point here is that Sartre can have such a view, and moreover believe in “subjectivity” in the sense that something like Descartes’s starting point has to the starting point for philosophy, without having anywhere in his theory a “subject.” Rather, again, there’s just the public ego (an object, not a subject), and NO transcendental subject lurking behind all of our experience (a la Kant), and consciousness itself, which is just nothing: just the form of the world itself in the phenomenological field.

Both Sartre’s and Lacan’s terminologies here are non-intuitive and non-conventional. If you want to say (as they both do) that identification of the public self with the agent of our actions is a mistake, then you have to tweak the language to accommodate your position. Sartre does this by turning to phenomenology and finds that while of course my body and my thoughts and all that feel like mine, that doesn’t mean that there was a “me” to have those things before the body and thoughts came along. Rather these phenomena, i.e. of the objects of our experience, are primary, and then “me” gets built off of that. I perceive, e.g. my emotions, and need to acknowledge those as me or be in bad faith. The self is built, but needs to be built coherently, and in consciousness of my freedom and responsibility in building it as it is.

Lacan likewise agrees that the self is built but for clinical reasons wants to separate the conscious ego, which is a product of the imagination (e.g. the mirror stage where we get an “image” of ourself) and the symbolic (languages as the Other’s desire) that’s a product of normal development but which involves a lot of self deception, from these identifications with the products of the unconscious which Lacan thinks are key in advancing therapeutically. While (per #1) there is no subject of the unconscious, I can take responsibility for the unconscious (well, bits of it) nonetheless: I can claim them, and call them “mine.” For Lacan, this describes the subject’s fleetingly coming into existence. The subject is essentially an action, not a substance, or more precisely, a phenomena encountered during an action. It’s important that the analysand use this “me” terminology so that he or he feels ownership; that’s just part of claiming responsibility.

To reiterate, I think this dispute is largely terminological: I don’t think either way of using or not using the term “subject” can be ideal, i.e. accord with our pre-philosophical notions of “I,” because these theories are meant to correct those pre-philosophical notions. Nonetheless, I find Lacan’s formulation unnecessarily obscure, and think he could just use “self” as an umbrella term for all the self-identifications here, whatever else he wants to say about their role in psychological health.

-Mark Linsenmayer

Lacan’s “Seminar on the Purloined Letter” from 1956 (which you can read here) analyzes the Edgar Allan Poe short story from 1845 (which you can read and listen to here or listen via iTunes U). Lacan’s point is to investigate “repetition automatism,” which was a puzzle for Freud: if all of our actions come from the libido (the pleasure principle), then why do we sometimes engage in repetitive, self-destructive behavior. Lacan’s explanation is that the unconscious is not just a bundle of drives, but is made up of symbolic strings, which participate in systems that have their own internal logic and thus motive force. In the story, the various characters take on certain roles in reaction to a letter being used to blackmail the Queen of France. The content of the letter is not divulged to the reader (is it evidence of an affair? a political plot? embarrassing fan fiction?), and so Lacan describes it as a “pure signifier” whose travel among the various characters constitutes a repetitive cycle: coming into possession of the letter pushes characters into a state of vulnerability, until at the end Lacan reveals that the supposed hero-genius of the story (who incidentally was a direct influence on the creation of Sherlock Holmes; this series of stories pretty much invented the modern detective story) has himself exposed his backside (figuratively) to the analyst, i.e. Lacan and his readers.

Jacques Derrida, in 1975, published his response to Lacan’s article as “The Purveyor of Truth.” In short, he criticized Lacan for not analyzing a text in such a way that makes use of Derrida’s deconstruction and his related claims about metaphysics and language. Even though Lacan is notoriously suspicious of traditional philosophical claims about truth (he unsurprisingly sees all such claims as expressions of psychological and social phenomena instead of their being really about what they claim to be), Derrida claims that the old fashioned “metaphysics of presence” is still alive and well in Lacan’s analysis, that Lacan depicts the act as speech as primary over writing (e.g. for Lacan, when you talk, you may let slip the contents of the unconscious, which as revealed are somehow more truly you than what you consciously think, though this is complicated; it turns out nether are “the real”), and that Lacan in analyzing the themes and content of the story and not the style of storytelling is missing the point of literary analysis. Not to mention that according to Derrida, psychoanalysis finds itself everywhere, meaning that Lacan is reading the usual hypersexualized/Oedipal triangle/castration story into Poe where this is really not warranted.

We read these articles in the collection The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading, complied in 1988 by John P. Muller and William J. Richardson. This is much preferable over chasing the abovementioned articles around on the Internet because:

1. There are supporting essays explaining specifically what Lacan is talking about and giving background on Derrida’s general project.
2. Even on the Poe story itself, there are lots of footnotes explaining where he got various ideas and other elements.
3. The Derrida essay has been mercifully abridged from some other versions, and the abridgment was Derrida-approved.
4. There’s some background on psychoanalytic reading in general, including an essay by Marie Bonaparte, a patient and student (well, “associate”) of Freud, whose more overtly sex-obsessed reading was read and criticized by Lacan.
5. There are no less than eight other essays in the volume that evaluate and expound upon the two articles we all read, including one by editor John Muller that helpfully explains Lacan’s debt to Hegel (i.e. my comment above about “logic and thus motive force” is an idea straight out of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit).

Beyond this, there’s plenty more information out there on Poe himself: it’s helpful to understand “The Purloined Letter” to at least read or listen to the first in the Dupin trilogy (the Letter being the third), “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” which introduces and explains the genius of the Dupin character. I also found it helpful to look at Poe’s essay “Philosophy of Composition,” which exemplifies how Poe actually worked. In the essay, he reveals how he crafted “The Raven,” i.e. very meticulously, with seemingly sole attention to affecting the reader, not trying to make any kind of philosophical point. While this doesn’t mean that he’s not tapping into some interesting psychological phenomena, to me it was a testament to what literary analysis actually should be, i.e. understanding why a work is effective and the techniques involved rather than merely appropriating the work to one’s already existent philosophical project.

Buy The Purloined Poe.

What is the self? Is that the same as the experiencing subject? Lacan says no: while the self (the ego) is an imaginative creation, cemented by language, the subject is something else, something split (at least initially) between consciousness and the unconscious. Lacan mixes this Freudian picture with semiotics–an emphasis on systems of linguistic symbols–using this to both create his picture of the psyche and explain how psychological disorders arise.

The regular PEL foursome (with Wes acting much like a guest due to his formal study of psychoanalysis) try to make sense of this complex picture as presented by American psychoanalyst Fink and complain about Lacan’s language as they wade into the nearly impenetrable writing of the Frenchman himself. Featuring the alienation of language! Eruptions into consciousness! Undifferentiated needs! “The Real” opposing “reality!” A baby preening in front of a mirror! Castration! And introducing the mysterious “object a!” Read more about the topic and get the texts.

End song: “Something Else” by Madison Lint, recorded mostly in late 2002 with vocals added just now; written by Jim Low and Mark Linsenmayer.

Please go to partiallyexaminedlife.com/donate to help support our efforts. A recurring gift will gain you all the benefits of PEL Citizenship. Thanks!

Writing and Difference

Here’s an example of some of the sections Paul and I discussed:

But—and this is the heart of the matter—everything that is exterior in relation to the book, everything that is negative as concerns the book, is produced within the book. The exit from the book, the other and the threshhold, are all articulated within the book. The other and the threshhold can only be written, can only affirm themselves in writing. One emerges from the book only within the book, because, for Jabès, the book is not in the world, but the world is in the book.

“The world exists because the book exists.” “The book is the work of the book” “The book multiplies the book” (p. 33). To be is to-be-in-the-book, even if Being is not the created nature often called the Book of God during the Middle Ages. “If God is, it is because He is in the book” (p. 32). Jabès knows that the book is possessed and threatened, that “its response is still a question, that its dwelling is ceaselessly threatened” (p. 32). But the book can only be threatened by nothing, non-Being, nonmeaning. If it came to be, the threat—as is the case here—would be avowed, pronounced, domesticated. It would be of the house and of the book.”

There were definitely points of frustration and parts where Paul and I were both throwing up our hands, but this discussion left the both of us a little more assured and ready to tackle more Derrida. If you enjoy what we’re talking about, join the group. On the other hand, if you completely disagree, then definitely join the group.

PEL Citizens (whether members of the group or not), can find the discussion recording on the Free Stuff for Citizens page.

–Rian Mitch

The situation seems pretty simple: We’re each on our own independent, spiritual quest. We can study on our own or we can go see what school has to offer us. We can seek wisdom by reading or talking to people we respect, or, as students, solicit help in making our ideas coherent by bouncing them off peers (even our loved ones not so interested in philosophy) or by trying to run our writing by a more experienced, professional, and/or professorly person or two to improve our skills.

Contrast this, however, with the production of art, particularly music. As a songwriter/performer, there’s a pretension (for most of us) that we want not only to engage in this creative activity, but that we want to share it, not just with other musicians in our band (though that kind of interaction is nice), but with the world at large. I as a fan have these intimate experiences with mulling over songs, albums, and artists, and want to contribute to that culture; I want to have other people getting as much out of my songs as I do.

I don’t think there’s anything essential about this difference to the activities in question, though. It just so happens that right now I feel like I do have this developed body of music that I want to share, whereas I see myself as a philosophy student, not as someone with a completed philosophical product that I desperately want to share with the world. But we all want our creations to be meaningful, to have impact, and despite my lack of (that sort of) philosophical pretension, I do think I’ve learned a thing or two and am gratified to have an outlet to share that. So I can certainly imagine with no difficulty beginner musicians who feel no need to share their creations and advanced philosophical creators (whether professionals or not) who feel about their papers and their know-how the way I do about my music.

What differs, though, are the social outlets available for these two forms of creation (and by all means I’m not contrasting art and philosophy as a whole; there are many arts that don’t have the sort of established outlets that popular, recorded music has). As difficult as it may be for a musician to get other people to bother to listen to his stuff, at least we, as a culture, have established patterns whereby people do discover musicians and glut on their output. Yes, most people are fed corporate radio to the extent that they aren’t going to appreciate music that’s not recorded in as professional a manner, and given how low the chances that anyone in particular whom you know is a musician actually produces something of the quality and style you’ll like, yes, it’s very hard to get a buzz going about your band. But still, there such a thing as band buzz, there are popular local acts, there are people that appreciate and even seek out underground talent, and moreover there’s an industry (even if ailing) by which underground talent comes aboveground, with radio, and CD stores, and iTunes, MySpace, and craploads of other Internet outlets.

For philosophers, things are not so easy. As annoying as “hey, listen to my CD” might be, “hey, read my 200 page book” is much more annoying. Philosophy has the advantage of, and recourse to, academia and its supporting publicity machine, such as it is. If you’re looking for a book in a certain area, you look for someone well credentialed who’s written in that area, or more likely a book that’s been cited by other works or is otherwise well known, which requires, in the vast majority of cases, exactly that kind of credentialing. The only exception is to produce a book (like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) that becomes popular as a book, and not as a philosophy book, i.e. the actual best-seller list.

But all we PEL-involved folks know that academia is all surface-level bullshit, right? Philosophy is raw, one person seeking truth, or one enlightening another, or a group of truth-seekers battling against the forces of meaninglessness and confusion. Well, this may well be a stance we podcasters take sometimes, and doubtless one that some of our audience would agree to. As a matter of reality, PEL is almost entirely parasitic upon academia: we rely largely on the buzz among professional philosophers to choose our topics, pull fodder for our interpretations (e.g. from the Stanford Encyclopedia), and of course we ourselves are products of academia even if we’re not currently involved. Whether or not this is a good thing is another question, but I just want to be clear that we don’t think ourselves the model of independent philosophizing. It’s a social effort, and even though the professionalization of that effort has its downsides, without that professionalization the landscape would be much much poorer for us fans/consumers/seekers.

How colleagues deal with each other within academia is actually a pretty good model for dealing with each other outside of academia. Professors are encouraged to be social, and hopefully, they’ll discuss their work with each other and so get some useful cross-pollination going among different disciplines. But unless they’re actually working in precisely the same area, the exchange is going to be somewhat casual, unless one of them decides that, e.g. the other’s position is so far off and so influential that it’s worth a turf war. (I’m thinking of the Searle-Derrida debate.) That aside, the ways of relating would be:

1. Actually collaborating together on a work
2. The semi-casual exchange of thoughts among those that respect each other, which may enrich either’s ideas or at least presentation
3. In effect becoming students and working together to learn some new thing
4. One becoming a student of another

PEL is a model of #3. Wes may know more about psychoanalysis than the rest of us, and that’s great if we get to pick up some of that from him in our discussion of Lacan, but we don’t set him up as in #4, which would become work for him and could be unnecessarily demeaning for us.

But what if, as in the case of the experienced musician, Wes just wants to teach us psychoanalysis. He thinks that we really would benefit from learning it, and it would be fun for him to share it with us, and maybe that he has a lot of original ideas in that area that he thinks teaching us about would be of benefit to not only us but the intellectual community as a whole? Well, he can certainly offer, but unless we had reason to think him a worthy teacher of that subject (which doesn’t necessarily require him to be an expert), and unless we were all on such a quest so as to recognize studying under him to be reasonable next step in our learning, it just wouldn’t happen.

In the case of Wes, it’s not unreasonable that he could attract students by demonstrating his expertise and acumen on the podcast, and getting a Not School group going. But in that case we’ve gone beyond the four options above: he wouldn’t be reaching out to you listeners as colleagues, but as potential students, through the medium of the podcast, which in that case would act (like the literary bestseller list) as a means to bypass academic credentialing and the classroom infrastructure in putting himself up in a professorial position.

If you don’t have a popular podcast or website or church or streetcorner on a campus where you park your ass a few times a week and preach, or some other means of bypass, and you don’t have academic credentials (and really, even if you do), then you’re limited to the list of 4 above. Moreover, extending even these four outside of an academic setting involves problems. How do you meet a collaborator? A co-learner? This is one of the reasons we created Not School, and there are of course plenty of other Internet avenues through which one could hook up with like-minded philosophy fans for potential collaboration.

This puts one much in the position of the musician looking for bandmates, with similar politics involved. So with my many years in that position, what can I share that might be relevant here?

1. It’s about them, not you. Just because you’re talented doesn’t mean that anyone will want to hang out with you. You have to be doing something that’s already what that particular person wants to be doing, and doing it in a way that’s fun for him or her.

2. It’s an economic transaction. Loosely speaking, that is. No money need be involved, but per #1, they have to be getting something out of it to give you what you want out of it. If they too are singer/songwriters (philosophers), then you have to play their songs and not just yours (you have to read their philosophy attentively too).

3. It’s probably easier to jump into something than to create your own. Join Not School or an existing local discussion group, or hang out at a particularly philosophical church or some other social organization. Angle for leadership once you’re there. Don’t be the guy that can only participate if he’s the leader. (Confession: I am that guy, most of the time.)

4. Find the optimum level of commitment. The chances of finding people who are as obsessed as you are about the things you’re obsessed about are slim. So back off, have reasonable expectations, and try to make those expectations clear, whether it be one practice a week and a gig every month or a month-long Not School group with defined parameters that hopefully you can get people to agree to before joining up.

5. Build up credibility by making connections. If you can start a philosophy blog and engage others’ blogs intelligently such that they want to put heaps of comments on your blog, or play a steady stream of gigs at nice places, then you demonstrate that other people have found you tolerable. This of course is the big trick in any endeavor (can’t get someone to give you a job because you don’t already have experience doing that exact thing), and frankly, I wouldn’t get hung up on it. Either it comes in the natural course of doing what you want, or it’s not something worth busting yourself over. If your hunger for recognition is so strong that you can’t do without it, and yet you don’t have the desire or ability to devote yourself almost wholly to the task of building your brand, then you’re a walking contradiction and may want to have that looked into.

In conclusion, philosophy, like rock n’ roll, does not tolerate giant egos very well. This may be surprising to hear given that I’m sure you can bring to mind paradigm egomaniacs in both areas. But the odd celebrity is not and should not be your point of emulation. Just because Nietzsche or Wittgenstein or Pirsig or Lacan wrote and/or behaved like an inconsiderate asshole and was immortalized for it doesn’t mean that you can get away with that. Just because Prince can snap his fingers and get bandmates and fans doesn’t mean you can. The best default position in approaching others in either realm is self-deprecation if not actual self-abnegation: pretend not to be pretentious even if you really are.

-Mark Linsenmayer

Simon Baron Cohen vis Cambridge Neuroscience

[DISCLAIMER:  Although I am using a conceptual distinction I got from the embedded Simon Baron-Cohen TEDx talk (where ever he got it from), I am not taking a position on his stance on Autism or Psychopathy.  I have no point of view about Autism and have reflected on empathy and psychopathy in this blog before, here and here.  I'm interested in the constituent parts of empathy that he lays out in relation to Smith and Hume's Moral Sentiment.  If you want to see some responses to Baron-Cohen on Autism, check out this blog or this one.]

Through the magic of Twitter, I was recently connected to a TEDx talk of Simon Baron Cohen on the erosion of empathy (embedded below).  After the requisite National Socialist reference, he outlined a distinction between two different aspects or types of empathy:  cognitive and affective.  Cognitive empathy is the ability to imagine someone else’s thoughts and feelings, the ability to put yourself in their position.  It is the recognition of the other’s state of being.  Affective empathy is the drive to respond with the appropriate emotion.

This put me in mind of our past discussion of Adam Smith and David Hume on Moral Sentiment.  Smith and Hume claimed that we build our understanding of morality by reflection (reason) on our reactions to people and events in comparison with the reactions of others.  These sentiments, filtered through the lens of rational moral judgment, form the basis of morality in any given society.  Smith explained the mechanism of sentiment as sympathy with others:  the ability to use imagination to put oneself in another’s place, feel their woes and judge oneself with respect to that experience.  That’s having a conscience.

I started out with the intent to see if I could reconcile Baron Cohen’s account with Smith and Hume’s and perhaps draw a distinction between a rational construction of morality vs a non-rational empathetic one.  Now I’m not so sure how they do or don’t fit together.

The question of how empathy plays in morality in both accounts is similar.  First, one needs to recognize when the situation of an other calls for empathy.  This consists of two parts:  one is being able to read external behaviors to identify suffering (or pain or sadness or whatever) and the second is the ability to imagine oneself in that other’s place.  The latter is the critical part in that, on both accounts, it is only by making the imaginative leap that one can ‘know’ what the other is experiencing.  Being able to recognize ‘outer’ clues to suffering isn’t enough to be empathetic:  one must be able to recreate or approximate the other’s internal life in one’s imagination (Smith points out that even if one can only do so imperfectly, this is sufficient).

Now, if one recognizes another suffering and can identify with it, one is being empathetic.  On the Smith/Hume account, empathy serves two purposes:  first, one compares one’s own empathetic responses to those of others.  Some seem to be shared, some not.  Taking all that into account one uses judgment to fashion a concept of conventional morality.  As in:  I feel bad (empathetic response) when I see X and every one I know feels bad when they see X, ergo X must be bad.  This is a bit of a simplification but the empathetic response is a guide for determining the moral.

Smith & Hume go further to say that empathy serves a second purpose and that is to motivate moral action.  Not only does one realize (over time, developmentally) that response R to X is moral, the empathetic capacity provides motivation to do R when X occurs.  This is Moral Sentiment.  Smith and Hume wanted to point out that reason or rational thought may determine what is moral but offer no motivation to do it.  Something further, a feeling, is required to impel one to action.

Initially I thought that Baron Cohen was offering a similar bifurcated structure but now I’m not so sure.  I thought the cognitive/affective distinction served the same purpose to distinguish what and then compel response.  But ultimately Baron Cohen is not talking about morality.  He’s concerned with the psychology of empathy itself, offering a distinction that Smith & Hume didn’t have and stopping short of trying to tie it into a broader moral context (although, true to TEDx form, he does make some sweeping generalizations at the end).

Cognitive empathy on Baron Cohen’s account seems to cover both the external recognition of the other’s suffering as well as the use of imagination to ‘know’ the other’s internal state as well.  In this it accords with the Smith/Humean account.  However for Smith/Hume, imagining the other’s internal state automatically generates those same feelings (or a best approximation) in the observer.  Having the capacity to empathize  means generating the appropriate emotional response.  Baron Cohen is saying that one can have recognition of suffering, know that one should be having a certain emotion in response and yet not feel that at all.

For Baron Cohen, there is a second movement in the empathetic response – the affective – which is the having of the empathetic emotion.  At one level we can simply see this as bringing modern psychology and neuroscience to a venerated philosophical tradition and reconcile it with the Smith/Humean account.  But I think it’s a bit more disruptive than that.

First, for Smith and Hume, to have empathy and reason is to have all you need for moral behavior.  Empathy is what gives you a basis for recognition of suffering and the motivation to act and combined with reason helps you to identify appropriate response.  Empathy is by nature affective.  For Baron Cohen, empathy has a strictly rational component – cognitive empathy – and an affective component that are distinct.

Baron Cohen presumably has some neuroscientific justification for this (I haven’t read all of his published works or watched all his talks but I’m assuming it’s out there) and needs it for his analysis of autism (affective but not cognitive) and psychopathy (cognitive but not affective).  When I look at in light of Moral Sentiment a la Smith and Hume, I see the distinction as offering them a way out of the knowledge of virtue is virtue trap in which Plato and Aristotle are stuck.

For Plato and Aristotle, knowledge of virtue (or the good) means doing virtue.  Both think that anyone who does wrong is simply ignorant of what is right.  It’s a defect or reason or knowledge.  It’s a problematic part of their ethical theories that Smith and Hume seem to be committed to as well.  The only way that Smith/Hume can say that someone acts immorally is either through a complete lack of empathy or a defect of reason.

The cognitive/affective distinction allows us to commit to a Moral Sentiment theory of morality while maintaining that someone who does wrong can be both in possession of knowledge and reason.  You can know what’s right and still not do it.  This helps accord to our intuitions about morality (lots of people do things they know are wrong) and works better when accounting for immoral behaviors in group dynamics (where conflicting feelings can override judgment).  Additionally, Baron Cohen points out that there is evidence that empathetic response falls on a bell curve and is developmental, impacted by things such as neglect in early childhood, learned obedience to authority, indoctrination into ideology and so on.  This allows us to maintain that morality via empathy is both teachable and correctable via behaviors as well as simply through reason.

What Baron Cohen’s distinction doesn’t do is explain what would impel one to act morally as opposed to just feel empathetic and it allows one to walk down the path of removing responsibility for immoral actions in those who ‘lack’ affective empathy.  Those concerns are valid on almost all psychological/neurobiological accounts of morality though and shouldn’t be considered decisive.

I strongly believe with Aristotle that virtue is learned, I side with Smith and Hume that it relies on empathy and I experience compassion as a practice a la Buddhism.  There is a way in which I see a cognitive/affective distinction allowing me to bind these three together somehow in a way I have not yet fully realized.  Watch Baron Cohen’s talk and let me know what you think.

–seth

[Spoiler]‘Mr. Tuttle’, as Lauren decides to call him, has a haunted look, he mimics old conversations between her and her late husband, he stares blankly, he eats, he pisses, he cries. It is easy to imagine Mr. Tuttle as imaginary, or a ghost, because only Lauren ever meets him, and, he has no explained origin.  Though one of Lauren’s fantasies is that he may be an escaped mental patient, that never pans out, and the mystery being remains mysterious. What is clear, is that Mr. Tuttle truly exists in Lauren’s mind making him a phenomenal fact, at least to her. The reality of Mr. Tuttle becomes even more obscure when Lauren, the body artist, begins performing Mr. Tuttle. [Spoiler Finished]  

The novel’s language is simple and the story flows beautifully from imagery to memory to self-reflection:

“Maybe this man experiences another kind of reality where he is here and there, before and after, and he moves from one to the other shatteringly, in a state of collapse, minus an identity, a language, a way to enjoy the savor of the honey-coated toast she watches him eat.

She thought maybe he lived in a kind of time that had no narrative quality. What else did she think? She sat in the nearly bare office on the second floor and didn’t know what else she thought.” (p.68)

This very afternoon (Sunday 3/31, 2pm central time) we will discuss Thomas Pynchon’s novel The Crying of Lot 49 with the Not School Fiction Group. If you’re familiar with this work and want to get in on the discussion, join Not School and check out the directions on the group to see how.

–Nathan Shane