Ideas of Imperfection

Coogan's Bluff

2009-11-16T10:06:00.001-05:00

Joshua Prager has written a sublime, prosaic book about the "shot heard round the world": Bobby Thomson's home run to win the National League pennant on the final playoff pitch of 1951. It has been compared to The Boys of Summer, but it is less parochial, more truthful, and more serious.

Prager's research is both exhilarating and exhaustive. In 2001, he became notorious for an article about the Giants' telescopic stealing of signs. Here it is catalogued in merciless detail.

As are the lives of Branca and Thomson. In a chapter that is a tour de force, Prager interrupts the 1951 season at the playoff to narrate in synchrony their paths to this defining moment: Branca's huge and happy family, Thomson's taciturn father and supportive brother. The intermission takes up a fifth of the book.

It is emblematic of Prager's digressions that the final game itself is paused, as Thomson steps into the batter's box, before the pitch – the swing – Russ Hodges' call – for a paragraph that begins thus:

Pitcher and hitter had both awakened that morning at 7:30 in the home of parents. Both had eaten eggs prepared by his mother, Thomson with a side of bacon, Branca a side of ham.

"We are not so different, you and I." How could we understand this miracle before we knew the breakfasts of which it was made?

If the events of Prager's narrative are deliberately inverted and pulled apart, so too his words. In the first ten pages:

Thus did a bloody digit and enflamed appendix now convene Durocher and Horace Stoneham in New York's center-field clubhouse.

Durocher was obnoxious, would from short instruct his pitcher to throw at opposing batters.

All about the city were starting nines, and the consequence most embraced of its newfound proficiency was the overtaking of New York.

There are dozens of these throughout the book: prepositions, verbs, scattered through sentences to surprise the reader. Meaning waits, as a string of signifiers, names and dates is given sense at last by the missing term, on which everything pivots. Call no man happy till he throws the final pitch.

What is a life, asks Prager? Facts and facts and facts: eggs eaten, girlfriends left, wives kissed and parents grieved. But there is only one fact about Branca: he threw the fastball Thomson hit.

The Sole Text of Rational Psychology

2009-11-09T06:41:00.005-05:00

Two passages to begin with. First, from Martin Amis, The Information:

"What did they say? Did anyone say anything?"

Yes. The man said, "I'm a child."

"The man said you're a child?" And Richard went back four or five years, to the natural confusions of early speech. "How are you?" he would ask him; and Marco would say, logically enough, "You're fine." And Marco would reach out to him with his arms and say, "Carry you." And Richard would pick him up and carry him…

No. He said I'm a child.

Then the following echo, from Life As We Know It, a memoir by Michael Bérubé:

Well into his second year, in fact, Nick persisting in saying "take him" to his parents whenever he wanted to be picked up. "No, no, take me," we said to him, to which he answered, logically enough, "take you."

Adorable, huh? But such inversions can also be symptomatic: many autistic children call themselves 'you' not 'I'; they struggle to master the conventional use of pronouns. Thus the natural confusions of childhood, logical enough in themselves, are marked as pathology: red flags.

Nor is this just any conceptual muddle, like a failure to grasp that numbers are for counting, or the eccentricity of Wittgenstein's wood sellers, who measure quantity by the area covered by a pile of wood, regardless of its volume. That there is an intimate connection between cognition and the first person concept is a thesis of the Critique of Pure Reason:

It must be possible for the 'I think' to accompany all my representations; for otherwise something would be represented in me which could not be thought at all, and that is equivalent to saying that the representation would be impossible, or at least would be nothing to me.

What kind of mind could lack this capacity? What form of thought is available to those who cannot distinguish themselves from others?

These questions evoke a persisting trope in the literature of autism: that of autist as alien. Temple Grandin writes that, for her mother, dealing with her was "like dealing with somebody from another planet." This is the obverse of the notorious defects of social cognition characteristic of autism. Grandin memorably called herself, in relation to others, "an anthropologist on Mars."

In the opening chapter of Thinking in Pictures, Grandin tries to depict the contents of her kind of mind. "Depict" is right, since she is an intensely visual thinker.

Unlike those of most people, my thoughts move from video-like specific images to generalizations and concepts. For example, my concept of dogs is inextricably linked to every dog I've ever known. It's as if I have a card catalogue of dogs I have seen, complete with pictures, which continually grows as I add more examples to my video library. If I think about Great Danes, the first memory that pops into my head is Dansk, the Great Dane owned by the headmaster at my high school […] the images I visualize are always specific. There is no generic, generalized Great Dane.

This is Berkeley's attack on abstract ideas – and something like Hume's solution. If ideas represent pictorially, and there is no such thing as a generic picture, we have to construct our concepts from images as associative files.

Reviewing Grandin's book in Hume Studies, Elijah Millgram went so far as to call it

a window into a mind of which Hume's psychology is for the most part true. […] he was, it now appears, inadvertently describing not his own experience, and not human mentation in general, but a certain type of autism.

It is a tempting move, to map the alien to the familiar – though which is which will depend on what you know. But it can't be right. Millgram is too mild when he remarks that "twentieth-century philosophers no longer find the psychology [of the British empiricists] convincing" because it "did not make good on its explanatory obligations […] a thought's being a mental picture is not a satisfactory account of why it has the content it does." Even if we drop the question of content, how to make sense of such mundane phenomena as belief, which Hume was led to equate with an indefinable "force" or "vivacity" of ideas? Quite apart from its obscurity, Hume's conception only works for ideas of particular things: it is an account of belief in x, not belief that p. Propositional belief would have to relate distinct ideas, some of them abstract – but not by association. Hume leaves no room for this.

To say this is not to question Grandin's testimony: she does not claim to be a Humean mind. But it does imply a certain failure. Her book explains how acute visualization may compensate for cognitive shortfalls. But we want more than that. When we read her words as a field report from another planet, they promise a window to the alien mind: a mode of thinking that is nothing but pictures. However it may seem, this cannot be made intelligible. It is only an illusion of thought.

Philosophical Experiments

2009-11-02T13:18:00.010-05:00

[Warning to the reader: the remarks that follow cite no-one and do not attempt to engage with details; but they are in part a response to the first two essays in this book.]

What is called "experimental philosophy" is diverse and does not admit of unified treatment. Some of it enlists the existing work of empirical scientists where it might be relevant to the questions of philosophy. While I may not always agree about the relevance, this seems innocent enough.

But there are more radical threads. One is a variety of "naturalism" that entails the complete rejection of a priori knowledge and non-empirically justified belief. Let the armchair blaze.

It is sometimes claimed by advocates of "naturalism" that the armchair method depends on a hopeless view of philosophy as conceptual analysis: what could one discover from the armchair, if anything, but the shape of one's conceptual space? (Can one discover even that? See below.) But whatever we make of the rest of it, the sociology of Williamson's recent book is sound when he denies that this view is orthodox. Many philosophers reject the conceptual analyst's account of a priori knowledge.

Some do not, of course, but others give other accounts, and there is a silent majority. Moreover, the pressure to countenance the a priori and to do so in a way that outstrips conceptual analysis or "epistemological analyticity" can be seen in any case, from the traditional problem of induction. According to a tempting principle,

One can be justified in believing p on the basis of evidence, q, only if one is independently justified in believing [if p then q].

This has the fairly rapid upshot that, if we are justified in believing things inductively, we must be non-empirically justified in believing contingent propositions. The argument may go wrong, but it must be faced by any honest attempt to live without the a priori or to confine it to the analysis of concepts.

This is the briefest sketch; I have not tried to say why the principle above should tempt us. But let the record state that there is an argument for a priori justification that has nothing to do with analyticity and everything to do with the threat of scepticism.

It is ironic, in this context, that the most baffling experimentalist project – the taking of surveys that elicit folk intuitions about such matters as knowledge, intentional action, and moral responsibility – would have a definite point if the content of our concepts was fixed by the corresponding dispositions, as some conceptual analysts believe. Witness the idiom, "folk concept of ____," as if one could make this theory true by stipulation. If the theory is false, we need some other incentive to care what the surveys say.

One of the reasons commonly given is that when we find that our intuitions are parochial, the beliefs that rest on them are undermined. But we should ask: what justifies that response? Perhaps the view that intuitions are evidence, akin to perceptual appearances. For if things look different to others, whose perceptual mechanisms we have no reason to question apart from the present discrepancy, that should give us pause. The problem is that we need not – should not – think of intuitions in that way. We could think of them, instead, as beliefs that are justified non-empirically, if at all, and not by the "evidence" of intuitive appearances.

Alternatively, the threat of parochiality might rest on a controversial view in the epistemology of disagreement, that we should give as much weight to the opinions of others as to our own unless we have antecedent reason to doubt their reliability. On the contrary, if some of my beliefs are justified a priori, quite apart from evidence, won't that give me reason to doubt the reliability of those who disagree, antecedent to – well, everything.

Again, these arguments may be wrong. But let the record state that inferences from surveys to the application of concepts or the justification of beliefs rest on hidden machinery: theories of concept-possession or epistemology disputed from the armchair, which stand in need of further defence. In its absence, the point of the surveys, however entertaining, is seriously opaque.

There is a final heresy, espoused by some, that is irrefutable by design: the surveys do nothing more, and need do nothing more, than map the cognitive powers by which "the folk" identify something as cause or effect, intentional action, exemption or excuse. There is no call to map them on to more familiar philosophical pursuits, as the strategies above purport to do. They stand on their own.

Still, we can ask for guidance. Why survey these particular questions? Why not study what people believe about just anything, or anything that has been a topic for philosophy: say, the meaning of life? It is no good responding that surveys are apt when philosophical problems are posed by "the basic concepts people use" or that an interest in such concepts is obviously philosophical: part of what is in dispute is how the study of folk beliefs relates to the study of concepts and their conditions of application.

Not everything is philosophy. But the boundaries of the field are controversial; and it would be wrong to refuse publication on grounds that reasonable philosophers dispute. There is, therefore, a standing risk that non-philosophy will be taught and studied as philosophy. This much follows from the proper humility of peer review and a wise refusal to police the borders. The borders should not be policed: these things must work themselves out. That doesn't mean it's philosophy, any more a heap of flesh and bones is a human being.

The Sense of an Ending

2009-10-26T08:03:00.001-05:00

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.

So begins John Berryman's Dream Song 14. His instruction was ignored by Bernard Williams in "The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immorality." His argument, in brief: if one lives sufficiently long, one must either remain the same, and so become hopelessly bored; or become so different that one might as well be someone else. If you want to live forever from self-interest you are out of luck.

One might hope that an argument against immortality would reconcile us to death. But it does not follow from Williams' conclusion – that I should not want to live forever – that I should ever not want to live. Nor that I should want there to be a future time at which I die. For even if I will become so different that self-interest cannot sustain concern for my 'future self,' that is no reason to wish him ill!

In any case, both sides of the dilemma have their flaws. Why should even radical change in my desires, my character, my occupations, destroy identity of the kind that underwrites self-love? And if it does, why should consistency in those matters precipitate boredom?

Not that having final ends is sufficient to prevent it. As Elijah Millgram argues, one can have things to do for their own sakes, even things that matter very much, without being the least bit interested. Along with practical rationality, we have "a kind of intellectual phototropism": "interest and boredom […] are involuntary" and "[their] function is not to stabilize the self" but to push us towards the adoption of new ends.

Part of this seems right: we must distinguish interests – in the colloquial sense – from ends. But it does not explain why we need to be pushed: why it is that ends stagnate or fail to sustain our indefinite engagement. It is oddly circular to argue for the necessity of boredom as a provocation to new pursuits. More economical, surely, to have our interests last forever.

These questions may defeat philosophy. Perhaps this is simply how it is: a matter of psychological fact. But I wonder, with hesitation, if there is not something more to say. Think about the possible objects of interest, among our possible ends. They are, it seems to me, completable, things that can be done but only if one makes it to some final point. Walking aimlessly is pleasant enough, but it cannot be interesting. More exalted aims like doing philosophy, or being happy, or treating others well – they can be sources of much interest, but not in themselves. The interest lies in the projects one undertakes in order to be happy, do philosophy, act decently. Again, this may be mere psychology, if it is true at all. But it may instead reflect the logic of interest, the sort of end by which it can intelligibly be sustained.

That would explain what is so peculiar in Aristotle's picture of the ideal life as one of contemplation, not discovery: not that contemplation must be boring, as my students insist, but that it cannot be interesting in itself.

If interest depends on completable ends, it is inevitably finite. It expires. It must be renewed. This conflicts with a certain philosophical vision – Platonic-Aristotelian – of life as governed by a single inexhaustible end. If everything I do is for the sake of philosophy, still my interest turns on finding problems to solve. If I fail, no good. If I solve them, I need more. To the problem of boredom itself, there can be no permanent solution: no end to the need for difficulties, enterprises, work.

The Rest is Silence

2009-10-19T12:24:00.004-05:00

Hilarious, inscrutable, disturbing, Melville's Bartleby both tempts and rebuffs interpretation. The basic facts are two: that we do not and cannot know what troubles Bartleby or why he ceases copying; and that the lawyer is a decent man.

In a fashionable reading, obtuseness about these matters is combined. Bartleby is Thoreau in "Civil Disobedience," set against "the numbing world of capitalist profit and alienated labor." The lawyer is a vain and self-deceived protagonist of that world.

Dan McCall's inspiring book demolishes this line.

Bartleby is Thoreau? No, the whole point of Bartleby, the maddening and precious thing about him, is that he is a lost cause. He is inconsolable.

Nor would things be different if the lawyer were an anarchist or a labour organizer. When critics condemn him, they fail to see that they are doing so in his own words: "Here I can cheaply purchase a morsel of delicious self-approval." The lawyer sees through himself: "The truly remarkable thing about [him] is just how reliable he really is." Can we question an observer whose adjectives are so generous and so sincere?

I can see that figure now – pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn.

"I prefer not to," he respectfully and slowly said, and mildly disappeared.

What vanity in the critic not to recognize that by "decoding" Bartleby, he recapitulates the lawyer's "helpless reaching" in the Dead Letter paragraph. And how humourless. Bartleby's demurral is comic, a mild assessment of options – when I compare doing it with not, on balance – not a petulant "don't want to" or an oppositional-defiant "I won't."

To the catalogue of readings refuted by McCall, we may add a few that have tempted me.

Bartleby as Meursault: "one wouldn't be far wrong in seeing ["Bartleby"] as the story of a man who, without any heroic pretensions, agrees to die for the truth." (So Camus wrote of L'Étranger in the Afterword written in 1955.) But Bartleby does not die for anything we can divine. We have no more reason to think he tells the truth because he hates hypocrisy than for any other reason.

Bartleby as furniture: "Nippers would sometimes impatiently rise from his seat, and stooping over his table, spread his arms wide apart, seize the whole desk, and move it, and jerk it, with a grim grinding motion, as if the table were a perverse voluntary agent, intent on thwarting and vexing him"; "Yes, Bartleby, stay there behind your screen, thought I; I shall persecute you no more; you are harmless and noiseless as any of these old chairs". But Bartleby is not inanimate: his will is implacable.

Bartleby as non-rational agent: "the occurrence of other answers to the question 'Why?' besides ones like 'I just did', is essential to the existence of the concept of an intention or voluntary action." (Anscombe's Intention, §20) But Bartleby neither refutes nor confirms this conjecture: we do not know why he prefers not to, nor do we know that there is no reason.

What moral can be drawn from such critical pathologies? For McCall, that confinement in symbols "parochializes literature and limits rather severely its claims on our attention." Worse, it does Bartleby "great violence – it takes his silence away from him." In reading Bartleby, we assault his dignity more severely and more evasively than the lawyer ever does. Unlike most of us, he honestly confronts his task. McCall concludes:

The deepest question in the story is what you do with Bartleby. The deepest answer the story provides is that you can do nothing.

A Critique of Rawls

2008-04-01T18:05:00.007-05:00

John Rawls (1921-2002) is to be revered primarily for two doctrines: his conception of justice as fairness, and the proposition that baseball is the best of all games. There is no longer an opening day, but in this opening week it seems apt to consider his arguments for the latter. There are six:

First: the rules of the game are in equilibrium: that is, from the start, the diamond was made just the right size, the pitcher's mound just the right distance from home plate, etc., and this makes possible the marvelous plays, such as the double play.

It is as if these words were written behind a veil of ignorance. Baseball's rules were in serious flux for at least 50 years, with sigificant changes afterwards. Some highlights:

1845: pitching distance is 45'.
1865-9: pitcher's box introduced and modified year to year.
1872: pitcher allowed to snap the ball but must still throw underhand.
1880-1: number of balls for a walk reduced from 9 to 8 to 7.
1881: pitching distance increased to 50'.
1883: pitching allowed from anywhere up to shoulder height.
1884: base on balls to 6.
1886: to 5.
1889: and finally to 4.
1893: pitching distance is at last increased to 60'6", and pitcher's box eliminated.
1895: foul balls become strikes.
1904: height of pitcher's mound established at no more than 15".
1920: abolition of the spitball.
1968: pitcher's mound lowered to 10".
1973: DH rule introduced in the AL.

Not to mention changes in the size of the strike zone, official and otherwise...

Second: the game does not give unusual preference or advantage to special physical types.

Third: the game uses all parts of the body: the arms to throw, the legs to run, and to swing the bat, etc.

These claims will be tempting to anyone with a soft spot for David Wells. But they were rejected by no less an authority than Phil Rizzuto, in verse:

The legs are so important.
In golf they're very,
People don't realize
How important legs are in golf,
Or in baseball,
And football, definitely.
Track.
Oh, in track.
All-important.
Jumping.
Soccer.
Is there anything, what?
Is there anything where the legs
Are not the most important?

Even in philosophy, I hasten to add.

Fourth: all plays of the game are open to view...

Fifth: baseball is the only game where scoring is not done with the ball...

Finally, there is the factor of time, the use of which is a central part of any game. Baseball shares with tennis the idea that time never runs out, as it does in basketball and football and soccer.

These are familiar thoughts, but 4 and 5 apply to cricket, too, and the last is notoriously misleading. As Bill James is fond of pointing out, before the installation of lights, baseball did have a clock: it was dusk, when the Owl of Minerva flies.

I am British and I love baseball, but I never liked cricket and they are different in a crucial respect, which is the deepest attraction of baseball and which Rawls omits: the stillness at the centre of the game. Cricket may be dull, but the bowler runs to the crease before launching the ball. In baseball, the pitcher stands, looking for a signal to which he responds with a barely discriminable nod or shake of the head, breathing into his glove, staring, staring - as we hold our breaths, and everything waits.

Unwritten Books

2008-03-10T10:24:00.015-05:00

My greatest intellectual fear – one that afflicts me whenever I finish writing something – is that I will have no more ideas, that I will realize that I have nothing to say. It could be worse, of course: I could fail to realize that I have nothing to say.

By way of insurance and with the inspiration of George Steiner, I here record five proposals for books that I would like to write. Steiner's own unwritten books include one on artistic envy, others on Jewish identity and animal rights. Notes for a book on his attachment to privacy appear beside a chapter on copulating with partners of every nationality: a penetrating study of language and sex. Steiner's erotic descriptions defy parody; read the Sunday Times review.

The suggestions that follow are not so erudite or, I hope, quite so embarrassing; nor are they all entirely serious…

1. Oxford's Hypatias – For about a decade from the late 1930s to 1940s, Oxford was home to five of the most influential women in 20th century philosophy: Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, Iris Murdoch and Mary Warnock. Two of them – the least important in academia – have written memoirs, and we have Peter Conradi's meticulous biography of Murdoch. But there is no serious intellectual history of this unparalleled time.

2. What Does It All Mean? – Despite their numerous flaws, these posts at least did not ignore the question: "Does life have meaning?" not "What does it take to live a meaningful life?"

3. Oscar Charleston: the Hoosier Comet – Charleston may have been the greatest all-around baseball player in history, next to Honus Wagner. He played center field for a series of teams in the Negro Leagues, ending up at first base and managing the Pittsburgh Crawfords at their peak, from 1932-36. Unlike some contemporaries, like Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige and even Willie Wells, he has yet to attract a biographer, though his life was surely as memorable as any.

4. Epistemology of the Old Ones – When I was 15, I compiled an enormous box of notes for a book contesting the now orthodox reading of H. P. Lovecraft as a "mechanistic materialist." I don't recall the particular charges and I could not recommend the notes – "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents." – but I suspect that there was something there.

5. Hull is Other People – As previously advertised, the story of my path from Kingston-upon-Hull to Pittsburgh, the Sheffield of Western Pennsylvania.

Let me stress that I make no claim of copyright here: with the obvious exception of number 5, these titles are yours to take. I ask only for a brief acknowledgment – "from an original concept by…" – and for a copy of the published book.

The Ant and the Grasshopper

2008-01-17T13:23:00.002-05:00

[The setting is heaven, with the old foes reunited at last.]

GRASSHOPPER: I didn't expect to see you here!

ANT: Believe me, I'm equally shocked! – Glad, too, since I recently read a book about you that contained some thoroughly implausible claims, and I've been looking for an opportunity to take them up.

G: Ah yes, my authorized biography. Tell me, though, what do you find implausible in it?

A: This, for a start (the ant begins to read from page 34):

[To] play a game is to engage in activity directed towards bringing about a specific state of affairs, using only means permitted by rules, where the rules prohibit more efficient in favour of less efficient means, and where such rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity.

So Wittgenstein should quake? As a definition of game-playing, this is hopeless. It may work for sports like running a marathon, where the goal of being 26 miles from here before the others would be achieved more efficiently by taking a cab. But what about chess? Checkmate is defined in terms of the rules: it is not a goal that could be achieved more efficiently without them!

G: Perhaps you didn't read the book with sufficient care. What I call the "prelusory goal" of chess is that the pieces should be arranged so that the conditions for checkmate are satisfied, which indeed makes no sense apart from the rules, but can be achieved without following them, as when someone cheats, or sets up the board as an illustration without ever playing a game.

A: Hmm. Fair enough. Let me try again. Now that you've mentioned them, there seems to be a problem about those who cheat. Your definition mistakenly counts them as not even playing the game. Professionals will be tempted to do this all the time. Come to think of it, they cause problems anyway, since they don't accept the rules just because they make the activity in question possible, but in order to make a living.

G: You are certainly persistent, my friend. No surprise there! Professionals do accept the rules in order to make the activity possible, even though they have further reasons for welcoming its possibility. You were misled by the phrase "just because," which was never meant to conflict with this. And I deny that cheats play the game, strictly speaking; they merely pretend to.

A: Are you serious? Well, of course not, but still…you are proposing a definition on which the majority of baseball players are not playing baseball, since they pretend to have caught balls they merely trapped, to have tagged runners they missed, to have touched bases they merely passed by.

G: Not playing baseball when they do those things, that's all.

A: I can see that it's hopeless to press this line. Here's another: your definition counts as game-playing all kinds of activities that are not games at all. Think about the institutions of promising and punishment, as they are analyzed by Rawls in "Two Concepts of Rules": we engage in activity directed towards cooperation or deterrence using only means permitted by the rules of a practice, and we accept them because they make this activity possible – though, like professionals, we have further reasons for welcoming its possibility.

G: Ant! I would have expected you, of all insects, to do your homework. This is dealt with in the book. Rules against punishing the innocent or creating false expectations are not accepted because they make punishment and promising possible, but on moral grounds. That is why these institutions are not the institution of games.

A: But your proposal doesn't work. Yes, there are moral constraints on the institutions of punishing and promising, as there are on any activity – "Don't kill the shortstop sliding into second base" – but so long as the rules of those institutions are to some degree arbitrary, as Rawls suggests, you can't deny that they are games.

G: Let me answer you with a riddle, which came to me in a dream…

A: Don't play with me, grasshopper! The truth is that you don't have any reply to this objection. In fact, it's worse than you think. Almost any ritual that we engage in self-consciously is going to count as a game for you, along with a vast array of practices whose rules we adopt because we need some practice of that general kind. No wonder you find yourself able to argue that life in utopia consists exclusively in playing games: what doesn't? Alarmingly absent from your discussion, as reported in the book, is any reference to fun!

Not Pure Drivel

2007-12-17T10:52:00.001-05:00

Some years ago, I wrote a post about philosophical humour. It ended up dwelling on philosophers. But there are also comedians who do philosophy.

Woody Allen is one of them, though he doesn't suit my taste: "When I was in school, I cheated on my metaphysics exam: I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me." More compelling, perhaps, is Steven Wright, as in this incisive contribution to debates about absolute generality: "You can't have everything. Where would you put it?"

But these intellects suffer from a lack of formal philosophical instruction, without which comedy is at best contingent. They should learn from such luminaries as Bill Murray, Steve Martin and Ricky Gervais.

In Born Standing Up, Martin describes his comedic and philosophical education. The latter took place at Long Beach State College, was stoked by Lewis Carroll's logic, and ended in Wittgensteinian despair. The former began with the discovery of jokes, "musty one-liners from other comedians' acts, but to me they were as new as sunrise." Like John Stuart Mill, however, who in his nervous breakdown was "seriously tormented by the […] exhaustibility of musical combinations," and Frank Ramsey, who found that there was nothing to discuss, Martin faced a crisis: what to do when the jokes run out, like the periods of Times Roman?

His solution was a construction of genius, the rigorous application of logic to the problems of life. Objecting to the Freudian theory of laughter as the release of pent-up tension, Martin asked:

What if there were no punchlines? What if there were no indicators? What if I created tension and never released it? What if I headed for a climax, but all I delivered was an anticlimax? What would the audience do with all that tension?

This refutation of the tension theory inadvertently confirms its rival: the conception of comedy as incongruity. What could be more incongruous, and thus hilarious, than set-up after set-up deflated, no punchline ever supplied?

On this basis, we can prove the necessity of humour. If a set-up is followed by an incongruous punchline, then the joke is funny; if there is no punchline or if it is not incongruous, this too is incongruous and therefore funny. Our happy conclusion – Steve Martin's sublime discovery – is that it is impossible not to be funny. You've got to laugh.

Philosophy for Elliot

2007-12-04T11:14:00.001-05:00

Plato, Republic:

Suppose that we were painting a statue, and someone came up to us and said, "Why do you not put the most beautiful colours on the most beautiful parts of the body: the eyes ought to be purple, but you have made them black"; to him we might fairly answer, "Sir, you would not surely have us beautify the eyes to such a degree that they are no longer eyes; consider rather whether, by giving this and the other features their due proportion, we make the whole beautiful."

Kant, Critique of Judgement:

The faculty of desire, so far as it is determinable only through concepts, i.e. to act in conformity with the representation of a purpose, would be the will. But an object, or a state of mind, or even an action, is called purposive, although its possibility does not necessarily presuppose the representation of a purpose, merely because its possibility can be explained and conceived by us only so far as we assume for its ground a causality according to purposes, i.e. a will which would have so disposed it according to the representation of a certain rule. There can be, then, purposiveness without purpose, so far as we do not place the causes of this form in a will, but yet can only make the explanation of its possibility intelligible to ourselves by deriving it from a will.

Wittgenstein, Lectures 1932-35:

In teaching a child language by pointing to things and pronouncing the words for them, where does the use of a proposition start? If you teach him to touch certain colours when you say the word "red," you have evidently not taught him sentences. [...] What is called understanding a sentence is not very different from what a child does when he points to colours on hearing colour words. Now there are all sorts of language-games suggested by the one in which colour words are taught: games of orders and commands, of question and answer, of questions and "Yes" and "No." We might think that in teaching a child such language-games we are not teaching him a language but are only preparing him for it. But these games are complete; nothing is lacking.

This is my body which is given for you

2007-08-27T10:18:00.000-05:00

What are the metaphysics of Antony Gormley’s bodyforms, the lead cases cast from plaster moulds of his body that he has described as "three-dimensional photographs"?

Like photographs, they are films, hollow skins containing a pause that their stillness recalls. They do not move. These are not Giacometti’s walkers, so urgently kinetic that they have no time to bend their knees, but standing, lying, upright, bent, immobile.

They are houses, places in which to live, "intimate architecture." The comparison is made explicit in Gormley’s most recent exhibition:

The body is our first habitation, the building our second.

In Allotment, buildings are shrunk to the scale of bodies, with apertures for mouth, ears, anus and genitals. Space Station magnifies the crouching form of the artist into a perforated mass of balanced crates that echo the brutalist architecture of the Hayward itself.

The tendency is disturbing. It hints at a kind of immaterialism even Descartes disavowed:

I am not merely present in my body as a pilot in his ship, but […] as it were, intermingled with it, so that I and my body form a unit.

Gormley writes that "architecture is another kind of body, another container." But the body is not a container, and our relation to it is not instrumental. We do not use our bodies as tools with which test our view of the world. Or perhaps only Gormley does. When it is not alienated from itself, action is a form of practical knowledge: knowing what one is doing by doing it, and thereby knowing one’s own materiality. This knowledge is misplaced in the ineluctable stasis of the bodyforms.

I love them anyway. As beings at rest. As performances, their incarnation of everyman at odds with their palpable origin in the artist’s particular body. Most simply, there is the physical graffiti of Event Horizon, attentive and demanding our attention, like the blurred bodies of other people in Blind Light, the most impressive work in the present collection.

Gormley once wrote: "I am tired of art about art. I am now trying to deal with what it feels like to be a human being." A feeling is not a worldview. Like some critics, we may tire of the demand for art to be about anything, tire of interpretation, feeling its presence in the presence of others.

Rousseau Bites

2007-08-13T08:55:00.000-05:00

In Rousseau's Dog David Edmonds and John Eidinow embark upon an impossible task. They aspire to make Hume seem less than a saint. Their strategy is equally quixotic: to find Hume guilty in the affair with Rousseau. Their book is exhaustively researched, but its argument pivots on innuendo. On conflicting accounts of their first quarrel:

Another discrepancy is over the nature of Rousseau's apology. In Hume's version, Rousseau is apologizing for his folly and ill behaviour; in Rousseau's version, the apology concerns Hume's character. Unquestionably, Rousseau's record of Hume's stilted reaction – so reminiscent of the Scotsman's embarrassing inarticulateness when playing the sultan in Paris to the two slaves – has the ring of veracity.

One need not be as sceptical as Hume to question an inference from his awkward reaction to the prospect of a public seduction to the cold reception of a private apology. The authors cite no other evidence.

They are willing to speculate elsewhere, too, always on behalf of Rousseau. When Madame de Boufflers ignores his letter vilifying Hume, they wonder whether "[perhaps] she recognized that some of his remarks about Hume were justified"; and they all but endorse the unprovable allegation that Hume was responsible for the nastiest quip in a fabricated letter from the King of Prussia written by Horace Walpole:

If you persist in perplexing your brains to find out new misfortunes, choose such as you like best; I am a king and can make you as miserable as you wish.

Rousseau was mad: neurotic, paranoid, aggressive, leaving a trail of broken friendships across Europe on his way to England. But it is Hume who is described in lunatic terms, writing "berserk letters to d'Holbach" – these have been conveniently destroyed; there is no evidence for claims about the "extraordinary violence" of their language – and exhibiting signs of "mania":

Perhaps the moral of the whole sad encounter is that while sane men cannot make madmen sane, madmen can make sane men mad. In his momentary madness, fury, and panic, Hume never grasped the root of Rousseau's complaint: that though Hume had carried out the obligations of a friend in practice, he was constitutionally incapable of doing so in spirit.

This is savage to Hume, who was loved by so many, and insanely generous to Rousseau. Do our authors forget the true cause of Rousseau's suspicions, which they carefully document? By his own account, Rousseau was terrified on the journey to Calais by Hume's muttering to himself, "Je tiens, Jean-Jacques Rousseau" and terrified again by his stare after dinner, "a frightening look that no honest man would ever have encountered." He suspected the domestic staff at a château in Normandy of being Hume's agents.

Rousseau was pursued by phantoms, not by the failure of others to conform to his demand for spiritual friendship. And Hume was rightly afraid that his reputation would be harmed by the brilliant, vindictive rhetoric of his accuser. With the appearance of this book, Hume's fear is finally justified.

A Constantly Prevented Falling

2007-07-24T20:50:00.000-05:00

My son Elliot is learning to walk. He seems oddly unmoved by the preposterous gravity of this development. This is not the mere acquisition of a skill, like drinking from a cup, but a change of substance, a form of generation or coming to be. If Heidegger was right to hold that there are kinds of being, being-pedestrian is one of them.

The parallel claim is often made in the case of speech, as the onset of reason. But to my mind, the contrast is overdrawn. Each transformation corresponds to one of the classical definitions of man: as rational animal and as featherless biped. (The shedding of the feathers is an equally miraculous event, though somewhat more disturbing.)

Walking is the paradigm of human activity, the principal object of action theory, the prime example of normativity allegedly found in the very fabric of things:

'Put one foot in front of the other' is a norm of walking […] And yet, you can try to walk, fail to put one foot in front of another, and trip […] Although these norms are constitutive, they are still norms, and not mere descriptions of the activities in question. And so there's room to ask why you should follow them: if you don't put one foot in front of the other you will not be walking and you will get nowhere […]

What Korsgaard wants is the idea of standards for walking that follow from the bare idea of what it is to walk – not just that you can try to walk and fail, but that you can try to walk, succeed, and do so badly by a canon contained in the nature of walking itself. The thought is more controversial than she suggests. If someone is not putting one foot in front of the other, he is failing to walk, not walking badly. Beckett supplies a more nearly persuasive illustration of her claim:

Watt's way of advancing due east […] was to turn his bust as far as possible toward the north and at the same time to fling out his right leg as far as possible towards the south, and then to turn his bust as far as possible toward the south and at the same time to fling out his left leg as far as possible towards the north, and then again to turn his bust as far as possible towards the north and to fling out his right leg as far as possible towards the south, and then again to turn his bust as far as possible towards the south and to fling out his left leg as far as possible towards the north, and so on, over and over again, many many times, until he reached his destination, and could sit down.

What makes this parody of action so affecting is that Watt is trying to get somewhere. His digressions would be innocent enough if he were merely taking a stroll.

Walking without a purpose: this too is not another skill, perhaps not even separate from the power of rational thought. It is an attempt to think. Or it is an attempt to silence thought, to quiet the incessant "Why?" In his delightful essay, The Walk, by which this post was inspired, Jeff Robinson quotes the following passage from Thoreau:

At length, as we plodded along the dusty roads, our thoughts became as dusty as they, all thought indeed stopped, thinking broke down, or proceeded only passively in a sort of rhythmical cadence of the confused material of thought, and we found ourselves mechanically repeating some familiar measure which timed with our tread.

Thinking while walking is contemplation. Having no end beyond itself, it is absolutely final, completing itself in pleasure like the bloom on the cheek of youth.

Experimental Philosophy…

2007-07-15T10:50:00.000-05:00

…in action.

Beethoven, Hero

2007-06-18T15:42:00.000-05:00

With Beethoven, the human element first came to the fore as the primary argument of musical art. (Ferrucio Busoni)

This claim could be set against the idealist reading of Beethoven's symphonies as expressions of the ineffable Absolute: it neglects the "human element." There is a powerful tendency to hear the heroic style as narrative, as in the liner notes to an excellent recording on period instruments:

The Fifth, that cosmic tale of tragedy leading to triumph, is the Star Wars of symphonic music. And the Third is a swashbuckling thriller which, for sheer passion, romance and gusto had to wait for Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark to find its visual counterpart.

Obstacles to this take on the Eroica include the death of the hero in the second movement, and perhaps his birth in the close. But the impulse is not confined to blurbs.

The history of programmatic accounts of the heroic style is told with sympathy and verve by Scott Burnham in Beethoven Hero. Despite occasional lapses – "To consider Beethoven's music as a projection of experiential temporality presupposes a temporal actant." – it is a beautifully written book, and intricately argued.

Burnham's defence of the "vulgarly" ethical response to Beethoven's style seems at first to dismiss the idealist reading altogether. We are affected by the sense of self as hero, not by more abstract intimations:

For the same reason, our minds will drop the loftiest metaphysical trains of thought to snatch at the merest tidbit of human interest: what avails the ding an sich when we hear the latest gossip about someone we know?

But this is doubly qualified. First, by a move towards synthesis:

Beethoven's enhanced sense of drama entails a new relationship between theme and form: the form no longer serves to present prestabilized thematic material but rather becomes a necessary process in the life of a theme. […Now] the theme as subject truly appears to create its own objective world (its form), thus musically embodying one of the principal conceits of German idealism.
Beethoven's heroic style merges the Goethean enactment of becoming with the Hegelian narration of consciousness.

Second, by a latent suspicion of "heroic" listening, which Burnham finds sublimated in the language and structures of music criticism:

[Recent] tonal theories […] are controlled by the paradigm of the heroic style: the engaging pull of this style compels us to process all music in a linear fashion, to expect implications to be realized, balances to be disturbed and then restored, closure to be unarguable, endings to be culminations.

I don't know whether to believe this. But it does reflect the terms most often invoked when philosophers talk about the representational power of music: struggle, conflict, return, resolution.

What Burnham finds admirable in the programmatic approach it that is not dishonest in its employment of concepts drawn from heroic narrative. In becoming covert, the human element becomes insidious: presenting itself as the form of music, as such, it prevents us from listening in other ways.

[Does] the ability to place yourself on the map, knowing how far you have come, how far you have left to go, does this type of knowledge take precedence over an awareness of your actual surroundings, of where you in fact are?

The question leads to an invocation of film rather different from the one that was cited above:

[The] thrill of listening may be more a matter of simply being in the world of the piece […] This is comparable to the pleasure of watching a favorite movie repeatedly. It is certainly true that we might pick up new details of the unfolding of the plot with each viewing, but what really keeps us there is the world the movie creates: we like being there.

Purgatory

2007-05-13T10:03:00.000-05:00

Troy Jollimore was a contemporary of mine in graduate school. He now teaches ethics at California State University, Chico. He also writes poetry, and his recent book, Tom Thomson in Purgatory, won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Jollimore's imagined folk hero is the namesake of an iconic Canadian landscape painter, and the object of a sonnet sequence reminiscent of John Berryman's Dream Songs: wry, conversational, whimsical, full of Yoda-esque inversions and grammatical lapses.

The miscellaneous poems ("From the Boy Scout Manual") are wonderful, too, rippled with the thrill of things as they are, sources of passion and pleasure - but not without ambivalence, like the fireflies we find

Poised, aflutter, between two
thoughts, two possibilities, each one
desiring our belief, though they cannot both be true.

Departure

2007-02-07T11:34:00.000-05:00

After two years and over a hundred posts, I have decided to take an indefinite break from Ideas of Imperfection. There are not enough hours in the day, I'm afraid – though if there were another three, I would probably want to spend them sleeping. Appropriately, the final substantive post returns to the subject of the first.

There may be occasional updates in the future. I'm sad never to have written about – or finished reading – Randall Collins' massive Sociology of Philosophies, which takes up Ernest Gellner's advice, in Words and Things:

Any sociologist of knowledge, wishing to trace the mechanism of the institutional and social influence on thought, could hardly do better than choose modern philosophy as his field of enquiry. It provides him with an area of thought where the social factors [...] operate, if not in an experimentally ideal state of isolation, at least in greater purity than they generally do in other fields.

Gellner's execution of the project was marked by a somewhat hysterical lack of charity for its object, and a disappointingly crude inventory of sociological moves, as in the following exemplary quote:

The minuteness, pedantry, lack of obvious purpose, in brief, the notorious triviality of [linguistic philosophy] can only be explained in Veblenesque terms. Conspicuous Triviality is a kind of Conspicuous Waste (of time, talent, and so forth). Not everyone can afford it [...]

Collins, I assume, is more sophisticated and more sympathetic. Perhaps I'll let you know…

Thanks to everyone who has read or commented on things that I have written here. I've enjoyed your reactions, and learned from them, more than I had any right to expect.

"On Truth"

2007-01-29T12:44:00.000-05:00

If font size is a measure of profundity, Harry Frankfurt's sequel to "On Bullshit" is even deeper and more insightful than its predecessor.

Its question is: what is wrong with bullshit, anyway, in its indifference to the truth? The proper response, according to Frankfurt, is that "truth often possesses very considerable practical utility." The obvious rejoinder is not quite ignored, but it is rather scandalously deferred to a final "chapter":

[What] can be said about the value of truth itself, as distinct from the rather commonplace suggestions I have already offered concerning the value of individual truths?

What Frankfurt goes on to provide, however, is not a reason to care about getting it right when doing so is not of practical use or is useful only to other people, or a reason to care about truth for its own sake, but a reason to be glad that there are truths to be acknowledged, even when those truths conflict with one's desires. The argument is that

our recognition and understanding of our identity arises out of, and depends integrally on, our appreciation of a reality that is definitively independent of ourselves. In other words, it arises out of and depends on our recognition that there are facts and truths over which we cannot hope to exercise direct or immediate control. If there were no such facts or truths, if the world invariably and unresistingly became whatever we might like or wish it to be, we would be unable to distinguish ourselves from what is other than ourselves and we would have no sense of what in particular we ourselves are.

Even if Frankfurt is right about this, one has to admit that it's pretty lame. We might have hoped for fireworks, as at the end of the earlier book: "sincerity itself is bullshit"! But the fireworks themselves were quite indifferent to the truth. And this book, too, instantiates its theme. However much he may have wished for his topic to be interesting, and its examination fruitful, the facts were not in his control.

Sonata, what do you want of me?

2007-01-22T12:31:00.000-05:00

So asked Fontenelle, according to Rousseau. His frustration is one that I have shared. It is hard to articulate the content of abstract music in a way that could explain why it matters so much, at least to some of us, and annoying to be left with nothing to say.

This plight is addressed with brevity, and an apt historicism, in a recent book by Mark Evan Bonds. Music as Thought recounts the valorization of instrumental music, and the symphony in particular, at the turn of the 18th century. In 1790, Kant could dismiss non-vocal music as "more pleasure than culture". By 1810, Hoffman would write, in a celebrated review, that Beethoven's Fifth "open[s] up to us the realm of the monstrous and immeasurable."

What happened in between, according to Music as Thought, was the aesthetics of post-Kantian idealism, in Fichte, Schelling and others. If abstract music conveys the infinite or the Absolute, or a unity of subject and object that lies beyond our conceptual grasp, there is no embarrassment in our inability to capture it in words. The philosophers and critics – not the musicians – could thus invent a new way of listening and, in doing so, a new kind of music.

Even if one is sympathetic to the need for generic and thus historical context in the explanation of art, there is something puzzling in this account. If it is right, we face a problem of belief – or worse – when we aspire to listen without anachronism. It is not just that we may not accept the metaphysics of idealism; we may not even attach a sense to the putative thoughts that Hoffman and others took Beethoven's symphonies to express.

Nor does Music as Thought say very much about how to interpret specific works. In part because the philosophy is so lightly sketched, what we get is not a map of the conventions of the idealist symphony against which particular symphonies stand out in relief, but something more like a reading of various works taken together – an approach that is "generic" in the negative sense.

This is only to say that the book is incomplete: it is a provocation to further thought. One of its best ideas is about the indeterminacy of abstract music. The facts of production and reception are sufficiently messy that they may not fix upon the form of a given piece, a single generic context. In an ingenious coda, this argument is applied to the musical formalism of Eduard Hanslick. Rather than divining the essence of abstract music, we might regard him as proposing – inadvertently, perhaps – yet another way in which it can be heard. The question is not what the sonata wants of us, but what we want of it.

Wittgenstein

2007-01-15T09:51:00.000-05:00

Why do I like this ridiculous film? In part, because it is beautiful, with its sheer black landscape and stark colours. And in part for its humility: it is, by its own confession, a Martian's view of philosophy; and it is framed by three remarks of Wittgenstein, spoken as a child:

If people did not sometimes do silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done.

In art it is hard to say anything as good as: saying nothing.

and

Even to have expressed a false thought boldly and clearly is already to have gained a great deal.

If the film's portrait of Wittgenstein's thought is a cartoon or caricature, it is not a bad one: we learn about the picture theory of the Tractatus, the reversal – with continuity – of the Investigations, the assault on privacy and the inner theatre of ideas. There are disappointing omissions, as when an effete Keynes expands to fill the boots of G. E. Moore, in Terry Eagleton's original script. But as Steven Wright remarked, you can't have everything – where would you put it?

For reasons that are hard to articulate, the many inaccuracies and infelicities of portrayal, the superficial depiction of philosophical argument, the sheer silliness and campiness of the whole enterprise – it all seems irrelevant to me. Perhaps that is because I find it hard to imagine doing a better job, however bad this one may be. Or perhaps I should follow Wittgenstein, and describe my feeling by the metaphor that, if a man could make a film about him which really was a film about him, this film would, with an explosion, destroy all the other films in the world. It's a good thing no-one has tried.

Love's Confusions

2007-01-08T13:07:00.000-05:00

At a pivotal moment in The Sea, The Sea, Iris Murdoch's protagonist is deserted, suddenly and without explanation, by the woman he loves. He reports this experience in a sentence I have always found breathtaking, despite the cliché:

You die at heart from a withdrawal of love.

What crushes the jilted lover is the unintelligibility of love's withdrawal. How could someone's feelings change like that? By what right? It is as if we want to hold our ex to account: justify yourself.

Taken this way, the demand is one of love's confusions, since it asks for reasons where reasons are not required. No-one needs an argument for falling out of love. In pressing the demand, one protests not only the loss of a particular relationship, but the implacable nature of love itself.

The example would be pleasing to C. D. C. Reeve, whose recent book about love begins with themes that have preoccupied me here: whether it can be promised or given at will, its relationship to work, and the perplexities of loving God. He is emphatic about love's passivity: recognizing that one's happiness depends on someone else is "more central to love than the desire to confer benefit – an acceptance of our lover's power, rather than an expression of our own." And he is a relentless critic of rationalism about the source and sustenance of love.

On Reeve's loosely Freudian account, love is never fully liberated from its infantile and "alimentary" origins. This poses difficulties for those who want to integrate sex with respectful loving commitment: sexual excitement may continue to depend on the politically incorrect – fantasies of dominance and abjection, or of being treated as an object.

I am less interested in the details of this speculation – on which I refuse to comment here – than in the incipient role of philosophy as therapy. "Dear Professor Reeve: my wife and I both work away from home, and believe in sexual equality. But things are falling flat between the sheets. What can do we do to spice them up?" Though they are not exactly framed this way, answers to this question appear throughout the book: exploiting jealousy or flirtation as a stimulus to desire, experimenting with other partners, keeping gender politics out of the bedroom.

Reeve is not alone in trying on the therapeutic form, even if he does so in a specially provocative way. He has a nice blurb by Paul Woodruff, whose book about the virtue of reverence – which manifests itself in feelings of awe for what surpasses human limitation – approaches the oracular style of the self-help manual:

Reverence is not enough by itself for a completely good character. You will need to develop other capacities in order to live a morally good life. But you may find that reverence is necessary – as is courage – to the regular exercise of all other virtues.

If one has doubts about the philosopher as moral guide, one is liable to be even more suspicious when he tacitly adopts the role of relationship counselor. I am reminded of Harry Frankfurt's nice response to a question about contingency that followed a series of lectures he gave at Princeton some years ago.

Audience member: What I can't see, on your account, is how there is any assurance that my wife will continue to love me.

Frankfurt: I'm sorry, sir, I'm afraid I can't help you with that.

A New Orthodoxy?

2007-01-01T09:54:00.000-05:00

The canonical form of title for a book of philosophy used to be X, Y and Z – though an occasional lack of inspiration would reduce this to X and Y. Thus we have Language, Truth and Logic, Anarchy, State and Utopia, Being and Time.

The model has served us well for decades, but there are signs of change. As we have jettisoned the 18th century's Essay, Inquiry and Treatise, so the new millennium abandons conjunction in favour of subtraction. Hilary Putnam turns his back on Reason, Truth and History, opting now for Ethics without Ontology. There is "Vagueness without Ignorance", Libertarianism without Inequality, Ethics without Principles.

Reluctantly, I am adding to the list: my book, Reasons without Rationalism will be published this month by Princeton University Press. I conceived the title some years ago, before its structure became routine, and it is too late to change it now. Perhaps I should be cheered by the development. Whatever the fate of its contents, the title of my book reflects a pattern whose time has come: X without Y.

On the Side of the Apes

2006-12-25T10:56:00.000-05:00

One of the chief culprits in the theft of "human nature", according to Garber, is Edward. O. Wilson. I wanted to like his recent book, Consilience, if only out of perversity: it was trashed by the philosophically informed reviewers.

The principal complaint is that Wilson never explains what "consilience", or the unity of knowledge, is supposed to be. Hints vary from the agreeably bland – the different branches of human learning had better be consistent with one another – to the dramatic: nothing of explanatory value is lost if we appeal to "only one class of explanation", the kind that invokes the laws of physics. As the commentators note, ontological reduction may be supported by the history of science; the redundancy of explanations framed in unreduced vocabularies is not. Wilson's pivotal step is an unexamined inference from the former to the latter.

The failure to think about the point of consilience in anything by the vaguest terms, as the synthesis of a worldview, lies behind most of the bad theorizing that occupies the rest of the book. For instance:

Mind is a stream of conscious and subconscious experience. It is at root the coded representation of sensory impressions and the memory and imagination of sensory impressions. […] Who or what in the brain monitors all this activity? No one. Nothing. The scenarios are not seen by some other part of the brain. They just are. Consciousness is the virtual world composed by the scenarios.

Wilson's completion of the Enlightenment project in the philosophy of mind looks suspiciously similar to the bundle of ideas that appeared at its beginning. Even if we set aside the long history of refutations, it is hard to think of a good question to which this might be the answer.

Elsewhere, the question is made tolerably clear, at the cost of changing the subject. Thus, the alleged consilience of art and science rests on an evolutionary account of human creativity – as though the deepest problem of interpretation were the novelist's worst friend: "Where do you get your ideas?"

The answer, not surprisingly, is that "[artistic] inspiration […] rises from the artesian wells of human nature." What doesn't? The controversial claim is not that our capacities were shaped by evolution, but that they come in relatively focused packages or dispositions, tied to specific behaviours, and that they are always or mostly adaptive. Wilson insists on the more ambitious theory, of fixed "epigenetic rules", modeled on the case of incest-avoidance, and extended to the power of reason itself:

I suggest that rational choice is the casting about among alternative mental scenarios to hit upon the ones which, in a given context, satisfy the strongest epigenetic rules.

There is only one exception:

The human mind evolved to believe in gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology. Acceptance of the supernatural conveyed a great advantage throughout prehistory, when the brain was evolving. Thus it is in sharp contrast to biology, which was developed as a product of the modern age and is not under-written by genetic algorithms. […] The essence of humanity's spiritual dilemma is that we evolved genetically to accept one truth and discovered another.

No wonder Wilson is keen to unify everything under the banner of science: it is the sole capacity of the human mind that is not hopelessly trapped in the Pleistocene.

Who Owns "Human Nature"?

2006-12-18T10:52:00.000-05:00

The question is posed by Marjorie Garber in the second lecture of her Manifesto for Literary Studies, an attractive booklet published a few years back, which I recently discovered. Her topic is the theft of "human nature" – which "was once the intellectual property of poets, philosophers and political theorists" – by natural science. According to Garber,

[This] shift in the disciplinary custody of "human nature" has serious consequences for the value of that amorphous enterprise called "the humanities." For if the place to investigate "human nature" is not "the humanities," what is the use of the humanistic disciplines? What else gives them cultural authority? And, equally to the point, what is the use of funding, supporting, studying and teaching them?

She spends the rest of the lecture in a rather scattered attempt to recover the stolen goods.

Garber's principal weapon is the claim that "[language] is not a secondary but a primary constituent of human nature". She might intend the view that human nature is linguistically constructed – whatever that means. But her remark could also be read more modestly, as the doctrine that man is a cultural animal: it belongs to our nature to participate in varied cultural and historical formations, to which human language is essential. "[What] I have been contending", Garber writes, "is that today's humanists are asking 'human nature' questions all the time, when they talk about psychic violence, or material culture, or epistemic breaks, or the history of the book, or the counterintuitive."

The problem is that studying these variations of culture is studying human nature the way a field guide to the insects of Western Pennsylvania is about the nature of life. If it is worth using the concept at all, human nature must refer to what is common and essential to human beings: in this case, the fact of culture, and its mutability, not the particular mutations.

What puzzles me in Garber's approach is why the prestige of the humanities should be thought to rest on a pervasive engagement with human nature in the first place. It is as though she concedes to the critics of the liberal arts that the study of a local tradition or form – lyric poetry, Greek tragedy, the Victorian novel – is pointless, in itself. The only questions worth asking – and more significantly, worth funding – are what she ends by calling "the Big Questions: the Who Am I questions, the What Am I Doing Here questions".

It would be tempting for a philosopher to accept the praise implicit in this idea. But the proper response is to doubt the assumption on which it rests. Why concede to science, and philosophy, that the relative generality of their questions makes them more important? A defence of the humanities should be a defence of history and anthropology and literary studies, even when they tell us nothing about who we are.

Narrative, deferred

2006-12-04T09:04:00.000-05:00

A structural property shared by two books I have read in the past few weeks: they are anonymous narratives of someone else's life.

The story of Jacques Austerlitz – his arrival in England on a Kinder-transport from Prague, his subsequent attempts to discover where he came from and who is – all of this is told at second hand, in W. G. Sebald's haunting novel. These conversations, scattered across Europe over many years, unplanned and structureless, create a sense of insubstantial identity, as if Austerlitz is himself the ghost of his parents.

The effect is quite different in Primo Levi's The Wrench. Here the vicarious narrative traces the exploits of Tino Faussone, itinerant mechanical problem-solver. From his elaborate descriptions of physical and intellectual labour – rigging cranes, distilling acid, beating copper, building bridges, welding steel – we are invited to draw the moral that, except for miracles, "loving your work […] represents the best, most concrete approximation of happiness on earth."

And yet, despite this happiness, what we are given directly is never work itself, but stories about work, told at leisure, over drinks or on aimless walks. It is the prospect of narration that justifies the hardship of work:

[If] there aren't troubles, it's no fun telling about it afterward. And you know, you said so yourself: telling about things is one of the joys of life.

What reconciles the threatened contradiction – is happiness work, or telling stories about work? – is the implicit argument that story-telling itself is work, that Faussone's listener must take the ore of conversation, "grind it, hone it [and] hammer it into shape". The deferral of narrative draws attention to these tasks: it is essential to the book.

It is hard to find a similar explanation for the structure of Austerlitz, which is marked by a second property, no less distinctive than the first: its sentences and paragraphs are enormously long. The first indentation appears on page 27, the next on page 59. A sentence describing the concentration camp at Theresienstadt goes on for eight pages before coming to a stop. The movement is not headlong; it is slow, mesmeric, aimless.

What is the point of these eccentricities of prose, and of form? Merely to generate an atmosphere of dislocation? In a novel about the paralysis involved in having no story – "I am living the wrong life" – there must be more to it than that.