Philosophers in the Anglo-Americabn tradition during the Twentieth Century followed the idea that there is wisdom in language in that its various forms-- it tenses, its contradictions, its phrases-- reveal the fundamental ways in which reality is constructed. That is very different from the Continental philosophers in the Twentieth Century, the various Existentialists, who would go to no effort to twist around language by inventing new terms so as to plumb the depths of experience which language itself could only indicate. A good example is G. E. Moore, one of the foundational creators of what was called “ordinary language philosophy”. He proposed what is called Moore’s Paradox. Moore proposed the sentence “It is raining and I believe it is not raining”. How is that possible? It seems contradictory even so the first statement is a fact and the second is a belief. If it is obviously raining and if a person sincerely thinks that it is not raining, how can it be possible to utter that statement? There must be something in the language that would indicate that it would show that the compound statement was contradictory even though it is not. But there is no paradox at all if language does not embody wisdom but that a term such as “and'' is not a monitor of meaning, just a conjunction. Language is just a makeshift account and it often errs. Language is not up to describing what it does in ordinary as well as peculiar cases. Here are two cases that show how language leaves us tongue-tied, and so has to be unpacked. The first of these concerns the trouble language has handling time and is an easier problem to unravel than is the second case, which deals with the trouble language has handling qualities.
Read MoreJane Austen, Conservative
Contemporary literary critics tend to be advocates. They think that books are places to promote their views on various matters, such as racial injustice or Feminism, or think that the primary purpose of a novel is to declare a social problem that is to be rectified. I found piquant, for example, when the most current Feminist Movement was on the rise, Jane Smiley, in his 1991 novel “A Thousand Acres”, retold Lear and his three daughters in a midwestern contemporary farm family to discover that the three daughters had each independently and in secret had incest with the father, as if that was what “King Lear” was really all about, never mind the infinite spaces and the general iniquities of people, as if the novel was to huff and puff and declare rather than explain that some people do this particular bad thing. There are also other periods when advocacy is a primary form of artistic life, Zola a key example, but even the Victorian novelists, who were not unwilling to point out the shames of the industrial world, were not, I think, even primarily about that. Even “Oliver Twist” pushes aside the miseries of poverty and crime for the figure of Fagin, who seems so much grander than his setting. In fact, one of the shortcomings of “The Grapes of Wrath”, another advocacy novel, is that Steinbeck documents the Okies but does not make the Joad clan as anything other than stereotypes of persistence in adversity. The book is not a drama that has been put in a setting but is only an illustration of a setting.
Read MoreThe Truth of Conversation
When I was a child and went to visit relatives with my parents, I thought how fortunate I was to be a child because I could go off to play in my room of my relative’s child and use his toys as well as the ones I had brought with me while the adults spent their time in the living room just talking. That had to wait until I was slightly older when I would sit on the stoop outside my apartment building and go over with friends what we had seen on television or what we knew about girls. It is worth pondering conversation as being an essential human activity, something we very much recognize during the pandemic in that people crave to be with people to flirt and drink and talk with one another, even if doing so can incur fatal risks. We have to be free to talk. There are many explanations for this. Talking allows people to convey information and to also hector and intimidate one another and also to display relative social prestige. Putting these and other functional advantages of talk aside, one of the most miraculous and existential qualities of talk is that it is unalienated, which means that people are likely to tell the truth of what they are when they converse with one another. It isn’t just that people will unload when in stress and so unload the truth. Rather, it is that in the ordinary course of events that we say what is the truth and that we have only with great difficulty do we manage to confide the truth or avoid blaring out what is in our mind. Yes, there are turns of phrases that distract and there are exaggerations and circumlocutions. But people are, in general, like dogs in that they are also not inclined to lie. A dog gives over that he is trying to lie. He will act submissively when the bad thing he has done, such as poop on the rug, will soon be revealed. No dog is an accomplished liar, and the same is with people.
Read MoreDown to Essentials
I have had the opportunity to downsize my home twice. I left a very large West End Avenue apartment where I had lived for forty-five years to move into a small apartment in South Brooklyn after my wife died and now I am pruning again to move with my son’s family to a Mountain state, thinking of this as a new adventure for an old man and therefore blessed, even though it is not exactly a great trek in that the national chains of banks and pharmacies have all the same records and so there is not much to change in my life as to commercial matters. What I have found out about pruning is that it is not all that jarring however much I am sentimental. Memories are more real than things. If there is a lesson in this adventure it is, as might be expected given my presumptions, getting rid of things is not like that very vivid scene in “2001” where the file books empty out of HAL’s computer until there is nothing left, his voice getting ever more base and then nothing. Rather, every person parrs down to an essence, which is their consciousness. Spinoza would say it more exactly. The essence is the complexity of a person’s experiences and ideas and that is irreducible and intact so long as the person lives. In that sense, every person, however reduced, has a “free will”, though Spinoza did not use the term as being irrelevant or redundant. What does having “free will” add to saying a person’s consciousness is more or less complex?. Ideas and emotions modify each other and themselves. That’s called “thinking”.
Read MoreHow Black Lives Can Matter
The past three weeks have moved quickly because there have been rapid and very different shifts of public attention. First, there was Bob Woodward’s book “Rage” which showed that Trump had lied by denying just how bad the coronavirus would be, he said, not so as to create panic, as if the only alternative to avoid panic is to lie. But as is the case with many of Trump’s outrages, people just move on, as when he said he would not accept the election if he lost, other Republican politicians pooh-poohing the matter, the succession to be intact as it has been since 1792. Republicans treat Trump much less seriously than Democrats do. Then there was the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, someone whom I much admired though I thought the accolades were a bit much, praise heaping over praise, perhaps because she is a model of probity as that is every moment implicitly contrasted to the current President. And then returned the public to an incident that awakens the issue of Blacks being unfairly killed by the police. There were no charges for the killing of Breonna Taylor, which led to public outrage and to the MSNBC regulars, who are sure that there should have been high criminal charges for the Louisville police officers. I am going to say something controversial about this last particular matter, even though it may give many people offense, that being the coin of the common realm. People are more concerned about whether they are rankled is more important than whether people are accurate or analytic, so deeply are deeply incurred to the solipsistic cliches of our times. Look carefully at the ways the choices of words spin the issues.
Read MoreThe Stratification of Disability
The disabled, which include the blind and the crippled and other infirmities, are usually understood as deviant in that they are more or less distasteful to ordinary society because they are not part of those who are able bodied, and so the disabled are a scourge to society just because they are unfamiliar with normal society. That also happens to criminals and drug addicts and sex perverts, who also are all degrees of deviance. Normal people just feel various degrees of apprehension and disgust for the deviants, rather than there being distinct differences in kind, as if there were different feelings to people who are, let us say, of low caste rather than disfigured. People look away at disabilities of the disfigured just as they abhor associating with loudmouths. President Trump thinks it depressing to see wounded war veterans on display. The various kinds of the disabled share the fact that they are “master statuses” in that disability is a constant companion that must be managed along with a person’s other roles. You can forget to lock your front door but, if you are using braces and crutches, you cannot forget to lock your knees when you rush to get to your cab.
Read MorePietro Mascagni
Pietro Mascagni’s second opera, “L’amico Fritz”, is nowhere as popular as his first, “Cavalleria Rusticana”, and is thought far inferior, a light romantic comedy, whereas the first was the founding work of the “verismo” style. “L’amico Fritz”, though, is in fact much darker. The prior opera was a straightforward revenge story lifted into the permanent international repertoire by the lyricism of long orchestral passages which supply “background music” for the stage evocation of a peasant culture. That foreshadowed a life long operatic style in which Mascagni primarily used music as a way to provide a setting for and comment on dramatic action rather than as a way to provide musical enhancement for dialogue.
Read MoreTrump and Other Verbal Confusions
I am continually astonished that Donald Trump supporters do not diminish their enthusiasm for him no matter how outrageous he says things. You might think that treating military deaths as “suckers” and “losers” would give people pause. Even if reports of this are regarded as lies, Trump did say on the record that McCain that he was not a hero because he had been captured would seem to patriotic citizens to regard as an affront. But I heard one Trump supporter say that the antagonism between Trump and McCain was just politics and so just dismissed the matter, as if politicians say and do just anything and so are to be discounted, though for some reason what is said or attributed about Clinton or Biden will not be discounted. So there is an attempt to make sense of whatever is the point of view of the Trump supporters, even though they are not, as a matter of fact, socially or economically disadvantaged, nor because they are poorly educated, in that since the uneducated clearly enough supported FDR because they clearly enough saw what was in their interests. The Trump supporters remain a puzzlement. Are they angry for no reason? Are they disturbed at the way society is changing? Part of the explanation, I suggest, for Trump supporters are partly the verbal confusions that occur in political discourse so as to evade or obfuscate issues. Verbal ju-jitsu allows people to support them for whatever other are the real reasons of a preference, whether that is racism or Covid denial or whatever other are the Trump concerns.The verbal gymnastics are longstanding and are currently on parade. But they also have to do with the particular kind of rhetoric in which Trump is involved, ways in which he cannot help himself, and that help along his obfuscations and so have made quite an appeal for him for five years now. I will try to parse out some of his peculiar verbal constructions.
Read MoreBruegel's Secularism
The Lowlands, or Lotharingia, as Henri Pirenne insisted on calling it, because it was a distinct cultural place that for a variety of reasons never became a great nation on its own the way France and Germany did, was nevertheless a central place for the creation of European history because it was the meeting place of the Roman and the Germanic cultures, never mind that John Motley, in his Nineteenth Century nationalist way, thought the distinctiveness of the Lowlands could be attributed to a native people living in a swampland that made them both ingenious and cooperative.
The Lowlands was the setting for a world empire that for a while rivaled those of Spain and England. It produced unsurpassed art and some of the most important scientific breakthroughs: the invention of the microscope and the discovery of the cell. Though the Lowlands never created a great vernacular literature, their literary and philosophical accomplishments are marked by Erasmus, Spinoza and Grotius, all of whom wrote in Latin. But most important, the Lowlands is where both political and philosophical liberalism began.
Read MoreBiden's First Hundred Days Or So
The Biden and Harris campaign is excoriating Trump as a sleaszy, racist, mean spirited person who has also been derelict in his duty in that the President has neither a plan to deal with the coronavirus pandemic or to deal with the continuing economic crisis. It is more than understandable that there would be a focus on this singular figure. Just about everything that might go bad has gone bad. We should be thankful that there is no major war. The focus groups may also conclude that the demeaning of Trump is likely to earn a few points in Biden learners and with those who are disenchanted with the President. That campaign decision is not to spend much time or attention on the plans Biden will roll out when he might become elected, even though the general wisdom is that elections are about hope and promises for the future rather than failures of the past. We will see. But interviews with Biden and Harris have made clear that there is a clear program of action should Biden become President, and so we are sometimes not emphasizing enough what Biden will do on Day 0ne. I want to cobble together what is said or implied about what his plan is, even if Biden does not want to make his plan front and center.
Read MoreThe Incomplete Status Sequence
Social theorists have connected social structures to what literary or philosophical people regard as the existential situation, which means the universal and fundamental experience of being in the world. That ties together social scientific objectivity with the realm of humanistic experience. Karl Marx connected some of the divisions of labor with alienation, which is a deeply and ubiquitous experience that it is difficult to pin down. Emile Durkheim connected the idea of norm with the experience of anxiety, everyone concerned to achieve conformity. Georg Simmel connected multiple lives and roles with the experience of metropolitan life, people now alive with choice and variety. Here is another connection between structure and experience, one that is a variation of Robert Merton”s role theory. The purely formal structure of what I will call an incomplete status sequence explains the sense of every person in life as caught between the present and the future and, as well, an experience as life always changing and surprising, which is different from the Durkheimian view, that everything is in a permanent present so that whatever is the norm is what that seems to be as it always has been and will be. A sociological concept therefore is able to unravel what might seem the always squishy and uncertain of what is the philosophical view.
Read MoreTricks of Memory in Ishiguro
Kazuo Ishiguro is a contemporary novelist very worthy of the Nobel Prize in Literature that he was awarded in 2017. Born in Japan and raised in Great Britain, Ishiguro differs from the Modernist and late Twentieth Century novelists who preceded him. Each of the Modernists developed a distinctive style that they applied to whatever subject matter they were dealing with. So a reader can recognize Hemingway for his short and aphoristic sentences, Faulkner for his long and complex sentences, Joyce for the allusive style of his masterpiece, “Ulysses”, and Mann for his richly descriptive style. That is different from Updike and Roth, both of whom wrote straightforwardly even if their subject matter was gauche. For his part, Ishiguro crafts a different style for each of his novels. He makes it seem that arriving at the style in which a novel will be written is part of the chore of writing because the style sets up the kind of world which he is creating. So “Never Let Me Go” sounded like a research report; “The Buried Giant” sounded like a legend; and “An Artist of the Floating World” sounded like a series of apologies, everyone deferential in what is supposed to be the Japanese manner. The subject matter of those three novels, however, was the same. They were about the impact on people’s lives of the loss of or never having had a memory of pivotal events. The clones in “Never Let Me Go” did not know their ancestry and never found out, however much the reader can catch on fairly early that they were descended from dogs. The people in “The Buried Giant” seem to forget things after a few days, and the Japanese in “An Artist of the Floating World” suppress their memories of what they did during the Second World War. Moreover, all three novels explore how and why it is that people are so deferential to those around them. They are very annoying even if some of the characters, such as the dog-clones, are quite endearing.
Read MoreThe Routine Republican Convention
David Brooks said on Friday that the talking points of the Republican Convention were incoherent. That is just incorrect, perhaps because Brooks preferred to believe Republicans had a sweeter tone in years past. But even on the first night, the talking points were neither new nor particularly biting than the accusations leveled against the Democrats ever since I started watching both Republican and Democratic Conventions ever since 1952. It has always been the penchant of Republicans to attack Democrats as Socialists or worse. They were also the exponents of Main Street and then of the suburbs. Republicans and Trump are against the labor unions and in favor of the corporate job creators. Republicans and Trump emphasize the danger of public rioting and urban unrest lest it reach to social anarchy. Republicans and Trump are bellicose about foreign nations, such as Cuba and the Soviet Union then, or, now, Venezuela and China and Iran. The great dirty secret is not that Trump took over the Republican Party, but that the Republican Party, however much its misgivings about his verbal excesses, is comfortable with most of his policy positions, to the extent that Trump can say he has a set of positions rather than a reflexive instinct for the most Conserrvative caricatures of American society. Henry Kissinger once said that the Republican Party was a first rate party with a second class constituency. He was probably thinking of the able cabinets Republican Presidents assembled once they got elected. That is no longer the case. The party is just its constituency.
Read MoreA Taste for "Lost Horizon"
On the one hand, I think Frank Capra’s “Lost Horizon”, from 1937, is a great movie that explores everyone’s sentimental search for a place of peace and quiet. On the other hand, I think that Howard Hawks’ 1938 “Bringing Up Baby”, despite its excellent pacing and performances, is just mildly amusing rather than hilarious. This preference may be merely personal, and so just a matter of taste in that limited meaning of the word, some people having a taste for salami while others do not, but perhaps taste is much deeper than that, about the way in which I apprehend the universe, taste then becoming a very profound matter indeed.
Read MoreThe Dull Democratic Convention
The Democratic Convention that ended on Thursday with Joe Biden’s acceptance speech, was a dull affair. That wasn’t just because there was no live hoopla on a convention floor. It was also that the convention organizers had failed to find a visual equivalent to that by creating fanciful settings in which to set the speeches. They did have a moment when you saw the states nominate Joe Biden with their landscapes in the background, so New Mexico looked like itself, as did American Samoa. But they needed the sort of people who design the opening night spectacles at the Olympics to choreograph some pageantry for an event that looked, instead, like something out of the early days of television. You might have thought that would be unnecessary given the gravity of the issues facing the nation, and these were indeed alluded to. Barack Obama took on Trump’s character, as well he could and might, but he did not spell out why the man is unfit for office. Why was he pulling his punches? Do the polls tell the Democrats not to go after Trump personally? Various speechifiers did lambast Trump on the issues that I, for one, think important. Trump had separated toddlers from their parents and made it hard for them to be reunited. He had not criticized Putin for putting a bounty on the lives of American troops. Unmentioned, however, was Trump’s on again and off again negotiations with the Chinese that had left farmers in the lurch. The speeches tended to be flat, more like a telethon, as one wag had it, which means for me that the speeches all said the same thing, which is that we would be spiritually better off if we give money to and, in this case, vote for a good cause, one that will bring us all together. Jerry Lewis did it better.
Read MoreThe Liturgy in "Revelations"
The older way to read the Bible is to take the text apart and show the various sources from which it was compiled. The Anchor Bible of the Seventies represented a kind of final step in what was known as the Higher Criticism. The editor of its edition of “The Book of Revelations” suggests that the material in the book comes largely from Jewish apocalypses although some other material is added on. That tells you that what separates “Revelations” from the rest of the New Testament is its ties to “Ezekiel”. It is not tied to the non-apocalyptic tone which pervades most of the Gospels, at least if you conceive Jesus and his followers, a few remarks to the contrary, to be in for the long haul of reconstructing mankind, which is what salvation is really about.
The newer way to read the Bible is to put the text together again by seeing it as a literary construction made up of a variety of materials whose final text, the one we have inherited for two thousand years or so, has a coherent meaning. The meanings in the New Testament are typological or allegorical. “Revelations”, by this light, can be interpreted, as it is, for one, by Bruce J. Malina in his still very useful 1983 book “The New Testament World: Insights from Cultural Anthropology”, as using the visions of sky gods that are available to the Mediterranean world at the time of its composition as the basis for conceiving what a city of god would be like. What separates “Revelations” from the rest of the New Testament, in this case, is its adoption of astrological imagery.
Read MoreIncumbent and Post-Incumbency Presidential Prosecutions
Time moves quickly in an election season. There I was writing a response to Michelle Goldberg’s column in the NY Times in which she suggested that there should be prosecutions of Trump and his deputies for their illegal shenanigans in office after they had left office, however difficult that might be, she agrees, without it seeming to be just a political vendetta against the deposed party, when information came out about the President trying to interfere in the administration of an election by having his appointee as Postmaster General downsize the Post Office so that it could not handle what are likely to be the huge number of absentee ballots that are mailed in this November. So the question shifts from what to do with him after he is defeated to what to do with him now, he having confessed that he wanted to withhold money from the USPS just so that it would not be able to process the ballots. That is a real life case of election tampering, which is barred by most state laws, and certainly an impeachable offense in that Nixon was hounded out of office for illegal acts to cover up his trying to influence the election of 1972, while here we have an attempt to intrude on the administration of an election, all out there in the open. But before going on to that, let us consider the Michelle Goldberg case for going after past crimes of a President.
Read MoreNurse Jane Eyre
A Masterpiece Theatre version of “Jane Eyre” that ran some years ago was full of candelabras and castles, dark shadows, and mean faced mysterious people carrying out plans understood, if at all, only by themselves and their subconsciouses. That is fully in keeping with understanding Charlotte Bronte’s book, which was published in 1848, as of the same genre, gothic romance, as her sister Emily’s “Wuthering Heights”, which was published in 1847. Those girls sure had raging hormones.
There is another way to look at “Jane Eyre”. It is largely a realistic novel that shares the sentimentality of “Oliver Twist”, which had been published some ten years before. That is hard to believe only because the Gothic romance,in general, precedes the novel that spells out the conditions of the poor, but authors don’t just exemplify the periods of which they are a part. Literature is a vast overlap of everything that can impinge upon an author: public history, personal history, the history of genres, some impulse of genius. You have to look at the text to see what was produced by the mind of the author.
Read MoreSports and Other Entertainments
A good way to see the difference between art and entertainment is to consider sports. Yes, there is the ballet of basketball, and a batter’s swing can be said to be beautiful. But these are stretches, metaphors parading as accurate descriptions, as when baseball is described as an American religion when it is just something that excites a feeling of loyalty about something not to be taken all that seriously. Bostonians and New Yorkers make believe they hate one another’s baseball teams, but in a crunch, as after the Patriot’s Day bombing, the police and fire departments work closely together. The conflict between Red Sox Nation and the Yankee Empire is an affectation. The same is the case with sports and art. Sports are not taken seriously as art. They do not make the same claim at the transcendental, or at originality. A batter is not rewarded for the creativity of his swing, just how dependable is his production of hits or home runs. Even very well paid players know their place. They say, at least, that what is important is providing for the economic security of their families; sports, after all, is just a game.
Read MorePolitics and Time
Politics is one of only a few social institutions that are complex in that they embody an existential paradox. On the one hand, politics is dramatic. The 1968 Democratic nominating process and the campaign that followed afterwards where Nixon went from a close to thirty percentage point lead over Humphrey to pulling out a victory by only about a half of one percent is testament to that. The same is so in any number of elections when people come from behind or, even more surprisingly, simply solidify their leads, as happened for George W. Bush in his bid for reelection, despite having led the nation into war under false pretenses, the Iraq War at its peak when the election was held. Politics provides the public with a bevy of interesting characters whose repeated exposure to the public makes the public think that it knows what these people are really like; campaign spectacles like rallies and even, up to forty years ago, the intrusion of assassinations and assassination attempts to provide dramatic reversals that keep the plots intriguing. Yet at the same time, politics is dramatic without doing what drama does, which is elide time so that the boring parts are cut out or shortened or compressed. Far from exemplifying Aristotle’s principle that there are unities of time and space in drama, politics works itself out in real time, events moving no faster than it takes them to unfold, however extended may be the longueurs between pivotal events. This fact about politics, that it is dramatic without eliding time, goes far to explain the texture of the public’s exposure to political life as well as the dynamics within politics itself.
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