Original Intent

A primitive form of interpretation

“Original intent” is one way to interpret texts, in that every text needs a theory of interpretation and that applies to legal statutes and to the United States Constitution which is presented as a set of laws about what the branches of government can and cannot do rather than principles to which people aspire, as in the French “Declaration of the Rights of Man”. Laws need interpretation because they are set up at one time to be applicable to later times and circumstances may change or seem to change or may need, after due consideration, need alteration. When the Ten Commandments says that “Thou shalt not kill”, that has to be qualified or interpreted to mean “Thou shalt not murder” which means legal killing, as in warfare, and is not forbidden or at least that will remain the case until it seems the more inclusive meaning comes to appear as the essential one when war and the death penalty are regarded as part of the same prohibition, part and parcel of the same idea.

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My Religion

However wrong, religion persists.

I don’t think it unusual for a child to indulge in superstitious thinking. As a child, lying in bed, I thought about the fact that ‘god’ spelled backwards was dog, that “GE” were special letters and so a special company, that I would try to make up nonsense words as signs of inspiration, and would chant phrases until I fell asleep, Don’t most children do something like that? What might be distinct was that a sense of awe was generated in me by outside properties having to do with the metaphysics of language rather than morality or human nature. That would come later. Maybe that is the way religion develops: history following the usual individual development, social phylogeny a recapitulation of individual ontogeny. First spirits and later, with Abraham, morality.

I had an ear for religious auras, just as some people have a green thumb or good pitch but I did not respond well to the Hebrew school I attended, kicked out of it for being rambunctious though I was very attentive at public school, maybe because I thought it really counted. But why didn’t religious instruction really count? Maybe because it really consisted only of learning to read the sounds of Hebrew without learning what they meant and was shameful of my failure to master prayers, never having been taught them. Who wants to excel at what you are not good at? (Me, who never learned much math but tried hard to do so.) At any rate, I treated religious books as to be held gingerly and with awe because included in the volumes were God’s word.


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Two Sisters

Shedding and acquiring guilt with regard to the Holocaust and other historical and ordinary problems.

My mother, originally known as Manya Demba, later Mary, grew up in Czenstochowa, Poland, a cathedral town close to the German border and famous for the shrine of the Black Madonna. She in later years told me that Easter Sunday was when youths would raid the Jewish ghetto and beat up people. My mother worked at a handbag company, never having gone past the sixth grade, while her sister, later anglicized as “Rae”, was a nanny and so got extra food and clothing from her employer. But war was impending. They had been through the Munich Crisis. Polish troops had been mobilized and my mother remembered the hypnotic power of Hitler on the radio, which she could well enough understand because of her Yiddish. (She later said that English was difficult to learn because its letters did not easily convey the sounds and meanings of the language while Polish was transparent, its letters indicating what was said). My mother planned to immigrate to Palestine and was learning Hebrew and Jewish history in preparation for that when a rich relative who had prospered as a baker in  America, much more so than his three brothers who had gone to America also as bakers a generation before, came to visit Czenstochowa, partly to provide money and also, I am inclined to think, to gloat a bit about his prosperity. He offered to sponsor the two young women, my mother and one of her sisters, Rae, to come to the United States by paying the fare and guaranteeing they would not be destitute, giving them food and housing, and so akin to the wards who populate nineteenth century English novels. The two girls decided to do that and departed on the luxury ship “Batory” in May of 1939, reportedly the last Polish ship to leave Poland before the war, my mother insisting in later years that boys took her dancing on the higher class decks while her sister was seasick. That was the most courageous thing the two sisters ever did, however many were the people who immigrated from Europe to America, never again to see the families from which they had departed. Most of her own relatives, including a number of sisters, were killed in the concentration camps after the war began.

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Network Anchors

Broadcast anchors are different from cable anchors.

Edward R. Murrow is generally regarded as the model of a network anchor man even though he never played that role. He became famous delivering his deep voice, slow delivery and objective statements of fact while broadcasting from the London Blitz to American radio listeners. Later on, in the Fifties, he presented half hour and full hour programs about current topics, including a squelching of Joe McCarthy and an exposure of the plight of migrant farm labor. What were known as “Murrow’s boys”, including Eric Severied and Charles Kuralt, carried out that tradition but the most serious version of that as anchor was when Walterr Cronkite became the anchor for the CBS evening news and what he said was law. When he announced that the election campaign someone had been elected President, that was that, CBS having in the back room calculated the votes. A young man I knew scoffed at letting the networks decide that Biden had been elected President in 2020 but should wait until the legal challenges were resolved, but that had been the way it was done. Also, when Walter Chronkite returned from a visit to Vietnam and declared that the war had been lost, that meant it had been subject only to the removal of our remaining troops. 

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Reality as Experience

Trust what you can remember.

There are deep structures in existence, like consciousness or the reality of the external world, that are thought to be philosophical or metaphysical or even just conceptual that in fact can be reduced to generalizations or inferences that people draw from experience rather than as inevitable or inherent. The evidence comes from consulting the experience of early age children as to establish what they themselves are able to find and what can be found about them even without the advantages supposedly offered by psychoanalysis about how the early child’s mind can be accessed. I am thinking of my commonplace observations of what Im remember before I was four about things I now know as having already been discovered in the world. I remember, for one thing, learning to drink from a glass rather than from a bottle. I had been a late learner and my mothers ruse, as I realized it to be many years later, was to say that she could not get down to the village to buy bottles and so I would have to cope by using a glass to drink milk. An accommodating sort, I said I would do that if I drank from a glass in private and she acquiesced and we went into a private space and I drank from a glass and never went back to bottles. Think about that. I already had the ability to feel embarrassed about making what seemed a major transition and I was able to negotiate  the terms of my acquiescence. 

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Re-release: Comedy and Tragedy in "Pride and Prejudice"

“Pride and Prejudice”, as well as the other Jane Austen novels, can be appreciated for their sparkling dialogue and their vivid characters and the clear narrative lines that manage to balance off multiple characters, as well as for the very detailed portrayal of the world of the country gentry in Regency England. The truth, however, is that Jane Austen accomplishes much more than that. She provides an objective appraisal of the human condition that you will find nowhere else except in Shakespeare and in some of the books of the Old Testament, notably in “Genesis” and the story of David as told in “Samuel I and II”. Among other things, Austen takes a perfectly objective approach to her characters, explaining what they are with utmost clarity, warts and all, while most novelists, including Dickens, take sides, preferring their heroes to their villains, while Jane Austen is beyond that, and that in itself is very liberating as it calls forth in a reader the ability also to be beyond judgment. People are what they are. Deal with it. Emma, for one, is less talented, and more superficial, than others in the Jane Austen repertoire. Elizabeth Bennet, for example, must have been an insufferably awkward and outspoken young woman at the beginning of "Pride and Prejudice", just as Darcy thought her to be, but she also has appeal as an extremely intelligent and firm and deeply moral person, which also appealed to Darcy, who has to be given credit for seeing her as a diamond in the rough. All of Jane Austen's heroines as flawed but not unworthy just because of that. Their flaws could have made them into tragic heroines, as in Ibsen, but instead Austen gives life to each of them so that they become precious souls instead of doomed creatures. 

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Burying the Past

What does it mean to bury the past? It is like burying the dead, which means not just acknowledging the fact as in “Gilgamesh” where the hero sees bugs coming out of his dead friend’s nose, but having come to terms with it, funeral rites a very ancient form of ritual perhaps to acknowledge that people have to be accepted as really dead because they visit us as ghosts and memories, no one really dead until Aldous Huxley replaces rituals with allowing factories to recover and recycle chemical remains. Then dead people are really dead because people now actually dead people really are. Similarly, burying the past is to do more than acknowledge that past times are over, whether the Romantic Age or hula hoops or JFK, but have come to terms with that fact, moving on or not with that sensibility. People can do that. It is possible for consciousness to transform dead people and past situations to become established as in the past. Here are some ways by which to wrestle with the past so that it is over.

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Re-release: Jane Austen's Conservatism

the persistance of conservatism versus liberalism

Jane Austen is a Conservative. That is not because she espouses Conservative ideology, as do Doestoevski and Tolstoy, nor as Thomas Mann endorsed Liberal ideology. It is not because she seems to have sided with the Conservative side in the Hastings trial or did not decry Sir Thomas Bertram in “Mansfield Park” for owning land in slave holding Jamaica. Rather, it is because she shares the complicated view of human nature and what we would now call the human condition that was also held by Dr. Johnson and Edmund Burke just a generation before and was carried on a generation later by Thomas Carlyle and John Henry Newman. This line of thinkers and writers were opposed to the Enlightenment, as that was practiced by the French philosophes, as well as by such writers as Wordsworth and Shelley and Hazlitt in England, all of whom favored the ideas of universal human rights and the equality of man. Jane Austen saw those ideas as hopelessly superficial and expressions of the enthusiasm she identified with Methodism. Her Conservatism is not to be confused with present day Conservatism because it was still humanitarian and progressive in that Austen and other Conservatives were in favor of mitigating the conditions of the poor and modernizing agriculture. It is just that they thought the Enlightenment and Liberalism turned the mind and heart away from the complexities of life.

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The Decline of the Liberal Arts

Does it have a use?

A recent report in the New Yorker documents a precipitous decline in liberal arts in colleges and universities. The number of students in history, English and philosophy are in decline and many departments in those colleges have closed entirely. A report replicates the same finding and adds that some politicians are disparaging liberal arts, one suggesting that students majoring in liberal arts pay higher tuition. The author of this and the other article cited are not good, however at explaining why this has come about, the New Yorker article scattershot in blaming it on Sputnik and also the difficulty of children to become fluent at reading. The article entitled “Colleges Should Be More Than Just Vocational Schools”, written by Melanie Lembrick and published in the NYT on April 2, 2023, seems to argue but only in an abbreviated manner that the decline of liberal arts is due to poorer people entering college and so not able to indulge such frivolous pursuits as liberal arts. As a product myself of the liberal arts and having devoted my life to it, I want to go more deeply into explanations and not just the facts of the decline and I conclude that there is a cultural mind shift whereby you don’t need to get educated so as to become a fuller human being and the significance of that new mindset, should it be sustained, is staggering to what it is to be a human being and a society, more important than Artificial Intelligence learning how to write an essay.



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A Disappointing Indictment

Bad law and worse drama

The MSNBC crowd are out for revenge, whatever the pretext for indictment, while I share the view of the NYT columnists who have misgivings. In my view, the legal case against Trump is jerry rigged, compounding a state misdemeanor with a federal felony. Prosecutors are all too ready to convict or extend crimes so as to catch a bad guy. Remember that Martha Stewart was put in jail for having lied to the FBI about insider trading because the prosecutors thought that they couldn't convict her of the actual inside trading. In general, don’t trust the FBI. James Comey helped to scuttle the Hillary election and the main FBI headquarters is still named after the infamous J. Edgar Hoover. Liberals rather than Conservatives are the ones who distrust law enforcement. Another example. Michael Cohen got a soft sentence for pleading guilty about the hush money but the whole issue was debatable and was never tested in court because it was prudent for him to plead guilty rather than get the book thrown out at him for the effrontery of having proceeded to trial. I am consistent in my view in that I am also opposed to hate crimes, another way of broadening criminal penalty. If you shoot up a jewelry store you should not get an additional charge for having yelled "kike" at the jewelry store owner even if you raise penalties for firebombing religious buildings like synagogues, mosques and churches.

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The Spirit of Any Age

Willam Hazlitt was a literary critic who published his book, “The Spirit of the Age”, in 1825 and in doing so started out a new method of investigation that remains available and practiced up to and including in our own time. Hazlitt said that an examination of the literary and philosophical works of the elite could tell what was going on with English society. The elite are tied to the general culture. The idea that there is a general culture was elaborated a generation later by Macaulay, and Samuel Johnson, writing a few generations before Hazlitt, had separated his criticism from his essays about the state of English society. I am particularly struck by Hazlitt’s vivid and accurate essays on Bentham and Coleridge. Bentham simplified life and morality to calculating benefits to be derived from pleasure and forgetting everything else, like obedience or moral obligation, reducing life to quantums of pleasure though never presenting a metric for it, though he left himself an out by considering “satisfaction” as a pleasure and that lets in treating honor or justice as that even if that involves pain. Coleridge, on the other hand, was a quasi-mystical medievalist committed to the sense that society was organic and complicated and that, as Pascal said, the heart has its reasons. But both views, Bentham’s late Enlightenment and Coleridge’s Romanticism, were both strands in the early nineteenth century English experience each to be savored and evaluated by the reader.

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Experiences Without Meaning

Snapple, storefronts and silences

The Existentialists from the Forties and the Fifties were out to explore the exotic so as to establish bedrock reality, what was really the human condition. So they looked at the stranger, that man without familial feeling, to show that people were truly alienated. And Sartre saw people who saw gnarled, hideous and frightening trees as looking at the world bare and maybe mad for having looked at nature without its Kantian categories. Twenty years later, Erving Goffman envisioned people as always only performing, their roles used to provide the impression that people managed their lives well, and so neglecting motives of love or loyalty, people just pulling their own marionette strings and so life reflected the Absurdist theater of the previous decade after all. I want to try a different approach. It is the most ordinary and familiar aspects of life that reveal or amount to the human condition, it is just difficult to objectify the obvious even if it is the substance of life, not the abstracted things like justice and God. Politics is just organized suasion, full of bombast and anger. Life is feeling yourself as breathing because without its familiarity you are dead and what could it possibly mean for a person to be alive if they do not experience breathing however much you try to think of metaphors that concern angels walking amid the clouds, in which case they would be breathing, wouldn’t they?

This approach is different from the usual oner whereby profound things are appreciated and explained by consulting the most complex and crafted form of art and literature, going deep into how Goya and Van Gogh and Balzac and Melville reshape our lives by creating objects skewed from what life is thought to be and thence trying to make sense of the discrepancies. In that cased, people engage life with self-consciousness so as to hone a sense of reality. The other path, as it is based on the wisdom of sociology, is that most of life is not filled with self consciousness but with ordinary perceptions and feelings and so free of these higher things, life crowded with the ordinary and so free of the burdens of being enlightened however enlightenment is the necessary task that allows life to be ordinary. And so we shall precede.

 

Here is an easy example of how an experience has little meaning but is just familiar and therefore part of the human condition even though it is superficial and artificial. Snapple is a soft drink which has a distinctive flavor that combines tea and peach and water and is chilled. The experience is taste and a feeling of cold liquid going into your innards and it satisfies thirst, none of these providing meaning but satisfying pleasure. The ingestion of cold liquids nowadays is quite general,and  habitual. For a hundred and fifty years soft drinks depend on refrigeration and the invention of Coca Cola as a particularly tasteful drink. Preceding that there were stimulants, like tea and coffee and chocolate, often because of the use of sugar, and is dated because it was possible earlier to heat rather than to cool and goes back a thousand years. Previous even to that are alcoholic and other potentially addictive liquids. It is curious that the more powerful liquids are by and large given in smaller portions, a cup of coffee smaller than a bottle of Snapple and a bottle of scotch having many portions that would lead to inebriation. Even smaller doses are used for narcotic addiction, so small as to be administered with injection or pills.The exception is that beer is a bigger dose than snapple. It is measured in a pint or a stein, perhaps because beer is such an ancient invention that more efficient doses had not been developed. The fact of the matter is that these ingestive habits are familiar and universal and so allow people to think of these as natural, their way to be, even if they do not convey anything of significance. The same is true with chocolate chip cookies and ketchup.What would life be like without these pleasures? 


Stacks of cartons and cans and bottles of soft drinks are stocked in supermarkets. They are so abundant in their variety that a consumer has to be aware of a choice whether to get sugared or nocal or iced teas or lightly flavored waters or just plain water. The consumer can think that consumer choice is a kind of democracy because the consumer is sovereign, each product advertised for its wares and successful only if the consumer prefers which product to buy. But that is misleading in that the decision to buy is merely a preference, of no significance other than to one’s own taste and the company’s bottom line unless there is, let us say, there is a boycott on South African wine during apartheid or because there is a movement to restrict sugar as a bad health thing. That is different from voting, where there is always a moral dimension so that choosing a candidate who will cut your taxes is a choice to think only of economic self interest and whether abortion is an issue worth thinking about and choosing what is a moral decision. Voting is never morally neutral while prteferring Snapple to Coke always is unless, letg us say, the prtoprietgor of some product is morally egregious and one refuses to buy from Hobby Lobby or a baker who won’t buy from gays who are about to marry. Legal issues about the neutrality of consumership arise.


Now here it gets tricky. Is there a difference with regard to consciousness between a preference and a moral dilemma, each considered on their own, or when the two are compared? Both of those analyses, the separate and the compared, are generalizations of facts, and so can be considered what we might call “raw empiricism”, people noticing the choices they make as moral or not and also whether to prefer moral to preferential or not, while the other view is that it is quite different to consider comparing preference versus morality rather than Snapple rather than Coke. Persons just engaged with a preference are aware of what they  are doing. To think otherwise is to be a robot or a lower form of animal. But comparing or deciding whether morality plays a role or not requires self consciousness rather than just awareness because perhaps it posits referring to concepts outside the empirical world, people enshrouded with invisible categories, as in the case of Kant, which make these decisions meaningful rather than just experiences of which one is aware. We have to, as the expression goes, “step back” in order to consider such categories, not only ordinary preferences, however much it may be to be rational in choosing one soft drink because of its taste or advertising slogan. So that is a way to say that a soft drink beverage choice is an experience but does not have meaning because it has no reverberations with a high level concept.


Here is another ordinary feature of life which can elaborate the idea that much of lifer is rational in that it is fully aware without being self-aware, which means inverted with meaning. I am thinking of storefronts, which are retail businesses which may not be as old as the cavemen, but are available for millenia, even if one stall is separated from one another by a cloth or nothing at all so as to buy or sell goods, like flour or rice, or services, like barbers and hairstylists, to a consumership in enough number that people will cross their thresholds to buy out of pickle barrels or stacks of dry goods. There are storefronts in Near Eastern bazaars way back and a small town on the American Western frontier had a general store and Jim Bridger had a fort back in the wilderness where he bought furs and sold general supplies to the indians and the other mountaineers that passed his way in Oregon. The storekeeper is invented but ubiquitous, opening up as soon as a battle ens so as to provide staples and disposables as soon as a supply customer to arrive in the slow midday hours, his shelves stocked with bottles, separating wines from liquors and scotches from gins and brandies,  chain is established, even among the rabble. Storefronts survived in London during the Blitz, so resilient is that form of enterprise.


I notice how similar to one another are storefronts to one another of a similar type. I remember in my youth a liquor store proprietor who had trained to be a lawyer who had fallen into this business waiting for a customer to come across the threshold during the slow midmorning hours, the bottles all lined up on the shelves, wines separated from liquors and gins and brandies separated from brandies. A liquor store was considered a clean business in that all you had to do was unpack boxes of shipments, while there was a lot of cleaning up that had ro be done in produced and dairy stores, so much to be trimmed or refreshed or made waste, so long as a liquor store needed a considerable initial capital to stock its wares. After that, it was easy sailing, except how to judge who to give credit to and how to turn away drunks or potential thieves out to get the register’s abundant cash. Liquor stores don’t look very different: filled with open boxes of bottles and special sale items, whether the liquor store is a sole proprietor or a state liquor authority. Consumables of small quantities are also ubiquitous and subject to state regulation.


On the other hand, some storefronts come and go.  There was a rage for ten or twenty years for storefronts that rented tapes of movies that could be played on home VCRs. It took little capital to start them up, only rent and inventory where people went in because, as I gathered, they hadn’t made much of something else. There were also larger stores in the Blackbuster franchise which also sold popcorn and movie candy but did not have any more variety of movies to offer than the smaller ones which carried recent releases rather than “classics'', which meant black and white movies from the Forties. All bit the dust when movies become available on cable and then by streaming, just as late night network movies had given way to talk shows. I remember “The Late Show” and “The Late Late Show” that made Patsy Kelly, the one with her distinctive nasal voice, a star to me.


The thing about storefronts is how much they come and go, much more frequently than the buildings where the storefronts were placed on their street entrances, at least on the Upper West Side of Manhattan where I lived for many years. I would know which pizza parlor shut down and which barber shop,m a breed that seemed to me ever to diminish. For a while, every block had another bank branch, maybe because people like branches close by because the services available are all pretty much the same. It was difficult, however, to create big supermarkets for a while because it was too expensive to get a large enough space until places like specialty shops, gourmet places like Citerella, were sufficiently capitalized. I would measure out the changing storefronts over the course of my years there. Remember when a particular chinese restaurant to which I took my kids closed down? Kids in Manhattan all learn chopsticks early.


And so to the theme. Store fronts are an ordinary occurrence and people can appreciate the different types. You know not to buy meat at a haberdashery store (also now extinct or very rare, included in sports goods clothing stores. That is a reasonable inference, a raw empirical observation , an experience of everyday life. But there is also an outside and abstract concept which turns storefronts into being a matter of self awareness and possibly deep contemplation. That, as I have already suggested, is the idea of time, a category so abstracted by Kant so as to rid it of its everyday experience as a change in the material settings whose alterations show change in time. Who and when was Ebbets Field demolished so as to be replaced by a housing project? This event or the memory of it displaces a person from a time to being “above” or “beyond” time and that makes you like God, however fragile might be your earthly existence. Think of emptied storefronts or even those in reconstruction, new fixtures put in  place as old ones are carried out even if ones that had elaborate plumbing was retained or altered so that a restaurant would probably be retained as a restaurant, a video store becoming anything, like a shoemaker because all you have to do is bring in the equipment, even if shoemakers are dying out because cloth sneakers replace leather and people prefer to replace rather than repair. We savor time in changing storefronts.


A perfectly ordinary experience that can give people comfort is listening to, as the phrase has it, “the sound of silence”, which is an oxymoronic if accurate observation, though you can make it odd and even eerie by giving it an Existentialist edge, making it strange that the absence of something is there. You lie in bed and your breathing slows down to barely if anything is being heard, not even a heartbeat. There are no cicadas or wind or fire engines rushing down West End Avenue or a soft rain that can lull you to sleep. It's so quiet that you sense silence as a wave of it, one after the other assaulting us because it insults us not to be otherwise, to be like music and so having rhythm and tone. And you edge into self consciousness as you contemplate the profundity of the thing, associated with sleep, another ordinary experience, erven as sleep is hardly silent, filled with dreams screaming to have their sexual and other dreams announcing their insights with startling invention and clarity, as when I dreamed how old my young wife would look forty years late and she did. Self-consciousness arrives, develops, out of making comparisons, just as in “Sesame Street”, one thing like  or different from another, though the decisive event is even earlier when a terrible two year old recognizes the power of “no!”, negation particularly a way to process thought by both Marxists and Existentialists. 


The thing about silence is that you don’t really hear them unless you are deaf. Otherwise, silence is an “ideal” almost always violated so that listening to silence is not literally true and such an assertion is a “no!” to silence and so makes it a metaphysical assertion or, more modestly, a concept that denies what overwhelmingly is and that mediates the experience of silence so that it helps self-consciousness to arise in that it generates the idea of possible events rather than just things that have happened, which is the bugaboo of positivists who only examine what has happened, as if there could not be representative democracies before any had been constructed, where people said it only happened in small nations until the United States invented itself and so made itself possible. That is worthy of the heavy burden of being self-conscious even if it is very difficult to define what the term means in that a director looking through  a camera lens is self aware of what he or she is seeing but the looking through the lens isn’t what does it but the mind of the director does and so the best that can be said is that Snapple, storefronts and silence leverage minds to become self conscious rather than constitute that.


The program in this and many of my essays is the Pragmatist one of eliminating philosophical words as either meaningless or to be reduced to simple empirical facts. That is different from regarding philosophy as a set of universal invisible terms that are inherent in existence and cannot be done without like justice or cause and effect, the first of which can be done without to explain social life and the second can be substituted with “context”, which means the conditions under which things happen. Pragmatism is also different from the idea that most people are expert enough to clarify these essential terms but rely on  custom and expertise to do the work for them when in fact people can provide a perfectly adequate explanation of their situation and the Entire Situation by referring ton facts, including experience. People are more enlightened, become freer, by getting rid of their philosophical baggage.


That is the case in the examples provided. People can do much to avoid moral terms if you treat much of it as preferences to kinds of soft drinks. Time, such a formidable concept, is reduced to changing storefronts and negation, that deeply profound matter, is reduced to noticing that silence is not absolute. All these are matters of everyday lifer and only because there is philosophy, which arises out of self-consciousness, is it possible to retain self-consciousness because of being rid of philosophy.

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The Passing Scene 2

Current events concern the topics, such as politics or weather or culture and all the rest, that are important to present to public consciousness so that there is an informed citizenry. But because newspapers have to fill so many pages and tv and cable media have to fill up so many hours and because the readership and viewership have to be entertained, also covered by current events are the police blotter, zoo animals, “human interest” stories about an old haunted house, snow storms when it's winter and heat waves in the summer, adding a bit of dread so as to appeal to those apocalyptically inclined, as well as important political assassinations and wars and scandals, leading back from Hunter Biden’s laptop to Sherman Adams, whose wife was gifted with vicuna coats when he was the first white house chief of staff, adopting for eisenhower as president the title used from the military where Beedle Smith had been chief of staff when Ike was head of eto. Different news organizations cull what appeals to their ideology, as when Fox News reviews or invents Biden scandals, but that does not mean, as Morning Joe on MSNBC suggests, that we are in a post information age. Newscasters and news reporters have always culled information, and offered their slants even if Fox News is the only network that deliberately lies about what its broadcasters know. Back in the old days, New York’s Daily News presented one take of the world and the mainstream Herald Tribune took another and Dorothy Schiff’s Liberal New York Post took an exposure to Joe McCarthy early on. Pick your silo commuting to and back from work on the subway. 

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Responsibility

A person would, could and should sort out these words so that what is said is clear and indubitable.

There are a number of concepts in moral philosophy that can be reduced to descriptions of fact and that is a worthwhile program because moral terms are leftovers from a religious insistence that morality is as real even if invisible as is the idea of God, trying to keep hold of spiritual things but without seeing gods in every tree or mountain. A good example of this is the idea of responsibility, which refers to the onus or burden of morality that is placed on an individual to do something that improves yourself or the lot of a set of people because of your circumstances, such as becoming a police officer who has to interfere with criminal events or a mentor who has to give sensible advice to students, or is even generalized to mean that all human beings are somehow responsible for the welfare of all other human beings, which can be taken to be the message of Jesus. Much of life involves our responsibilities rather than our pleasures or preferences and moral philosophy concerns what and how to comply with these matters, whether it means whether one is obligated to intrude when a friend makes a racist remark or to be a whistleblower or who to vote for if one candidate is harsh on the poor rather than a choice of whom to vote for because of a balance of interests.

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When the Academy Awards Was an Event

—until recent films stopped processing current events.

It used to be that the Academy Award telecast was an event. People wanted to watch people preen in their tuxes or tails and the women stuffed into their gowns, all of them displaying their “real” personalities and interacting with one another even if they had taken roles in different movies and also to see as it was happening which persons and movies got awards because that seemed important, these matters raised out of entertainment, just a pastime, into an event of historical consciousness. Journalism may be the first draft of history, but movies are the reconsidered draft, whereby “Gone With the Wind'' rehabilitates the antebellum South by eliding the cruelty of slavery and “The Best Years of Our Lives'' confronting how people who survived the war would carry on. You wanted to be there while it was happening, akin to a World Series game or the Simon and Garfinkel event in Central Park or the Bicentennial fireworks or some other non entertainment events like 9/11 or Jan. 6th which were also confined in time and space and played out for a national and international audience.

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Human Warmth

I want to use literal human warmth, which is what happens when a person sits near a fire or wears a quilted coat, as a way to understand metaphorical human warmth, which is associated with friendship and community, so as to be more precise about the metaphorical and other meanings.

Everyone knows what it is like to get warm or feel deprived of warmth even if you have not  experienced the lack of warmth in a bombed out building in winter in  Ukraine or the shambles of earthquake damage in Turkey and Syria in wintertime. You know what it is to get under the covers and warm up, quickly enough and deliciously, mostly by capturing your own heat.There is something delicious in that experiencing the warmth overcoming the cold until you reach a point when you feel fully warm and languorous as a result of it, what seem to be the waves of warmth invigorating the person within that enclosure, knowing that intellectually just inches away the temperature is still cold, a person reassuring himself that there are no gaps in the cocoon whereby warmth might lek out. This is an experience as old as the cavemen or older, to primates who shivered and knew they shivered before fire had been controlled and so became a metaphor for wellbeing.

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The Importance of Lady Windemere's Fan

Here is a re-release of an example of what used to be called “close textual analysis”, which meant that the entire resources of literary criticism, such as symbolism, plot, irony, character analysis, dramatic reversals and dramatic parallels, were used to unfold the meaning of a piece of literature, assuming that the work operated as a singled whole. It is a skill that still applies as well to politics and everyday life.

What might seem a failure of plot structure in Oscar Wilde’s “Lady Windermere’s Fan” is, in fact, a key to understanding the play. There are numerous occasions on which the characters in the know are about to break the truth of Lady Windermere’s birth to her so that she will put a stop to some very self-destructive behavior. She is about to go off with a man not her husband because she thinks her husband has been unfaithful to her with a woman who is in fact her mother and who has been supported by Lord Windermere so that she can find herself a suitable match and so put an end to her years of wandering about the Continent as a fallen woman who had apparently turned to her wiles as the way to support herself.

Neither Mrs. Erlynne nor Lord Windermere will break the fateful news to Lady Windermere. For this, there is always an excuse. Someone has come into the room and interrupted the conversation. There is some other immediate concern to be addressed. But why such reluctance when so much is at stake? If people would only speak clearly, so many calamities would be averted. It is not enough to say that the entire play is about how people keep things from one another. That does not explain what is happening.

The truth is that the taboo, the shame, of being the daughter of a fallen woman and then of having her brought into your presence is so great that it is to be avoided if at all possible and it is to be avoided, this being a comedy, after all, and not a melodrama, where bad things always do come out and are entitled to come out, whether in the Brontes or in “Great Expectations” or in Raymond Chandler. In comedy, the audience becomes inured to the complexities of life, to the way settlements with the truth have to be made so that people can get along and be happy. It happens in “As You Like It”, when Beatrice and Benedict learn to get along because they love one another, or in “Waiting For Godot”, where the characters push on because what else is there to do but make the best of life.

Here, in “Lady Windermere’s Fan”, the comic tone and ending are accomplished by the perpetuation of a pretense. Mrs. Erlynne, Marjorie Windermere’s mother, will get married to the bumpkin she wanted to marry after all, despite a new disgrace, but she and he will go abroad (as did Anna Karenina and her lover) and so live outside proper society. Lady Windermere will continue to think fondly and idealistically of a mother she thinks dead and also be spared the shame of also having been so indiscrete as to try to run off with an acquaintance of her husband’s. Lord Windermere is, for his part, left permanently in the dark about his wife’s secret, which is known only to herself and to her mother. Women keep their secrets and that is the way of the world, the same message conveyed by that Congreve play of two centuries before. That is the only comedy since Shakespeare to be in the same class as the four Wilde plays of the 1890’s.

The most important secret the play reveals is not a plot device. It is its theme which, like that of many a Restoration comedy, is that sex is the main thing that motivates both men and women and that honor and station are covers for that fact. The play features nobility and wealth but that is because this is the state upon which passion can be dressed up and presented to an equally dressed up audience. There are no disparities in the class of the lovers to complicate matters, as is the case in Shaw and Shakespeare. Mrs. Erlynne was as well bred as any of them, just someone who made poor choices. Nor are there, as also happens in Shaw, complications created by the social structure of inequality and upbringing. There is only the straightforward matter of how women and men are attracted to one another and weave webs that complicate that story. This is more “Cosi Fan Tutti” than Shakespeare.

How challenging this theme and moral of finding a way to deal with passion and jealousy was to Oscar Wilde’s audience can be seen by comparing “Lady Windermere’s Fan'' to a play produced on the London stage only a few years before. Arthur Pinero’s “The Second Mrs. Tanqueray” deals with the same theme of how to deal with a sexual past but it does so very differently. The theme of the earlier play was also sex, there treated as the token of the breakthrough into the modern, a topic of great interest to Lady Windermere’s friends, just as sex was the topic that always comes up as the marker of a shift from one social dispensation to the next. It worked that way for Shakespeare, for the French enlightenment and for an American youth generation obsessed with Frank Sinatra. It had worked that way for Jane Austen. Fanny Price, in “Mansfield Park”, turns down an agricultural modernizer as a suitor, which is only one of the many clues about how retrograde the protagonist of the novel is.

In the Pinero play, a course woman is married by a widower but introducing her into his family is so unsettling that it drives her to suicide, which is just as well, because it has become clear, at least to her husband, that she was not fit company for his daughter by his first wife. All of the widower’s friends are against the arrangement. He should not have given in to his passions. It is as simple as that. Tanqueray loses his friends. “Lady Windermere’s Fan” is light years ahead of that, and not just because, for Wilde, sex is about sex and not a token of the rise or fall of social structures. Lord Windermere’s friends are won over by Mrs. Erlynne’s charm and beauty once she has been allowed to come to the ball. The plan has succeeded. It is only the principles that struggle with principal, which in the case of Lord Windermere is how to reconcile the woman who had fallen with the woman who is, and in the case of Lady Windermere, how to reconcile the woman who is with the woman of whom she is jealous but who has given no hint of any cause for jealousy. 

The production of the play I saw some years ago did not help its audience see the subtleties of the characters because it was so concerned to make it look properly Edwardian. The stage design copied both Whistler and Sargent. There is too much posing, as if this was a vivant tableau, and no talking was necessary. Wilde, however, does not need visual assistance to explain himself. He gives words to the age even as painters provided it with its characteristic poses. The first act of this production was played for its melodrama so as to suggest that there are deep matters afoot, and only the second act is played as a comedy. That is not to trust Wilde to establish seriousness all on his own.

Some of the lines in the play can be read flat or badly and so the audience cannot take note of their resonance. That happens in the very first moments of the production of the play that I saw. Lady Windermere is fixing the roses when Lord Darlington’s presence is announced. She tells him that she cannot take his hand because they are wet from the roses. Get that? She is wet from being as dewy and fresh as roses. This line is read as a throwaway even though it is clear from the ever economical Wilde that she does not want Lord Darlington to take her hand because he has already been too forward and so should be held at a distance, given no encouragement, even a bit of a rebuke, through her forbearance of a pleasantry. She might even sound a bit arch when announcing her excuse. Yes, she is just of age, but old enough and experienced enough and sophisticated enough to be sardonic and suspicious of someone who announces he is bad so that you won’t believe it or, worse, is announcing that he is bad because he really is bad, which is what happens later on when he declares his love for her and asks her to run away from her husband.

Never let appearances go untrusted, Wilde is saying. That lesson we have already learned from Shakespeare. The usurpation of the throne by Claudius in “Hamlet” certainly appears to be that and it takes a while for Hamlet to form a conviction that what appears to be is true. And neither Othello nor Shylock nor Richard III is to be trusted because the first is a Moor, the second is a Jew, and the third is a crookback. Their inner natures will come out.  Wilde uses the same device of someone announcing himself to be a friend in “An Ideal Husband”. There the person who announces he is a friend is a loyal one, the joke being that he is also a fop, while in “Lady Windermere’s Fan” friendship is announced by a self proclaimed bad guy so that the friendship, the audience knows, will be betrayed.

Lady Windermere must be substantial if she is to hold the sympathy of an audience who will find her to be priggish and judgmental and untrustful. The audience can well say that the world is not much to be trusted except for the best and only reason, which is so as to get on with a satisfactory and emotional life. After all, while still early in the first act, Lord Darlington asks Lady Windermere about her view that women are either good or bad, and so should remain ever faithful. Darlington asks if men should also remain subject to the same standards. In this production, the audience sees her as if she is struggling to make her principles consistent with what she knows to be common opinion. But just suggesting that line of argument should be enough to gain some laughter from the audience. How ridiculous to think that men can remain virtuous! That is not the way they are! What the line shows is just how ridiculous Lady Windermere’s idealism is. It is prudish. It reduces her to absurdity and shows how hard won is her view at the end of the play that there is good and bad in everyone, the general moral condition a euphemism for strictly sexual behavior and feelings, and that people should not consign others to one side or the other of a moral wall.

Mind you, according to this play, sexual immorality does exist. This is no H. G. Wells going on about free love or Theodore Dreiser allowing passion to do what it will. Rather, adulterous behavior by a woman is so vile that it should be roundly condemned and there is no reason not to ostracize the woman. It is just that after much remorse and a life spent in the backwaters of respectability, she can be restored to society so long as she is now and has been for a very long time blameless. Redemption is a long road. So Lord Windermere thinks as he begrudgingly aids Mrs. Erlynne, only to be disappointed by what seems another fall of hers from grace.

The moral of the play is, as Lady Windermere says, that there is good and bad and no one is so totally one or the other that they are to be judged by some single act alone. The theme of the play, however, is that lust is everywhere, just a glance away, and everyone knows this, men and women, young and old, married and unmarried, sophisticates like Mrs. Erlynne, and naïve ones, like Agatha, who knows what she wants and gets Mr. Hopper to give it to her, which is to get away from her mother and so join him in Australia where people are less accessible than they are in England, according to him, even though that is contrary to the usual view of the provinces to the homeland, Oscar Wilde, as usual, telling only the truth in his clever sayings.

Here is another place in the production I saw where a line could have been read more cleverly. The running gag is that Agatha offers an affectless “Yes” to whatever her mother says, as “Yes” is also her answer to Mr. Hopper’s proposal, as is her answer to her mother on whether she had accepted his proposal, all these building to the punch line, which is her “Yes” to whether she was going off to Australia with him, which is very much not to her mother’s liking. The motif does earn the playwright laughter. Wilde had milked his joke, just one of a number that he sprinkled in more for their amusement than for any advancement they make of the plot. Though it could be argued that Agatha is in fact showing off Wilde’s sense that women get what they want and can do so in very few words. That point would have been made more clearly if Agatha had been more sardonic or assertive in her offering of her various “Yeses”, or even if she had said each of them differently, so as to indicate that she was a master of communication.

The short term running gag is clever enough to show that Wilde can invent whatever he needs to, even though in gags not required by the plot, though that does not mean they cannot also be milked for meaning. Women get their way, never mind that morality is always on the side of men, whether they honor it or not, or just invoke it for their purposes. Women have the burden of being capable of dishonor and so that is what creates the topic of the play: that lust rules the world as much as it does any Restoration comedy even if the sides are not as equally armed as they are in Congreve. That is a very harsh message and it is one that this production very handily evokes, whatever its deficiencies in reading one or another line may be. The battle of the sexes, according to Wilde, is difficult, protracted, nasty and mean. It is a wonder that any one survives with any emotions intact. Sex is what everyone thinks about—the old biddies whose eagle eyes suppress it, the young people who turn it into love, and a person who has been wounded in the sexual wars and, in this case, comes to the rescue of someone in danger of also being seriously wounded.

Wilde does not treat sex as Freud will. It is not an underground psychic force ever distorted into new forms. Nor is it even what “La Ronde” makes of it: an irrepressible impulse which marks one as a deviant. Rather, sex is to be managed whether by propriety or morality or good sense. It is just a fact of life even as it gives rise to sublime as well as dastardly motives. And Wilde makes sense of its universal pull as well as the subterfuges needed to satisfy it through the creation of yet another scene where dramatic invention does what paintings cannot do, which is to reveal in a set of implicit contrasts yet another facet of the drama that has forever enclosed men and women.

That is the scene that occurs after the grand scene at the ball when everyone has explained themselves: Agatha to her mother, Mrs. Erlynne and Lord Windermere to one another and to the audience, and Lady Windermere to Lord Darlington. One might have expected that the following scene would be a change of pace, a time to absorb what has gone before. This visit to Lord Darlington’s rooms, however, creates its own drama, even if slower paced; it is heavy with ironies unannounced as the ones in the previous scene had been highlighted by the dialogue.

The two women, Lady Windermere and Mrs. Erlynne, have been discussing why Mrs. Erlynne thinks that Lady Windermere, who is not at all resolved to stay and become Lord Darlington’s mistress, should leave immediately and so not have her reputation ruined. (Notice that immorality is always a matter of reputation rather than fact. There is no explaining why people’s passions take them to do one thing or another.) They are interrupted by Lord Worthington and his friends returning to his rooms because he is following Mrs. Erlynne’s instruction not to allow Lord Windermere to return home and find out that his wife is not there. (This plot has been worked out in every detail. Oscar Wilde does not let his characters just spill over, the plot merely an excuse for their speeches, which is the case with Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill. For Wilde, as in Chekhov, a plot is like a puzzle; there cannot be a piece left over.)

The two women retreat to the rear of the apartment. That means they can overhear what the men are saying. That is notable. Wilde is invoking the Jane Austen problem, which is that she never writes a conversation where a woman is not present because how is she to know what it is men say to one another when they are not speaking in front of women? What secrets would such conversations reveal? Do men think differently when with one another, or make plots, or speak more coarsely of women than they do when in their company? This last might be suspected because men did so just a few generations ago. More importantly, will the men reveal different motives than they let on to in mixed company? The two women will be able to hear the truth and the audience will be able to hear what men say and what the women make of that.

This is a dazzling expectation, however brief the period during which the audience has to contemplate it, but much to be savored in recalling the action of the play. The expectation is very quickly disappointed because the truth is that the men themselves are neither dazzling in their wit (Wilde must have worked to suppress his talents) nor engaging even in foul or malign banter. They are a dull lot, far less interesting than the women who are now off stage but not out of mind. The men in this production are quite properly portrayed, I think, as just deflated by the absence of women. They have little to say to one another which is not a repetition of what they said at the ball. They whine about how women get the best of them and so see themselves as henpecked just the way they jovially remarked themselves to be at the ball, where it might be thought an affection assumed to lighten the mastery of men over the situation, when it is just the clear truth of the matter. So what is the truth of the Jane Austen problem? When men are off with their horses and doing the town, they may be more grubby, but no more astute than they are when in the company of women. Mr. Higgins, why can’t a man be more like a woman?

This is also the scene where Lady Windermere drops her fan and so her presence in Lord Darlington’s room would have been discovered and created a great scandal were it not that Mrs. Erlynne steps into the breach, allowing herself to be the one to have been caught being in the wrong place. The fan has the name “Marjorie” on it because it was a present to Lady Windermere from her husband, given her earlier in the day because she had just come of age, as she was to come of age in this very long day in the sense of catching on to the ways of the world. (Take note that Wilde observes the unity of time so well that it is easy to forget that the entire play takes place in less than twenty four hours.)

But remember that Mrs. Erlynne shares the same Christian name, as she points out. How do we not know that it was not she who dropped a similar fan? This thought is neither necessitated by nor useful in understanding the plot. Wilde does not use symbols that way. Shaw does have things take on importance in that way, as when the burning of the library in “Caesar and Cleopatra” is an event in the play and also a symbol of the end of a civilization. But Wilde, for his part, treats symbols as things in themselves, to be handled and inspected for what they tell about the plot, not about how they move it along. Here we are left to think our Wilde inspired thoughts and then go on to the plot, the reality of what is being presented.

Lady Windermere's fan can be thought of as a symbol of duplicity. People drop their fans or raise them when they are lying or cannot come up with a lie. Or else one can think of the fan as the apparatus one uses so as to make an appearance in public. The fan is the symbol of one’s public persona. A woman has composed herself so as to make a good impression, which means in part to be taken as an attractive woman who is yet a bit remote so as to remain respectable. The fan attracts and yet separates.

There is another level on which the fan operates. It may not be Mrs. Erlynne’s fan but it might as well have been. The two Marjorie’s share not just blood but inclination: they are capable of great indiscretion and the younger Marjorie comes to decide that any woman can become some other woman. So the fan is a symbol of the identity of women in general and of these two women in particular, the good one and the bad one. Whose fan it is is of little consequence so long as one woman helps out another.

The single Marjorie was divided into two parts long ago. Indeed, one Marjorie is the mother of the other Marjorie, and so why would one be surprised that the younger one is in danger of falling into the same sort of life as the older one? The two are doppelgangers; their fates are intertwined and the two lives cast both light and shadow on each other. This is not an unusual conceit in Victorian fiction. Willkie Collins does it with the two women in white in the novel of that name. Mark Twain does it all the time. Huck and Tom, the prince and the pauper are both paired people, as is the slave and the young master in “Pudd’nhead Wilson”. The only difference here is that the Corsican Brothers are mother and daughter.

That a single person can have multiple identities and that different people can in some sense be the same person is a philosophical conundrum much spoken of nowadays by professional philosophers. It is important to recognize, however, that in Wilde’s time, when analytic philosophy was just finding its way. G. E. Moore was pressing his readers to engage in common sense queries that would make philosophical quandaries just disappear into thin air. Take that, dragon. Wilde purveys that same spirit when he has an audience wonder about not just whether the two Marjorie’s are alike or akin but substitutes for one another, the original having time traveled to her daughter’s generation. She had been out of touch for a while, hadn’t she? And yet she takes over the drama as soon as she makes her appearance. It is uncanny.

Wilde would go on to dazzle with his mastery of the philosophical argot in “The Importance of Being Earnest” where the key question is what is in a name: do things have essential names or are names arbitrary. How could Gwendolyn marry someone other than someone named Ernest? That is the name she has always associated with the man whom she will marry. He has to be an “Ernest” and it was under that name that Gwendolyn fell in love with him. The order of the universe is a matter of names, of finding the correct ones, even the correct proper nouns, for things, including lovers. It is a metaphysical order that is to be restored by Wilde’s comedy, not just propriety or rectitude.

That more complicated picture is foreshadowed in “Lady Windermere’s Fan” because all the women are spirits, as are all the men, each trying to cling to a social identity while still being flesh and blood, and that social identity consisting of their personal names as well as their collective gender, both of which are always up for grabs. This is not the Erving Goffman version of everyday life wherein people cling to making themselves socially acceptable so that they have an identity to cover their emptiness. Rather it is that they are firmly placed in gender and personhood but are flung about by their genders and personhood in ways they do not anticipate. The question is how the two Marjorie’s are to be restored to one another on a practical level—which means on the level of art, as the outcome of a comedy—rather than because there has been social change, as is always expected in Shaw, or through some new plumbing of the human condition, as might be the case in Chekhov or Ibsen. After all, Wilde and Beckett were both Irishmen. Comedy is the only freedom there is. Art is not for art’s sake; it is for humanity’s sake.

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