Gadfly Spring 2010

the undergraduate philosophy magazine of Columbia UniversityGADFLYTHE

GADFLYTHE

Spring 2010

ShortsYou’re Precisely My Cup of Tea

A Chat with Senior Philosophy Majors

The Lapse of History Hegel and Columbia

XenakisMusical Insensitivity We Can Believe In?

Features

The Religion of the Secular (read heathen) Age?

A Philosophical Framework For Finnegans Wake

On Love, Or How to Cure the Ills of the Stomach

Our Parents, Ourselves

CriticismWhat Can Philosophy Say About Art?

A Debate

Making Small Talk With Philip KitcherAn Interview

Revolutionizing ArtA Review of The Emancipated Spectator

Sumedha Chablani

Sam Roth

César Adrián Montúfar

Nick Jusino

Shana Crandell

J.X. Daboin

Rhoda Feng

Bart PielaPuya Gerami

Victoria Jackson-Hanen

Rebecca Spalding

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From the Editor

The Gadfly is sponsored in part by the Arts Initiative at Columbia University. This funding is made possible through a generous gift from The Gatsby Charitable Foundation.

STAFF

Editor-in-Chief Bart Piela

Managing Editor Puya Gerami

Shorts EditorSumedha Chablani

Features EditorsStephany Garcia

Alan Daboin

Criticism EditorsVictoria Jackson-Hanen

Rebecca Spalding

Copy EditorLinda Ma

Arts EditorHong Kong Nguyen

Layout EditorChristina Johnston

Technology DirectorCindy Zhang

Business and Finance Manager

Michelle Vallejo

Thanks to the Columbia and Barnard Philosophy Departments for their support and assistance.

ILLUSTRATORSClaire SabelJ.X. Daboin

Louise McCuneAshley Lee

Natalie RobehmedConstance Castillo

Daniel NyariMaryn Carlson

Naomi RoochnikKeenan Korth

In Plato’s Symposium, a young Alcibiades, loudly drunk, recounts a charming story about our father of Western philosophy. One morning, Alcibiades relates, Socrates became so fixed in thought that he remained standing in one place all day and throughout the night, pondering; it was only the next morning at dawn that he broke from his reverie, offered a prayer, and continued his walk. This image of Socrates embodies the popular—and perhaps misguided—notion of the philosopher’s role: the unique commitment to focused thought, a concentrated reflection which can appear akin to intellectual clairvoyance.

But on that night of uninterrupted calculation, what exactly was Socrates thinking? Socrates’ almost mystic apprehension of the world of Forms may contribute to the inaccurate idealization of the philosopher as one who can access an indefinable realm of human cognition. Nevertheless, the image of Socrates motionless on a winter night points to an inescapable question: what do we think about when we think about philosophy?

Socrates himself may have an answer: the philosopher, he alleges in Phaedo, orders “intellectual vision” to come as close as possible to the essence of things. Our very own Philip Kitcher reminds us of this when he states that philosophers excel at “anatomy.”

The authors in this issue of The Gadfly all, in some way, seek to grasp the essence buried inside outer form, the reality hidden behind appearance. They all anatomize: whether their subject be a complex novel, a work of art, a musical composition, or even something so elusive as emotional attachment. Through them, The Gadfly seeks to apply the perceptive tools of philosophy to the experiences of everyday life. In this way the Socratic epiphany does not seem so impossibly distant; it is not some unknown event reserved for the few. Instead, philosophy serves us all best as the road towards understanding the structures that lie beneath the surface of experience.

Puya Gerami

THE GADFLY Spring 20092

Q

You’re Precisely My Cup of Tea A Chat with Senior Philosophy Majors

Stephanie Wu,Laura Rodgers,Tao Zeng, and Shana Crandell

How did you become interested in philosophy?

Stephanie: I wanted to take a course to discover what philosophy even meant. I still don’t know what it is or means, but I think I don’t know in a more robust way.Shana: Christia Mercer’s “History of Philosophy II” got me hooked.Tao: It’s not Stats or Econ (my other two majors).

Stephanie: Professor Neuhouser’s “Hegel” lecture and “Phenomenology of Spirit” seminar.Laura: “Phenomenology & Existentialism” with Taylor Carman & “Kant’s Ethics” with Patricia Kitcher.Shana: “Hegel” with Neuhouser; “Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason” with Patricia Kitcher.Tao: “Metaphyics” with Achille Varzi.

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Stephanie: Wittgenstein.Laura: Georges Bataille & Thomas Hobbes.Shana: Leibniz.Tao: Marx.

Stephanie: Schopenhauer?Shana: Derrida, I guess.Laura: George Berkeley, what a bore.Tao: Engels.

Illustrated by Claire Sabel

QWhich philosopher, dead or alive, would you most like to meet?

QWhich philosopher, dead or alive, would you least like to meet?

Which have been your favorite philosophy classes?

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QStephanie: Philosophy really helped me develop my close reading skills, which I’ve found useful for writing all sorts of papers and intrinsically enjoyable in my own leisure reading.Shana: Philosophy students arrogantly claim that they can successfuly venture into other disciplines because of their training. I’ve found this arrogance to be quite well-founded.Tao: Professors matter. The same class can be taught very differently by different professors.

QStephanie: I am going to study German and Chinese for a year, and hopefully hang out with my grandparents in China for a few months. Then, law school.Laura: Moving to Washington, D.C. and looking for a job.Shana: Taking a year to learn German and then heading to grad school, hopefully to end up studying Kant or Hegel for five or ten more years.Tao: Peace Corps.

QWhat is your advice to aspiring philosophy majors?

Stephanie: Philosophy classes assign few pages of reading. Do lots of delicious close reading.Shana: Take grad seminars early and often; one of my regrets is thinking I couldn’t take a seminar on the Phenomenology of Spirit when I was a sophomore. Fear not the G. You don’t have to write a thesis to be a serious student of philosophy.Tao: Take classes outside your major.

How would you sum up your experience as a philosophy major?

What are your plans after graduation?


The Lapse of History:

Sam RothIllustrated by J.X. Daboin

Hegel and Columbia

The night of October 13th, 1806, must have stretched on endlessly for the residents of the German

town of Jena. The French and Prussian armies, between which war now seemed inevitable, fitfully skirmished nearby as they prepared for a decisive battle. In that one small town, remarked a struggling ac-ademic at the local university, were forces sufficient to alter the face of the globe. But the lecturer had more immediate con-cerns. On that night, he raced to complete his first book, facing now not only an im-patient publisher but also the violent con-flict about to grip his city. By the end of the next day, Napo-leon had routed the Prussians and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel had finished The Phenomenology of Spirit. But for Hegel,

the night marked more than national tri-umph or personal accomplishment. It was the end of history itself. The last serious challenger to the progressive ideals of the French Revolution had been defeated in a blaze of glory. From that point forward, Hegel suggested, the ideals of republican governance would grow ineluctably across the globe. The competition of political ideologies, which had driven international history for millennia, had been perma-nently extinguished.

In April 1968, Columbia student Mark Rudd and a legion of disaffected peers stormed Hamilton Hall, taking

up positions outside the office of Henry Coleman, Dean of the College. But Cole-man, the uprising’s chosen hostage, wasn’t in. Elbowing his way through the crowd to reach his own office door, he stood next to Rudd and boomed, “I have no control over the demands you are making, but I have no intention of meeting any de-mand under a situation such as this.” Each group had the power to deny the other, and, as a thousand police officers stormed the Morningside Campus with weapons bared, it became clear that neither was interested in détente. Coleman waited through the night to be freed by his cap-tors the next day.

It is easy to imagine the class of 2013 sympathizing with Hegel. Their older classmates have weathered hunger

strikes and petty dictators, worn out their voices over navy boys and classroom inti-fadas, and packed Low Steps—twice—to cheer a former transfer student who went on to bigger things. But not this year. Stu-dents who first arrived at Columbia in 2009 have toiled on a sleepy green cam-pus, adrift somewhere north of Columbus Circle.

What happened?

Hegel, of course, was spectacularly wrong. The struggle over ideas was just beginning.

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It’s hard to claim a lack of provocation. Uyghur Muslim activist Rebiya Kadeer and Is-lamophobic Dutch MP Geert Wilders both in-veighed against enemies—the People’s Republic of China and all Muslims ever, respectively. Stu-dent councils debated whether or not to use the boot of oppression to put out your cigarette. For Christ’s sake, a professor punched someone, al-legedly on a question of race relations.

All this to little reaction. Kadeer, for example, engendered a protest of about four people with printer-paper flyers. Wilders, perhaps because he was so ludi-crously objectionable, also proved a non-starter. Lionel McIntyre, for all his alleged sins, remains a professor at the School of Architecture. If ever there were a time and place to calm down, it was Columbia in fall 2009. Perhaps the ideo-logical struggles are won and the history of Columbia is really over.

The historical narrative has not ended at Columbia University. The new conflicts may be hard to imagine from within the lapse of history.


Without a doubt, this past year has seen dramatic shifts in the nature of the issues that once excited us.

In 2009, Barack Obama’s electrifying promises of change, once the basis for uncompromising popular struggle, became part of a complex and ambiguous political process. Closer to home, the slow development of the Global Core demonstrated that, while questions of multiculturalism persist, the work of radical persuasion is over. Students, even if they disagree about smoking on campus, can hard-ly challenge the decision-making framework, having directly elected it. It could be that our quiescence, then, is the sign of a university at ease with itself. We have re-solved the fundamental conflict—the sharp distinction of interests—at the heart of history. Unlike Napoleon charging the Prus-sians, we face an amorphous sea of possibili-ties that move in one direction or another on strange and slow-moving tides.

But it’s hard to make that kind of pronouncement without thinking about He-gel at the Battle of Jena because Hegel, of course, was spectacularly wrong. The struggle over ideals in Europe was not over; it was just beginning. In the two centuries that fol-lowed, nationalism, fascism and communism, would radically threaten the identity of Hegel’s Western world. So don’t lose faith, freshmen. Your very arrival ensures that, for better or for worse, the historical narrative has not ended at Columbia University. The new conflicts may be hard to imagine from within the lapse of history. But as Hegel and Henry Coleman knew, the night only lasts for so long.

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The Religion of the Secular (read heathen) Age?

Nick JusinoIllustrated by Louise McCune

The attempt by certain religious believers to characterize the rela-tion between scientifically inclined

individuals and scientific disciplines as a relation between a faithful believer and his creed is ultimately quite disingenuous. However, as with many errors, there is a certain plausible kernel of truth here that lends credence to the larger claim in the minds of those only too eager to malign science and its advocates for the purpose of saving their religion from perceived danger. The difficulty rests in the claim by the enthusiasts of science that scientific methods are unique sources of objective

knowledge. This is true by any sensible standard but false when one looks to ex-aggerated criteria of knowledge. Uninten-tionally, the religious believers’ accusation leads us into an important epistemic de-bate.

When replying to the not unsub-stantial boast of the methods of science, the religious believer has two options: he can either claim that religion is more re-liable than others think, or he can allege that scientific inquiry isn’t so trustworthy. These are the options for a believer should he care to pursue the question of knowl-edge and not the question of faith.

When dealing with qualified scientists, religious people often discover quite quick-

ly that their variety of religious “knowledge” is a far cry from the rigorous knowledge sought accord-ing to stringent standards by scien-tists. Thus if the first option fails, believers find that the second op-tion presents a much harder task. A good scientist (despite her spe-cialization) likely knows how peni-cillin works, what a genome is and other points of general knowledge. Moreover, she probably knows a great deal of the foundational evi-dence upon which these matters are based.

There is no meaningful element of faith in science.


Faced with an uphill battle, the common religious believer might resort to desperate measures, such as unleash-ing the dreaded problem of induction. But in challenging our experientially well-founded presupposition that a sequence of events in the future will occur as it always has in the past (e.g., the laws of physics will hold as they have always been observed to hold), any religious believer looking to undermine science is in fact undermining the basis of his everyday experience. It can be safely assumed that the believer will predict that throwing wa-ter on a fire will put it out and not that H2O will whimsically become flammable itself. Unbeknownst to the believer, he or she relies on induction all the time. Oth-erwise, crossing a room might become a

true adventure and opening a door would never be safe as it may open to hell or, still better, to two-dimensional Flatland.

However, most of us are not so well versed in the history and methods of science. That being

the case, such religious believers needn’t devolve into such absurdity in attempting to undermine science among the general public. They instead might allege, in an al-ternative attempt to devalue the reliability of science and undermine its stature, that lay aficionados of science lack any knowl-edge of its validity and that they must ap-proach it with the very same (blind) faith with which they approach their own deity. Thus they claim that science is the religion of the secular (read heathen) age.

To start in earnest on the topic at hand, I might ask “What do you know?” It is a simple question, but it in-volves a bit of con-ceptual work. Let’s tentatively use the classic JTB analy-sis of knowledge as justified true belief. What,

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then, do we know? Well, 2+2=4; on a clear day, the sky is typically blue; Obama is the president; Albany is north of New York City, etc. But do I know Schwarzchild’s ra-dius equals 2GM/c2? Do I know all that much about the theoretical aspects of evo-lution, let alone the underlying genetics? Or else can I grasp the entirety of the lat-est report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change? Can I justify its find-ings or the methods employed in reaching the conclusions therein—explaining their assumptions, the mathematics and the evi-dentiary bases behind all of the methods? The answer to many of these questions is certainly “no.” But do I then know that these things are correct? An epistemic quandary is rearing its head here: What do I know and how do I know it? Some believers would like to exploit my igno-rance on many

matters as well as my uncertainty and fuzziness about others to their ends. In this way, they would like to demonstrate that there is some significant element of faith involved in believing that science is valid.

Where might we draw a line so as to subsume enthusiasts for science under knowledge

(perhaps nearer its fringes) and believers clearly under faith? An obvious answer comes to mind. As above, knowledge might be taken as justified true belief. Faith, then, might be a sort of confidence

that is provided by no evidentiary back-ing whatsoever and directed to something that is inscrutable (e.g., God). If the re-tort that trust in science is modern faith can be taken as indicative of the epistemic bankruptcy of religious belief (which is probably called “belief ” precisely because it cannot aspire to much justification), then it seems clear how believers might be subsumed under the category of “faith.” Enthusiasts for science then might be subsumed under knowledge, but only if we first define “justification.” For these purposes we might take it to consist in the use of reliable ways of coming to belief. If we think we can produce reliable and sensible reasons for coming to believe in the validity of science, then we can see why confidence in science is not compa-rable to religious faith.

Unfortunately, many religious persons who would lob the allegation at hand have ad-

opted unrealistic and very different criteria for the justification of knowl-edge. They would prefer a hyper-reliable sort of knowledge precisely because it places an overwhelming burden on any supporter of sci-

ence with its sheer impracticability. Hyper-reliable knowledge is unimaginable in the vast majority of human endeavors (save perhaps mathematics and logic) and so it’s not of much worth addressing, though I will note that many believers who would even attempt this crude tactic fail to approach a great many aspects of their own lives with that same hyperbolic skepticism. They don’t apply it to their own religious beliefs or to the great many sorts of social media that they might care for (e.g. televangelists). Nor do they en-tertain the idea that they might be brains in vats or else under the spell of an evil demon (though they might be tempted to resort to Descartes’s embarrassingly bad

An epistemic quandary is rearing its head here: What do I know and how do I know it?


solution and its requisite circular justifica-tion of God.) Instead, in setting the bar for knowledge so ludicrously high they count on it resulting in everyone’s having only some variety of “faith.”

But let’s see if we can ascribe to enthusiasts of science any sort of knowledge on the weaker criterion

provided above, i.e. if we can produce re-liable and sensible reasons for coming to believe in the validity of science. Quite ob-

viously the internal affairs of science and scientists in their professional contexts re-main unassailable. The strict methodolo-gies, community standards and means of peer review are effective ways of ensuring quality. In terms of education and societal confidence in science, its successes are the most striking and convincing justification anyone could point to. By its successes sci-ence shows remarkable reliability across a range of contexts.

What about the deep epistemic attack of religious enthusiasts? A text-book might say inherited genetics deter-mine the features of an organism, but do I know this? Do I know that DNA is made from arrangements of adenine, guanine, thymine and cytosine? Well, no, not if that means that I must have myself repeated the experiments that allegedly demon-strate these things. But this is not such a worry on the eminently practical criterion. The theories are cogent. The information came from reliable sources of qualified professionals whom I trust. And it has subsequently proved theoretically sound as the basis of later experimentation and advances from which I derive much prac-tical benefit.

In this case, we must take a non-foundationalist view of knowledge here; we are not moving from premises to logi-cal conclusions. Rather, we are basing our understanding on previous views deemed reliable. Given inherited knowledge, sci-ence will be continuously revised for all foreseeable time. This is a virtue of science in that, unlike religion and faith, it takes no dogmatic given at its word as unassailable and a justification of itself. Science—con-trary to the false image painted by some

believers of a despotic closed authority—even invites the likes of “intelligent design-ers” to take a shot at

explaining relevant matters, though scien-tists ultimately find their “theory” facile, without positive explanation but only nay-saying. So while our confidence in science might not meet the exaggerated Cartesian standard, it is still very reliable while reli-gious belief remains otherwise.

There is no meaningful element of faith in science. Setting the bar for knowledge too high is intended to

result in everyone having some variety of faith as found in religion. However, with its strict standards of proof, replicability, peer review, etc., science offers great ob-jectivity. Science is objective enough, be-ing based on the reliable knowledge of preceding generations, though it always reserves the option to correct itself, some-thing religion could never do. Further-more, it is reliable enough to adequately justify confidence in it. The allegation that confidence in science is comparable to the baseless faith found in religion is a particularly facile one that no respectable religious believer could advance. Instead, only those who themselves see the world through blind faith could accuse others of doing the same.

Science, unlike religion and faith, takes no dogmatic given at its word.

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Debate:

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgen-stein wrote: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be si-

lent.” Many philosophers have taken Wit-tgenstein’s suggestion—albeit, interpreted outside its context—to mean that all that we can say in philosophy is what we can

say precisely. The project of analytic

philosophy has been to make investigation as precise as possible. Can a philosopher say anything precise about art? Decidedly, no. It is not that it is impossible to think about art; certainly it is, and the results can be fasci-nating. But contemplation of art through proper philosophy is, in fact, impossible. Philosophy requires smooth systematiza-tion and, to a large degree, the tools of logical analysis. Those tools cannot be ap-plied to something so imprecise as human creativity.

Art relies on the various contradic-tions inherent in subjective ex-perience. When reading a single

passage of Tolstoy’s masterwork, War and Peace, the reader feels simultaneous love and hate, envy and repulsion, affirma-tion and denial. It is this sort of passage that is likely to receive the astute atten-tion of literary criticism. Napoleon is at once the greatest of all men and the smallest. He is the freest and the most bound. It is up to the reader to de-cide what to make of this. To a

large extent, what we have heard

The Lack of PrecisionBart Piela

Philosophy requires smooth systematization and the tools of logical analysis.

What can philosophy say about art?Illustrated by Ashley Lee


In Plato’s Republic, Socrates explains his reasons for banishing all poets from the ideal city-state: he fears the per-

nicious ‘imitations’ of artists who could corrupt the stable order of his Kallipolis, citing the “ancient quarrel” between po-etry and philosophy. For Socrates, rever-end martyr of Western philosophy, there is something seductive, mesmerizing and inescapably dangerous in the verse of the tragedian or the sculpture of the artist. Because of this, the philosopher uniquely chooses to banish art from his utopian fantasy. There is no room for creators in the static world of the philosopher-king. But Socrates’ frustrated attempt to exile art from the realm of the thinker is not philosophy’s rejection of aesthetics.

Rather it is philosophy’s recognition of the enigmatic, often unclassifiable nature of human expression. For the last two and a half millennia, a host of philosophers—from Aristotle to Hegel to Benjamin—have attempted to define the dynamics of aesthetic experience. Philosophy seeks to inquire, conceptualize and, above all else, demystify. Thus many thinkers have cho-sen to critically demystify the seemingly superhuman qualities of art by more fruit-fully understanding its complex relation-ship with human identity and perception. What makes an object a work of art? How do we perceive and define beau-ty? How does one construct a hierarchy of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ art? These provocative questions can only be approached with

in our introductory humanities classes is true: “There is no wrong answer.” There are only more compelling answers. But how compelling these answers are is based on wit, persuasiveness and style. Not on logic. Add to this already contradictory, imprecise form of expression an even more contradictory and imprecise pos-sible range of subjective reactions—what does one get? We can only say what we think the artist was thinking. And even the artist is not committed to what he or she is thinking, since much of his or her expression is subconscious. Not every art-ist is committed to the precise order of Raphael. Consider the chaos of Pollock.

Some principles of subjective ex-perience might be articulated. But this is only possible within the framework of the philosophy of psychology, or even psy-chology itself. Philosophy of art thus be-comes a branch of psychology, and that is certainly not what its proponents want. Philosophy’s greatest success comes when it is applied to disciplines with inherent precision, like mathematics and physics. The body of twentieth century analytic philosophy should be seen as progress in philosophy, just as the advances in mathe-matics and physics have been seen as prog-ress. It is very doubtful if philosophy will ever have such success in art; in fact, that kind of success may just be unattainable.

Wealth of DiscoursePuya Gerami

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the philosopher’s lens, equipped with the ability to distinguish and systematize. Ulti-mately philosophy can reveal to us the in-tricate processes involved in constructing and viewing art. Only philosophy leads us to understand far more precisely our dif-ferentiation between ‘art’ and ‘non-art’.

Philosophy is at its best when it is used to penetrate the inherent contradictions of reality, carefully

annihilating the dogmatic pretensions of received truths. It cannot be limited to the static results and mathematical certainties of logic. Philosophers hope to understand a world, and a human world-view, that is constantly transforming itself. Art is cen-tral to our existence because it represents this perpetual flux. Many of the most revered think-ers became acquainted with philosophy only while falling in love with art at the same time. Sartre’s last book is his attempt

to under-stand the writings of Flaubert; Nietz-sche’s first ends with a paean to the mu-sic of Richard Wagner. What explains this unique relationship between philosophy and art? If the role of philosophy is to understand what it means to be human, art boldly attempts to express that very wish. Unsurprisingly, the most talented philosophers seem to be astonishing art-ists in their own right: Socrates banishes all poets from the Kallipolis and lambasts the deceptive rhetoric of the Sophists, but he is perhaps the greatest oratorical word-smith of all time. The philosopher is undaunted by what first appears indefinable. If phi-losophy is the thinker’s mastery of critical understanding, then nothing, not even the protean, difficult nature of art, ought to escape its comprehensive vision.

Philosophy at its best penetrates the inherent contradictions of reality.


Making Small Talk with Philip KitcherVictoria Jackson-Hanen

Illustrated by Daniel Nyari

Tell me about your background. How did you get into philosophy?

I began as a mathematician, and I got bored with doing mathematics. I thought I wouldn’t do any creative work in it. My tutor suggested that I do history of science, so I did this in my third year at Cambridge, which I had to do to finish my residence requirement for the degree. While I was doing history of science, I got interested in philosophy of science. I then went to graduate school in philoso-phy without having taken any philosophy classes, which was nearly disastrous. But I survived, and I worked in philosophy of science for the first part of my career. But I’ve done lots of other kinds of philoso-phy at various stages along the way.

One of them being philosophy of literature. Yes.

So what is philosophy of literature? What kind of questions does it ask?

Two different kinds of ques-tions. There is an approach to philosophy of literature that is allied with aesthetics: questions about the presentation of char-acter in literature, the different forms of narration, that sort of thing. Then there is philosophy of literature that is the study of philosophical themes in works of lit-erature, which I regard as something many European philosophers have often done. Many doubled as literary figures in their own right. Think of Camus and Sartre,

and in certain respects Schiller and Dos-toevsky. You’ve got that tradition well es-tablished in Europe, whereas in English language philosophy it’s been much less prominent—although there are some like John Stuart Mill, who is one my heroes. I was personally extremely excit-ed by Stanley Cavell’s essay on King Lear called “The Avoidance of Love.” It’s a re-ally great essay. That’s what led me to think that there could be serious work done in philosophical explorations of literature. That’s now becoming much more fre-quent, and a number of people have writ-ten philosophical works exploring themes in literature. Henry James is very popular, but others like Robert Pippin and Martha Nussbaum have all written things about this. It’s a developing genre. I’d like to see more of it taught at the undergraduate level. I’ve actually taught from quite early in my career courses on the philosophy of literature. Part of this goes very deep into my past because when I was fifteen, I was in the British educational system and there you had to specialize at fifteen. I really found this a very difficult choice because one side of me really wanted to do Eng-lish, French and German, and the other side of me wanted to do mathematics and physics. I was quite torn. I have to say, it was Lydia Goehr who got me to do philosophy of literature at an earlier stage than I thought I would. She invited me to write an essay on the legacy of Don Giovanni in Wagner. That got me started and once I did it was dif-ficult to stop!

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In what ways does the philosophy of literature connect with the work you do in other areas?

Well, it doesn’t really connect with the philosophy of science at all. It connects with some of the philosophical questions you ask in CC. So, in a way, all those years I spent teaching CC were per-fect for preparing me for these sorts of philosophical questions. Lit Hum and CC are all about the nature of the good life. Literature is often a very vivid explora-tion of that. I find Joyce particularly good, but not just Joyce. I’m very interested in Thomas Mann, and Shakespeare, of course. I have all sorts of tentative proj-ects for doing things in the philosophy of literature. I’m very interested in ethical and social change, and so a play like Shake-speare’s Merchant of Venice seems to me to be a very interesting study of change be-tween two sorts of ethical attitudes: one based on informal relations of sympathy and another based on very definite rules. I think there are vast amounts of stuff you can do in the philosophy of literature. We’ve only just begun.

How does having knowledge of the philosophy of literature enhance the experience of reading?

If you’re interested in philosoph-ical themes in literature, then you tend to gravitate towards particular kinds of liter-ary works. You tend to read them incred-ibly closely, as closely as you read the most difficult texts in philosophy. It seems to me that as I’ve been doing this I’ve really been immersing myself in some texts in ways that make me feel that my previous

readings of them were utterly superficial. You just see things in them, and you follow them through. You read very carefully in-deed. It’s a distinctive way of approaching a text. I often find that much secondary literature about a text I find most inter-esting to probe is often not very probing or helpful at all. People are interested in different things. Philosophers, once they really get inside a text, are going to think about it in a very distinctive way.

What is your favorite book written by a non-philosopher, and how is it philosophical?

Well, this is really hard. The ob-vious thing to go for would be Finnegans Wake. Joyce’s prose work really wrestles with questions about how lives can flour-ish and how they can fail to flourish. So you have a bundle of stories of how lives can just be blocked and pinched and nar-rowed and confined. Then you have in A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man this vision of a character with tremendous as-pirations to escape from this pinched, de-based world in which life can never really succeed. It’s interesting because Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist, thinks he has to soar—hence the name—and it doesn’t work. We know that it’s dubious at the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and then when we see him again in Ulysses, he’s come down in a complete crash. Ul-ysses is all about people who have lost a sense of where they’re going. Stephen has lost a sense of where he’s going. Leopold

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Joyce’s prose work really wrestles with questions about how lives can flourish and how they can fail to flourish.


Bloom is lost and wandering, and Molly is lost and wandering. In the end, there’s a move-ment back together, but it’s left wonderfully uncertain. And then there’s Finnegans Wake: dif-ferent style, immensely interesting, difficult and complicated. It seems to me to be all about how you come to terms with your life at a moment when you can’t really do much to change it, when its shape is fixed. It’s im-mensely complementary to the book I’ve just been teaching in Lit Hum, Montaigne’s Essays, also written under the awareness of approaching death. I think Joyce wrote an ex-traordinary novel about things that you can’t face directly, and therefore float in dream lan-guage and have to be approached obliquely. They have to be approached again and again and again to reassure yourself that you’ve re-ally worked everything through and that the reconciliation, when it comes, is real, genuine and not premature. Joyce was not a tragedian by nature. He wrote a comedy as Dante wrote a comedy. His books are funnier than Dante’s. But his books are funny in that there is a pos-sibility of reconciliation.

Thomas Mann also strikes me as extremely interesting. There’s one thread that runs through two of Mann’s greatest novels, The Magic Mountain and Doctor Faus-tus. That thread is the conflict between the liberal values of the Enlightenment and the richness and depth and turbulence of reac-tions to the Enlightenment. Mann is work-ing his way through this material and trying to come to terms with a sense of passion, depth and seriousness of existence that the Enlightenment in some ways doesn’t do justice to, while at the same time recog-nizing its dangers. It’s no accident that both

Great literature is a way of ethical experimentation with values.

17criticism

books turn to the opposition of two fig-ures, one of whom is profoundly dark and dangerous, and the other who is apparently refined and civil and enlightened. The diffi-culty in both cases is finding either of them to be satisfactory. These are both deeply philosophical books. Not surprisingly in Mann’s case, he has this famous passage in a book that he wrote to try to justify Ger-many’s participation in the First World War, where he writes about reading Schopenhau-er, and the passage concludes, “One only reads that way once.”

What do you think literature can tell us about philosophy?

I think philosophers tend to be very good at what one might call anatomy, that is, recognizing certain kinds of structures. So if you think about Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, it gives you a picture of the catego-ries in which you might try to understand “the good life.” Novelists, as it were, put flesh on this skeleton and really give you a vivid un-derstanding of how one might live through something. Dewey, another one of my he-roes, is really committed to this idea that great literature is a way of ethical experi-mentation, experimentation with values. I think there is something to this idea. In one place he says that our understanding of what is valuable, and what it means and the ways in which values are consolidated and spread has not so much been carried out by philosophers as by great works of drama and poetry and literature. I think that’s a real insight.

Philosophers tend to be very good at what one might call anatomy.

(vi)


Xenakis: Musical insensitivity we can believe in?

César Adrián MontúfarIllustrated by Natalie Robehmed

In his short essay, “Xenakis, prophète de l’insensibilité,” Czech novelist Mi-lan Kundera explains that his love

for the music of Greek composer Iannis Xenakis comes from its rejection of senti-mentality. He praises the ‘soothing objec-tivity’ in Xenakis’ music as a break from the oppressive predominance of emotion in the European canon. For Milan Kun-dera, the unconditional vindication of sentimentality as a palliative against the coldness of reason had been exposed at the time as a structure of brutality. Ob-jectivity, cleansed of emotion, became the source of true beauty. Its incarnation was the expression of order and rationality in the music of Iannis Xenakis.

It is one thing for music to be directed by sentimentality to a greater or lesser degree, and quite another that its beauty be founded on insensible and ob-jective rationality. This opposition can be elucidated by an example.

Consider Alban Berg’s expressionist Piano Sonata Op.1 as a counterex-ample to Xenakis’ “Concret PH.”

The sonata’s highly enriched harmonic language sets it apart from the typical B minor piece. At the time of its composi-tion, tonality was the accepted conven-tion for subjective conflicts in music. Berg operates at the limits of this convention. From the first few measures the listener is meant to understand that behind the mu-

sic there is a voice speaking. It tells a story and expresses something that belongs to the composer. The role of the listener is to uncover this voice and interpret the story it is telling.

Xenakis’ “Concret PH” calls for a completely different attitude from the listener. The piece consists of the altered, distorted sounds of burning charcoal; this is the only “story” behind the music. The listener is not oppressed by what the com-poser is trying to express. The music is not about telling but about showing. One’s ex-perience of the piece is governed by lis-tening objectively.

A notorious result of Xenakis’s for-mal approach is his use of what he calls stochastic processes. A

stochastic composition gives traditional compositional choices over to a prob-ability framework that randomly produces complex masses of sound. The complex-

ity of the sonic interactions is guided and shaped by the struc-tural sound pillars that Xenakis erects for the composition. In the pieces that are “calculated” in this way, Xenakis’ aesthetic

choices can only be seen as very thick brushstrokes. While listening to “Metas-taseis”, one can observe a rather simple diagram presenting certain fundamental aspects of the piece, relating to the sound landscape or to the textural density oper-ating in time during the piece. The dia-gram’s description is clear and illuminat-ing; it shows what is happening globally in the music on a single sheet of paper. On the other hand, by listening to the sounds

Objectivity, cleansed of emotion, became the source of true beauty.

shorts 19

resulting from the stochastic framework at the local level, one hears how the enor-mous complexity of the music embodies Xenakis’ rejection of traditional craft and artistry.

The masses of sound in Xenakis’ music (wheth-er they are produced by

calculation or not) have inner lives, but they do not, on their own, affect the listener emotionally. Even so, Xenakis does not choose to reject traditional beau-ty to replace it with expressionist “ugli-ness.” He does not insist on breaking ex-pressive conventions, but proposes a lack of convention. Qualitative judgment of any individual sound is renounced in the midst of the music’s bulky yet unintended complexity. Large-scale clarity is the only valid parameter for judg-ing the sound events that occur in his

compositions. One must objectively listen to the piece to really take it in. There is something genuinely soothing about the objectivity in Xenakis’ music as each piece attempts to construct a sound world of

its own. The listener is not required to have knowledge of history, or of the life of the composer, or to share a common background in the conventions of tonal-ity. This is the kind of music where only attention to sound is essential for enjoy-ment.

Milan Kundera’s article is available, in an Ital-ian translation, in the Columbia Music Library as part of a multi-authored book on Xenakis, edited by Enzo Restagno.

Each piece attempts to create a sound world of its own.


A Philosophical Framework for Finnegans Wake

Shana CrandellIllustrated by Constance Castillo

Finnegans Wake is hard to understand. More often than not, students of the Wake focus on its narrative

content at the expense of understand-ing the form in which it is delivered, or set aside the ambiguous narrative and treat individual words and paragraphs as puzzles to be solved. I will take a slightly different approach. I will attempt to pres-ent a philosophical framework in which to understand its difficult language and its ambiguous and elusive narrative content. I will do this with the help of the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus and the nineteenth-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. My intention is not to argue that Joyce had either of these figures in

mind when working on the Wake. Rather, I want to show how these three figures—Heraclitus, Nietzsche and Joyce—fit to-gether to form a compelling philosophical system, and how this system can help elu-cidate Joyce’s often mystifying text. Finnegans Wake can be thought of as a sequence of dreams that affords its

reader access to the dreamer’s uncon-scious experience. The dream experience Joyce presents is delivered in a “dream-language” suited to the indeterminate and often conflicting nature of the dreamer’s thoughts and anxieties. The experience he wishes to convey requires this dream-lan-guage. This is the basis of the theoretical framework I wish to propose for reading Finnegans Wake. However, since the dream-language is both syntactically and mor-phemically English, this claim needs to be more specific. The project of Finnegans Wake does not require an entirely new lan-guage with its own grammar and syntax; rather, it requires what I will call a flexible lexicon. The “Finneganese” lexicon must surpass ordinary language in its capacity for signification in order to be adequate to its content. This flexible lexicon, I will argue, allows Joyce to achieve a level of truthfulness that is otherwise impossible.

In the epigraph above, Nietzsche paraphrases and augments a frag-ment from Heraclitus. Heraclitus, via

Nietzsche, denies stable, eternal, perma-nent being in favor of flux. The river is a metaphor for this. Those things in the world we might pick out and name as un-changing entities are, in fact, constantly

It is the fault of your myopia and not of the essence of things if you believe that you see firm land anywhere in the ocean of Becoming. You need names for things, just as if they had a rigid permanence, but the very river in which you bathe a second time is no longer the same one which you entered before. (Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks)

The “Finneganese” lexicon must surpass ordinary language in its capacity for signification.

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in the process of changing—just as the water of a river is replaced by new water, though we call that river by the same name. Constant and eternal change is, for Heraclitus, the essential nature of the world. His claim that the “rigid permanence” of language is fundamen-tally unsuited to the na-ture of reality reveals the unusual capacities of the Wake’s flexible lexicon. Here’s an ex-ample: “Funferall” is perhaps the most fa-mous of Joyce’s made-up portmanteau words. Tim Finnegan’s funeral—the namesake of Finnegans Wake—is an event unlike most other funerals. The story goes that after drunkenly falling from his ladder, Tim Finnegan is pronounced dead. When a guest at his wake spills a bottle of whiskey, however, he miraculously rises from his deathbed. A word like “funeral’” can refer to a single thing, in this case Tim Finnegan’s funeral, and to funerals generally, i.e. to a fu-nereal essence, as though there were an un-changing entity that corresponds to that es-sence. But some funerals, e.g. Tim Finnegan’s funeral in which the honored dead man is alive and partakes in the fun, bear no resemblance to that essence. The word “funferall,” unlike most words in the English lexicon, allows for Tim Finnegan’s wake to be both a funeral and a fun-for-all. It is flexible in the sense that it can accommodate seemingly opposite proper-ties into a single word.

Heraclitus’ conception of the fun-d a m e n t a l

nature of the world (namely, flux and

contradiction)—which cannot be captured within the bounds of ordinary language—can be captured by a lexicon that is equally as mal-leable as the entities to which its units refer. The way Heraclitus accounted for the transitoriness of the world was via the phe-nomenon of, as Nietzsche described it, “polar-ity.” A seemingly singular, unchanging entity is

actually composed of opposite forces, and is itself, in some sense, those opposite things

together. Heraclitus’ (and Nietzsche’s) in-sight is not the obvious point that things

change through time. Rather, their in-sight is that it is contrary to our ordi-

nary conception of the world—one in which there is the constant,


“Being”—to truly account for the contra-dictoriness that constant and eternal flux entails. Because things change and pass out of existence, every entity in the world must be ascribed the opposite properties

“being” and “not-being”—for Heracli-tus and for Nietzsche this means that in some sense, the fundamental nature of the world is contradiction.

This notion (which is, it is worth noting, quite different from our ordinary use of “contradiction”)

applies to

the un-conscious

m i n d — t h e territory of Finnegans

Wake. A distinguishing feature of the unconscious mind is that it is

tolerant of a certain kind of dissonance of which the conscious mind is not. Con-trary emotions, even contrary accounts of a single event, condition or thing, might be entertained simultaneously by the unconscious mind, while the same set of contraries might, by the conscious mind, be triaged, and the unfit dismissed or repressed. It is the project of Finnegans Wake to reveal those dissonant emotions and accounts that the conscious mind

does not tolerate. The flexible lexicon is the tool with which this project is carried out. The project of excavating the unconscious mind—and allowing for the confusion that lies at its core—can be messy and unpleasant. It is, as Joyce describes it, “[seeing] life foully the plak and the smut.” As the dreamer examines his life through the central figure HCE, the most repulsive facts of human life emerge. The nauseating, the horrifying, the painful and the mundane are brought to light. The grit of human life—in its conscious and unconscious conditions—is exposed in the radically flexible lan-guage of Finnegans Wake. It gives expres-sion to a human scale of contradiction—a

scale on which at one end the conscious mind is working in rig-id, individuated, non-contradictory terms, and at the other, the unconscious mind is working in murkier territory. It is Joyce’s aim to give every point on this scale a substantial and necessary place (in strictly Nietzschean terms) in his final and most elaborate artwork. For Nietzsche, this kind of expression is true in an important sense. If an artwork gives maximally hu-man expression to human life, it is true to its subject matter. Insofar as Joyce permits of the unpleasant and the everyday—the “plak and the smut”—and the contradic-tory mental activity that generates it, both via the flexible lexicon I have described, he has provided a truthful and ultimately,

It rumbles from beyond the rigid bounds of human langauge.

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I think, affirmative picture of human life. Every awful detail is unearthed and proclaimed in order that it may get the famous “Yes” that concludes Ulysses.

Heraclitus’ account of the world as flux and contradiction has a second implication for Joyce’s

project. Individual humans are among those entities that are utterly transitory and hence, in strictly Heraclitean terms, contradictory. Insofar as we are individuals with names and life spans, we are both being and not-being. I have described truth in the sense of maximal expression of a given sphere of the world—in our case, human life. A second kind of truth is also achieved in Finnegans Wake: the contradiction that underlies the world beyond the scale of humanity is also given expres-sion. The life Joyce examines is a nameless one, and it is nearing its end. The primary figure through which life’s questions are considered is designated by the three letters H, C and E. In perhaps the most telling instance, these initials stand for Here Comes Every-body. In an important sense, Finnegans Wake operates on a level beyond that of the individual, and aims to defend the sta-tus of human life generally within an un-certain picture of the world beyond it. For Nietzsche, this is truth-giving in an important sense: if the transitoriness of human exis-tence is permitted and even embraced, then the fun-damental contradictoriness of the world is given true expression. In form and in matter, Finnegans Wake is-successful on this count; its language, to quote Nietz-sche, “[strains] to its limits to imitate music.” It rumbles from beyond the rigid bounds of human language to deliver universal ideas. The dream figures in Finnegans Wake, who have perhaps arrived at their final night, demand more vitality, and they demand it in the fleet-ing and contradictory form in which it exists. They “[escape] from liquidation by the heirs of their death,” writes Joyce. Their finitude is also their infinitude.

The unconscious mind is tolerant of a certain kind of dissonance of which the conscious mind is not.


On Love, or How to Cure the Ills of the Stomach

J.X. DaboinIllustrated by Maryn Carlson

It sounds shocking to say that love is a matter of the will, a conscious and irrational choice—a delusional yet ac-

tive decision by the individual.How could it be that a feeling so

potentially damaging to the self is chosen freely? Why doesn’t this rob love of its great hold on us? When we see a friend who is lovesick, are we not supposed to feel pity for them since they are in the clutches of something beyond their con-trol? Or when we are in love, don't we like to believe that it could not have been oth-erwise, that there are greater forces at work against which we cannot and should not battle? I think the cure—once our stom-ach lining have been thoroughly damaged by the barrage of emotional stress associ-ated with this emotion called “love”—lies in the realization that we are responsible for our feelings and what we choose to do with them. This is the philosophical ant-acid that nature provides to those poor souls afflicted with the devastating pangs of love.

I

There are many who merely deem love as a passive sensation and hold that what we love is what

we find agreeable to us. They are bold in attempting to explain something that ap-

pears so absurd and see`1mingly inexpli-cable through the lens of science. These persons make two assumptions: (i) that we can explain love and (ii) that love is some-thing beyond our choice embedded in the laws of nature.

There are some who go further in making these assumptions and hold that we are determined by an evolution-ary model that calculates all our choices. This is a position common among naive biological hacks, the same persons who say our notions of beauty or morality are based purely on what we deem as benefi-cial to the survival of our species (e.g. in the case of beauty, men supposedly pre-fer doe-eyed, full-lipped females because these facial features suggest youth and fertility). Newsweek magazine's pseudo-Daniel Dennetts want us to believe that there is no self beyond what the body or "mind" (generally under an evolutionary model) dictates. Expounding on the dif-ferent secretions of love, these thinkers reductively believe it to be a matter of neurons.

Love is not passive, nor is it a force outside us that we cannot control.

features 25

II

Those who disregard all things beyond the body unimaginatively mistake love for "comfort." They are passive and

focused on the corporeal, but they are not in love. These are generally persons who are in relationships that are ignorant of and do not celebrate the great cul-tural, human heritage of "love." It is true that love does not have to be a burning poetic passion all the time; but the most "human" thing these persons could possibly aspire to is the search for comfortable com-panionship. They will not drink of the divine ambrosia man has created in this phenomenon called love, but fill their hungry stomachs from the filthy trough of mere animal instinct laid before them. You will hear both parties express (in order to add a "hu-man" dimension), "I cannot open up to someone emotionally if I do not open up physically," or “We started hook-ing up and then he kind of just grew on me.” “Necessity” being sated, they then label whatever semi-civilized aspect borne thereafter with the word “love.” The self is passively determined by immediate desires and the search for these to be satisfied.


III

There are yet others who see love as an imperative for that far worse imperative of our current culture,

a vague sense of "happiness." For them, love becomes a duty and a force impelling the lover to action.

It is evident that our culture sup-poses that in order to lead a fulfilled life, we must find love. It is true that love, like health, enhances our experience. There is a problem, though, in the insistence that love has to work. It becomes beyond our choice to stop caring, struggling and fight-ing for it. They believe that a feeling of love entails a sort of duty to make this love "happen." Even in couples where both persons love each other in equal amounts, it is not always the case that they should keep alive this manifestation of each oth-er’s love, (i.e., the concrete, monogamous and exclusive relationship).

These persons will define them-selves as “romantics” and speak of the force of love beyond their control, or

Love (exclusively romantic) as a sort of god to be worshipped, whatever the price. Sometimes they might define love as some foreign, mysterious and enchanting force that can disappear at any moment. There is a contradiction in all of these state-ments, which lies chiefly in describing love in cultural, poetic terms while at the same time deeming it as something beyond hu-man comprehension.

IV

We must realize that love is in great part an active matter of the will. We will be able to see

this most clearly in the case of the person who does not have to love, but contin-ues to do so. Let us imagine the case of someone whose love is not materialized or reciprocated in any way; imagine the most lovesick fool. Bad timing, physical limitation, misuse of words, a lack of pru-dence or shrewdness, strategy or manipu-lation—one or more of these have con-tributed to the person's lack of love being returned. What, however, in full knowl-edge of hopelessness, allows the lover to keep loving? Is the person completely and incomprehensibly blind in their devotion or is there a hidden and defiant element of freedom? This freedom is very subtle and it lies in the choice to be deceived. Love is the active faculty of the imagination working in tandem with the will in order to choose to be deluded. We see the pas-sive voice here—“to be deluded”—but we shall see that the greater part of love is to be deluded by ourselves. We form a fictive narrative when we are in love in which the imagination goads our feeling.

The narrative of the love story it-self begins with the welcoming of untruth. Let us examine the first

stage, that of seduction, which lays this groundwork. Do we not choose to be lied to by some over others? Imagine your-self at a party, being hit on by a ridiculous braggart—you easily accept that you are being fed lies because this person does not interest you on any level. Now imagine yourself on that first date with someone you find physically attractive. The person quotes your favorite author, exaggerates their aspirations and “projects,” pretends to care about what your sibling studies, etc. and we are at some level aware of all this. Let us suppose also that the person is not all that great. The “What if ?” that arises when the physical presence of the

The manifestation of our will lies in the forming of the fiction.

features 27

person is gone is the first instance in which we are al-lowed to enter into the realm of imagination. We allow ourselves to be seduced by “possibility.” We are not yet in love with the person, but what our imagination has conjured up is already making us choose to allow things to happen.

Does it not cause us pain, though, to simply live in our minds? Love is an active choice of the individual to participate in a fiction, and

it is when she realizes this that the lack of its material-ization in the world of phenomena seems harmless, or at least less painful. We want our ideals and the work-

ings of our imagination to leave their stamp upon the world of things—everyone wants their will to be manifested in their actions. We do not want to live

in the clouds. A retreat from the outside world into our mind, believed to be separated and free, is not favored all of the time, although many believe it is the key to a certain sort of happiness, where man is free from the con-

tingency of the external. What is the case with love? If it is a matter of the will does

it not cause us pain when it is not mani-fested, materialized or reciprocated?

This is where the separation be-tween love and desire lies. Desire lies in the realm of phenomena. Desire fetishizes the material and wants it to be arranged in a cer-tain way. But in the case of love-delusion,

desire is eventually transcended. This comes when we realize just how

paltry the reality really is. Reality does not deserve our fiction—“This is not the man I fell in love with, why should I want

to be with him?” Reality is disap-pointing, sullied and, often, simply not

worth it. Sometimes the mere contempla-tion of an ideal is even preferable, although it can become too distracting. Once faced with the hideousness of naked reality, there comes a point, even after having dragged on for so long, that nothing fruitful can come from let-ting it occupy our mind.


Our Parents, OurselvesIllustrated by Naomi Roochnik

Rhoda Feng

World life expectancy is rising. According to the United Na-tions, ten percent of the global

population is age sixty or older. In 2050, that percentage will more than double. The shift towards an older population portends that today’s teenagers will have to deal not only with the practical demands of work and home, but also with the by-no-means-small responsibility of caring for their ag-ing parents. It remains to be see to what extent the wave of aging will alter the par-ent-child relationship.

In 1892, William DeWitt Hyde, presi-dent of Bowdoin College, wrote, “Chil-dren owe to their parents obedience

and such service as they are able to render. Parents owe to children support, training and an education sufficient to give them a fair start in life.” Most of us acknowledge that grown children should care for their parents, minister to their needs and pro-vide them succor in old age, but do most of us also use such terms as “debt” and “owe” when discussing parent-child rela-tionships? Do we, in fact, owe anything to our parents?

features 29

Gratitude and Filial Piety

In the Confucian tradition, the rela-tionship between parent and child was more important than that be-

tween friends, husbands and wives and even between ruler and subject. Children, who were considered physical extensions of their parents, incurred an enormous “debt” due to the notion that they “owed” their existence to their parents. To repay their parents’ for their zi, or nurture, chil-dren were expected to practice xiao, or filial piety. They had an obligation to obey their parents, respect them, look after them in old age and perform elaborate rites of an-cestor worship after their deaths. In The Analects, Confucius even condoned law-breaking if such a transgression was ne-

cessitated by filial obligations.

I do not believe, however, that children necessarily owe their parents filial love simply because they are the fruit of their parents’ loins. Nancy Jecker, Professor of Medical Ethics at the University of Wash-ington School of Medicine, rejects what

she terms the “Law of Athens,” which es-tablishes a debt of gratitude on the part of children to their parents for begetting them. Aristotle and Saint Thomas Aqui-nas supported such a view of filial obliga-tion, but Jecker claims that children should treat their parents with filial piety only as a token of gratitude for the beneficial acts that their parents performed out of love—and beyond duty—rather than for the mere act of begetting. Jecker’s refuta-tion of the “Law of Athens” is sound and sensible, given that the “Law” is oblique shorthand at best and sophistry at worst.

Suppose, for instance, that parents have ba-bies for the sole pur-

pose of eating them (as in Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic world) or sell-ing them to others as food

(as in Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal”).

Doesn’t it then make

The “gift of life” is not enough to warrant the gratitude of children.


sense for such children to loathe their par-ents instead of being grateful to them for the “gift of life”? The “gift of life” is not enough to warrant the gratitude of chil-dren. A parent’s continued nurturing of, and love for, his or her child is the only

solid basis for filial piety; after all, it is not uncommon for adopted children to ex-press filial piety to their adoptive parents despite the absence of a biological bond.

Friends Don’t Owe Friends

So what exactly does one make of parent-child relationships? Why are certain terms not appropriate in de-

scribing such relationships? Philosopher Nicholas Dixon contends that a parent-child relationship should be based on the friendship model, which seeks to empha-size the voluntary and loving aspects of the parent-child bond. Unlike the word “duty,” the word “debt” is annexed to the notion of a bur-den that can undermine parent-child rela-tionships. In J. M. Coetzee’s fictionalized memoir, Boyhood, the author ruefully re-counts, “The thought of a lifetime bowed under a debt of love baffles and infuri-ates him to the point where he will not kiss [his mother], refuses to be touched by her.” It would seem perverse to describe an invidious parent-child relationship us-ing positive words, but if a child has a lov-ing rapport with his parents, words with negative connotations should be omitted rather than carelessly shoehorned into dis-cussions. Otherwise, one does injustice to

one’s parents and to oneself by implying mendacious permutations of the truth.

Confucians perceive filial piety as the wellspring of all other virtues. Building upon this idea academic

Philip Ivanhoe urges us to view filial pi-ety as a “cultivated disposition,” an ir-reducible virtue distinct from gratitude and duty. In her seminal essay “What Do Grown Children Owe Their Parents?” philosopher Jane English argues that one should avoid using words like “debt,” “fa-vors,” “investment” and “owing” when talking about a parent-child relationship. Such a relationship should be viewed as a friendship that is founded on love instead of the exchange of favors that occurs be-tween people who are not friends. English supports her revisionist position by stat-ing that strangers, not friends, exchange favors, which engender debts that can be repaid, canceled or discharged. Once a friendship ends, the demands of mutual-ity end as well. Sacrifices are vital to sus-taining friendships, but the root of filial obligations is friendship itself rather than any sacrifices made. Friends perform vol-untary acts of kindness for their friends out of the kindness of their hearts, rather than being motivated by “mutual gain” or the promise of return on investments.

To love one’s parents is not nec-essarily to follow all their advice. If my parents pushed me to become a profes-sional pianist or artist, I could oppose their demand without eroding our friend-ship, by claiming that I would be happy with neither vocation. A child’s love for

Confucians perceive filial piety as the wellspring of all other virtues.

The root of filial piety is friendship, not sacrifice.

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his parents naturally grows in accordance with the amount of diligent love bestowed upon him. The “amount of love” is, of course, unquantifiable, but the full weight of its import impresses itself upon the subject through the power of memory. Recalling the attentive care he received as a child, the grown adult seeks to care for his parents out of love, friendship, grati-tude and the cardinal virtue of filial piety.

Lessons in Love

Asserting the role of fiction in in-stilling moral virtue, Thomas Jef-ferson once remarked: “A lively

and lasting sense of filial duty is more ef-fectually impressed on the mind of a son or daughter by reading King Lear, than by all the dry volumes of ethics and divinity that ever were written.” The filial love and

respect Cordelia feels for Lear stems from all the love, education, care and nurtur-ing he has given her. Her recalcitrance to her father’s love contest is more poignant than any flattering answer could ever be. She proclaims, “You have begot me, bred me, loved me / I return those duties back as are right fit / Obey you, love you, and most honor you.

When I was younger, I believed that my parents’ prudential wisdom was all the reason I needed to blindly follow their advice. With the recognition that friendship, love and gratitude form the ac-tual bedrock of my relationship with my parents, I have become more appreciative of all they have done to raise me. And so, I welcome the upcoming years of person-al growth and continued devotion to my parents.

2895 Broadway, New York, New York 10025Phone: 212.666.7653 Fax: 212.865.3590


Rebecca Spalding

little philosophy

books

Revolutionizing Art: A Review of Jacques Ranciere’s The Emancipated Spectator

Illustrated by Keenan Korth

Jacques Ranciere’s new philosophical study, The Emancipated Spectator, tackles the role of the aesthetic in contempo-

rary society with the intensity and rigor that one expects from one of France’s

most penetrating cultural critics. The book is in many ways a complementary text to Ranciere’s The Ig-norant Schoolmaster, in which the author explores what he calls “intellectual eman-cipation.” In that text, Ranciere argues that ignorance and knowledge are simply structural positions that the student and the schoolteacher occupy respectively, rather than states of being that define each actor. True intellectual emancipation emerges when both the student and the

teacher recognize their arbitrary relation-ship, allowing the student to pursue her own path to knowledge without adhering to the prescribed ends of formal educa-tion.

Ranciere applies the same concept to the artist and the spectator of art in The Emancipated Spectator

when he defines emancipation as “the blurring of the boundary between those who act and those who look; between individuals and members of a collective body.” Instead of the simple applica-tion of “emancipation” to certain works of art, Ranciere articulates his theory by critiquing the conventional postmodern treatment of the spectator. He points out that many postmodern theorists criti-cize the passivity of the spectator. These theorists believe that the artist must either

It is ultimately more fruitful to emancipate each actor fom his or her structural position.

33criticism

make the spectator aware of her passivity or else involve the spectator in a way that would make her “abdicate the very posi-tion of the viewer.” For Ranciere, the two distinc-tions of activity/passivity and artist/spec-tator are false. Instead, it is ultimately more

fruitful to emancipate each actor from his or her structural position in or-

der to reveal that each is an equally creative member in a collective group. The act of perceiving art proves to be as imaginative as the act of creating it. On this view, the artist and the specta-

tor are equally responsible for the consumption and commodifi-

cation of art and image. While the artist may, through grotesque images,

critique the consumer’s commodificia-tion of art, the artist is actually reaffirm-

ing this commodificiation and reasserting the power of late capitalist culture.

Never afraid to tackle politi-cal issues, Ranciere dives headfirst into the Arab-

Israeli conflict, the war on terror and September 11th, although he has

trouble making these events relevant to aesthetics. Anyone familiar with Ran-ciere’s work will immediately recognize and appreciate his trademark style in The Emancipated Spectator, while anyone new to Ranciere will enjoy his rigorous and unapologetic treatment of today’s world of images.

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Gadfly Spring 2010

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Transcript of Gadfly Spring 2010