Der Untergeher

After one drink

2006-12-05T19:37:00.000-08:00

I think that the problem with my life is that it gives me nothing to talk about. After two, I know that it's that I have no choice but to go home alone tonight.

Belle Paris?

2006-06-27T11:09:00.000-07:00

"X is Y, but Paris, Paris is beautiful." A common enough thought in all its variations. But is Paris beautiful? Or, more precisely, is it really as beautiful as they say?

Certainly Paris is pretty. There's no doubt of that. But it's far easier to say whether something is pretty than to say whether it is beautiful - and a good deal of distance separates the two. Paris is also, without question, elegant and stately. And its architecture and city planning - in certain districts at least - form a harmonious whole of a sort one very rarely encounters, especially in a city of Paris' size.

But all of this is not entirely to Paris' advantage. For precisely this elegance, this harmony of elements often lessens one's aesthetic responses. There is something predictable and monotonous about just those features that Paris is most famous for. Something which can deaden, rather than excite, the senses.

Contrast Paris in this respect with New York - a city that is all too seldom thought of as beautiful. New York lacks the harmonious interaction of building with building that characterizes the stereotypically Parisian boulevard. But just this makes New York far more of a feast for the imagination than Paris. For New York is filled with unexpected and unpredictable juxtapositions. It is constantly challenging one's imaginative faculties in a manner Paris seldom does.

To say this - to prefer New York to Paris - to reject a certain sort of theory about what beauty consists in. In particular, it is to reject the classicism that states that beauty simply consists in the harmonious interaction of an object's elements. Or, in other words, it is to insist, against Kant, that beauty is impossible without a certain measure of the sublime.

Of course, Kant also believed that a beautiful object is one which excites the free play of our imaginative faculties. And this seems to me more or less correct. I differ from Kant only in what sorts of objects actually do excite this sort of state in me. What Kant found beautiful, puts me to sleep. And what I find beautiful, would have been enough to paralyze Kant's aesthetic senses - if he is to believed.

No problem here - for Kant is not famous because of his fine sense of taste. But what of Paris? Is there still hope for its beauty? Part of the problem here, I suspect, is that Paris in the past was hardly as harmonious a place as it is now. Hardly as clean. Hardly as neat and tidy and well-organized. Perhaps the Paris of the fin de siecle would been very much to my liking. Thus, my recipe for Paris is simple. A bit of poverty. A bit of bad urban planning. And a bit of day-to-day decay. And Paris will soon be back on the right track again.

Cultural and political success

2006-06-23T09:27:00.000-07:00

A common theme in German cultural thought, especially in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is that a group only flourishes culturally when it is lacking in political power or engagement. For example, in Twilight of the Idols Nietzsche writes,

You can't ultimately spend more than you have - that's true of individuals, it's true of peoples. If you spend yourself on power, on grandiose politics, on economics, world trade, parliaments, military interests - if you give away in this direction the quantity of understanding, seriousness, will and self-overcoming that you are, then this quantity is not available in the other direction. .. One lives off the other, one prospers at the expense of the other. All the great ages of culture are ages of decline, politically speaking: what is great in the cultural sense has been unpolitical even antipolitical.

The thought here is that a group or society, given the historical conditions under which it lives, has at its command only a limited amount of creative energy, which may be given either artistic or political expression, but not both. Thus the balance between cultural production and political activity is something of a zero-sum game; increase the level of political activity or engagement and one will invariably decrease the level of cultural productivity to a corresponding degree.

This line of thought, as I noted, can be found throughout German thought about culture and politics. For example, even today one regularly encounters the idea that the flowering of classical German culture that occurred just before and during the Napoleonic wars was a response to the political impotence of the German middle classes, both at home and abroad, during that period. Unable to take political action at home via the democratic means available elsewhere - the thought seems to go - and just as unable to collectively take action (as Germans) until the very end against the might of Napoleonic France, the German middle classes turned their creative energies toward the forging of a German nation, not by political, but rather by cultural means.

At least in the passage above, Nietzsche seems sympathetic to this line of thought. And he suggests that with the rise of Germany to the status of global political power, the creative energies of the German nation will come to be expressed, not in literature and the arts, but rather in more prosaic (and potentially threatening) political forms.

For all its simplicity, this way of thinking of the relationship between culture and politics has some obvious attractions, at least when one focuses one's attention on certain periods of German history. After all, it fits, not just the German experience during the age of Goethe and Schiller, but also the explosion of artistic creativity during the Weimar Republic, quite well. But nonetheless it is obvious that it is not always the case that politics and culture form this sort of zero-sum game. Frequently an increase in political or economic power will also increase cultural productivity to a corresponding degree. In part, this is a matter of simple economics. Very often, political success brings with it means of cultural production that would have otherwise been lacking. Think of the newly independent Netherlands, France under Louis XIV, or America in the first half of this century. Of course, as some of these examples indicate, this sort of cultural production may not be long-lived. But even so, it is surely common enough for an increase in political power and activity to unleash, rather than restrain, the cultural energies of a society.

So the simple formula Nietzsche's comment suggests hardly stands up as a general law, which raises a number of interesting questions:

First, are there any interesting general laws governing when political success dampens cultural productivity and when it encourages it? Is one sort of political success better than others in this regard? Is democracy to be preferred to other forms of government? Or not? And to what degree is it economic success as opposed to political success that matters most here?

Second, is the sort of art and literature that flourishes under conditions of political strength different in kind from the sort of art and literature that flourishes under conditions of political weakness? Here, it is natural to think that even when political success brings forth a burst of cultural activity, this activity is somehow more shallow or less critical than the cultural activity that accompanies periods in which political success is lacking. (Something of this is evident in the quote I began with.) But does this prejudice hold up upon reflection?

Exactly how philosophy should proceed:

2006-06-17T17:58:00.000-07:00

The International Kant Interview

It's remarkable how many big names they got to respond. And a given philosopher's answers are sometimes quite revealing, if not of their philosophical views, then at least of their personalities. (For instance, take a gander at Apel's lengthy response to the second question, complete with detailed citations from his own work.)

Still what this webpage needs is a statistical breakdown of the responses. Until I see that, I can't really be sure what Kant's biggest mistake was.

Summer jams

2006-06-12T06:38:00.000-07:00

I've been driving around New England a lot over the past few weeks, and have been listening to far too much pop music. Which is fortunate in at least one respect. The summer is starting, it's time to consider what this year's summer jam should be, and for once I'm well informed enough about the possibilities to have an opinion.

Now, just to be clear, the selection of a summer jam is not an opportunity to show off one's knowledge of obscure trends in independent music. A summer jam should be at least mainstream enough for one to have a reasonable chance of hearing it on commercial radio during daylight hours. But, on the other hand, it shouldn't be so all-pervasive that one will be sick of it by the middle of June. In other words, the song that everybody else thinks is this year's summer jam probably won't be it.

So there's a delicate line to toe here, and I'm probably not up to navigating it. But here are three possibilities that came to my mind driving around over the last few weeks:

First, there's Gnarles Barkley's "Crazy". This seems to have been anointed the year's summer jam by the critical establishment, which is surely a strike against it. But, all the same, it has plenty going for it as well. The Danger Mouse / Adult Swim connection, for one. And the way Cee-Lo responds to the question, "Does that make me crazy?", with an especially soulful, "Possibly". Downright philosophical.

Then, and this is a bit embarrassing, there's "Promiscuous" by Nelly Furtado and Timbaland. Now, I'm no fan of Furtado - generally her schtick makes me want to kick some hippy butt. But somehow I kept finding myself hoping to stumble upon this song when scanning my way down the highway. And Timbaland is in hilarious top-form.

But my summer jam, until I hear otherwise, is Ghostface Killah's "Back Like That". It isn't a true Ghostface joint, but if it was it would hardly be in the running here. Plus its got a chorus that gets my atonal sinuses vibrating and a nice little undercurrent of (unintended?) gender-role-reversal as well.

Still, there must be other possibilities out there that I'm missing. Any thoughts?

Why is Manhattan so expensive?

2006-06-10T06:36:00.000-07:00

is the title of a new working paper by Ed Glaeser, Joseph Gyourko, and Raven Saks. The paper is a part of an ongoing research project, in which Glaeser attempts to document the ways in which regulatory restrictions inflate housing prices throughout the US's. Not surprisingly, then, Glaeser et al conclude that the high cost of housing in Manhattan is largely the result of explicit and implicit regulation. More precisely, they conclude that roughly half the cost per square foot of an average Manhattan apartment can traced back to various sorts of implicit "regulatory taxes".

The general thrust of Glaeser et al's argument here is not terribly surprising, although I suspect his study overstates the degree to which Manhattan housing prices are due to regulatory factors. But what interests me here is the further conclusion Glaeser et al draw from these claims: namely, that at least from a social welfare perspective, the level of regulation that Manhattan imposes upon builders is unjustifiable.

Implicit in Glaeser et al's discussion is the idea that the appropriate level of regulation within a market is determined by the various externalities imposed upon current residents of the market by new construction there. So, for example, according to Glaeser et al, if the externalities related to a unit of new construction with a market M impose a net loss of X dollars worth of welfare on M's current residents, it is reasonable to impose implicit and explicit regulatory taxes on new construction within M up to X dollars per unit.

Now there are any number of questions one might raise about this framework for evaluating the appropriate level of regulation within a given market. For, of course, it is often quite misleading to think of even the economic impacts and purposes of regulation solely in terms of an implicit "regulatory tax". But even allowing this point, the question Glaeser et al are asking here seems an interesting one. For if it really is the case that the level of regulatory "taxation" in Manhattan far exceeds the external social costs associated with new construction there, this fact surely will have some significance for the evaluation of such regulation.

The question, then, is whether Glaeser et al have correctly identified the various factors that generate externalities associated with new construction in an area like Manhattan. Glaeser et al's discussion focuses on three potential sources of external social costs: (i) the effect new construction can have on existing views, (ii) the congestion caused by new construction, and (iii) the effects new construction might have on a municipality's fiscal bottom-line. Of these three, Glaeser et al conclude that only the first is likely to the source of considerable externalities in the case of new construction within Manhattan. For, they argue, the effects of new construction on congestion are likely to be minimal, and the effects of it on the city's bottom-line will on balance probably be positive.

But it is natural to wonder whether Glaeser et al have really captured all of the relevant externalities here. After all, when one hears people describe the reasons why they support restrictive zoning regulations in their neighborhood, the primary reason stated is almost always that such regulation is required in order to preserve the current "character" of the neighborhood. And in so far as Glaeser et al's discussion touches on this issue, it does so solely via the question of whether new construction will effect existing views, which hardly seems to capture all the concerns that motivate support for zoning within the actual world.

The question, though, is whether this, admittedly common, vague sense that new construction would negatively impact upon the character of a given neighborhood in other ways actually corresponds to significant external social costs that come with new construction. In some cases, it seems relatively easy to argue that it does. Take, for example, neighborhoods - like the Lower East Side or East Williamsburg - in which new construction threatens to dramatically alter the current ethnic or economic make-up of a neighborhood. In such cases, it seems clear that current residents may have a very real interest in maintaining the current make-up of their neighborhood. And so, at least in cases which involve these sorts of transformations, there may be many externalities associated with new construction that Glaeser et al's discussion simply ignores.

In a related vein, one might point to the ways in which new construction might affect the architectural or aesthetic character of a neighborhood, over and above any effects such construction might have on existing views. So for example, a set of new 20-story buildings of the sort Glaeser et al discuss, even if they do not negatively affect my view, may have a dramatic impact on what it is like psychologically to live in my neighborhood. In more wealthy neighborhoods, it is often - I take it - considerations of this sort that are the source of much of the opposition to new construction. And while it is easy to dismiss these sorts of considerations as insignificant, they are plainly not regarded as such by many Manhattan residents. Which raises the question of why Glaeser et al once again ignore them.

Once again, none of this is meant to suggest that the question Glaeser et al raise are uninteresting. For, quite on contrary, the task of evaluating the social costs associated with new urban construction seems to me a fascinating one. But it is clear that Glaeser et al have not done nearly enough to give us anything like a complete picture of what these costs may or may not involve.

The idea is better than the end result

2006-06-09T06:37:00.000-07:00

but the idea is pretty good: Reading Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations Considered As Log Entries Of A Failed Expedition to the Antarctic.

Does eHarmony grade you on your manliness?

2006-06-04T16:44:00.000-07:00

For reasons that will become clear shortly, there's no chance of me actually reading Harvey Mansfield's recent tract on "Manliness". But fortunately, thanks to The New York Review of Books - the TV Guide for the New York set, a friend of mine notes - there's no need for me to do so. Especially if my primary interest in reading Mansfield is to evaluate my own manliness according to his criteria. (I really am a child of my age, you see.) So, given my limited exposure to Mansfield's ideas - I use this term in the most permissive sense possible - let's see how I score. Will I come out of the process as comfortable with my masculinity as I was when I went it? Or will my self-conception be transformed by the raw power of Straussian thinking.*

Let's start off with some of my intellectual, emotional, and social characteristics:

(1) I'm generally rational in my approach to everyday life. Given my chosen profession, there's possibly no project that I identify with more than the project of rational criticism and self-control. Now, to be sure, I understand this project in different terms than most do, and, in particular, do not understand it as a cold and dispassionate enterprise. But nonetheless it seems clear that for Mansfield this would count as a clear mark of unmanliness. After all, for Mansfield, manliness is clearly opposed to the neurosis of self-examination, embracing instead the unreflective "manly" leap into the risky unknown. (The very thought of it makes me nervous.)

(2) I am generally sympathetic to the needs of others, and when I am not, I strive to be. This too would count against my manliness for Mansfield. For sympathy yokes our actions to the feelings and reactions of others, and nothing could be as unmanly as this. And, even worse, sympathy is a clear indication that, as a "sensitive man", I have allowed my emotional life to be shaped by certain traditionally feminine ideals. Very much a no-no, according to Mansfield.

(3) I find the "manly job of self-assertion" deeply unpleasant - although also ultimately irresistible. Here my grade seems to mixed - for I seem to be in a state of conflict with my inner manliness. Part of me, being manly, feels driven to assert myself. But at the same time, I feel ashamed of this drive and constantly try to repress it. Perhaps if I can overcome these repressive urges, a greater share of manliness might lie within my grasp.

(4) Finally, I refuse to behave in a "chivalrous" fashion. Mansfield writes that, "Most of the time the gentleman conceals his superiority with chivalrous irony; he pretends to defer to his inferiors." Or, in other words, a manly man respects women by making a show of behaving towards them as if they were his superiors. Unfortunately, here too I grade out as decidedly unmanly. In fact, I go much further in this direction than will most contemporary men. I won't even pick up the tap on a first date. And not because I'm cheap. Rather simply because it seems to me morally unacceptable to do so.

So on these criteria, I am scoring very low by Mansfield's lights. Which raises the question of whether there is a self-help companion to "Manliness" for those of us lost in a sea of post-feminist gender dissociation. (One might think it would be impossible to become manly by such means, but Mansfield's comments on Teddy Roosevelt suggest otherwise.)

But is this really all that there is to our traditional understanding of manliness? Isn't, on the contrary, the essence of manliness something more physical? Doesn't the core of what it is to be a man lie in having a certain sort of body as opposed to a certain sort of mind? At the very least, it seems wrong to exclude the physical aspects of manliness from our discussion here. So here is my last hope. Perhaps I do not have a manly mind or heart, but I still might at least possess a manly body. And if so, aren't I one up on Mansfield where it really counts (from a manly perspective)? So let's see how I do here:

(1) I am quite hairy. This seems intrinsically manly. And it is a good indicator of high testosterone levels. And what could be more manly than that?

(2) I sweat in extraordinary quantities. Gross, but manly. For instance, the Japanese appear to find the smell of my sweat disgusting. Again not a clear advantage, but surely manly. (As I'm sure Teddy would agree.)

(3) I am very strong, given my level of physical exercise. Manly on its own, and indicative again of hidden reserves of manliness as well.

This side of things is indeed looking up. (And I haven't even touched on what really matters when it comes to the physical side of manliness.) Still, what sort of life can I expect with such a manly body and such an unmanly mind. What women would consider a sad hybrid like me? Perhaps someone with a manly mind and unmanly body? Or, in other words, according to Mansfield, a truly sexy feminist. I must say, that sounds rather nice.

*Of course, the fact that Mansfield is a Straussian raises all sorts of interpretative complications here. For instance, is Mansfield's neo-conservatism really just a pose for the general reading public? Is his work really a feminist polemic on the esoteric level? In defending manliness does he really mean to do manliness a disservice? Most reviewers of Mansfield's book have ignored these questions, but the very idea of someone like Harvey Mansfield writing a book defending manliness is so hilarious that it's hard not to think that there's some sort of convert agenda at work here. At the very least, it's worth noting that Mansfield does often acknowledge that there is a difference between "being manly" and "defending manliness", something which opens the door to all sorts of interpretative possibilities.

Giving me head on the unmade bed

2006-06-04T16:24:00.000-07:00

An old friend of mine has been working recently as a dispatcher for an escort service in Tokyo. (I leave the reader to decide whether this in fact makes him a pimp. I think not.) Still I did imagine this being rather exciting. I saw him being called upon to intervene in a dispute between a visiting German businessman and his companion. Or finishing off a long night's work with sake and sushi at the Tsukiji market.

Of course, these fantasies say more about my rather adolescent - and ethically questionable - response to the sex industry than they do about the actual nature of the work in question. Not surprisingly, it seems that working as a dispatcher for a Japanese escort service is not very different from working as one for a pizza parlor in Des Moines. One takes calls, routes traffic, and occasionally has an interesting conversation. Still, my friend did have a few interesting tidbits.

First, despite the semi-legal status of the sex industry in Japan, he is not allowed to assure his clients that the women they request will actually sleep with them. Rather, all he can promise is that his company provides the full "girlfriend experience". Obviously, this is simply meant as code. But when I think about the market for the sorts of services my friends is dispatching, I wonder whether this is a particularly effective way to market them. Do visiting Western businessman really want the complete "girlfriend experience"? I would, to be sure, but I'm not sure my desires in this area generalize. But perhaps I have more in common with these men than I imagine.

Of course, it's not only lonely businessmen who are seeking the girlfriend experience in Japan. My friend insists that his company's services have been repeatedly called upon by Leonard Cohen. Of course, I have no way of confirming this, but it seems all too plausible to me. It also strikes me as quite sad. Was Cohen's interest in Zen Buddhism based in a desire to have easier access to Japanese prostitutes? Can't he achieve the full girlfriend experience without giving out a credit card number? And what would that women in the Chelsea Hotel have thought? I suppose she probably would have expected as much.

What makes a date a date?

2006-05-20T13:53:00.000-07:00

It is clear that the analytic philosophical community is failing to provide some of the basic services that the public has a right to expect from its local philosophical experts. Take the area of conceptual analysis, for example. Contemporary analytic philosophy will furnish one with countless attempts to give necessary and sufficient conditions for the concepts of cause, necessity, or knowledge.* But what of the concepts that really matter to us in our everyday lives?

For instance, consider the concept of a date. Surely this is one place where we face issues of conceptual analysis on a daily basis. "Was meeting for drinks last night a date?" "Did he just ask me out?" "I can't believe that he told you it was a date, but maybe it was?" Clearly these are questions we face all the time. And our confusion about them often involves a certain degree of confusion about just what should count as a date in the first place.

Here, then, is that rare creature: a case in which the methods of analytic philosophy are directly relevant to the problems that we all face in everyday life. So one might have thought that we would find analytic philosophers falling over themselves to offer accounts of datehood and to refute competing accounts of what makes a meeting a date. But so far as I can see, the analytic philosophical literature is shockingly silent on this issue.**

I don't intend here to fill this gap - for surely these issues are too serious to be dealt with in a blog-post. But, with the reader's permission, I will make some initial comments on the difficulties philosophers are likely to encounter in this area:

(1) It is clearly insufficient to make a meeting a date that both parties involved have romantic or sexual feelings for one another. Nor is it sufficient that both parties know of these feelings. For surely a sexually charged friendship does not consist of a series of dates.

(2) Moreover, it is clearly insufficient to make a meeting a date that both parties want it to be a date. Nor it is sufficient that these desires are common knowledge between the parties. For, even in the face of such common knowledge, it is plainly possible for these desires to be frustrated.

(3) What, then, of cases in which both parties believe a meeting to be a date? Plainly this is not a necessary condition on a meeting being a date - for it is surely possible to discover that one has been on a date only after the fact. But is it even a sufficient condition? Not necessarily. For we may both believe that some meeting is a date because we also believe that it satisfies some condition that it does not in fact satisfy. In such cases, it seems natural to say that although we both thought our meeting was a date, we were both mistaken.

(4) A more plausible condition on datehood, I would suggest, is teleological in character. For thinking of something as a date does involve thinking of it as having a certain aim - or, in other words, it involves thinking of it as having certain success conditions. For instance, when I think of a meeting with someone as a date, I think of this meeting as having as its aim further romantic or sexual interactions with that person of some sort. And, no matter how much fun a date might be on its own, if it fails to produce further interactions of this sort - whether on the night in question or in the future - there is an important sense in which it may be regarded as a failure.

I’m not sure this is correct, but it seems a more promising line of thought than those noted above. As such, it might provide us with the beginnings of a philosophical account of the essence of dating. But surely it is only a beginning.

* Not that any of these are worth a damn, of course.

** This, I take it, is one reason for the relative popularity of continental philosophy among a certain demographic. Whatever their faults, continental philosophers are certainly not afraid to address the issues I am discussing here.

The art of conversation

2006-05-13T15:16:00.000-07:00

One of the reasons why I tend to find it difficult to engage in causal conversation is the high standards I have for it. Unless I (or someone else) has something particularly original, witty, or thoughtful to say, I get bored and anxious in conversational contexts very quickly.* But perhaps my standards for causal conversation aren't high, they're simply wrong.

"Obviously", you may think. And it seems that the experts on the conversational art would agree. Here's Virginia Woolf, for instance, on the subject:

There must be talk, and it must be general, and it must be about everything. It must not go too deep, and it must not be too clever, for if it went too far in either of these directions somebody was sure to feel out of it, and to sit balancing with his tea cup, saying nothing.

(From the The New York Review of Books)

So, according to Woolf, it's not just that conversation needn't be any of things I demand, it's that it shouldn't be any of these things, at least to any great degree. So the norms I've been applying to myself and others when conversing with them - the norms that are the source of so much anxiety for me when making conversation - are simply the product of my failure to identify the real aims of conversation.

I suppose this is more or less right. But if these are the norms that govern conversation, this seems to raise the question of why conversation was and is considered by so many so terribly valuable. After all, do we really want to be part of a conversation in which, "if anyone said a brilliant thing it was felt to be rather a breach of etiquette—an accident that one ignored, like a fit of sneezing, or some catastrophe with a muffin." To my mind, at least, there seems to be something rather perverse in the idea of conversing with others while simultaneously making sure that what one has to say is not too intelligent or too provocative. Of course, such conversation will bring the pleasures that come whenever we interact with others. But shouldn't it be possible to enjoy these pleasures without limiting ourselves to talk that is of an artificially low level?

* This, for example, is why I've always found the conversations people have while high so insufferable. But here again, the reflections above may help to explain why otherwise intelligent people find drugs a suitable conversational aid. After all, if the comments above are correct, then the greatest obstacle to good conversation among intelligent people may sometimes be, not a lack of intelligence, but rather an excess of it.

It's sad that,

2006-05-11T20:21:00.000-07:00

statistically speaking, I'm more likely to remember Mother's Day than I am my mother's birthday. Although when one thinks about it, this is really no great surprise. I have a bad head for dates, at least of a non-historical kind, and in the weeks preceding Mother's Day we all are bombarded with reminders that our yearly chance to demonstrate our love for our mothers is fast approaching. Still, the fact that I'm more likely to remember a holiday manufactured (in large part) by the greeting card companies than I am the day of my mother's birth indicates something sad in my relationship with her. A certain distance. Or perhaps a certain impersonality.

In any case, from now I won't be celebrating Mother's Day or any other mass-produced holiday of this kind. It's time for me to concentrate on the arbitrary celebrations that really matter.

Slogans and catchphrases

2006-05-11T20:16:00.000-07:00

We'll always be your sugar!

- Domino Sugar

I have a bad reaction to this one. It's quite pushy and more than a bit clingy. I want to say to Domino Sugar: "It's early in our relationship. Let's just go slowly... Don't crowd me. If we're going to build a relationship that's going to last, you need to respect my boundaries."

Does Ann Landers get questions like this?

2006-05-03T15:43:00.000-07:00

I spill salt. I want to remove any taint of bad luck that results. The proper response: throw salt over my shoulder. But which one? Left or right? The logic of superstition suggests that choosing the wrong shoulder will only redouble my bad fortune. So it makes no sense to gamble. Perhaps a pinch over both, with the hope that this will be sufficiently confusing for the fates that I'll escape without consequence?

Any advice would be welcome.

Note to self

2006-05-03T15:38:00.000-07:00

Some phrases I hope not to use on this blog:

"it seems to me"
"Now" as a way of beginning a sentence or a paragraph
"I think"
"perhaps"
"as such"
Any variation on "it is relatively clear that"
"obviously"
Any modifier that weakens a claim
Any modifier that makes me less than fully responsible for a claim

Further suggestions are welcome.

Irrationality and the concept of mind

2006-04-28T06:46:00.000-07:00

It is inherent to our very idea of mind that minds are restless. Minds are not mere algorithm-performing machines, and they do not merely follow out the logical consequences of an agent's beliefs and desires. Rather, it is part of the very idea of mind that a mind must be able to make leaps, to make associations, to bring things together and divide them up in all sorts of strange ways. Creativity isn't simply an empirical blessing - though it is that; it is a conceptual requirement: a mind must have at least the potentiality for creativity.

(Jonathan Lear, Open Minded, 84-5)

There is something intuitively right in what Lear says here. After all, when we think of the reasons why it seems like no computer, no matter how advanced, could ever constitute a mind, one of the reasons that first comes to mind is that no computer could ever display the sort of creativity that we associate with real mentality. This, it seems to me, is something very important that is often lost in the contemporary focus on consciousness as the unique factor that separates minds from mere computational devices. For in many ways the gap that exists between a mere computer and a creative mind can seem every bit as great as the gap between a zombie's brain and a truly conscious mind.

But, of course, it is far from obvious that a mere "algorithm-performing machine" couldn't display all of the creativity that we do. The tacit assumption here is that the sort of creative thought and imagination that we think any mind must possess could never be the product of the mere application of rules and algorithms to given data. And surely we do - at least in our more "artistic" moments - tend to think of creativity in this way. But is this anything more than cheap self-flattery? Or, in other words, even if this particular notion of creativity is part of our concept of mind, is it something than we ourselves display? For if it is not, then it will hardly matter much that other things cannot display it as well.

The difficulty here is that Lear seems to want to think of the sort of creative "restlessness" he has in mind here as involving something more than a mere mistake. But then the sorts of associations in question will have to be rooted in the architecture of the mind in question. And this might seem to imply that they will, after all, be the product of certain basic algorithms built into it's structure - even if these algorithms aren't anything like rules of deductive or inductive inference.

This, I think, points to any interesting tension in the very idea of creative thought. Such thought, it seems, can't be the product of the mechanical application of some set of already accepted rules or principles. For that would render it something other than creative. But, on the other hand, it cannot simply be a matter of a mere mistake or accident within the mind in question, and this makes it hard to see how it could be anything else...

Cheap shots

2006-04-28T06:40:00.000-07:00

I am tempted to end on this conciliatory note, but I cannot imagine it placating her embattled spirit, and perhaps the incivility of righteousness is catching. She herself often preferred to end with a parting kick, like this: the index lists eleven pages for justice, and none at all for altruism, benevolence, charity, compassion, empathy, forgiveness, mercy, sympathy, or love.

(Simon Blackburn's review of G.E.M. Anscombe's Human Life, Action and Ethics)

Kieran Setiya has a nice post on

2006-04-27T10:27:00.000-07:00

the reasons (or possible lack thereof) for procreation. He quite rightly points out that the most important reasons people have for having a child do not seem to be based in their own interests - for this, at least intuitively, is surely too self-intestered a reason for bringing a child into the world. But their reasons do not seem to be based any more in the consequences their action will have for the child - not least because heading down this road threatens to lead to Parfitian paradox. And while procreation may sometimes benefit the species or the world, this is surely also not the sort of reason most people are responding to when they decide to have a child. So, Setiya asks, what exactly are the reasons that sometimes make having a child the reasonable thing for two people to do?

This case seems to me to be of interest, in part, because it is an instance of a broader class of actions that raise some interesting practical/moral questions - namely, those actions whereby we create new special relationships, and thus new obligations between persons. For instance, let's consider a case of this kind which does not involve creating a new person: the case of entering into a friendship. Here again, while we do generally hope that our friendships will be beneficial to both parties, the benefits in question do not seem to provide us with our most basic reasons for becoming friends, at least under normal circumstances. After all, if one is asked: "Why do you want to become friends with A?", it hardly seems an acceptable response to answer: "Because I expect a friendship with A to benefit me as follows..." The reasons behind our friendships, one wants to say, just shouldn't be consequential in this way.

The same thing seems to me to be true of entering into other sorts of intimate relationships with others. And it also, albeit in a somewhat different way, seems to be true of procreation. In each of these cases, what makes the action in question reasonable is not anything about its expected consequences. Rather, the reasonableness of the action is best understood in terms of a correct or appropriate response to the current situation or state of affairs. So, for example, becoming friends with someone seems reasonable to us when it is a response to the fact that my interactions with someone have a certain character and provoke a certain sort of emotional response. And procreation seems reasonable, not because of the manner in which it will change the world, but rather as a response to the actual feelings and interactions of the two persons involved in the act of procreation.

If this is correct, then the reasonableness of these sorts of actions is not forward-looking, as the consequentialist analysis suggest, but backward looking. It is best understood, not as an attempt to achieve a certain sort of result, but as a natural and appropriate response to the current state of affairs. Of course, this just raises the question of when and why a given response is appropriate. And to understand this, I think, we need to first better understand the role that passions and emotions play in the practical reasoning of a rational (or better reasonable) agent.

A telling psychological fact about me

2006-04-26T09:58:00.000-07:00

is that whenever I feel irritated with someone else, my natural reaction is to write them an email apologizing for how I have acted and how I feel. In part this is a reaction to my desperately felt need to repair whatever rift with the person in question my irritation might have created or simply might represent. But this reaction is also plainly an expression of the manner in which I tend to transfer irritation at individuals around me onto myself. In this way, for me, feeling irritated or angry at someone else is never a stable state of mind. Rather, with time, I will inevitably turn such anger around on myself. For I simply find it easier to bear being angry at myself than at someone else.

The question, then, is why I find it easier to focus my negative emotions inward than to leave them attached to their original targets outside of me. Surely, part of the phenomenon here involves the difficulty I have in acting on anger or other negative emotions when they are directed at others. For instance, when I'm angry at someone else, the natural thing for me to do is to respond to them in ways that express this anger. But to do this - to criticize them or even attack them - is almost impossible for me. So whenever I feel other-directed anger, I feel myself drawn to actions that I simultaneously find impossible to perform. And this seems to explain much of the instability of this state of mind.

On the other hand, I find it quite easy and natural to attack, undermine, and criticize myself. And so when my anger is directed at myself, the actions that my anger brings to mind seem entirely natural to me. Thus, self-directed anger is a much more stable state of mind for me than anger which is direct at others. And this, I think, explains a good deal of my tendency to shift from a state of other-direct anger to a state in which I'm angry at myself. But...

(To Be Continued)

A Hero of our time?

2006-04-26T09:53:00.001-07:00

An apologia for Larry David would go something like the following.

This week B has been watching all of Curb Your Enthusiasm front to back again. And, naturally enough, I've been watching a good deal of it with him. Over dinner last night, I mentioned that with this kind of intensive exposure to the show, I can feel myself taking on some of Larry David's mannerisms and (perhaps more disturbingly) viewpoint on the world.

Of course this is more a product of my tendency to sympathetically over-identify with whatever strong personalities I am exposed to than anything else. But it provoked a discussion of the merits of the show and, in particular, of Larry David's "character". The center of the discussion, from my point of view at least, was whether or not the viewer should find David's character (i.e. David) at all sympathetic.

The case against this claim is simple enough. David is dominated by his own petty egocentric concerns to the degree that he regularly causes real pain to those around him - or, at the very least, causes whatever passes for pain among the rich and pampered Hollywood elite and their hangers-on. He is, in effect, someone who lives within a set of barriers constructed out of his own, only partially intelligible, rules and principles for life - a set of barriers which prevents him from having much in the way of satisfying or genuine interaction with others.

But just this, I think, is the basis of what - in the end - makes David so sympathetic, at least to me. After all, one thing he plainly is is a man of principle - even if these principles are idiosyncratic and irrational. And this - his principled nature - is the basis for nearly all of the action that takes within the series. For nearly every plot-point within the series is based on one or another objection David makes to the normal or conventional pattern of behavior - and these objections are always based on some obscure principle or another of his own.

Thus, one way to think of David's character is as a sort of parody of the rule-governed Kantian moral agent - albeit one whose selection of principles is surely not guided by anything like the Categorical Imperative. Still, whatever David's failings, one of them is not that his principles are draw from the prevailing social conventions and norms. Rather, David is both deeply principled and deeply unconventional. Thus, his difficulties may be understood as the product of the struggle of a man of principle to interact with a world whose conventions do not fit with his principles. And this struggle, at least, is something that anyone who sometimes feels disgust at the petty and irrational conventions which govern social interaction should be sympathetic to.

In fact, as David makes clear, to be principled today in an unconventional manner is no small achievement. For, in today's climate of conformity disguised as deviance, achieving a truly principled non-conformity may require the sort of absurd behavior that David displays. After all, the principles that guide an agent will either be intelligible in terms of our accepted conventions and norms for action or else they will possess at least some of the absurdity that David's principles possess. Perhaps this is something of a reductio of the very idea of a principled non-conformity, but - so long as we find this ideal attractive, as I still do - we should find something in Larry David to like, and even to admire.