Amy Sutherland

Interesting article on the ecology of nagging from feminist, Lindsay Beyerstein. She reviews Amy Sutherland’s NY Times article and book which outlines the effectiveness of using animal training techniques on her husband.

On the face of it, being trained like an animal isn’t appealing, but when one considers the alternative…

Finem respice.

by Zbigniew Herbert

IT IS AN amazing thing that our memory best retains images of great philosophers when their lives were coming to an end. Socrates raising the chalice with hemlock to his mouth, Seneca whose veins were opened by a slave (there is a painting of this by Rubens), Descartes roaming cold palace rooms with a foreboding that his role of teacher of the Swedish Queen would be his last, old Kant smelling a grated horseradish before his daily walk (the cane preceding him, sinking deeper and deeper into the sand), Spinoza consumed by tuberculosis and patiently polishing lenses, so weak he is unable to finish his Treatise on the Rainbow. . .A gallery of noble moribunds, pale masks, plaster casts.

In the eyes of his biographers Spinoza was unmistakably an ideal wise man: exclusively concentrated on the precise architecture of his works, perfectly indifferent to material affairs, and liberated from all passions. But an episode in his life is passed over in silence by some biographers, while others consider it only an incomprehensible, youthful whim.
Spinoza’s father died in 1656. In his family Baruch had the reputation of an eccentric young man who had no practical sense and wasted precious time studying incomprehensible books. Due to clever intrigues (his stepsister Rebecca and her husband Casseres played the main role in this) he was deprived of his inheritance. She hoped the absentminded young man would not even notice. But it happened otherwise.

Baruch initiated a lawsuit in court with an energy no one suspected him to have. He hired lawyers, called witnesses, was both matter-of-fact and passionate, extremely well-oriented in the most subtle details of procedure and convincing as a son injured and stripped of his rights.

They settled the division of the estate relatively quickly (clear legal rules existed in this matter). But then a second act of the trial unexpectedly followed, causing a general sense of unpleasantness and embarrassment.

As if the devil of possessiveness had entered him, Baruch began to litigate over almost each object from his father’s house. It started with the bed in which his mother, Deborah, had died (he did not forget about its dark green curtains). Then he requested objects without any value, explaining he had an emotional attachment to them. The judges were monumentally bored, and could not understand where this irresistible desire in the ascetic young man came from. Why did he wish to inherit a poker, a pewter pot with a broken handle, an ordinary kitchen stool, a china figure representing a shepherd without a head, a broken clock which stood in the vestibule and was a home for mice, or a painting that hung over the fireplace and was so completely blackened it looked like a self-portrait of tar?

Baruch won the trial. He could now sit with pride on his pyramid of spoils, casting spiteful glances at those who tried to disinherit him. But he did not do this. He only chose his mother’s bed (with the dark green curtain), giving the rest away to his adversaries defeated at the trial.

No one understood why he acted this way. It seemed an obvious extravagance, but in fact had a deeper meaning. It was as if Baruch wanted to say that virtue is not at all an asylum for the weak. The act of renunciation is an act of courage-it requires the sacrifice of things universally desired (not without regret and hesitation) for matters that are great, and incomprehensible.

From Making Introductions – John Carpenter and Zbigniew Herbert

Loads more Polish literature at:
http://home.nycap.rr.com/polishlit/

from Adam Phillips in conversation with Philip Davis in The Reader:

Samuel Johnson said it’s very difficult to be friends with people who hold views directly opposed to your own…

It’s not that I think ‘How fascinating it is that there are other people’. What reassures me or makes me feel better is the fact that I don’t have to respond with violence, as a reflex, to the person with the opposed view. This is not a liberal point – clearly there’s a point at which the
unacceptable is unacceptable. Morality is based on that. But I do thinkthe thing we are likely to be affronted by is the thing with which we have some affinity. And there’s a loss of energy in the repudiation of the opposing view. Because your enemy, so to speak, has something rofoundly in common with you.

The model you don’t like is one of anger and enmity whereas what I think I am talking about is more to do with the feeling of disappointment when people don’t understand your work, and then a sort of indifference that then comes upon one… There may well be another subject matter you can have with that other person, and that usually means giving up on your thing and looking for their thing.

What of the possibility that sadness and indifference is a transformation of violent anger? Unconsciously, your first experience is ‘I want to murder this person’. This is obviously terrible and impossible and you’ll be in prison, so you can’t do that. This anger turns into indifference, boredom, sadness. In other words, you’ve had a resignation and faced the fact that there’s no meeting here. I would want more of the violence to be available for conversation without it being enacted. I do believe in conflict as a form of affinity, rather than conflict being the problem.

There are connections, says Wordsworth, finer than those of contrast. Though I appreciate your argument that the sadness is a version of the anger, I think there is some terrible truth in a shamed and reluctant sense that everything is potentially disappointing. That’s my biggest fear. And that would exactly be in the area of what we were talking in reading Malamud.

Let’s imagine that disappointment is a useful refuge, so that once you feel disappointed you know where you are. This is one version. The other version is that there’s a life organised to avoid the possibility of disappointment. And then the question would be, what’s the big problem
with disappointment? You could think disappointment is integral to being human so you had better start learning about it in order to be able to take risks. I would not want my children not to do things for fear of disappointment. I’d want them to be attentive to the moments when they take flight into disappointment as an avoidance of something else. Because I think disappointment is extremely consoling.

Yes, agreed: I do associate disappointment with those forms of ageing that give up and I do want to resist it.

For some people, it is a real question and one of the things we can do, thank God, is to kill ourselves. That should be a serious option built into our education. Why are you tolerating pain? I would prefer to start from the position of asking the question whether interview life is worth living, whether certain kinds of pain are worth suffering.

Interesting how this relates to the suicides documented in The Bridge. The reasons for suicide usually aren’t very well founded and in the case of 2 survivors, Ken Baldwin and Jason Hines, evaporated as soon as they let go.

Excellent interview with Robinson in The Paris Review.

INTERVIEWER
You’ve also written that Americans tend to avoid contemplating larger issues. What is it that we’re afraid of?

ROBINSON
People are frightened of themselves. It’s like Freud saying that the best thing is to have no sensation at all, as if we’re supposed to live painlessly and unconsciously in the world. I have a much different view. The ancients are right: the dear old human experience is a singular, difficult, shadowed, brilliant experience that does not resolve into being comfortable in the world. The valley of the shadow is part of that, and you are depriving yourself if you do not experience what humankind has experienced, including doubt and sorrow. We experience pain and difficulty as failure instead of saying, I will pass through this, everyone I have ever admired has passed through this, music has come out of this, literature has come out of it. We should think of our humanity as a privilege.

Marilynne Robinson isn’t saying anything very new, but over the course of the interview, she gives the impression that she has reflected more than most. When asked about how she negotiates the conflict between her own values and how other people choose to live, she is straighforwardly liberal, but because we see this in the context of her background, her work… how she actually spends her time, it is all the more striking:

INTERVIEWER
Does your faith ever conflict with your “regular life”?

ROBINSON
When I’m teaching, sometimes issues come up. I might read a scene in a student’s story that seems—by my standards—pornographic. I don’t believe in exploiting or treating with disrespect even an imagined person. But at the same time, I realize that I can’t universalize my standards. In instances like that, I feel I have to hold my religious reaction at bay. It is important to let people live out their experience of the world without censorious interference, except in very extreme cases.

Also, review of HOME by Michiko Kakutani in the NY Times.

Tim Parks: headhunters, pianists – we’re all the same – Telegraph

His work raises the issue of intervention. The translator’s goal is to vanish, to prevent his own identity from influencing the writer/reader interface.

Now in his fifties, Parks says that “whereas 10 years ago I might have offered advice to a friend in marriage or professional difficulties, my instinct now is to listen and not influence the situation. Because people will do what they will do.”

Then he tells me: “Maybe one of the characteristics of a decadent period is that the people doing a lot of thinking – maybe the people who you hope would be driving a community – are the people who are bowing out and saying, ‘We don’t think there’s much you can do about all this’.

“So it’s interesting looking back at writers like D H Lawrence or somebody much more difficult – like Nietzsche – and their line was that it’s always better to make an adventurous mistake than not get engaged at all.”

So while Parks has an “emotional sympathy” with Batesonian non-intervention, he also “rather admires” Helen’s work.

“It’s an ambiguity about how we think of the Third World,” he says. “Half of the time we’re thinking we should sort the whole thing out for them, and the other half we’re thinking it’s criminal that we ever got engaged with them at all.

“Between colonialism and the charitable organisations, there’s an enormous amount in common: that you go somewhere and do something. I’m not really on anybody’s side in that debate.”

Guy Damman taking a detached view of drinking. Big drinker, are you Guy?
High spirits | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

Outside its quotation marks, Baudelaire’s argument is nowadays almost impossible to make publicly. But before the statisticians and their nannies eclipse all possibility of praising drunkenness – beyond the prim encomiums to the health benefits of an occasional glass of red wine – it is worth pausing to remember that alcohol is one of increasingly few psychological resources for the vital but often overlooked experience of excess.

Getting drunk, in which the quotidiadrn economies of intention and expression, perception and reaction, are turned topsy-turvy, temporarily levels the creeping walls of propriety with which the rampant public sphere bears down upon the dwindling private domain. The chance to see things differently for a time – a chance given away so cheaply with a few pints in the pub – is often the only thing separating life as a broken cog from life as a full person, giddy with emotion, hiccupping from gulping down the sweet air of human freedom.

No one should pretend that alcohol addiction is in some way better than other kinds of addiction. Nor should there be any doubt that our society’s fondness for binge drinking is related to the spreading epidemic of extreme casual violence. “Booze Britain” is both real and ugly. But it seems to me that the more we publicly condemn the private practice of getting slightly pie-eyed as a quiet, usually fairly harmless way of subverting the hideous, alienated, hypercommodified obliteration of significance that is contemporary existence, the more likely it seems to me that those with a private fondness for the bottle may become alcoholics, as well as becoming publicly diagnosed as such.

How true and wise this sounds with a clear head. In the grip of hangover: dangerous nonsense.

Last Night’s TV:
Imagine…Doris Lessing – The Hostess And The Alien, BBC1

I approached the film a little warily, nervous that it might settle for the clichés of formidable old age, indifferent to social and cultural convention. I’d reckoned without Doris Lessing, whose entire life seems to have been conducted with a wild daring, and Jill Nicholls, the director, who crafted a compelling, even challenging, portrait of a completely original artist. 

“I despise people who don’t experiment with their lives,” Lessing once wrote, and she unquestionably lived up to her own credo. You can’t do such a thing, of course, without also experimenting with the lives of those attached to you, which in Lessing’s case included the young children she abandoned when she walked out of her first marriage. Lessing got edgy when questioned about this, but it says something about the film that you felt persuaded of the necessity of her flight. And if you wanted proof of her poetic power as a fabulist, it came right at the end when she described a childhood memory of luring moths out of the African night with a hand smeared with honey, as good an image of the writer’s talent for drawing things out of obscurity as you could want.

A nose for Nazis | Comment is free

The truth is that the Fritzl horror reveals precisely nothing about the Austrian people – but the rabid reaction to the Fritzl horror reveals a great deal about the sense of loss, confusion, desperation and chauvinism amongst opinion-formers here at home.

I wonder what Thomas Bernhard would have to say about Herr Fritzl and his neighbours? I don’t think he would be as sanguine as Brendan O’Neill – who goes too far in wanting to impose caution and restraint on his fellow hacks.

There probably are casual factors which are peculiarly Austrian – along with a great many that are not.

Smile and kiss your right to privacy goodbye (according to David Byrne)

Appiah introduces the trend towards a more experimental approach to philosophy and uses the famous sense and reference debate to illustrate how this has been applied:

In one of the most famous arguments of postwar philosophy of language, Saul Kripke addressed a question that had long preoccupied philosophers: how do names refer to people or things? (The larger question here is: How does language get traction on reality?) In a theory that Bertrand Russell made canonical, a name is basically shorthand for a description that specifies the person or thing in question. Kripke was skeptical. He suggested that the way names come to refer to something is akin to baptism: once upon a time, someone or some group conferred the name on an object, and, through the causal chains of history, we borrow that original designation.

To support his case, Kripke offered a thought experiment:

Quote:

Suppose, he asked us to imagine, that Gödel’s theorem was actually the work of a fellow named Schmidt; it’s just that Gödel somehow got hold of the manuscript and thereafter was wrongly credited with its authorship. When those of us who know about “Gödel” only as the theorem’s author invoke that name, whom are we referring to?

According to Russell’s view of reference, we’re actually referring to Schmidt: “Gödel” is merely shorthand for the fellow who devised the famous theorem, and Schmidt is the creature who answers to that description. “But it seems to me that we are not,” Kripke declared. “We simply are not.”

To which experimentalists reply: What do you mean “we,” kemo sabe? Recently, a team of philosophers led by Machery came up with situations that had the same form as Kripke’s and presented them to two groups of undergraduates — one in New Jersey and another in Hong Kong. The Americans, it turned out, were significantly more likely to give the responses that Kripke took to be obvious; the Chinese students had intuitions that were consonant with the older theory of reference.Maybe this relates to the supposed individualism of Westerners; maybe their concern that we get Schmidt’s name right isn’t shared by the supposedly more group-minded East Asians. Whatever the explanation, it’s a discomforting result. “We simply are not”: well, that may be so at Princeton or Rutgers. On the other side of the planet, it might seem we are. What should philosophers make of that?

And Appiah’s conclusion?

X-phi helps keep us honest and enforces a useful modesty about how much weight to give one’s personal hunches, even when they’re shared by the guy in the next office. But — this is my own empirical observation — although experiments can illuminate philosophical arguments, they don’t settle them.

I guess it’s just a question of utility – I can imagine that the experimental approach might offer extremely banal results, if it isn’t deployed judiciously.

Imagine all the uninspired PhDs this might springboard!

Idea Lab – Philosophy – New York Times