From an interview with Lee Rourke at bookslut:

Can boredom ever lead to anything good, and if so, what?

Again, not that I read him that much, it was Bertrand Russell who said that “boredom is a vital problem for the moralist, since at least half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.” Not that I’m in any way shape or form a moralist, or The Canal imparts any form of moral guidance, but if I imagine that we could simply break things up into things that are deemed “good” and “bad” then I would concur with Russell and argue that good things happen when we try to embrace boredom rather than fight it. I think boredom, when we allow its indifferent space into our lives, can lead to a greater perspective on things; it allows us the mental sovereignty to observe and ponder things at a slower pace, away from modern distractions, which are only designed to quicken time anyway. It always amazes me that people want time to move quickly, to speed things up every day of their lives, to wile away their evenings and weekends doing things that are considered exciting and solely designed and conceived to pass the time for them, and then, when all this is over, at the end of there lives — what a surprise! — they wonder to themselves why things have passed them by so quickly. What’s all that about?

Guy Damman gives the theodicy another whipping…
Good God, why? | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

The real problem, though, consists in the fact that an element of free will is generally agreed to be essential to the notion of goodness. Whether an action is judged to be morally good through a reflection on its ends or on its means, the ascription of goodness to the act’s perpetrator necessarily involves the implication that the course of action in question was chosen freely. In other words, to be good in doing the right thing, the possibility of doing the wrong thing must exist too. 

But with God existing outside all known constraints, even those of space and time, and for whom the distance between thought and action is precisely zero, to speak of goodness in this sense is simply meaningless. Good God! The idea is preposterous.

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/

Has bad philosophy killed the Booker prize? | Books | guardian.co.uk

Recently, the British philosopher Simon Critchley gave a lecture at the inaugural Speakers’ Corner held at the Paradise Row gallery in East London. There’s something a little out of the ordinary right there. It’s that juxtaposition of the words “British” and “philosopher”.

It sits uncomfortably with me. Why is that? Is it because British philosophers have, for so long, been inching down the blind alley of analytical philosophy, the foundation for our current avoidance of anything that might seem esoteric, or – dare I say it – continental? Or is it because we are force-fed something else in its place: a slick, concise, quick-fix philosophising that’s grounded in fact and not too time-consuming to read? Whatever it is, I’m positive such inert scepticism governs our philosophical and literary judgment in this country. It’s the reason that the recent Booker prize shortlist, which reflects our deeply conservative, philosophy-lite tastes, is such an embarrassing failure.

I first read the work of Simon Critchley when the novelist Tom McCarthy gave me a sneak-preview transcript of their joint New York Declaration: INS Statement on Inauthenticity (it was announced by the International Necronautical Society [INS] in the Drawing Center, Manhattan on September 25th, 2007). I was immediately hooked when they declared: “For us, art is the consequence and experience of failed transcendence … art’s dirty secret is inauthenticity all the way down, a series of repetitions and reenactments that attempt to cover over the traumatic event of materiality.”

Critchley’s entire oeuvre to date, similarly to the novels of McCarthy, is a call against the stuffy, reductive thinking that has haunted a British establishment that sides with form at all costs. When the Booker prize prize judge and novelist Louise Doughty writes: “The ability to come up with a good plot and create a good structure are great literary qualities – it is not just about how to make a finely turned sentence. The ability to move a story on in an engaging way, and the creation of character – these are great literary skills,” I begin to understand the kind of Idealism the INS is rallying against.

Critchley’s thinking explores the “circularity of ethical experience” and the motivational forces behind political action – predominantly disappointment, both religious and political, as he argues in Infinitely Demanding. In Things Merely Are he examines the “the situation of the relation of philosophy and poetry” through the work of Wallace Stevens, ultimately arriving at an acceptance of materialism in literature. For Critchley, material reality is a “trauma” that literature must “navigate”, allowing “things to be in their irreducible materiality” – something he has explored himself in a series of experimental writings with McCarthy and the INS.

It is somewhere within the navigation of materiality that I feel the future of the British novel lies. If literature is to evolve in this country it should put aside its traditional empiricism and strive towards radical contemporary philosophies and the esoteric, as far removed from us as they may seem. Sadly, the Booker prize is a reflection of a massive wrong-turn in our literary and philosophical culture. We have ventured no further than a conservative, establishment cul-de-sac of un-acceptance: we simply do not do philosophy that veers away from the tried and tested. We’ve got to get out of the anti-philosophical avenue our wrong-headed literary culture is pursuing.

Critchley is right when he says that all philosophy “begins in disappointment”. It is this same sense of disappointment that should encourage us to explore his work further.

The Happiness Project: This Saturday: a happiness quotation from Schopenhauer.

“To attain something desired is to discover how vain it is; and…though we live all our lives in expectation of better things, we often at the same time long regretfully for what is past. The present, on the other hand, is regarded as something quite temporary and serving only as the road to our goal. That is why most men discover when they look back on their life that they have the whole time been living ad interim, and are surprised to see that which they let go by so unregarded and unenjoyed was precisely their life, was precisely in expectation of which they lived.”
–Schopenhauer

Reminds me of the Henry James quotation,
‘Live all you can – it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that, what have you had?’

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

Peter Wollen notes,

Visual display is the other side of the spectacle, the side of production rather than consumption or reception.

Guy Debord, the theorist of spectacle, noted how, in modern times, an excess of display has the effect of concealing the truth of the society that produces it, providing the viewer with an unending stream of images that might be best understood, not simply as detached from the real world of things, as Debord implied, but as working to efface any trace of the symbolic, condemning the viewer to a world in which we can see everything but understand nothing – allowing us as viewer-victims, in Debord’s phrase, only ‘a random choice of ephemera’.

I was throwing out some semi-digested content and found the Wollen quotation above. It’s interesting in light of the ‘Person of the Year’ Time Magazine article. This view of spectacle is getting turned on its head. Technology is empowering the consumer – don’t you just love that word! – to produce the images and more widely the content which is sending shockwaves in the world of corporate mass media.

Semi interesting musings on the difference between unhappiness and despair from Kieran Setiya.

The nub of the argument:

—————

…if despair is unhappiness about the impossibility of achieving some good, the good must be an object of commitment – or else irrelevant to one’s happiness – and so it must be something one thinks one could achieve. At the very least, one must hope for its attainment, and in hoping believe that it is possible. It follows that despair is epistemically irrational: it depends on having contradictory beliefs.

The “irrationality of unhappiness” turns on the further claim that all unhappiness is despair. For how could one be unhappy about the frustration of an end one thinks one could achieve?

—————

Even philosopher, Setiya, admits it’s a good illustration of how philosophy fails to get to grips with life as we live it.

He points to the case of a fan who supports an unsuccessful team. In this formulation, to commit oneself to something that is out of one’s control is irrational, even though it’s hard to see why there is any muddled thinking. Setiya relates this to the difference between pure and practical reason. I feel a Wikipedia search coming on…