waste

The truth in push-polling

I'm reading Raz' The Truth in Particularism—I find the sections on Dancy kind of unconvincing.  (There's one part that I really hope isn't just making the claim that if you think reasons are "generic features of action-types", then you will have problems with particularism, because—of course. And if you take a different view of reasons—or, for that matter, carve up action-types sufficiently finely—the point of that section against Dancy seems to vanish.) But here's a different part. One of Dancy's examples is this: if you have borrowed a book from a friend, and return it, your reason in doing so is that you borrowed it.  But that you borrowed it would not be a reason to return the book to your friend if you discovered that he had stolen it from the library, because in that case you should do something else.  (Return it to the library, I guess. We don't get that part.) So the very same consideration—that you had borrowed the book—is a reason for action in one case but not the other, according to Dancy. And indeed people will tend to cite just the fact that the book was borrowed as their reason for returning it in the normal case.  Raz observes that this doesn't necessarily touch on reasons at all, but just on someone's understanding of a reason; someone who just cites that the book was borrowed may simply incompletely understand the real reason for which he acts. And:

[T]ake the book loan example moentioned above. Most likely when asked people would say their reason for returning the book was that they borrowed it, or promised to return it. But if asked at the time would the fact that the person from whom it was borrowed had the right to possess it, that he did not steal it, etc. be relevant to their reason (i.e. was their reason that they borrowed from someone entitled to lend them the book), most people would say yes. Regarding those people the example fails. Their reason was not one which applies in cases of a borrower who stole the book.

And indeed the real reason (R) to return the book has the form r ∧¬(d₁ ∨ … ∨ d_n), where r is the seemingly main reason, that the book was borrowed, and each d is a defeater (that the book was stolen; that the book describes how to make bombs and you suspect your friend has a more than academic interest in the subject, etc). But even if that is the reason, you can't infer from the results of asking someone about to act "isn't your reason also this?" that it was or wasn't; the effect of asking a question like that is to make salient a possibility that may never have entered the person's mind—why should we not think that, rather than illuminating the reason on which the person was going to act all along, asking the question changes that reason?

I also wonder, to engage in a little slantwise ipsedixitry, if Raz would endorse a parallel to R in the case of justification for belief—that you're justified in believing something to the extent that you can eliminate every possible ground of doubt. Further: how can R serve either the guiding or the evaluative functions of reasons?  The odds that anyone will know that R obtains are very small; in fact, Raz acknowledges that there is reason to think that one could not know all the defeaters for an action.  And there seems to be no way to tell that someone acted for R, rather than for the extremely similar reason S—which isn't the reason to act, in this case—r ∧¬(d₁ ∨ … ∨ d_n-1), where d_n happens not to obtain in this case.  Why think that someone acted for R, but with a limited understanding that only grasped S, instead of thinking he acted for S, with the correct understanding that that was the reason?

Strike, dear mistress, and cure his heart

Frankfurt, in On Caring, shortly after announcing that he isn't certain why volitional constraint "should be so precious to us", gives a description of just that (that features, obviously, in other essays and lectures of his), to wit:

Suppose a man tells a woman that his love for her is the only thing that makes his life worthwhile … The fact that loving her is so important to him will not strike her as implying that he does not actually love her at all or that his love for her is tainted by self-regarding concerns. The apparent conflic between selflessness and self-interest disappears once it is understood that what serves the self-interest of the lover is, precisely, his selflessness. The benefit of loving accrues to him only if he he is genuinely selfless. He fulfills his own need only because in loving he forgets himself.

(The same argument comes up practically identically phrased in The Reasons of Love, is alluded to in Autonomy, Necessity and Love, and is a case of the argument in On the Usefulness of Final Ends and maybe On the Necessity of Ideals.) There are supposed to be lots of good things about love on Frankfurt's account, but the principle service it renders those in its grip is that it settles questions of what to do.  Frankfurt will go so far as to say that the totality of what a person cares about, combined with the order of rank of those cares, answers for him the question of how to live—either because he thinks that the cares and their ordering suffice to guide action all the way down, or because he thinks that, should any gaps remain, there's no way to fill them anyway.  Caring, and loving specifically, are willing captivations (thus not enslavements, as to passions—and willing in the double sense of being endorsed and being internal to the will) that circumscribe the range of reasons one will be able to consider, and not able not to consider; they proscribe some, and prescribe other, actions, in a way internal to the process of any possible deliberation.  This comes about because the lover takes himself to be subordinated to his beloved (or its interests), and it is only because of this subordination, moreover, that loving is important to us for its own sake.

All of which makes it rather striking that, when Jonathan Lear wants, as so many do, to get Frankfurt to admit some carings/lovings shouldn't be considered authoritative for the agent, because they're immoral or even outright evil, he chooses (this is in his contribution to Contours of Agency) the example of a slave's love for his master.  But this—much more than Frankfurt's own favored example of a parent's love for h/h children—is the paradigm case of what Frankfurt describes, because it requires the minimum of creativity on the part of the agent. There is no ambiguity as to how to serve the interests of the beloved, when one is literally enthralled: you do what, when, and as you're told. This language of self-abnegation, of self-forgetfulness, captivation and subordination, it isn't just decorative.

Well I got this bassoon, and I learned how to make it talk

Words can have unexpectedly evocative powers, even when, as with "rue", the evocation is founded in a mistake; the same, evidently, applies to the names of things.  In particular, it turns out that Univers Zero's first album is not called 1313, the name by which everyone knows it and even the name under which it was first released on CD by Cuneiform Records.  (Unrelatedly: the original cover, and the cover of the rerelease on Cryonic, are both superior to the original Cuneiform rerelease (proof—and note the URL), as was the original cover of Heresie, the second album.) It was actually self-titled, with the serial number EF 1313 (it was mixed by Eric Faes, who's commemorated in the title of an improvisation on Art Zoyd's Phase IV).  The new Cuneiform reissue, with bonus tracks (a live performance of "La Faulx"), returns to the original album art and title, and, presumably out of sentiment, the original serial number (RUNE 1313, this time), even though it's actually the 271st release.

But it should have been called 1313, dammit! The name fits, not just because of the repeated "13"s, but because of the sound. Frank Zappa, as is well known, once said that

The bassoon is one of my favorite instruments. It has the medieval aroma, like the days when everything used to sound like that. Some people crave baseball . . . I find this unfathomable, but I can easily understand why a person could get excited about playing the bassoon.

1313 and Heresie have the medieval aroma too, even though of course things didn't sound that way.  Even the crumhorn, if Wikipedia is to be believed, was mostly used in the Renaissance. Consider, though, "Complainte", the last track from 1313 (dammit) and my favorite thing they've ever done.  Listen to that wheeze!  How, I dunno, dry (vibratoless?) (some of) the strings sound. Totally medieval. Naturally I assumed all along that the name referred to the year.

Now all my illusions have been taken from me and I face the day a broken-minded man, and live in a world of broken ideas.

What I see, when I think of Stanley Cavell

This guy right here.

The signal's coming from Pittsburgh

Everyone feels compelled to point out that when Kafka read his stories to his circle, they, or maybe just he, found them laugh-out-loud funny, but no one ever seems terribly motivated to explain what's so funny about them.  Since exhaustive research indicates that the following insight has not yet been made, or made widely known, I share it with you all: "A Hunger Artist" is a shaggy dog story.  Big buildup, and it turns out: the guy's just never found anything he really likes.

Chicagoans are lucky skunks

I quote for evidence footnote twenty of Agnes Callard's Akratic Ignorance: Aristotle's Reply to Socrates: Proairesis is the inspiration behind besires and other attempts to yoke the cognitive and the conative in the works of philosophers such as Thomas Nagel, John McDowell, Nicholas Zangwill, Margaret Little, et aliorum.

A woman after my own heart. (This instance is all the more noteworthy since, while "et al." is normally taken to abbreviate "et alii", it could just as well abbreviate "et aliorum" or "et aliibus" or whatever.) I realize a case can be made that thinking that one should take full advantage of the morphological resources of a language words or phrases of which one is importing into an english sentence might not be highly correlated with philosophical acumen, but until I hear one I'm going to assume that it is.

(Maybe I should mention that the paper is also really interesting and stimulating and whatnot.)

More deceptive prudery

Throughout Dick Higgins' translation of Hymnen an die Nacht, "Schoß" is consistently translated as "womb", except in the last line, "Und senkt uns in des Vaters Schoß", which is translated as "and sink us forever [?] in our Father's lap".  Even though the first two lines of that very stanza refer to Jesus as a beloved bride.  (Right, Jesus ≠ heavenly father, but it should at least indicate that some fastness* and looseness is being played with gender.)

* It has never before occurred to me to wonder about "fast and loose", presumably because I'd never substantialized the phrase before. Having always assumed that "fast" in the phrase was speedy, and "fast and loose" just meant something like hard to get a handle on, tricky, or whatever, I am delighted to learn that it's actually a contrast; the "fast" is (if you will) "fest", not "schnell": held tight.  Sez the OED:

fig. to play (at) fast and loose: to ignore at one moment obligations which one acknowledges at another; to be ‘slippery’ or inconstant.

That's def. b.; the primary, now obsolete meaning is as the name of "an old cheating game", which the quotation from 1857 describes: Fast-and-loose, a cheating game played with a stick and a belt or string, so arranged that a spectator would think he could make the latter fast by placing a stick through its intricate folds, whereas the operator could detach it at once..  This implies that "fastness and looseness" wasn't really apt, above.

Sounds like a real fun game, too.

Unhalfbricking

I seem to be occasionally reading bits of Frank's Einführung in die frühromantische Ästhetik.  (Very occasionally; very bits.)  At one point in the sixteenth lecture (with which, to be clear, I began) he presents a collection of quotations from Novalis, one of them beginning thus:

Es giebt gewisse Dichtungen in uns, die einen ganz andern Karacter, als die Übrigen zu haben scheinen, denn sie sind vom Gefühle der Nothwendigkeit begleitet, und doch ist schlechterdings kein äußrer Grund zu ihnen vorhanden. Es dünckt dem Menschen, als sey er in einem Gespräch begriffen, und irgend ein unbekanntes, geisteges Wesen veranlasse ihn auf eine wunderbare Weise zur Entwickelung der evidentesten Gedancken.

Ok, I can handle all this.  Feelings of necessity, great.  But isn't this contrast between sorts of Dichtungen in us kind of odd?  And what are all these Dichtungen, some accompanied by feelings of necessity, some not, doing in us? If it just means poetries, or poems, then it's not clear why there's more than one in one, or why some are necessitous and others aren't, etc.  This not being the first time I saw the word used in a way that suggested it might not mean what I thought, I decided to check it out in the Grimm's dictionary, and what did I see, following the inoffensive "poesis. das wort kommt im ahd. und mhd. noch nicht vor.", but this as the first definition:

im allgemeinen die erhebung der wirklichkeit in die höhere wahrheit, in ein geistiges dasein. gut sagt schon MAALER ein liebliche dichtung, der warheit nit ungleich 89c. in diesem sinn nennt GÖTHE die beschreibung seines lebens dichtung und wahrheit: es soll damit kein gegensatz ausgedrückt werden, die wahrheit bezeichnet die wirklichkeit, aus welcher die dichtung als die blüte hervorsteigt; sie enthüllt und verdeckt zugleich. so spricht die poesie zu GÖTHE, [follows some poetry]

The italicized portions being, as I understand it, the official endorsed-by-the-Grimms definition.

This strikes me as remarkable, and so I remark on it.

Two cultivars of human ugliness

Although this post has the title of one I've been thinking of writing for a long time (I mentioned it two and a half years ago!), it will probably not be the one I wanted to write back then; while I might at one point have been capable of writing such a post, I fear it is too late now. In particular, this post doesn't really have a point.  The proximate cause of anything appearing under this title is that last night at an Edmund Welles concert Cornelius Boots (not his real name! I'm shocked!), after a spectacular performance of Asmodeus the Destroyer, King of the Demons,* acknowledged that he'd ripped off the coda from Bethlehem, and then commended that band to the audience, saying that in the rest of their music (he'd adapted the ending from a song that I infer is called Aphel, die schwarze Schlange), there's near-constant screaming, real screaming; it sounds like he's dying at every note.  (He also said that he doesn't tell people about the Bethlehem connection frequently, which struck me as very strange, since it's acknowledged in the liner notes to Agrippa's 3 Books.)  And that comment of his reminded me of this idea, you see.

Partly I just think that "cultivar"—"cultivated variety"; cabbage, kale, broccoli, brussels sprouts, and kings are all cultivars of the same species—is a cool word; the other part was listening for the first time (not long, I think, after first encountering the word "cultivar") to Black Dahlia Murder's album Miasma.  The Allmusic review of that album ends somewhat hilariously thus:

This harsh, blistering sledgehammer of a CD falls short of remarkable, but it's a decent (if somewhat uneven) effort that is worth checking out if one holds Scandinavian-style death metal and Scandinavian-style black metal in equally high regard.

Totally.

Black Dahlia Murder features two singing styles (and in fact two different singers).  That's not all that unusual; Opeth's Mikael Åkerfeldt employs both "clean" and "cookie monster" (as they're known) styles, frequently in the same song, though I didn't bother poking around Youtube long enough to find a good sample of that.  So here's clean vokills**, in a cover of Soldier of Fortune, and cookie monster***, in a song from My Arms Your Hearse, an album I don't actually have (and whose name demonstrates some of what makes Opeth so interesting; it comes from the rather grisly Comus song "Drip Drip"****).  What makes Black Dahlia Murder interesting is, rather, that their each of their singers practices a different form of deliberately ugly-sounding singing: they have a death metal growler and a black metal shrieker. Here's the song Flies; you can hear both within the first twenty seconds. The black metal dude comes off more repellent on this track; there's something about that style that makes it sound as if the person singing might really be simultaneously vomiting, or as if listening to it ought to make you really vomit, or something like that.  Definitely some vomit involved.  But that could just be because their death metal guy isn't as talented; it's certainly possible for that kind of growling to be discomfiting. (You'd think it would also fuck up your throat, but Åkerfeldt seems to be doing ok.) At the beginning of that second Opeth clip, there's really something uncanny about seeing that voice coming out of a person.  It might also be that that simultaneously constrained and high-pitched black metal stuff is just genuinely creepier, at least to me; one of the few vocal performances I can recall really being kind of creeped out by came when, at Chicago, I was overseeing the end of a previous DJ's set before mine began; he had been playing Khanate's Too Close Enough to Touch (last two minutes). While in the some lights***** it can seem just kind of goofy, in the right setting that raspy, constricted speak-singing can sound genuinely ugly, which is, you know, not an easy effect to achieve.  It helps to listen to the whole thing, but it's 11 minutes long.

Car Bomb seems to have a similar strategy to Black Dahlia Murder, though they have only one singer.  There's a pretty sweet bit, vocally, in Cellophane Stiletto, around 1:56–2:04.

And, of course, while I am wedded to the title Two Cultivars of Human Ugliness, because I think it's a great title, I'm not really wedded to the idea that contemporary ugly metal vox have to be traced to either black or death metal, especially since I'm basically talking out my ass here.

I'm not quite sure where it belongs but I want to include this great bit from the Tokyo Damage Report, which I am very pleased to learn has started up again (apparently quite some time ago, too):

There are two main approaches to noise : high brow and low brow.

The high brow noise guys see themselves as the latest in a long line of non-melodic, avant-garde music. . starting with Music Concrete in the 20's, Futurism in the 40's, and the weird shrieky sounds of Xenis Xenikakis or Karlheinz Stockhausen in the 60's. the goal, (like the goal of Modern Art in general) isn't to be aesthetically pleasing. Things like 'notes' or 'melodies' or 'rhythm' are for sell-outs! The goal is to be 'challenging' and take the listener to another world where he or she can contemplate the subtle sonic textures hidden inside the noise.

The low brow nosie guys see themselves as the latest in a long line of angry metalheads. . . Their attitude was, metal was noiser than rock: Distorted and angry . Death metal was noisier than metal-non melodic, dissonant. Grind bands like A.C. pretty much demolished the few remaining musical rules- becoming a blur without tempo or notes. Pretty much the only way to take things further out than A.C. was to just abandon rock instruments altogether and just produce pure white noise. Rather than thinking of noise as intellectual or contemplative, they are convinced that it's super duper extreme/ intense / messed up, and put totally disgusting pictures of mutilated corpses on their album covers.

The irony is, both approaches sound about the same!!

I assume A.C. is Anal Cunt? You also get totally disgusting pictures of corpses, or pornography, on Naked City album covers; it's well known that John Zorn admires metal, but he probably belongs more in the high-brow category.  Or: the high-brows who wish they were low brow.

* That is really the title, no lie; he drew some titters when he announced it before they started playing, but I think they managed to convince the audience by the end.  The other high point of that concert was a new piece apparently called "At the Soda Shop", which started out in the same style, I guess, as Mother Mallard's Portable Masterpiece Co.'s Harpsichord Truck, and which was gradually varied to have a kind of off-kilter melody, much more dissonance, and, uh, you know, spreading things out more. (I know what I mean.) Good stuff!
** I don't think I will ever stop finding that word amusing.
***I wasn't really paying attention when I listened to that song; it does have clean singing, though not that much of it.
**** Good lord, apparently Comus has started playing live again?! If you want to see a pudgy man who's probably in his sixties sing about being caked with blood and necrophilia, here's your chance; really, though, you're better off getting the album, since the audio quality in this video is predictably sucky, and it doesn't seem like the best performance anyway.  Dollars to donuts David Tibet was in the audience rocking a huge boner.
***** Another time at KZSU Tim Aher and Brian Collins were talking about the propriety of playing black metal during the day (and specifically right then, at the end of Tim's show, at around noon, I think).  The eventual conclusion was that while it would be incongruous to play music like that on a sunny day in Spring, the true darkness is in your soul anyway.

One's prior education turns out to effect what one currently thinks

This is all quite confused, of course.  And my confusions regarding this book are far from over!  If you're lucky you'll get to hear about more.

Kieran Setiya: the standards for being a good F may differ from the standards for being a good G, even when Fs are a kind of G.  "Even when"?  But isn't that what one would expect?  More particularly, if one were moved to think in terms of inheritance hierarchies, one would expect that (just as a square has all a rectangle's properties, and more*) the standards for being a good F would be a superset of those of being a good G. I'm not sure if that's the difference he's thinking of, partly because of that "even when" and partly because the example he gives—the standards for being a good theft are not the standards for being a good act, even though theft is a kind of act—is kind of hard to work with: what are the standards for being a good act?  (Obviously this doesn't mean a morally good act, not that that would make it any clearer what the standards are.)  Devices for measuring the length of medium-sized dry goods, and tape measures, are a more tractable G and F; whatever the standard of goodness for devices for measuring the length of such things might be, it probably includes things like accuracy, ease of use relative to the task, and a bunch of other things that we would use in assessing a tape measure, but not having a locking mechanism that holds the tape in place when engaged and allows the tape to retract when released, which is part of being a good tape measure (and not part of being a good yardstick or caliper).

Even if this post was originally motivated by a kind of silly analogy with inheritance hierarchies in object-oriented languages, that isn't the whole point. A bit later Setiya refersto the metaphysical truth that the standards for being a good F are determined by the nature of Fs, which is none to clear but at least involves the claim that there's a function from natures to standards for being good.  I, at least, have the intuition that this function is an injection, that is, that no two distinct natures have the same standards for being good.  So if Fs are a kind of G, then obviously they have different standards for being good; if they didn't, why would one think that Fs were (merely) a kind of G? Probably there are a zillion examples of different things have the same standards for being good which I'm overlooking, though. At any rate, this thought makes me find things like this confusing:

The standards for being a good disposition of practical thought might differ from the standards for being a good trait of character, even though, as I argued in section 1, dispositions of practical thought are traits of character.

(The task of the remainder being to overcome that gap.) But the traits of section one are such as: selfish, generous, callous, just. These don't seem to form a kind that is differentiable from some other group of character traits, though in context that's what you might expect the force of the statement to be.  (The reason they might differ is that the ones are kinds of the other).  They are instances of traits, but the instance-of relation is not the subclass-of relation. And if there really were a joint that separated the traits that apply to practical thought from the other traits, such that the members of the groups really were instances of different kinds of character traits, I would expect them to have different standards of being good. This all makes me very confused, as I said, about what the relation between dispositions of practical thought and character traits is supposed to be in danger of being, and what it is supposed to actually be.

*unless you think that a rectangle's properties include such things as "possibly having sides of unequal length" or something like that.

The drive to 2010

Dear friends,

I was just thinking about the remark you made recently about Dave Longstreth—about his unconventional guitar playing.  Or rather I should say about his guitar playing, since the substance of the remark was that his playing is unconventional. Unusual picking, I believe? Anyway, I recently saw him perform with his combo, The Dirty Projectors, last night, and I bore that remark in mind, attending more than I probably otherwise would have to Longstreth's playing.  I know the conversation's moved on now, and I hate to seem a bore, but I thought I'd drop you this brief note to let you know what my thoughts on the matter were.  I hope you find them as interesting and even eye-opening as I found yours.

Briefly (I must be brief now, having wasted so much space with preliminaries—I must ask your indulgence), the conclusions I reached were two. First, that especially, but not only, when he solos, Longstreth put me, at any rate, in mind of Sonny Sharrock: think of the Space Ghost album, for instance. Second, what with the increased prominence given in the live performances to various intertwining guitar parts on the part of Longstreth and the fleet-fingered hottie whose name I don't know who plays guitar and sings, that the current lineup of the DPs (call it the Rise Above lineup) is the 80s King Crimson for our decade.

Those are the things I thought while auditing the band, at least; now, in the cold light of day, I'm not sure how well either identification holds up, even granting that they were all along supposed to be loose, dare I say it, analogies. It's funny, isn't it, how that can happen? How something that, in the rush of the moment, seems like such a good idea, can appear much less certain not ten hours later… Anyway, I'm rambling.  I hope there are no hard feelings.

Yours,
Willard Maas

Proposal

Reclam should adopt the motto "Klein. Gelb. Anders."

I would prefer payment in Euros.

“You can't have everything; where would you put it?”

I infer that Steven Wright has never been a landowner.

(Even personal property can be left, after acquisition, wherever it was prior to acquisition.)

Frustration

Doesn't this look like an article I'd want to read?  The author quotes from "Heinrich Mann: ein Untergang" (omitting some of the text I'm including):

Früher in meinem Dorf wurde jedes Ding nur mit Gott oder dem Tod verknüpft und nie mit einer Irdischkeit.  Da standen die Dinge fest auf ihrem Platze und reichten bis in das Herz der Erde.

Bis mich die Seuch der Erkenntis schlug: es geht nirgends etwas vor; es geschieht alles nur in meinehm Gehirn. Da fingen die Dinge an zu schwanken, wurden verächtlich und kaum des Ansehens wert. Und selber die grossen Dinge: wer ist Gott? und wer ist Tod? Kleinigkeiten. Wappentiere. Worte aus meiner Mutter Mund.

Nun gab es nichts mehr, das mich trug. Nun war über allen Tiefen nur mein Odem. Nun war das Du tot. Nun war alles tot: Erlösung, Opfer und Erlöschen.

Rock on, Gottfried.  But here's the thing: the article kinda, uh, sucks.  (One could perhaps have anticipated this merely from looking at its page count—how much interesting could be said in the barely nine pages of actual text it comprises?)

Presumably there is worthwhile Benn scholarship, even in English; presumably one is not terribly likely to find it by typing "benn gehirne" into google in the hopes of finding one of the stories (successfully, at that, though it did take some refinement of the terms.)