waste

A philosophical census

"Smith" and "Jones" are family names, not given names, at least usually; they can belong as easily to women as to men, and I would guess have belonged to women and men in roughly equal proportion in actually existing life. However in philosophical examples it seems that by far the majority of Smiths and Joneses have been men, or at least male. There presumably exists no high-minded justification for this practice, such as Velleman offers here and there for using "he" and friends as gender-neutral third-person pronouns and adjectives. We could come up with some low-minded explanations, though:

1. Philosophical examples take place in a world quite like our own, except with stricter rules regarding the disposition of surnames; in particular, the initial population of Smiths and Joneses in this world was all male, women keep their surnames on marriage, and no Smith or Jones has ever had a daughter (or perhaps daughters inherit the surnames of their mothers and sons of their fathers). Examples which concern naming customs, of which I'm sure there must be some, are governed by extremely complicated rules.

2. The Smith referred to in these examples isn't a cipher at all, but rather Michael Smith. What began as a joking practice in some seminar ("suppose", says one student, "that Smith here did such and such. Then obviously ...") took off and has propagated throughout the philosophical community, to the point that most people have no idea about whom they're really making these sometimes quite scurrilous suggestions. Jones is Indiana Jones, or maybe Sellars' Jones, who proved himself so useful when he first appeared and who has therefore been recruited by other ambitious philosophers somewhat in the fashion of whichever of the characters in At Swim-Two-Birds it is who does this.

3. It is a reflection of the assumption that arbitrary or anonymous ("Smith" at least being famously not very specific) persons are male.

4. "Smith" and "Jones" are actually given names in these examples. While they are relatively uncommon as given names in actually existing life, we do know that in some societies there exists the practice of giving a son his mother's maiden name as his first name (or middle name, but one can certainly go by one's middle name); I believe that (William) Robertson Davies was named in this fashion, and that his character (Percy) Boyd (later Boy) Staunton was as well. So it's certainly possible that these people are named, say, Carol Smith Fitzwilliam or Jones P. Cooper.

October is the cruellest month?

Is Autumn "Herbst" in German because it's the most herbacious time of year? Evidently not, but it's still nice to think so. (Nor a backformation. Shame.)

While I still believe that the beginning of A Canticle to the Waterbirds is betrayed by its ending, which become too forthright and wordy (compare the first and second-to-last stanzas!), giving the whole the feel of an even less subtle nature poem of Robinson Jeffers, that is perhaps a minor flaw compared to the one just discovered to me: namely, that this is a Christian, and I believe even Catholic, poem, yet waterbirds are nearly all heretics, and followers of one of the older and most perennially popular heresies at that: they are deniers of Original Sin and affirmers of the perfectibility of man.

Peeve

I don't think a single character on Mad Men uses "lie" when it, and not "lay", is called for.

You can't get it from here

Nearly a year ago I offhandedly suggested that Hegel's Phenomenology be considered as a shaggy dog story; in the past few days this interpretation, such as it is, has grown on me (as has the idea, which is not in competition with it, that the reason the "Absolute Knowing" chapter is so hard to understand is that, obviously, we haven't attained absolute knowing yet—once that happens, we'll all go back to our books and think "of course! It's so obvious now!"—we'll at that point be able to understand it better than Hegel himself, of course, since even he, writing when he did, could only see it as through a glass, darkly), to the point that I am prepared to claim, or at least prepared to pretend to claim, that the Phenomenology is an even better example of a literary shaggy dog story than "A Hunger Artist".

I previously claimed that the trouble with the written shaggy dog story was simply that one can read faster than listen, which is true enough. But that hardly gets at the essence of the problem; if it did, simple length would resolve it. But that ignores two further features of such stories that, because normally they are told aloud, and told at a leisurely pace, are often obscure: first, the teller's control over when the punchline is delivered, and, second, the possible relevance of all the material up to the punchline. "A Hunger Artist" is longer, as a story, than most shaggy dog stories I've ever told, but it doesn't really meet either criterion, and for the same reason in each case: namely, that one can simply flip forward to the end at any point. In the Phenomenology both features are won by the same method, and you might think that I've actually just described the same feature twice, but a consideration of an incompetently told spoken shaggy dog story should disabuse you of that notion; in such a case, the audience is still at the mercy of the teller as far as when the punchline is delivered, but will have figured out before that moment arrives that nothing they're hearing is actually relevant to it: they can identify the joke-in-progress, after a certain point, as filler. So really the way "A Hunger Artist" fails to have the second feature is in virtue of its failing to have the first: if you fail to be captivated by the story, and just want to find out what happens at the end, thinking that there's nothing to be won by continuing to read, you can at any point check. (It has to be this way, since after all in practically no shaggy dog story is any of the material that intervenes between the introduction—the setup proper—and the conclusion actually relevant to the latter; that material serves only to manipulate the audience's expectations and keep them as high as possiple.)

Hegel, in his shaggy dog story, hits upon an ingenious method of ensuring that the reader cannot simply flip to the end, and thereby retains control over the delivery of the punchline, and he does this by as much as asserting that the only way to even understand the punchline is by slogging through the whole damn book. The value of the punchline is path-dependent, so that even if you think, partway through your reading, that you basically see how things are going and can we just get to the bloody end already, you can't check your guess: Hegel has inoculated himself against your finding the story unamusing if you do that by telling you outright that each episode in the joke builds on the last until we get the big payoff at the end. In an orally delivered shaggy dog story, you can keep the audience engaged by varying the delivery, inserting mildly amusing bits into the story as you go with the promise that they'll contribute to even greater mirth somewhere down the road, or, if need be, just saying something like "bear with me; this'll all be worth it". Hegel, by contrast, wins the audience's loyalty first by having the initial sections build on each other in fairly clear ways, so that it becomes plausible that the whole thing really will end in hilarity (it's a sign of his true mastery of the genre that, as the book progresses, it becomes much less clear from formation to formation how formation n+1 had to arise in just this fashion from formation n: since later formations can shed retrospective light on earlier, it becomes possible to claim that any confusions you have now will be lessened in the future, so that there's really a double anticipation: first, everything is building towards this great climax, so you look forward to it; second, the climax will clarify just what it was that was building towards that very climax, so you look forward to it—this is a real coup), and second by including various historical and literary allusions and references into the text, which, though they may not contribute to the forward motion of the story per se, do serve to periodically refresh possibly flagging interest.

It may be, though, that the relative shortness of "A Hunger Artist" works to its advantage, despite its theoretical flaws: even if one does think he knows the score, it's a short enough story that he might decide to stick it out anyway, but long enough still to have an effect. Much more research ought to be done in this area.

Atoning for cholesterol

Nothing brings as much joy to my heart as the sight of a jar filled with beautiful golden honey-colored freshly rendered chicken fat, unless it is eating pieces of beautiful golden honey-colored crispy chicken skin.

(Insert here the standard warning concerning gribenes and mohels.)

Not if I saw it with mayonnaise

In general, we conceal logical structure when we treat prepositions as integral parts of verbs; it is a merit of the present proposal that it suggests a way of treating prepositions as contributing structure … it is also good to be able to keep track of the common element in "fly to" and "fly away from" and this of course we cannot do if we treat these as unstructured predicates.

An example, perhaps, is this: "I flew my spaceship" may entail, "I flew", but if it does, it is not, I think, because of the logical form of the sentences. My reason for saying this is that I find no reason to believe the logical form of "I flew my spaceship" differs from that of "I sank the Bismarck", which does not entail "I sank" though it does happen to entail "the Bismarck sank".

The most important thing to take away here is that the punctuation, which I have reproduced punctiliously, is correct. The next is this: of course in general we might conceal logical structure by treating prepositions like that; it is nice to be able to go from "on that day he stood for about an hour" to "he stood", "on that day he stood", and "he stood for about an hour". But of course one can't go from "on that day he stood for something noble" to "on that day he stood" or "he stood", or even "he stood for something noble" (since he may have been on every other day an absolute bastard of whom there was nothing good to be said whatsoever who stood, sans phrase, for rapine and slaughter). Confronted with the accusation "your problem is you've never stood for anything!", responding "that's not so—just yesterday I stood for hours in line" gets you a one-way ticket to the Catskills (note that we are not generally taken in by these superficial structural analogies or grammatical matters for longer than it takes to get the joke, which is not very long at all in most cases, which is not to say it won't lead to befuddlement in others). So, right: after all he does just say "in general". Presumably "he stood for something noble" has a different logical form than does "he stood for about an hour". Presumably too we know this because, observing what inferences will be allowed, we choose a proper begriffschriftlich formalization which will respect what we already know anyway. Which suggests that Davidson's monetary metaphor, in which the paper bills of ordinary phraseology is backed up by a mysterious specie of some sort (just try, though, to get it accepted as legal tender, the next time you have a request or proclamation), is suboptimal, and a better one would be this: we trade just fine in ordinary language based on barter, and some would propose, for ease of economic analysis, to introduce money into the equation; in doing so, they attempt to find out what the values of various phrases would be under the new system, based on the way they're currently traded.

Here I would like to say: this would be a nice place to quote Wittgenstein on crystalline purity. But PI is all the way across the room. So I won't even say it.

The second quotation is there because, if we do want to say that from "I flew my spaceship" one can infer "I flew", I don't see why we can't also infer "I sank" from "I sank the Bismarck". If one can come up with a context in which "I flew" meant "I flew something reference to which has been deleted" rather than "I flew, intransitively, perhaps as a passenger, who knows?", the latter being the relevant contrast (because it wouldn't be terribly interesting to learn that, to use a language in which these senses are distinguished even in the words, going from "ich habe mein Raumschiff geflogen" to "ich bin geflogen" relies on more than just the form), that same one could probably also come up with a context in which "I sank" meant something like "I sank objects reference to which has been deleted". This is plainly unimportant, though, since there are examples of the sort Davidson intends to draw (and as he acknowledges, "I flew my spaceship"->"I flew" might be one of them). It's just kind of an odd example. Likewise his claim that "deliberately" in "Jones buttered the toast slowly, deliberately, in the bathroom, with a knife, at midnight" imputes intention, such that it would be improper to use that word if he were had in fact intended to butter his comb. This strikes me as plainly false: "slowly, deliberately, with eyes shut to enhance the effect, Jones buttered his toast, thinking it was his comb" makes perfect sense (I included the "with eyes shut" part only to be able to omit an "and" between "slowly" and "deliberately", while cutting out the other modifiers), because "deliberately" can, obviously, mean something like "with great care and consideration (as someone who has deliberated about how to proceed)", as one can advance slowly and deliberately, or do something absurd, if one is Groucho Marx, say, ceremoniously and deliberately. Again, unimportant. I would like to say something like "telling", but I'm not sure what it might tell.

Three versions of charity

Consider, if you will, Moses Maimonides' categorization of acts of charity. There are a couple of interesting features about the list. First, it's not clear whether the "giving willingly" in seven means "before being asked" or, for that matter, how it interacts with the other items on the list—for instance, is giving willingly but inadequately, but also anonymously to unknown persons, higher or lower than giving adequately after being asked? One is tempted to assume that the good features of each lower rung are present in each higher rung, thus that "willingly" means "not in sadness", that everything above six is adequate, etc. (This awesomely-URL'd page is clearer on that.) A sufficiently clever mind might be able to reconcile three and four according to this requirement, saying that the good thing in four is anonymity, and it is preserved, though attached to a different (better) figure, in three—and that might work well enough. But clearly that won't suffice for one, since it will be hard to hire someone, or make a partnership with him, in a way that doesn't basically come down to giving a grant, or undignified make-work (and the importance of having some amount of dignity in the process, if it were not already obvious, should be apparent from the fact that giving a loan is higher than giving a grant—the loan is something that requires work to pay off, and having work is generally important to people), if you don't know who the person is, or without making yourself known to him.

But, of course, once you start thinking that way, you're going to start questioning the inclusion of the first item on the list anyway, as written; after all, while you might from charitable motives decide to make an effort to include poorer people in the pool when you're hiring, or forming a partnership, no one of them will likely be pleased to think that he was chosen specifically as an act of charity. Interest-free loans and grants, though, do seem to be reconcilable with the preceding item—they're just anonymous acts of charity of particular magnitude. So we keep them.

It is not hard to imagine why the anonymity of the giver is ranked higher than the unknownness of the recipient, or why it should be yet better when neither party knows the other: it is a mortification, not of the flesh, of course, but of the pride. The person who gives publicly to unknown recipients still is able to drink in the esteem of his fellows for his charitable act—indeed, he might receive all the more esteem for having had the consideration not to make public who it was who received his charity (this person may, after all, not want it to be known that he needed it). The person who gives anonymously to a known recipient may take pleasure in seeing his gift put to good uses, and puff himself up thereby (if the gift is put to bad uses there are obvious parallel perils). But when a person gives anonymously via some mechanism or other to persons unknown to him, then only he, and perhaps his accountant, know that he gave anything at all, and nor does he form any opinions about himself as a result of the recipient's behavior, nor does he potentially strain any personal relationships. This, then, is all to the good, innit?

Not quite. Because of course there are many kinds of pride one can take in one's behavior, and a subtle, but correspondingly pernicious, form is just this: taking pride in doing good, despite the lack of worldly esteem that comes to one as a result. The pride one has, one might put it, in having a good will, or supposing one does. (Analogous to Johnson's remark, quoted to not entirely clear effect by Moran, that "all censure of a man's self is oblique praise. It is in order to shew how much he can spare.".) It leads to smugness, to self-satisfaction, to the thought, perhaps, that despite the criticism one (justly!) draws for various acts for which one is known, one is, unknown to the critics, in fact a magnanimous man, a great philanthropist, and therefore one need not worry excessively much about the criticisms. For one can set as great store by them as one likes, they being known only to oneself (and, perhaps, one's accountant, but he is presumably not among the critics anyway). (A sort of beauty of soul, entrenched.)

We tend, these days, to look down our noses at those whose love of mankind is joined by their love of seeing their own names in large letters, adorning halls, stadia, or institutions, or reproduced at the bottom of the first, or the last, pages of research articles, or in the acknowledgements of books, stating that the preceding or succeeding could not have been brought off but for the generous support of X—; in this, we echo Rambam, nor is that anything we ought to be ashamed of. (Would that we could echo him in more!) But we may condemn them too hastily. For perhaps they are deeper moral psychologists than we, and choose to make public their acts of largesse as penance for some unknown sins, or as mortification, not of pride, but of the will: they act as they do so as not to be in a position to fool themselves with regard to their own motives, thinking them ever unmixed.