waste

Sometimes I have a similar reaction to the claim that "we" can conceive of something-or-other. What do you mean, "we"?

Mill, in his essay eulogizing Bentham, writes:

From the same principle in Bentham came the intricate and involved style, which makes his later writings books for the student only, not the general reader. It was from his perpetually aiming at impracticable precision. … in his later years and more advanced studies, he fell into a Latin or German structure of sentence, foreign to the genius of the English language. He could not bear, for the sake of clearness and the reader's ease, to say, as ordinary men are content to do, a little more than the truth in one sentence, and correct it in the next. The whole of the qualifying remarks which he intended to make, he insisted upon embedding as parentheses in the very middle of the sentence itself.

Certainly such a writerly habit does not conduce to readerly pleasure, but it springs, I think, from an admirable source (and I don't call it admirable just because a like reticulation is not always absent from my own productions, when I don't take care to prevent that, and even, at times, when I do; after all, it could simply be for me as it was for Plutarch—"These things coming into my memory as I am writing this story, it would be unnatural for me to omit them")—one doesn't want casually to mislead, or to say something for which the ground has not yet been prepared. It is good to be careful! Often one gets (putative) counterexamples, or worries, tossed off without its being adequately made clear exactly in what respect they are supposed to be counterexamples. This is really only related to Mill's description of Bentham in that going into the details of the instance would have the effect he claims for Bentham's writing; by the time we got through it, we'd be in danger of having lost track of the point in whose service the damn thing was introduced in the first place. But that's a danger worth running, I think; if the alternative is merely being suggestive, that, no doubt, is fine, but being suggestive in criticism can easily shade into spreading FUD, which is not fine.

Here is an example of a case in which it seems that the author surely must be aware that the situation is not nearly as cut and dried as he presents it as being (suggests it to be?). It's from the NDPR review of Rational Causation:

I would add, however, that a more troublesome state-type for him would be ones like "the holding of the French line"—which are not only countable, but exhibit the end-directedness he sees as distinctive of events. While 'X was believing' entails 'X believed' in a way that 'Y was crossing Grand Avenue' does not entail 'Y crossed Grand Avenue' (198), that the French line was holding at noon does not entail that it held.

But surely we might wonder about this on any number of dimensions.

1. Are holdings of the French line countable? I'm just not sure what gets counted here, or how. If the French line holds on June 3rd and June 4th, is that two holdings of the line, or one? Does it matter if there's no fighting at night? (If there's no fighting at night, does that mean we have, not two holdings of the French line, but two holdings of French lines?) What if the French line holds at noon and one on June 3rd?
2. Is the holding of the French line a state at all? Perhaps (one could suggest) there is really here only the activity of the French in holding the line. The suggestion can be resisted with reference to, say, holdings of knots. (There's only the activity of … the string?) But it is really not clear at all, then, that holdings of knots are countable. (Except in the trivial sense in which you could render any stative claim countable through a grammatical transformation. The knot held? Then there was one holding of the knot (and there couldn't be two, since any other holding would involve a different knot. The wall was red? Then there was one being red of the wall.)
3. Is the holding of the French line end-directed? True, what we would express by saying that the French line was holding at noon does not entail what we would express by saying that it held, but that doesn't establish that its holding at a particular time was directed to its holding simpliciter, or even that there is such a thing as its holding simpliciter. Surely—one can conceive a person confidently asserting—to say "the French line held" is to say that it held throughout some period of interest, for instance, that while it was holding at noon, the Belgians penetrated it at four, so it didn't hold all day. "The French line held—but not for long" makes perfect sense to me, and at least suggests that the part of the sentence before the em dash doesn't indicate that it achieved some end.

With regard to the first and the third, we might contrast the holding of the French line with things being in locations in various manners. That the infant was lying in its crib at noon doesn't entail what, in many contexts, would be expressed by "the infant lay in its crib". "What did Little Infant do while we were gone?" is not aptly answered with "LI lay in its crib" if it mostly wasn't doing that, though it would be a fine component of an answer cataloguing the various things that LI did. (Just as it would be perfectly just to say "the French line held" in the course of giving a relatively fine-grained account of the progress of the battle: "the Belgians launched a fierce attack at 11:55, but the French line held. By the early evening, however …".)

The knot case can be extended from the second item to the third. Certainly that the knot held/was holding at noon does not entail what would normally be expressed by "the knot held". But that hardly establishes that the knot's holding is directed at an end. I have an end for the knot, and if I say that it "didn't hold" because halfway through whatever I was doing it came undone, that is too bad for me and the end I was directed at, but that end was no business of the knot's; it isn't going for—what would the end even be? Having held at the end of time? "Holding" strikes me as canonically endless. Even in the case of the apparently metaphorical extension to holding a line: a line is done being held when there is no longer any occasion to hold it, because, say, peace has been negotiated. Holding the line does not itself move toward such an end state (except incidentally—a war of attrition). That is: there is no longer any need for the line, so it's dispersed. But that's something external to the line's holding (couldn't the French line stay there once the Belgians leave the field, after all?), not something toward which it's directed or progresses (in general I think directedness and potential progress move together).

I would not be surprised at all to know that the reviewer has answers to my puzzlement. (I would be surprised if I found the answers satisfactory, but that may simply be a personal problem.) And I will acknowledge that it would probably be out of place to go into all the details about how this problem is supposed actually to be problematic in a relatively brief review. What this suggests to me, though, is that some acknowledgement should be made, either that there seems to be something troublesome in this vicinity, rather than the bald statement actually made, or that the claims that render the example problematic do stand in need of fleshing out, and that that fleshing out is not here done.

What thing is needful?

Here is the text of Gay Science 290 (and here for the Kenner):

One thing is needful.—To 'give style' to one's character—a great and rare art! It is practised by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses that their nature has to offer and then fit them into an artistic plan until each appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye. Here a great mass of second nature has been added; there a piece of first nature removed—both times through long practice and daily work at it. Here the ugly that could not be removed is concealed; there it is reinterpreted into sublimity. Much that is vague and resisted shaping has been saved and employed for distant views—it is supposed to beckon towards the remote and immense. In the end, when the work is complete, it becomes clear how it was the force of a single taste that ruled and shaped everything great and small—whether the taste was good or bad means less than one may think; it's enough that it was one taste! It will be the strong and domineering natures who experience their most exquisite pleasure under such coercion, in being bound by but also perfected under their own law; the passion of their tremendous will becomes less intense in the face of all stylized nature, all conquered and serving nature; even when they have palaces to build and gardens to design, they resist giving nature free rein. Conversely, it is the weak characters with no power over themselves who hate the constraint of style: they feel that if this bitterly evil compulsion were to be imposed on them, they would have to become commonplace under it—they become slaves as soon as they serve; they hate to serve. Such minds—and they may be of the first rank—are always out to shape or interpret their environment as free nature—wild, arbitrary, fantastic, disorderly, and surprising—and they are well advised to do so, because only thus do they please themselves! For one thing is needful: that a human being should attain satisfaction with himself—be it through this or that poetry or art; only then is a human being at all tolerable to behold! Whoever is dissatisfied with himself is continually prepared to avenge himself for this, and we others will be his victims if only by having to endure his sight. For the sight of something ugly makes one bad and gloomy.

Quære: what thing is needful?

If you said "to give style to one's character", you are in excellent company, so far as I can tell, among Nietzsche scholars who comment on the passage (wouldn't illustrative examples be nice here? Yep!); you are also wrong. What is needful is that one should attain satisfaction with himself. Some do that by giving style to their characters, others by giving style to their environments. (It is also common to pass over the parts dealing with weak characters as of little interest.)

I am thinking of—later—putting up a post on the theme Things That I Realized in the Course of Teaching Nietzsche. One is: positions and people whom I formerly thought highly of fell somewhat in my esteem as I devoted more close attention to them than I had previously. Another: many papers on Nietzsche on Topic X don't read as closely, or with as much of an eye to context, as one would perhaps have liked. (Millgram's papers—Millgram not taking that approach—are very refreshing in this regard.) Here I actually do have some examples! But they will be deferred until that post, I think. Instead I will point out the curiosity of Nehamas' failing to mention, when arguing against reading Nietzsche's talk of self-creation as holding "that to become what one is is to actualize all the capacities for which one is inherently suited", not mentioning (even to dismiss it as not Nietzsche's mature/final position) Human, All Too Human 263:

Talent.—In as highly developed a humanity as ours now is everyone acquires from nature access to many talents. Everyone possesses inborn talent, but few possess the degree of inborn and acquired toughness, en durance and energy actually to become a talent, that is to say to become what he is: which means to discharge it in works and actions.

I mean, it seems like it might just support that reading!

What's eating Elizabeth Costello?

The previous post's content was recycled from (not merely the actual experience it relates but also) an old IM conversation (my mill recognizes neither bone, nor meat, nor tendon, nor organs—only gristle, only gristle), but was prompted by a re-reading of Cora Diamond's "The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy", and several of the other essays included with it in Philosophy and Animal Life. The obvious connection between the two being: the encounter with such old, isolated, inhuman (if it makes sense to call only some trees inhuman) trees seems to have a similar potential for psychic disruption as do the examples she adduces—though they strike me as somewhat heterogeneous.

One of them (the one with which the least time is spent) is just of beauty, with reference, in fact, to trees. But the description given ("the slimness of a column crowned with green"), while certainly evocative, isn't, or wasn't in my case, really sufficient to get across, or stimulate, what, say, the apprehension of a monstrous death-in-life in the photograph Ted Hughes describes in the poem that serves as her first example gets across or stimulates—some kind of apprehension of something that remains recalcitrant, that resists us our efforts to tame, or that we resist even trying to tame. I don't think she should even really speak, as she does, of "instances of beauty"; the issue, I think, isn't that this beautiful thing is here but should not be or is somehow incomprehensible, but that there should be beautiful things at all is. (After all, beauty itself isn't supposed to be off-putting, not evendivinely superfluous beauty; it takes more than a bit of black bile to have the reaction Diamond describes to it.) I think it's easier to assimilate being somewhat disordered, when confronted with a nearly 5,000-year-old living thing, to something like sublimity—except even the sublime is supposed to be precisely something that we can quarantine in thought, while the point of Diamond's interest in the phenomena she singles out is precisely that they can't.

In that respect she might count, in Braver's eyes, as a continental realist; we encounter—occasionally, and not on the same occasions—something which we take to be "resistant to our thinking it, or possibly to be painful in its inexplicability, or perhaps awesome and astonishing in its inexplicability" (45–46), or, later and more severely, something "beyond what we can think. To attempt to think it is to feel one's thinking come unhinged. Our concepts, our ordinary life with our concepts, pass by this difficulty" (57), so that, faced with its difficulty, we are apt to retreat to our ordinary concepts, transforming the experience into something more tractable (we don't realize how much we are already artists*), rather than staring into the abyss with resolution.*

The heterogeneity of the examples she adduces, and her remonstration with the commentators on Coetzee's novella (and especially with Peter Singer), in which she argues that they have missed its real significance, that its significance precisely is to show us someone who has had such an experience, or a realization, and been unhinged because she does not allow herself to be diverted—whereas they, the commentators, do—almost makes it seem as if the precise content of what so upsets Elizabeth Costello is not only not the real scene of the action in the novella, but interesting only insofar as it's the source of Costello's "wound". (It's actually tendentious to describe Singer as engaged in deflection, because he would have first to have had the relevant experience if he's going to deflect it. But he may not have. Deflection isn't the same as just not seeing something.†) The real action is the view Coetzee gives us of a "profound disturbance of the soul" (56); that's what the novella is "centrally concerned" with (49)—and not with an ethical issue. How we should treat animals is itself not an "ethical issue" (51).

I take it Diamond means to be rejecting (or means to take Costello as rejecting) the issue part of "ethical issue"; for Costello, certainly, it isn't at issue, which is part of what's so horrifyingly disturbing about the smiling faces of the people who offer her bits of corpses to grind between her teeth. But even things that aren't at issue, not really disputed about, can be ethical issues insofar as there is room to say why they are bad (or good). It may be self-evident that, and why, the Holocaust gave us a new categorical imperative, but, as lovers say in a different context, it doesn't hurt to say it. And it's important that in the case of the treatment of animals, it's something that even those who are not vegetarians, or are not vegetarians for Costello's (or Diamond's) reasons (which is not to say reasonings), the question of the treatment of animals is one that we can at least acknowledge as something to be addressed. The thing which wounds Costello is important itself. And, to some extent at least, I think that Diamond does Singer a disservice in her treatment of his response.

Another part of what's so horrifying for Costello is that people don't just offer her corpses as comestibles, and do so apparently seeing nothing wrong with it, but that Costello herself has no certain hold on her own take on the situation; the enormity with which she's confronted alternates between that of everyone else's complicity in an outrageous crime and the possibility that she herself simply stands outside the community for no reason, that she's being hypersensitive. Nothing gives her an answer—and after all everyone seems to be managing just fine. (People emphasize the parallel Costello draws between the Holocaust and the eating of meat. But this is a striking difference: "We look (or used to look) askance at Germans of a certain generation because they are, in a sense, polluted; in the very signs of their normality (their healthy appetites, their hearty laughter) we see proof of how deeply seated pollution is in them" (21; emphasis added), she says toward the beginning of her lecture. But at the end of that lecture: "Every day a fresh holocaust, yet, as far as I can see, our moral being is untouched. We do not feel tainted. We can do anything, it seems, and come away clean" (35), and at the end of the novella: "I no longer know where I am. I seem to move around perfectly easily among people … is it possible, I ask myself, that all of them are participants in a crime of stupefying proportions? … I look into your eyes, into Norma's, into the children's, and I see only kindness, human-kindness. Calm down, I tell myself, you are making a mountain out of a molehill. This is life. Everyone else comes to terms with it, why can't you?" (69). The point of quoting which is not to emphasize how adrift Costello feels, but that she feels adrift in a way that she presumably wouldn't when confronted with Germans of a certain age—even if they had healthy appetites and hearty laughs, and seemed perfectly normal and kind to each other. It may not be at issue for her, something to be decided by reasons, but it's not settled for her.) But it's important that, even if we don't see things as Costello does, we can at least see how someone might see things that way.

Hacking, in his conclusion to the book, notes that it would be perfectly natural to be unhinged if you and your family were actually being targeted for weird experiments and abductions by sinister alien forces, especially if no one believed you. If that's what were going on, you would, indeed, likely be unhinged by it, but you wouldn't be crazy. But if you believe that's what's going on, you are likely, sadly, to be crazy. And additionally unhinged! Given that you're crazy in this way, we can expect you to be unhinged. But a novella about someone unhinged for that reason, while it could be interesting in itself, would not be like The Lives of Animals, even though it would also show us a profound disturbance of the soul, because we would attribute the disturbance of the soul to a disturbance of the mind. Or—on the Braver tip—we could think that Johannes de Silentio's Abraham is similarly isolated (and isolated, indeed, from the ethical!), but I am uncertain how a novella about him would fare, presented to a largely secular audience. ("Well, of course he was deranged—he was the father of fanatics.") Says Hacking: "it must be reasonable to suppose that the putative reality is what is the case, is the reality" (153). But—well—is it reality? If I don't think it is, can you persuade me that it is? Say I, like Montaigne, "hardly ever [what, never? no: hardly ever] catch a beast alive without restoring it to its fields"—this an example of how cruelly I detest cruelty—and say, with him, that, first, "I do not attach much importance to such cousinship between us an the beasts" (to be fair, in context he appears to be speaking of literal metempsychosis), and, second, that "watching animals playing together and cuddling each other is nobody's sport: everyone's sport is to watch them tearing each other apart and wrenching off their limbs". This is may way of being with animals; it is the sense in which they are my fellows. Or perhaps—as against Diamond's claim in "Eating Meat and Eating People" that we would find someone "batty" who "freed his cows on his deathbed" (477)—I think it was downright sensible when "the Athenians commanded that the he-mules and she-mules which had been used in building the temple named the Hecatompedon should be set free and allowed to graze anywhere without hindrance" (all of this Montaigne being from "On Cruelty"). Here is my life with animals; there is yours. What then? Well, in "Eating Meat", Diamond suggests that we can make appeals on behalf of animals to see it this way, see these creatures thus, as Orwell suddenly saw the fascist holding up his trousers as a fellow-creature, look into the cow's eyes, etc. And—sure. (Think of the power of the descriptions of lobsters clinging to life in "Consider the Lobster".) And she insists that we oughtn't look for reasons that will be a reason for just anyone—to which again I am sympathetic. But there is a great gap between that and just not giving reasons; when Singer (paraphrased) says, "whenever I hear the phrase 'I think with my blood', I reach for my 'Therefores'", the reaction is, I think, just.

The mention of Abraham supra is calculated: if a mark of the ethical is precisely that it is characterized by reasons we offer one another, then Abraham is beyond the ethical, he's isolated from others; no one would accept, would believe, that he had received this instruction from God. And so is Costello, on Diamond's telling, not because she believes something unbelievable, but because she can't get others to occupy the position she occupies by giving them reasons. Though, again, it's important that we can see how someone could occupy that position without simply being a kook. But this seeing can't be: the seeing how someone could see the familiar figure as a duck rather than as a rabbit. Because—and I think this gets at a sense in which the question clearly is an ethical one, even if not whatever it is that Diamond means to denote by "ethical issue"—while we can freely go back and forth between the duck and the rabbit, once we have the knack, if we could actually see things as Costello sees them, we couldn't just flip back and forth between that and our previous point of view. (Something else that comes from Hacking. First, the fact that "the tom [of commercial turkeys] has been bred to be so heavy that, aside from the fact taht he can no longer walk but only totters, he cannot fertilize a female, for if he mounts her he will crush her to death" (147). Could someone who knows that just decide to put it out of his head, come November? If he actually found it disturbing, that is. For he could also, as Hacking notes, consider it to be a marvellously interesting development, a kind of symbiosis between this new breed of turkey and mankind. Could someone flip back and forth between inhabiting that viewpoint, and finding it disturbing? Surely not.)

* hey, I'm teaching Nietzsche this quarter too; you have to expect something will spill over.

† another reason to find the accusation puzzling. Singer may well be insensitive in his reading of the novel, in overlooking the position Costello's in. But what is the position she's in? She thinks that she's surrounded by participants in a horrible crime of extreme proportions, a daily slaughter. But surely Singer, too, thinks something like that? That meat-eating, factory farming, etc., are horrific, immoral enterprises? He doesn't think it the same way. But surely he does think it?

Archaic Forest of Bristlecone Pines

There is, absurdly, a page of reviews of the ancient bristlecone pine forest on Yelp; this strikes me as substantially more bizarre than there being a review of a Burger King, even though one might reasonably note that at least the forest is something significant. There simply seems to be something funny (not exactly presumptuous, but that's in there too) about reviewing a visually somewhat unimpressive but simultaneously mind-boggling stand of squat trees (and then giving it fewer than five out of five stars! Though that is not the important part). "Being in the presence of a tree that was not only alive but had been alive for around two thousand years when Homer was in short pants was amazing, A+++ WOULD BE HUMBLED AGAIN." [1]

Perhaps posting to Yelp is really no stranger, or even no different, from enthusing about the place to one's friends, and certainly I've done that. But it seems—each seems!—a weirdly inadequate response; describing the experience as "peaceful" (though it is) is an inadequate response; describing it as surreal or unsettling (though it is) is an inadequate response.

Part of the effect is doubtless a product not just of the knowledge that these trees are extremely old, but also the environment in which one encounters them: a windy drive up a tall hill (they are, of course, in a pretty isolated area) to an exposed area where the trees, which are surprisingly short, and surprisingly bare, sit in inhospitable earth. Near the area where you park (where we parked, when I was there, something like five years ago now) there's a bunch of sagebrush—it's downhill from the road, the pine trees uphill. There appears to be nothing else in the area with the pines than pines; there are lots of small ones, no more than six inches tall, for instance, which are probably older than my grandparents. It's all very disconcerting and one doesn't know quite how to take it. It seems to call for something.

It gets worse: while on the one hand a clonal organism seems like cheating in the "oldest living creature" competition, the idea of this colony of aspens is distressing in its own way: a going concern for 80,000 years, occupying 43 hectares. 43 hectares of nothing but yourself—and there are apparently colonies in Utah of over 80 hectares—how oppressive! It must, one wants to say, be so boring. And then there's this:

If its postulated age is correct, the climate into which Pando was born was markedly different from that of today, and it may be as many as 10,000 years since Pando's last successful flowering.

One can hardly imagine.

[1] Relating the age of the trees to things like when Homer lived is one of those maneuvers that you need to engage in, which take one away from the thing itself, in order to enable it to have its proper effect. Analogy: Arthur Dent, on learning that the Earth has been destroyed, finds himself unable to react to that knowledge at all until he frames it in terms of the nonexistence of some fast-food chain or other. (I think that's it.)