waste

Wingtip Dot Club

When I was taking these photos, and was thinking ahead to the post I was already planning to write about them—which, in truth, I had already been thinking about previously, and which occasioned the taking of the photos—I thought that when I wrote the post, I would start it off in a fairly abstruse and complicated vein. I would start it off, I thought when I took the photos, by mentioning Richard Taruskin's Text and Act, the first and only collection of his essays and reviews that I've read.

When I was taking these photos and thinking ahead to the post I am now writing, I thought I would mention Taruskin's claim that so-called "historically informed performance", or period performance, or "authentic" performance, conceived in opposition to the ideal of "Werktreue" in the earlier part of the previous century, was not, despite its name and its advertisements for itself, a recovery of the past, or an opportunity for the audience to hear the pieces as audiences of the past would have heard them. Such performances and ideals, as I intended to recollect his argument, were thoroughly up-to-the-minute and modern. Whatever one of thinks of the resemblance of the playing or of the techniques employed to the playing or techniques employed by ensembles of the various composers' times, the contemporary employment of them answers a distinctively modern craving precisely for the "authentic", despite its irrecoverability.

When I thought about how I would employ this point to further the end with which I was taking the photos, namely deriding and ridiculing the establishment shown in the photos, I thought that I would endeavor to draw attention to something that my varied and dear readers would likely see plainly for themselves. I thought that my acute blog friendship would not need much prompting to see the decidedly old-fashioned design of the window decorations, the out-of-date prices for barbering services, and the specifics of the advertised goods and services, which function nicely as a list of contemporary imaginings of rugged yet tasteful masculinities of the past. Although I suspected at the time I was thinking about how I would write this post and how I would relate Taruskin's position to the details of the photos of the shop windows that I would not need to point out to those reading the post the text in the first picture reading "solutions for the modern gentleman", I still intended to do so.

After having pointed out this text, my thought, as I imagined the progression of the argument of the post, when I was taking the pictures I am now posting, is probably now obvious to my readers, who are uniformly a sharp bunch: my thought was to deny any incongruity. I would have asked: what in fact is more characteristic of the "modern gentleman" than to clutch desperately at the tokens of an imagined past gentlemanliness? The craving for what Taruskin referred to as "the tainted A-word", authenticity, is as in evidence here as in an improvised cadenza by Christopher Hogwood. (At the time I was thinking these thoughts, I did not know that in addition to a keyboardist bearing the name Christopher Hogwood, there also lived in the present century a pig bearing that same name, so I could not have thought, at the time, to insert a mock-clarificatory note. Now that I am actually writing the post that I had previously only been thinking of composing, however, and because I have learned that both Hogwood the keyboardist and Hogwood the pig lived in the present century, I am able to have that thought.)

After I had taken the photos and was walking back to my office, still dwelling on the post I was planning on writing at some remove regarding the photos, I thought about what accounts for the dissimilarity between this store, which is stupid and tacky, and Hogwood's music, which is not, when they both originate, in some sense, in the same impulse. I was thinking of this both as a question to myself, and as a question I might pose in the post whose writing I was then dwelling on. I would put the question in the post, I thought, as if I were still musing on it. I intended, when I was walking back to the office, to ask in the post whether it was because Hogwood's performances came after long study and practice so that he could more fully play his parts as, for example, Mozart would have expected them to be played, whereas the proprietors of this shop seemed to believe that the sale of cufflinks as such is worthy of advertisement, and the sale of sabers intended to be used for opening bottles of sparkling wine is worthy of anything but shame. If Hogwood had started performing immediately after learning that improvisation was common in Mozart's time without knowing much about the specifics, would he not also have seemed foolish? I had no intention, walking back to my office, of providing a definitive answer to such questions as these, intending rather to leave them open. Another possibility that I intended to moot was that there was an important difference in the subject matter. I thought, as I was returning to my office with Taruskin's argument commingling in my mind with the very idea of a "belt bar", that I might ask my readers if the exploration of different performance styles, even an exploration conceptualized as a recovery of past performance styles, was simply a less ridiculous and more admirable thing to do than the exploration of styles of masculinity, especially an archaizing exploration conceptualized as a recovery of a style of masculinity that places an emphasis on scotch, cigars, and clubs. (Prior to taking the photos that led me to think these thoughts, I had been reminded of the existence of this store when I walked past it at a time that was not kairotic for photography. This walking past of the store by me did lead me to google the shop for information about it, and I discovered in so doing that it has an attached club, or perhaps the club has an attached shop. As I was walking back to my office after having taken the photos, I had not forgotten about this history of how I learned about the club occurred to me, but neither was I thinking about it.) Perhaps—I imagined that I might pose this question in the post—it's just the obvious concern with outmoded masculinity or masculinity at all that's so bad.

I had all these thoughts several days prior to the time at which I actually began to write the post. For one or two days after I had taken the photos, and after having had the thoughts about what I would write in the post that I recounted in the first five paragraphs of this post, I continued to think that the post I would write would proceed along more or less the lines I had earlier conceived for it. During all of these days I knew that I would not actually begin writing the post until the weekend.

At some point after the one or two days during which I continued to believe that I would write a post along the lines that had occurred to me while I was taking the photos and walking back to my office, but before I began to write the post which you are now reading, I realized that I did not need to do anything so complicated to convey my point or, hopefully, amuse my blog friends. I realized, at some point before the weekend but one or two days after I had taken the photos, that a much simpler avenue was open to me.

My realization was this: I had only to point out that one of the brands stocked by the store is named "Rodd & Gunn".

(Several days after having written the fourth and fifth paragraphs of this post, I realized that I had been confused while writing them. I had thought that Taruskin praised Hogwood's playing for its contemporary-antique freshness. In fact, I should have named Robert Levin. I learned this only after having obtained a copy of Text and Act, which I did not have at the time I wrote the above-mentioned paragraphs, and having read an essay in it, "A Mozart Wholly Ours".  After learning that Levin's was the correct name, I contemplated editing the text of the post to replace Hogwood's name with Levin's. I began to do so, but realized that I would no longer be able, with any real cause, to mention the pig named Christopher Hogwood. I opted for this addendum for that reason.)

Ford contra O'Shaugnessy

I recently read Anton Ford's paper The Province of Human Agency, which recently appeared in Νοῦς (the third number of its fifty-second volume), and it was a bit of an odd experience in that I am extremely sympathetic to (what I take to be) the basic perspective from which he writes, and the basic position he's trying to advocate for (and I really liked his dissertation), but also (and I have this experience a lot with let's call them Pittsburgh Anscombians) I found the paper itself to be frustratingly hard to get a handle on. (I also had the somewhat melancholy thought that my papers dammit would have been relevant to its composition and its successors, should there be any: here is someone, Ford, who would probably be interested in my stuff! And might even have had cause to read some had I remained in the academy, and conferred, and whatnot, but who now will, basically, not.) But it was also somewhat annoying because I thought the use made of Brian O'Shaughnessy was very shabby. I thought I would write a short post substantiating that thought. I may or may not have succeeded in substantiating it; I definitely failed in writing a short post, or one that confines itself to that task.

Here's the context. A picture of action theory is given in which two views do combat: volitionalism, in which all we ever do, sensu stricto, is will, or intend, or try (in some purely mental sense of "try"!), and what Ford calls, identifying it with the mainstream, "corporealism", in which all we ever do is move our bodies, in some sense which is unfortunately not laid out particularly clearly. Davidson, for instance, explicitly endorses this view … or something like it. (The view Davidson explicitly endorses is also not particularly clear, so that fits, at least!) The immediate unclarity is perhaps harmless, since Ford will later extend it to encompass one which explicitly has it that we do do more than merely move our bodies (Feinberg's, on p 712): the essential point for corporealism isn't that the limit of our as we might put it contributions as agents to what happens stops at the body, but that it stops somewhere short of what happens. (As is also true of volitionalism.) After some point, what we do is over, and the rest is just the workings-out of cause and effect ("up to nature", in Davidson's phrase), and (therefore) not what we do. Of course philosophers who speak in such a way are willing to countenance what is apparently an inexact habit of speech in which those effects do count as what we do, by, I suppose, courtesy. Ford: they "uniformly go on to say that, given the right setting and a certain amount of luck, moving one's body might amount to something as sophisticated as turning on the lights" (697), owing to the possibility of redescribing a cause in terms of its effects (the famous "accordion effect"). But this is, apparently, if we are to be rigorously philosophical, loose talk. (Mark that luck, though!) Or such is, roughly, how Ford sets it out.

Given, then, that the issue is not really just about moving one's body and what it might mean to say that all we ever do (in some privileged sense) is that, the failure to get clear on what "all we ever do is move our body" is perhaps excusable. Really, we are interested in the idea that all we ever do (in some privileged sense) is less than everything that happens when we do what we do (in that privileged sense). But that doesn't remove the fundamental issue, which is that we don't, yet, know what that privileged sense is! As a result of which we don't know, for instance, how much of a courtesy the extension of the title of deeds to those things which a person's privileged deeds cause is. Maybe not much!

More of that later, though.

In order, then, to produce conviction in the reader that corporealism is rampant, and found among partisans of numerous philosophical orientations (not merely among those with scientistic or physicalist sympathies), we get a brief list, with one or two supporting quotations, of folks said to endorse it—Davidson and Michael Smith, but also Helen Steward, Adrian Haddock, John McDowell, and Brian O'Shaughnessy. The point of such a list is, in a way, rhetorical: it says, look, this isn't just Davidson and Davidsonians (*ahem*, no matter what one might gather from the actually following text …): it's pervasive in modern action theory. It's a deep tendency. One wants to swell the ranks. (In this light including O'Shaughnessy is kind of strange, actually, at least if my suspicion that he isn't much read is correct.) That this is accomplished by corralling lots of short quotations from the above-named persons, which evince what are superficially similar positions, is somewhat astounding, since Ford doesn't actually establish that they are the same position, which would require expounding on each in context. The fact that two philosophers summing up their positions in a few sentences might use similar formulations no more establishes that their positions are consonant than the fact that O'Shaughnessy and a probate proceeding are both concerned with "the will" establishes that they have the same topic. If the philosophers in question all came from broadly the same school or lineage it might be fine, but Ford's whole point is that they don't; we ought to be wary of casual syncretism.

Let us roughly group what follows thus: (a), why the inclusion of O'Shaughnessy is prima facie puzzling (there are actually lots of reasons for this, and I've only included the one that first came to me, as I was reading Ford's paper); (b), why, on the other hand, one might be tempted to include him, and what Ford quotes by way of supporting this inclusion; (c), the connection of this to other parts of the paper; (d), a look at the overall argumentative structure of the paper; it's even less specific to O'Shaughnessy than (c) is but there's something notably weird about it. Finally, there are scads of notes, including two long ones that almost constitute a rare thing from me, a defense of Davidson. We will begin, conventionally, with (a).

(a) It's been a while since I read The Will, but I remember bits of it well enough to be able to say that even before getting to the quotation brought in to justify the identification of O'Shaughnessy as a corporealist, one ought to find the mere fact of his inclusion strange. For he does not merely fail to join the chorus of those apologizing for their strange views with reference to the accordion effect, he explicitly mentions it to say that it's bosh—he considers at length the case of someone adjusting a radio's volume by adjusting its volume knob (by moving his fingers), and whether one ought to say, when speaking properly, that really he's only moving his fingers, and the rest is simply an effect, and concludes that … one should not say that. (Nor does he identify any point at which one would be correct to say: here is the point at which the agent's contribution stops.) So he not only does not do what we are told that corporealists uniformly do, he seems to be rejecting corporealism in one part of his (admittedly, long and complex) text, something that ought to make us demand more than simply a single quotation with no further explication to justify his inclusion in the corporealist body. O'Shaughnessy even expresses himself, in the course of this discussion, with prose that any Thompson epigone ought to admire:

Now the peculiar thing about the utterance, "He is really only moving his fingers", is the word "only". What is it that is being ruled out? What is it that he does not do? A strange and primitive sort of linguistic reaction wells up within one at this stage. What is it that he does not do? "Why, he doesn't do that", we say, pointing at the movement of the knob that he is moving, "He isn't doing that", pointing to the moving and glowing insides of the wireless, "He isn't doing the causal connections!" This is a bizarre and wild outbreak of the philosophical unconscious. (The Will, 2nd ed, 109)

On p 108 he says outright that (supposing the radio is actually working, the knob not jammed, etc.) "he is really only moving his fingers" is "false". The discussion is quite lengthy and proceeds somewhat eccentrically (his immediate concern is not Ford's, or Davidson's), but I find nothing in it to undermine my initial seeming recollection that O'Shaughnessy does not believe that action, strictly aspeaking, extends only to bodily movements, or indeed to less than what happens, much less only to willings in some bad merely internal sense (O'Shaughnessy's own sense of "willing" is of course more complicated than that), and plenty to support it, such as, say, "In section (e) … I shall indicate what a valid motive for such a restriction on the extension of 'action' might be, and show that no such justification here exists" (117). Seems pretty unambiguous, if merely promised (but I'm reading it through again in order, and don't have all day, you know [1]).

(b) I'm not going to attempt to summarize the third chapter of the first volume of The Will (since it really is about that much, if not that and the second chapter for context, that's relevant to O'Shaughnessy's consideration of the whether sensu stricto one only ever moves one's body), but I do think this ought to suffice to show that prima facie he's an odd choice to name as a corporealist, underspecified as that position is, and Ford does very little to support his inclusion. Nevertheless one must admit that statements such as "once that outbreak [of the philosophical unconscious] is fully analysed, we shall then find ourselves in a position to use the once metaphysical 'I cannot move the knob of the wireless' non-metaphysically. Analysing such a metaphysical utterance is the very complicated process of giving it a use." (121–2) as, well, they might make one think that in the end we will end up restricting actions, in some sense, to bodily movements (always excepting, as O'Shaughnessy does explicitly mention, actions that essentially involve no gross movement) after all. And indeed the entire second part of the first volume is concerned with "The Immediate Object of the Will", namely, as it turns out, the body. (The modifier, obviously, is important.)

It's not that, however, which Ford adduces, but this sentence (-fragment, in context), which is, I think, somewhat less than dispositive, even taken by itself, and much less than dispositive in its larger context:

the event of willing physically develops, in a naturally appointed causal manner, to the point at which it incorporates the event of limb movement, and completes itself in so doing. (512)

I think it is reasonable to say that this does not precisely imply that all we ever do, sensu stricto, is move our bodies, or that all that happens after the movement (or some other thing) is technically not our doing. For one thing, when I turn the volume knob, the (event of the) turning takes place simultaneously with (the event of) my fingers' moving! The event in which the willing completes itself, the event of the bodily movement, and the event of the moving of the thing moved by the body's moving can all be the same event. (And "willing" is a technical term for O'Shaughnessy; one oughtn't just drop it into one's piece as if its meaning is clear to all and move on.) And yet this may be thought a rather special case; when the sharp pockets the eight ball, or when Rube Goldberg operates his light switches, the body's movement ends before the goal is attained. (On the other hand, it might be thought that Ford's examples of transaction, too, are much more like turning the radio knob than like what Rube characteristically does, in that one is continually interacting with the material on which one is acting.) So something is, if not fishy precisely, in need of explanation; is all our willing really exhausted in bodily movements?

It is somewhat tempting to observe that O'Shaughnessy's official remit in the section in which that quotation occurs is "bodily action", and so he may simply be concerned with actions that are no more than, i.e. not more extended than, bodily movements (though he does also refer to turnings on of lights). And I think he really is concerned, here, mostly with basic actions (a concept he countenances, as do I), because I think he is, here, concerned with wondering about, well, the curious yet oh so classic duality seemingly exhibited by action (psychic phenomena, yet also physical phenomena!), and the marriage of mind and body exhibited in intentional bodily movements would seem to be the place in which that problematic is exhibited in exemplary fashion (this is a person, after all, who wrote a paper called "Trying (As the Mental 'Pineal Gland')" and repeats the pineal gland line again in The Will). There is something to be investigated about the will and the body—about willings and movings—which is different from the investigation of whether it is proper to identify action with bodily movement.

Now it is from the late discussions explicitly about action (the first part, that I was quoting from in (a), is not about action as such) clear that O'Shaughnessy also countenances non-basic, instrumental or constitutive actions, though unfortunately giving examples of his doing so is made more difficult by the fact that he also countenances the concept of the unintentional action, so when he speaks of starting an avalanche by firing a rifle (as on 458; N.B., though, not "by contracting a finger" on a trigger that happens to be hard by!), he means this to be an unintentional doing. It ought to be borne in mind that accepting the idea of a basic action, and holding the position that ultimately everything one does one does by or in doing basic actions (singly or in series), does not force one to hold the further position that those basic actions qua intentional actions are bodily movements in the way Davidson seems to intend; that is, such a person can (and should!) fully adopt Ford's points on pp 707f. (But then, as far as I can tell, so also can and should Davidson.) (Such a person should also adopt my points in "Second Nature and Basic Action"!) That is, one might analyze the structure of actions into the instrumental/constitutive and the basic, such that all of the former are accomplished (in some way) by or in the latter, without committing oneself to identifying action with bodily movement, or believing that the effects of the basic actions are not properly our doings.

For all that, though, O'Shaughnessy especially in the second volume of The Will, and especially its latter portions, does seem awfully preoccupied, when talking about both action and the will, with bodily movements, in a way that might lead one to think that that really is all he thinks action amounts to. And it's not clear to me in this paper but it seems at times as if for Ford recognizing basic actions makes you a corporealist.

(c) As alluded to at the beginning of the post, there's a rather wide range of positions that get put together as "corporealism" or that count as "identifying action with bodily movement", and it's not always super clear what it's intended to be captured. It doesn't help, of course, that his leading target, Davidson, is monumentally unclear about how to construe his position, in two ways. I suspect it's at least correct that Davidson thinks that all our primitive or basic actions are bodily movements, and that he thinks all our basic actions are bodily movements under bodily-movement descriptions (though the argument he advances, if that really his supposed to be the position, is notably bad). The second thing there is in my opinion incorrect and as far as I can tell comes in with no clear motivation other than Davidson's apparent belief that it's theoretically neat; at any rate, even saying that much doesn't amount to the claim, which of course Davidson also makes, that all we do is move our bodies (regardless of the description qua which these movements are intentional actions), and when he adds that, he seems to be contradicting himself [2]! (It still seems unfair of Ford to saddle him with the charges that he doesn't believe in instrumental action or that for him the body has no need of the extra-bodily [3].) But then he's got Feinberg as a target, too, and Feinberg explicitly does not believe that "all the actions there are" are bodily movements.

Ford characterizes both corporealism and voluntarism as species of "practical dualism", and says that such a doctrine in general

divides what is presumed to be an unproblematic case of intentional action, like turning on the lights, into two causally-related [sic] parts, one of which is the agent's contribution to what happens, and the other of which is "up to nature". Although I have said that materialism marks no such division, the suspicion may linger that it must do so, on pain of embracing an absurd triumphalism, according to which there are no limits to what one can do intentionally. (712)

It's almost like Frankfurt's concern in "The Problem of Action", but his solution is (in my memory of it, anyway), a cybernetic more-of-the-same. (And one ought to allow, in some circumstances, that the agent is doing whatever she's doing even if she isn't following the unfolding progress, ready to intervene, pace Frankfurt.)

I've quoted his remark about materialism and triumphalism as well because I find the characterization of why someone actually would want to speak of leaving something "up to nature" rather confusing—what the temptation actually is, or, otherwise put, what leaving something up to nature is supposed to mean. (That is, I'm not sure what limits Ford thinks might be lifted in triumph. We would be able to … turn on lights? Glow like filaments?) Why would someone think that? What sort of not-doing might be in question in the "part" that's up to nature? Surely there's an innocuous sense in which, once I have poured the poison into the king's ear, I allow its its fatal action of, I don't know, its binding to red blood cells and preventing them from carrying oxygen, a natural potential which we exploit, to run its course? Must saying that mean saying that I didn't kill the king, I merely tilted my wrist just so? Whence the temptation to make a special place for the body? What even is a body, anyway?

There is a strange missed opportunity early on in the introduction of "materialism" as a term:

It did not escape [Aristotle's] notice that a person needs to move herself in order to move something else. Nor did he fail to appreciate that when one moves a stone by pushing it with a stick, there are real and important differences between the "moving" one does of the stone, the "moving" one does of the stick, and the "moving" one does of oneself. But none of this led him to fixate on the movement of the body. (700)

Unfortunately for me, Ford does not record where Aristotle notices this [4]. Unfortunately for all of us, he doesn't record what those important differences are, or again in the paper take cognizance of fact that one must move oneself in order to move one's body, or what the significance for the philosophy of action that fact might have. We can take this, however, at least implicitly allowing that one can be a materialist in good standing while affirming that bodily movements are special, being both necessary for and different (in some important way!) from the movements of the non-bodily.

In a footnote, he does tell us that the materialist tradition includes Marx and many phenomenologists, adding that

one striking difference between phenomenologists, on the one hand, and analytic action theorists, on the other, is that the former are apt to devote while chapters of their main works to thinking about the human body. There is nothing remotely similar in the Davidsonian corpus. And that is the great irony of what I am calling "corporealism": though analytic action theorists constantly mention "bodily movement", the nature of the human body is rarely thematized as a topic of philosophical reflection. (718n28)

Reader, I found this infuriating: O'Shaughnessy not only devotes a whole hell of a lot of The Will precisely to the human body, much of what he says resounds harmoniously with Merleau-Ponty. (Ford says next to nothing about it.) It's especially irksome given that Ford spends more time with this remark of Anscombe's, not obviously consonant with Aristotle's noticing:

People sometimes say that one can get one's arm to move by an act of will but not a matchbox; but if they mean 'Will a matchbox to move and it won't' the answer is 'If I will my arm to move in that way, it won't', and if they mean, 'I can move my arm but not my matchbox' the answer is that I can move the matchbox—nothing easier. (quoted on 706)

This seems to lose track of the idea that there is a real, much less an important, difference between the two movings. Something seems to have escaped Anscombe's notice, at least in the use Ford makes of this remark. What, after all, is the way in which I move my arm, when I move it to move the matchbox? And if I try—do I even know how to try?—to move the matchbox that way, do I? It's in the context of O'Shaughnessy's lengthy considerations of, basically, just this question that he first disputes that we only ever do the finger-moving, and not also the volume adjusting, but this doesn't lead him to gloss over the differences between the two. (It is bizarre of Ford to commend Aristotle for not "fixating" on the body and, in a footnote attached to just that commendation, commend phenomenologists for (and abuse analytic philosophers for not) occupying themselves deeply with the body. As we know, a "fixation" is a theory, or an object of study eventuating in a theory, one doesn't like.) If we retain notice of the necessity of moving oneself in order to move something else, then there must surely be a sense in which one can move oneself but not the matchbox: one doesn't move the matchbox in the way one moves oneself, or one wouldn't need to move oneself in order to move the matchbox. (Or the matchbox would be oneself, which is not a priori impossible.) Thus while I don't know what parts of Aristotle Ford had in his mind, what came first to mine was this:

It follows that the soul is analogous to the hand; for as the hand is a tool of tools, so the mind is the form of forms and sense the form of sensible things. (DA 432a)

Much could be made about the perception/action parallel being drawn in these few lines with respect to the instant problematic [5], but it flashed on me because, well, isn't it odd that we should even have a tool of tools? Like, we've got all these tools, right, both artifacts made (often using other tools!) for our purposes, and natural objects appropriated as-is to be used for this or that. Why don't we just use them? Why don't we use the tools, that is, directly, rather than using a tool of tools to use them? (And if for some reason we must use a tool of tools to use the tools, why mustn't we use a tool of tools of tools to use the tool of tools?) Haven't we, after all, just been assured that we can do precisely that, namely just use the (say) knife to peel the apple—nothing easier?

Well, the answer is, you can indeed peel an apple, but try to peel an apple that way, and you won't. For that matter, you can indeed move your spleen, but try to move it that way, and you won't. For O'Shaughnessy, as indeed for Merleau-Ponty, the "body" with which we are concerned does not include the spleen, but does, or at least can, include such incorporeal addenda as prosthetics (O'S) or canes (M-P) [6]. (This is another thing that, all by itself, ought to give one pause before including O'Shaughnessy among the corporealists!) Such things are, for those who have learned how to use them, among the "immediate object[s] of the will", in O'Shaughnessy's phrase. I don't think "object" is the happiest term, or necessary for him, since it implies that the will acts on the body and the body, then, on something else; the point is the immediacy, which we do not enjoy (except if we have, as he puts it, "rare powers") with respect to knives.

One is tempted to say something like this: we need a tool of tools because the active powers of the soul do not extend directly to all the world, as infants are said to believe they do; we are finite beings whose practical efficacy requires physical intercession, and physical intercession in the world happens via the soul's physical expression, which is the body. (Ronald Polansky, in his commentary on De anima, puts it by saying "the hand reaches out to touch and grasp many things, while the soul through its cognitive faculties embraces the whole world of things" (496), which nicely sets up the hand not merely as like the soul or the soul as like the hand but the hand as the active counterpart to the soul's receptive nature.) And this is also why we do not need a tool of tools of tools: the body is the actualization of our active nature, not a tool which the soul makes use of (though it's not always easy to find the right way to express this thought). This poses no particular restriction on what counts as "the body" (it could include canes; it could exclude spleens; it is apt to be different for you and for me) or the range of activities in which our practical natures are immediately (or mediately) expressed. Whether this amounts to identifying actions with bodily movements is unclear; the "body" in question is not the biological body, and we have no reason not to say that the laces, when I tie them, are temporarily incorporated, to a limited purpose. (If we do this, we do so because the laces figure in the sole or most basic practical thought involved in lace-tying; we have lost grasp of "the body" independent from that in which the will expresses itself practically. Actually I think what to say about things not connected to the body that nevertheless figure in the most basic practical thought, like the cup one goes to grasp and to whose outline one's hand is conformed in anticipation, is a super interesting question, but I don't really have a settled opinion about it.) This is if not a distinct "part" at least relevantly different from what we accomplish in and/or by thus expressing ourselves, in that those further things we do are, well, again, being finite, we are dependent on, uh, nature and natural regularities to effect our desires. "Up to nature" gives the whole thing a rather helpless air, which Ford, with his previous rather unaccountable invocation of "luck", makes much of:

The dualist's conviction that an agent must leave something up to nature, even when all she is doing is turning on the lights, betrays an unrealistic conception of the ordinary objects that we use on a daily basis … the only "nature" in question is an incandescent light bulb … they are made by human beings to be used by human beings … it is no accident that they tend to turn on when people flip the switches that are made to turn them on. (713)

Ford doesn't say what the unrealistic conception actually is! (Does he think that it means, like, the woods? I honestly found this baffling.) Presumably, though, on it, it is an accident that light bulbs mostly do turn on when their switches are flipped. This only makes sense if "the rest is up to nature" means "sure, I flipped the switch, and it's anybody's guess what happens next", or something like that; but—whence might he have gotten that idea? [7] It is precisely because leaving things up to nature is not a matter of accident that we can make light bulbs at all; I can leave it up to the filament to glow when the current goes through it. Indeed, I don't need to know anything about the construction of light bulbs or the wiring of my home to operate a light switch. I just flip the switch! The rest—lovely nature—takes care of itself, and need not be represented in my practical or indeed theoretical thought at all [8]. The temptation to speak of leaving stuff up to nature is not, I think, that otherwise we seem to be omnipotent, but the simple observation that I just loose the string and the arrow goes, flip the switch and the light turns on, pour the poison and the king dies, rub the sticks and the kindling lights, whatever, there's the thing I'm immediately doing, and the things that I do by so doing. (Ford wants to say that "when I intentionally turn on the lights, what I change intentionally is not merely the switch that I manipulate, but [also] the lights" (713). So does O'Shaughnessy, and, for that matter, so does Davidson. Ford's own formulation acknowledges that one manipulates the switch, but not the lights. How do the lights come to be light, rather than dark, then? Is it because the manipulation closes a circuit, which sends electricity through the filament, which causes the filament to get really hot and emit light? If so, is it merely by courtesy that we say that I changed the lights intentionally?) And although I need to rub my hands on the stick up here so that the other end down there turns in the wood, it is in the nature of the wood down there to be heated and ignite from the friction. I am turning, heating, igniting; but I am relying on nature to get me from deed to deed.

One is tempted to believe that in so saying one is not sinning against materialism, or at least falling into corporealism, and that O'Shaughnessy can safely be said to have evaded the charge. It seems, where it skirts territory Ford anathematizes, to be doing so innocuously, in unmetaphysical ways, and it seems to be drawing out the primacy and difference of bodily movement which he seems to tolerate in Aristotle. But I'm not certain, because Ford has McDowell in the beginning saying precisely that

"actualizations of our active nature" extend into the "goings-on in which natural things, like limbs, do natural things, like moving." For McDowell, it is things like hands, not things like handles, whose movements are realizations of our "active nature". The mind enters the world, he thinks, but only a little way[.] (698)

So, who knows! I mean, hands and not handles seems right up there with tools of tools and not tools. But I still think that O'Shaughnessy is being miscategorized. I certainly think that the diversity of positions putatively under consideration, relative to the attention given to any actual position, is unfortunate: it really does seem unclear to me whether assenting to "there are basic actions" is supposed to make one a corporealist. I don't think it does?

(d) Here's the overall structure of the paper: volitionalism asserts its primacy on the grounds of three considerations (which I will call "the first three"): fallibility (of bodily movement as against willing), separability (of willing from movement), and etiology (of bodily movement from willing). Against these corporealism asserts it has the advantage with another three considerations ("the second three"): pre-theoretical practical thought, embodiment, and animality. Things can't just stand there, though; corporealism has to address the first three. Ford gives it two options: deny the phenomena (an option he says is "rarely, if ever, exercised", possibly because of "its lack of promise" (705)) or to "grant the phenomena, but deny that they disqualify bodily movement as the prime expression of agency" (705).

However, materialism now comes along and says: just as the second three give corporealism the edge over volitionalism, so too they give materialism the edge over corporealism: if you find those considerations moving, you should be moved to materialism. Against that, corporealism advances counter-considerations against materialism: fallibility (of transaction as against bodily movement), separability (of bodily movement from transaction), and etiology (of transaction from movement). But wait—didn't the corporealist just say that those considerations have no force?

Ford says yes—the corporealist did just say that, and is therefore "in the impossible position of needing to deny out of one side of their mouths … exactly what they affirm out of the other that fallibility, separability and etiological priority establish the primacy of one expression of agency as against another" (711).

What's weird about this is: Ford is a person who likes to reject highest-common-factor type considerations. You know the sort of thing: formally, or from one limited perspective, these two things are the same, and so, we're stuck. He seems to envision the only possible route the corporealist could take against the volitionalist as being: "no consideration of separability ever favors any one conception of agency over any other". It's just not, formally, the sort of consideration that could do that. And yet, isn't there another possibility? Couldn't there be a substantive argument against the specific consideration, in which the corporealist simply says "this consideration of separability, for substantive reasons pertaining to (say) the nature of willing, or of tryings, or bodily movings, or whatever, doesn't favor volitionalism over corporealism"? (George Wilson—and I, in the second chapter of my dissertation!—have made arguments against "pure intending", for instance. As has, in a different vein, Thompson, I believe.)

It's possible that doing this would amount, in Ford's view, to denying the phenomena, because it disputes their characterization. (But it might only dispute their significance, but specifically with respect to their natures: accept the phenomena, deny the "thus …", but not because the genre of consideration is wrong.) If so, though, I don't know why he just says without expanding on it that the strategy lacks promise or is hardly ever undertaken: it seems promising to me, and he literally quotes O'Shaughnessy in the process of, if not undertaking specifically that project, at least developing a position from which to undertake it (717n14). Of course I've been denying that O'Shaughnessy is a corporealist, but Ford seems to be saying that it's not done by and not promising for anyone.

Similarly, corporealism could deny that the considerations it supposedly adduces against volitionalism do in fact move one all the way to materialism. For instance, consider pre-theoretical practical thought, and Rube Goldberg machines for turning lights on. I set one off by putting a teakettle to boil, and five minutes later a domino, pushed over by its rear neighbor, is pushing its fore neighbor over. I think that if you zoom in, as it were, just on that, pre-theoretical practical thought would be willing to say, well, you aren't doing that. (Pre-theoretical practical thought is not unrelated to O'Shaughnessy's philosophical unconscious! At the same time it probably would say I'm turning the light on, but the whole thing about the pre-theoretical is that one has to allow it to be not obviously systematic or self-consistent.) You just started it off, P-TPT might, quite plausibly, say. Feinberg looks pretty good on this score, if you ask me! (Ford's own discussion of how P-TPT approaches the corporealism-materialism divide is extremely theoretical.)

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ETA on the following day: of course basic actions probably do suffice to make one a corporealist on this view, given the (only now clear to me) strong family resemblance between Ford's characterization here, and Lavin's, in "Must There Be Basic Action?", of the basic agent as one who as it were supervises the unfolding but does not participate in it as agent. But this is only a resemblance of characterization; it isn't support for the inclusion, and as we know (don't we, loyal audience of readers?) I think Lavin has things badly wrong about basic action.

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[1] This is a joke, of course; this was written in far more than a day, and has involved reading far more of The Will (and of other things) than I initially predicted it might. But I'm leaving these first two parts sketchy.

[2] Specifically, he writes:

It is correctly assumed that unless the agent himself is aware of what he is doing with his body alone, unless he can conceive his movements as an event physically separate from whatever else takes place, his bodily movements cannot be his action. But it is wrongly supposed that such awareness and conception are impossible in the case of speaking or of tying one's shoelaces … if I tie my shoelaces, here is a description of my movements: I move my body in just the way required to tie my shoelaces. ("Agency", 51)

Ok, fine. But there's a big difference between "the agent is aware" and "it's not impossible for the agent to be aware"! Sure, the agent could aware of his movements under the anodyne description, but mostly, the agent is not, or if the agent is, it's in a derived, theoretical way. And when it is, it's in a derived practical way: I want to demonstrate how I move when I tie my shoelaces, and I know that I will move in that way if I tie my shoelaces, so I tie them. But here the syllogism is "I want to move however I move when I tie my laces; if I tie my laces I will do that; so: let me tie my laces". It's not the other way around! (It's interesting that Thompson and Lavin make this exact error when they argue against basic actions. The deep Davidsonian core of Pittsburgh Anscombianism!) But perhaps Davidson merely means: something like this has to be the case for my bodily movements not to be foreign to me; not: when I tie my shoelaces I move my hands under this description. One might say, for instance, that it's correctly supposed that unless beliefs can be adduced which display one's movements in a rational light and which the one would accept they cannot be one's actions, and point out that when one steps through a door without first checking what's on the far side obviously one believed that there was a floor there. That doesn't mean that one explicitly thought "there's a floor there, so I can step". One's bodily movements aren't foreign to one when tying one's laces because one can recognize them as one's own under a laces-inclusive description, might be the thought. Of course this doesn't lead to the conclusion that only bodily movements are actions, but neither does it exclude it. I think there just isn't a good reason to be found in "Agency" for restricting basic action to bodily movement! (AFAICT, and again this isn't coming from a careful re-reading, the structure is basically "here's an idea" followed by "here are responses to some objections". Ok, but how about a positive argument?)

The apparent contradiction lies in the juxtaposition of "once he has done one thing … each consequence presents us with a deed" (53), some of which are intentional (that is, as I would say, the one thing presents us with further actions) with bodily movements being "all the actions there are" (59), unless there's some extremely subtle distinction between "action" and "intentional deed". It's especially bad if the movements are intentional only under movement descriptions, because then one can't appeal as easily to the movements having been done for the sake of the further consequences, and because on 53 Davidson seems to be saying that the intention with which the body is moved is relevant to which of the further consequences are intentional, which is hard to make out unless the description is not cast solely in bodily terms. But I don't think we need to think that they are, even on Davidson's own terms. (It's really unclear to me why Davidson says that, about "all the actions there are". What would be lost to him if he just said "all primitive actions are bodily movements" and left it at that? For that matter, what would be lost to him if he just said "there is some set of primitive actions"? Not much, I suspect, especially in the first case.)

[3] Thus:

[T]hey do not need [the extra-corporeal] to state their position on the only other kind of action, non-primitive action, since there position is, in fact, purely hypothetical: … if the agent's bodily movement causes a further event, then the latter is also the agent's doing … the kind of "body" that corporealism attributes to us is one whose activity does not essentially involve any interaction with the extra-corporeal world … But the movement proper to a human body, and therefore to a human being, essentially involves extra-corporeal objects. (709)

(It's interesting to note, perhaps, that O'Shaughnessy also observes that someone who thinks that we only ever move our bodies is in danger of denying the existence of instrumental acts (109).) This impression is made more vivid by Ford's rather tendentious characterization of how the downstream effects get in the picture: they do so "given the right setting and a certain amount of luck" (697), as if people were in the habit of flicking their fingers and hoping that a light switch that might just be connected to a light in this very room might be nearby. Davidson of course says instead that "the rest is up to nature" (Agency, 59), a rather more defensible and much different claim (nature is the realm of laws, not of luck!), if one that does smack of the outbreak of the philosophical unconscious O'Shaughnessy notes: he isn't (pointing at the wire leading to the light bulb) doing the conductivity of copper! He isn't (pointing at the filament) doing the emission of photons!

The diagnosis about instrumentality would have surprised Davidson, who supplies a clear case of instrumental action two sentences after making the claim Ford disputes:

First, it will be said that some actions require that we do others in order to bring them off, and so cannot be primitive: for example, before I can hit the bull's eye, I must load and raise my gun, then aim and pull the trigger. Of course I do not deny that we must prepare the way for some actions by performing others. (Agency, 59)

I load the gun in order to later hit the bull's eye. It won't do to insist, against this, that really all I do is perform a variety of bodily movements among whose effects is the loading of the gun, unless we are also forestalled from saying that those bodily movements are done in order to later make it the case that my contracting of my finger causes a bullet, rather than nothing at all, to fly out of the barrel. As for the idea that the bodily movements presupposed by corporealism make no reference to the extra-corporeal, that too would have surprised Davidson, was worse off than being unable to describe or think how he moves his fingers when he ties his laces: "nor am I capable of moving my fingers in the appropriate way when no laces are present (this is a trick I might learn)" (Agency, 51—this comes immediately after a bit Ford quotes). It sure seems as if Davidson thinks that in order for him to be able perform this bodily movement, something extra-bodily has to be to hand. (So to speak.) It also has to be present to thought, because the practical thought Davidson gins up to solve the problem he thinks confronts him, if in fact it is supposed to be a practical thought, is to move his body however it moves to tie his shoelaces. (And why would I do that if not to tie my shoelaces?)

To be sure: "it would have surprised Davidson" doesn't mean the accusation is unjust. But I think it does mean that one ought to support the accusation, either directly or with a reference. What's worse is that Ford isn't really accusing Davidson alone of these things; it's supposed to be a common failing of all corporealists. But this is even harder to substantiate, for even if we believe that philosophers with a great diversity of backgrounds have all converged on something that can be thus characterized, that doesn't mean they've all converged on the same something, and making the charges stick in each case might require considering the details of the particular somethings in question. Or it might not: but Ford doesn't do much to convince us that the common position, if there is a single position, can in virtue solely of what is common be convicted of the charges.

[4] Perhaps this is just super obvious to those in the swim, on a level with not providing a citation for something about the virtues being a mean.

[5] Ford draws the obvious (given the author) general parallel, that rejecting practical dualism is like rejecting the thesis that all one perceives is sense data. O'Shaughnessy also brings perception into the mix (456–8) (he retains the sense datum, but holds that perceiving it is identical with perceiving the thing; that is, there's no inferential leap—odd position but not the concern here).

[6] If I remember correctly, Merleau-Ponty is willing to expand this to automobiles!

[7] I suspect that regarding causalists one actually can make something like this argument go, at least a little, but that requires making the argument specifically about causalists, which, again, is not Ford's ambition.

[8] Here's an ultra-pedantic quibble, but then, claims of necessity ought to be subject to pedantry:

If, as Anscombe claims, "the failure to execute intentions is necessarily the rare exception," then, since we normally use instruments to execute our intentions, our instruments must normally serve the purposes that we put them to.

#Actually, we can be more reliable in executing our intentions than our instruments are in serving our purposes. For a silly example, consider the esoteric programming language Java2k:

Because (almost) all builtin functions in Java2K have only a 90% chance of returning the correct result, actual results often deviate more-or-less from expected results. So, the real challenge is to develop techniques of getting a higher probability of correct results !

It is relatively easy to write a function that will return a one 90% of the time, but it is more difficult to write a function that has a 99.9999% chance of doing so, and even more difficult of doing this to a function that returns something as simple as the number two.

More difficult but not impossible. Or consider this task: given a biased coin that shows heads 2/3 of the time, flip it and get tails. The technique is simple: just keep doing it until you get tails.

But, if our instruments do normally serve our purposes, it's because nature … is … reliable?

The fire in me now

The deadline for submissions to the Pacific APA either having passed recently, or being about to pass soon, or as I finally publish this actually having passed some time ago, and I realizing that I would therefore be completely unable to both write and submit the paper I was too-idly contemplating, I thought it might at least be a nice idea to write, here, a description of the general plan, and that then became the more general related thought that it would be nice, in fact, to write up a description of My Philosophical Interests, Such As They Remain To Me, tied or not to any particular (actual or, let's be honest, theoretical) writing project. This thought was given added something, I don't know, not urgency; perhaps piquancy or … mental heft, or something, when toward the end of September an ad was posted announcing an Ass't Profship at Stanford one of whose AOSes was that rare bird, the philosophy of action. (Reader: the question of whether I should apply did, absurdly, cross my mind.) But this is meant to be more a stock-taking, and a pretty loose one at that. (So loose, in fact, that I dribbled it out intermittently over the course of over a month, and finally just decided to stop, rather than bringing it to a tidy, much less complete, end. Apologies, faithful readers, for the no doubt great incoherence.) And some of these are far more ambitious than others, as will be clear.

The commonest thread through the most—not necessarily articulated in them—is the defense and articulation of a stridently [sic] non-"naturalist" conception of agency carrying with it more first-person authority than is likely to strike many as strictly plausible.

• Well, first of all, the paper whose salient nonexistence prompted this project. (This is likely to be the most detailed entry on this list, since it was most recently and most detailédly on my mind.) Having reread a bunch of early Davidson a couple of months ago, I was reminded, or so I thought, of an argument about the incompatibility of anomalous monism with Davidson's rejection of scheme/content dualism. I thought the argument was made in "Anomalous Monism: Oscillating between Dogmas", but on reviewing that paper I couldn't really make it out again. (I can find the point at which the argument I thought I remembered would come. But the argument that does come isn't what I thought I remembered, and is pretty sketchy.) But in attempting to reconstruct the argument I thought I remembered I came up with one that seemed worth pursuing, assuming I haven't just failed to remember the actual place I read it.

  The crux in both cases (i.e., both the Synthese paper's actual argument, and my reconstruction) is that there's at a minimum something fishy about Davidson's assurance that to a given mental event, such as an action or a course of deliberation, there corresponds precisely a physical event. (Or, and I don't think this helps but it is more Davidsonianly correct, that the selfsame event that has a description also has a purely physical description.) It sure seems as if this is edging us toward recognizing an event independent of but susceptible to multiple descriptions—a bit of content schematizable physically or mentally, is the charge. The question is making it stick; the Synthese paper seems to conclude at the point where it should be applying the glue. Having mentioned the Synthese paper on Facebook, Daniel asked why Davidson couldn't simply do what Anscombe does, in "Under a Description", when faced with the question "what is the action that answers to all these different descriptions?" and repeat one of the descriptions. I'm not sure he can, though, and it's also not obvious to me what Anscombe means to be doing when she thus answers. "Under a Description" is stranger than I remembered it; for instance, and connected with the preceding puzzlement, I would have guessed that in answer to the question "how many actions does N.N. perform when he moves his arm, startles a fly, threatens X.'s queen, etc.?" not to be "one", but in the paper she evidently thinks that the answer is one (under the inferred circumstances of the question, namely the case in which there is one bodily movement). So, you know, I wanted to inquire into what kind of answer the one suggested for Davidson is for Anscombe, and what it would have to be for Davidson. The bit of "Under a Description" where Anscombe scoffs at the sensibility of a question such as "how many things are here?" absent further specification of how one is meant to group, well, things into things was, I thought, going to be important here, not least because it was the justification for the title I thought I would use, namely "Which Events are Events?", in honor of Hornsby's "Which Physical Events are Mental Events?".

  I am cleverly omitting most of the details here because I want to be sure that I continually forget them and have to remember them afresh, rather than ever developing them.

• I mean, what is called awkwardness? Already over two years old; I still think I should do something more with this. Lee Konstantinou's observation that the entire first half can be dropped is sound, but I couldn't figure out (not that I tried very hard) how to get an entry into the subject without it. More generally on Cavell and sociality; both Diamond's "The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy" and Gustafsson's "Austinian Examples and Perfect Pitch" being Leitfaden for me, though I persist in thinking that the second errs in its understanding of "the whirl of organism" and why, precisely, that's supposed to be terrifying.—All this stuff is freshly on my mind as a result of reading The Religion of Existence, in the course of doing which Cavell came occasionally to mind as someone with similar, albeit modulated in expression, concerns, related both to the possible grounding of one's projects and existence and how one might react to the relevant revelations. (Possibly a superficial or fantastic similarity.)

  The most successful part of the philosophy and literature course I taught at UCSB, all these years ago, was, I think, the sequence of Cavell ("Aesthetic Problems", "Music Discomposed"), Davidson and more Cavell ("What Metaphors Mean" and "Excursus on Wittgenstein's Vision of Language", respectively), and Danto (the two "Works of And Mere …" chapters from Transfiguration of the Commonplace), Danto also having been accompanied by a bit of Ern Malley. (Though I think the most successful single meeting was the one concerned with "The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy", several meetings later, though that obviously has its Cavellian bits. Actually there was a lot of good stuff on that syllabus. I recall thinking, in teaching "Fearing Fictions", that I had finally figured out exactly where it went completely off the rails.) I would like to delve more into Cavell's aesthetics, especially since having learned at the 2016 PacAPA how non-mainstream it seems to be.

  I am similarly interested in Cavell (and the more recent Stroud!) on skepticism, and what (in different ways) they refer to as "the truth in skepticism", and, what I think is connected to that, how to conceive of progress in philosophy. Connected because it seems to me that for Cavell one truth of skepticism is: technical problems you may not always have with you, but skepticism you will always have with you. This seems right to me, because there is something there, just not what it's theorized as being, but it also isn't clear that argument (anyway, as analytic philosophers like to conceive of it, in the main) is the way out of the mistheorization, and a phenomenon that attaches to a lot of philosophical problems. (Cavell on skepticism is, in a lot of ways, like Cavell on art, and I think that's one of the reasons that his general take is so submerged, in favor of approaches that at least purport to give nice neat answers. (Ontological approaches, for instance, or institutional ones that offload work.) Whereas Cavell insists that it's just inherently problematic and contested, and there's no easy resting place to be had. "But is it art?" you will always have with you, too. Ethics, too. "Oh, great, now we know how to live and don't need to worry about that anymore"—no matter how advanced our practical ethics, that isn't going to happen, at least not because of the study of ethics. So, like, what are we doing? A further metaphysical question pertains to what we're doing day to day: the ideology seems to be that we're trying to convince each other of things. But I doubt that people really are convinced of much except what precise position to take within the larger affiliations that remain unchanged.)

• Behavior and intentional action. This somewhat flows into the below, and is perhaps really just an aspect of it, but let's consider it separately, shall we? I claim that there is a strong tendency to act (and to philosophize, as a kind of acting!) as if, as much as possible, episodes wherein (the circumlocution you are about to read is part of the point; I don't want to commit to any particular characterization of the episode) a person originates, in some sense, or in the same sense refrains from originating, a change, which are also episodes that are broadly interesting or significant, are intentional, or are to be called be some other term that is, let's say, maximally agency-involving. For instance, a twitch, or even a bit of finger-drumming, likely count as changes initiated by a person (I'm saying "person" rather than "agent" here deliberately!), but are probably not apt to be described even by the most zealous philosopher as intentional. But the maintenance of conversational distance with a partner who has different standards about how far apart to stand (so that one keeps approaching or backing off during the conversation) has been put to me as intentional, and it's barely more interesting. Correspondingly, if one says of some such thing that one does not consider it intentional, one is often taken as dismissing it in some sense, as if, having classed some performance as not intentional, one were saying that it held no philosophical interest. This strikes me as quite strange (surely the not exactly recent resurgence of interest in virtue in ethics should have gotten us used to the idea that there's much more than their intentional actions that matters in a person's history?), but I've seen it with my own eyes on several occasions. I had, in my dissertation, to say a little about this kind of thing—both conversational distance and a decidedly more interesting in terms of personal history but not I think different in kind case (the breakup of a romantic relationship)—in my dissertation, but not enough; it would be nice to have a more robust story about sub-intentional and habitual actions, and the category of "behavior" that doesn't rise to the level of intentional action. (Of course, there already are examples of such things. The one that comes most readily to my mind is O'Shaughnessy on sub-intentional action but I doubt that's indicative of the state of the art.)

  I suspect there's pressure to over-ascribe intentionality from two sorts of opposed philosophical inclinations. When my advisor, a somewhat classical causal theorist of action, pressed the example of conversational distance on me, part of his reason for doing so was that retreating in response to encroachment or encroaching in response to retreat is a complex, controlled undertaking, apparently performed "for reasons" (I am discomfited and wish not to be; backing up will remove my discomfiture; let me back up). On causal theories in general there's no reason to think that agents will often or normally be aware of their reasons and it looks as if everything's all lined up for the application of the theory. On the other side, if you have a McDowell-esque sort of position, you're probably used to making the observation that the fact that rational and non-rational animals both engage in superficially similar behaviors (here using the term neutrally) doesn't mean that the accounts for those behaviors are the same in each case, and that reason can be involved in the rational-animal case and not in the other. For such a person, saying "ok but here reason doesn't enter into it (in an intentionalness-adding way)" might look like special pleading, absent some really good story.

  Concomitant with which, I remain interested in basic, skillful, and habitual actions—I have written a little on these, albeit largely destructively, targeting Michael Thompson and Doug Lavin; it would be nice to write something more positive.

• Since, as I was working on my dissertation, Anscombe happened to be having a renaissance, and her take on practical knowledge more and more explored and taken seriously by more and more people (including, somewhat to my annoyance, by John McDowell, pushing an account that I thought was really a lot like mine, not at all unsurprisingly), I clearly needed to come up with another, even more heterodox position to espouse, and I think I've found it in the denial of most unconscious phenomena as those tend to be conceptualized; I have tended to express this as simply denying that there are unconscious desires, but I'm willing to extend it pretty broadly (and definitely no unconscious phenomena intimately related to rationalagency, e.g. deciding or deliberating). All that I've actually produced in this direction is around ten thousand (!) mildly directionless words, half-ish concerning David Finkelstein (written between 2012, and, I'm somewhat surprised to discover, early 2015, though it looks as if that was just shuffling stuff around and the last real work was in late 2014) and my belief that there was some reason, which I don't think I was ever able to successfully specify, that his willingness to acknowledge unconscious intentional attitudes played poorly with the rest of his story in Expression and the Inner, and half-ish concerning some putative examples of learning of an unconsciously held mental state (especially the bafflingly popular case of learning of one's love for another); and several blog posts about Krista Lawlor's paper on "Knowing What One Wants". (Also this post, though it's less directly on point.)

  This is obviously super ambitious as a project, and I'm not sure I know how I would actually undertake it were I to attempt it (I'm quite confident it could not be carried out competently given my present employment); it's almost the case that the most positive thing I can say on its behalf is that I don't believe I've yet encountered a putative example of unconscious desire that can't be otherwise accounted for, which would be fine, sort of, if "no unconscious desires" were the generally accepted default position that had to be defended against other comers. But indeed the situation is precisely the opposite and the onus is on me. One needs, to carry out this project, a positive picture of the nature of desire and what we're up to in talking about desire, appealing to or attributing desire, etc. (Akeel Bilgrami has a paper—or had, I think I read it in draft on his website and it's possible nothing came of it—about speaker meaning and whether a speaker might be ignorant of it, he denying this possibility, part of which involved asking, well, why is "speaker meaning" even a thing we care about? why do we talk about it at all, and could the concept serve if speakers might be ignorant of their speaker meaning? Of course any attempt to directly port such a line of thought over to desire will founder on the shoals, since everyone will claim that there are lots of things we do with desire-talk and plenty of them can be carried out with respect to unconscious desires. Nevertheless I found Bilgrami's paper refreshing. The question is whether the selfsame concept is invoked in all these cases, anyway.)

  Since, however, I recognize the reasonableness of the question "but why would you believe such a strange thing?", here are a couple of considerations, the first of which is explanatory but not, you know, cogent, and the second of which is really only supposed gesture toward opening the question: if you are going to cite beliefs, desires, intentions, etc. as parts of action-explanation and as parts of what gives actions their natures (as being φings, etc.), and you quite reasonably are not going to insist on anything like conscious (= occurrent, in this context) rehearsals of reasons or reasonings, then it sure looks as if, if all these things can be unconscious, it will be possible for an intentional-qua-φing action to be undertaken and the agent not know it under the description φing, which, if you think that when an agent performs an intentional action, she knows nonobservationally that she's performing it, is a problem, and you need to have something to say about that possibility. And I think that! Perhaps one can build one's account of practical reasoning such that the attitudes can be unconscious in the sense that's more robust than merely not being present objects of awareness but the reasoning can't be like that; maybe not. (Frankly I think if you're going to make that stick you've probably gone most of the way to making the more general claim anyway.) But that's a sort of explanation for why I might find myself in this boat in the first place. (This is the same sort of reason why I had to address the very idea of a causal theory of action in my dissertation—not that I wasn't already set against them, but they were specifically relevant because, if you've got an account whereby an action is just the upshot of certain sorts of causes, there's really no reason to think that the causation will ever be accompanied by knowledge, without a lot of extra machinery.) Here, then, is the second: suppose you take a person acting in a way that generally leads others to ascribe an unknown desire to them, and you take a person who has a sort of canonically consciously known and avowable desire. By what right do we say that each of these people has one of the same kind of thing, different only in whether and how it's known? Perhaps you're some kind of functionalist and you claim to observe the ascribed/avowed items playing the same role in the agents' mental lives. I'm not some kind of functionalist—it really does depend on how you conceive of natures of mental things!—but even if you are, it's striking that people to whom unconscious desires and people with ascribable desires with the same content do not generally act similarly. So, in general, it's my strong suspicion that when we flesh out the answer to the question "why do we call both of these phenomena a person's desiring something?", we'll end up with an overall picture of mental life that I want to reject. (This is now nearing the specific issue that I thought was lurking somewhere for Finkelstein, having to do with what we were supposed to make of an unconscious desire of which someone becomes conscious, meaning not merely aware of it as a third person can be, but able to avow it—what, for him, is the nature of a desire such that it can be unavowable and unconscious, and then become avowable? Shouldn't there be an expressivist story about that? How's that happen?)

  There is a peculiar phenomenon I have observed when expressing some of these beliefs, which is that they are ruled out of order, because, if you hold them, you will think you know the answer to certain questions which are held to be puzzling. (This is a somewhat tendentious characterization.) E.g., recently in response to the question whether it's possible for a person to make a decision unconsciously, or in ignorance of his or her having decided, I replied that I believed the answer to be "no", because—this is admittedly a trivial answer!—well, because I don't believe a decision is the sort of thing that can be made, or as one might rather say in such a situation take place, and the decider be ignorant. Admittedly: someone saying this had better have something to say about what they take decisions to be, and why other phenomena which bring a divided mind to unanimity don't count as decisions. The replies I received, however, were not concerned with whether I could provide that something more; they were concerned with the fact that my response rendered the question uninteresting. This is strange twice over: first because no question has the right to be considered interesting, just because it can be posed; second because in advance of an understanding of what a decision is the question can't be adjudicated, and once you have one who's to say whether the question will be nontrivial? One might think a "decision" is whatever it is that brings one from multiplicity to singularity of mind, and include within it such phenomena as falling asleep torn between two options and waking up to find that one of them has simply lost all its appeal—in that case the answer is "yes", directly, and the question is again uninteresting.

• Oh almost forgot (did forget, in fact), also Nietzschean moral psychology, but not, I think, as that's commonly meant, more like "Romantic irony and". (But it connects to as that's more commonly meant, or so I suspect; basically, I'd like to firm up the things I  gestured at in the piece that, as I still can't quite believe, was published in the JNS.) Also on the moral-psychological tip it would be interesting to see if I could articulate coherently why I came to find Frankfurt's writing on autonomy and and that of those following in his wake distasteful. "Distasteful" is not obviously a philosophical objection!

The credulity of the recappers, or, what does Rick & Morty have in common with "Who Was Nietzsche's Genealogist?"

Yes, that's right; my first post in over six months is going to be about Rick and Morty, and not even directly about Rick and Morty—more about Rick and Morty fans. DON'T WORRY; I might have a post about Davidson (actually about my attempt to remember the argument of a paper that might not exist) up in the next two months. Maybe just be happy it isn't a terrible joke.

So (by the way there are R&M spoilers here; to my mind it isn't a show to which the concept is remotely applicable but who knows who lurks in my wide and varied readership; I sure don't), here's the situation: at the end of the second season, Rick, overhearing his family, including Morty, talking about his unreliability and tendency to let people down or abandon them because he only really cares about himself, turns himself in. Nine Inch Nails' "Hurt" plays, because of course it does. No one in his family knows that he's overheard them or that he's turning himself in; he does it by himself, and with an extremely morose, disaffected-to-despairing affect. (He even credits Jerry with turning him in—that is, he doesn't tell the authorities "here I am, come and get me"; he tells them, pretending to be Jerry, "You can find Rick at such-and-such a place".) Persons writing about this at the time seemed to take it pretty straight—Rick really is doing something on their behalf, he actually is distraught, the emotional state we're free to read in him, as he does all this stuff with no one looking on (and therefore for no one's benefit) is really his.

Then, in the season 3 premiere, he says a lot of stuff about how it was his plan all along to go to the prison so he could break out of it and destroy the empire and also conveniently get rid of Jerry, and he's never cared for anyone but himself (and a long-gone McDonald's condiment), and a whole bunch of stuff that is not easily reconciled with the end of the second season (it's also asserted by one of the characters who has no evident reason to know that he did in fact turn himself in, but whatever). Oddly, people writing about this at the time it came out behaved exactly as credulously with respect to it as they had, previously, with respect to the end of the second season: if that's what Rick says now, it must be true, and must have been true, all along, meaning he must have been faking it back at the end of the second season.

And yet … why should anyone think that? Isn't there not one possibility, but at least three?

1. Rick was putting on some kind of sob story show for no one in particular, for some reason, in season two, but is being straight with Morty in season three.
2. Rick's emotional state as we discerned it in season two was genuine, and he's unwilling or unable to admit to any actual feelings for his family in season three. (Not implausible! Though it does have its own interpretive difficulties with respect to the premiere!)
3. The show actually has no interest in giving coherence to Rick's character, and will play on the self-loathing-but-does-care string when that serves its purposes (as it's done several times), and the unapologetic-nihilist string when that does (as it's done several times), without particularly caring to make them fit together, much less into any sort of arc.

I think that the third is overwhelmingly the most likely option, but I can understand why someone who has to write about it on the regular might refrain from embracing it, and I can also understand why you might think that as a matter of interpretive principle something like that ought to be the option of last resort. But why not at least give air time to the second option?

Bad faith, briefly expounded

Recently on facebook (yes, I, too, am on facebook, fond readers; my output is not limited to this, my blog) I "defined" bad faith (as in mauvaise foi, not as in just anything for which the phrase is used in English) concisely if gnomically as "identification with an identity", and followed it up with a link to the Onion classic Asshole Admits to Being Asshole in Supreme Asshole Move, which also, I claimed, exemplified bad faith. Unsurprisingly not all found either of these transparent or informative; hence this post, which attempts to explain why I thought "identification with an identity" was a decent way of getting at (part of) what's intended by "bad faith". This is not actually a good post, I think, but I said I would make one, so here we all are.

I say "part of" because I tend to be guided by Dick Moran's presentation of bad faith in Authority and Estrangement, where he's mostly concerned with what one might call the bad faith of identity (he calls it something, but I can't remember what), as against what Sartre in Being and Nothingness seems more concerned with, what one might (and I think Moran does) call the bad faith of transcendence. (Incidentally, and somewhat irrelevantly, I find Sartre's presentation extremely confusing, because many of the examples of bad faith he gives seem to me to be merely self-deception, and while he does characterize bad faith as self-deception it doesn't seem as if he thinks it's found in every case of self-deception. (For instance, the (not very sympathetic) discussion of the homosexual, pp 107f.) And others, the ones that do seem more significant, don't seem to have anything to do with self-deception, necessarily.) But anyway: the key, I think, lies in Sartre's characterization of a person as "at once a facticity and a transcendence" (p 98 of my edition), and the basic move of bad faith is taking oneself to be entirely a facticity or a transcendence. (Something that needn't involve self-deception!) So the bad faith of transcendence is exhibited by "the man who in the face of reproaches or rancor dissociates himself from his past by insisting on his freedom and on his perpetual re-creation" (100), or, in Moran's example, a habitual gambler who, realizing that his habit is unfortunate, just decides that he'll stop. Indeed, a person is not exhausted by his or her present characteristics, and is changeable, and can give direction to those changes; one enjoys freedom in that respect. But one can't just up and decide to be different—the present facts do matter. (This is the kind of bad faith that Velleman accuses Frankfurt's agents of indulging in, and I think he's right: the writing-off of disfavored actions as not really mine could come straight out of one of the examples in Being and Nothingness.)

The bad faith of identity is what the asshole exemplifies. Why is admitting to being an asshole the supreme asshole move? In this case, at least, because the recognition of assholery brings with it no desire to change into a non-asshole, or acknowledgement that there's anything one might reasonably say against being an asshole. Instead, an asshole is just who he is—it's a fact—so you'd better get used to it. This is bad faith: it just isn't true that a person is an asshole the way (say) a person is dependent on oxygen to live. It's treating a fact about one's person (or personality) as if it characterized one's essence—swinging entirely to the side of facticity. That, more or less, is what I meant by "identification with an identity": one has various identities or roles one plays, self-conferred or conferred by others, which have or are thought to have various characteristic properties. And one can identify with them in the sense of taking the identity not to be something one has, or has adopted, or has had foisted upon one, or whatever, but of being what one is, really and deeply, such that further things about oneself follow from it. One sees it in statements like "I'm an English major, so …"; "I'm an artist, so [something about an unconventional personal life is apt to follow]"; "I'm a geek, so …". One can recognize that one has some, many, or all of the trappings of, and will be assigned, some label or identity; it's a further step to embrace it, and yet a further step to see oneself as defined by it, with further consequences for who one is, what one does, etc. (The flip of the switch would seem to come in a move from "because I do such-and-such, I am a so-and-so" to "because I am a so-and-so, I do such-and-such", but even there, there's a difference in inflection; it needn't be bad faith to affirm "because I am a doctor, I often work long hours".) That's what "identification with an identity" was meant to capture.

Verse roundup!!!!

Limericks/double dactyls/etc composed but not previously made public (outside of facebook):

1. If there's one thing that's good, and sans phrase,
   It's a will that submits to the laws:
   Not desire and friends,
   But the Kingdom of Ends!
   (See part 3 for some stuff about "cause".)
   
   
2. I admit first of all that I'm sick.
   And I'm spiteful as well---a real prick.
   I'd run into a wall
   To show once and for all
   You can't reckon me as clocks tick.
   
   (you are requested to take the metrical hash of the last line as thematic.)
3. Once as I slowly the
   Streets of Laredo was
   Ambling in outfit of
   Cowboy along,
   
   Cerements spotted I
   Wrapping a cowboy who
   Testamentarily
   Sang me this song.
   
   (Spot me "cerements".)

4. Connolly and Pearse
   Are wearing green
   A terrible birth
   Of beauty's seen
   Easter Shave
   
   
5. I'd put it from a candle
   About a foot away,
   And nosh on Brot und Mandel
   And watch the face decay.
   
   The plea "Oh help me sir!"
   From Cumber then would come,
   "Before my eyes I see a blur;
   I fear my race is run!"
   
   But I would sit back in my chair
   And watch his features melt;
   "This fate will come to foul and fair:
   Now play the hand you're dealt."
6. (The first quatrain here was supplied by the artistic director of Golosa after I pronounced myself incapable of finding a beginning for the second quatrain)
   
   Wordily, wordily,
   Wolfson outdoes himself,
   though for a subject he
   doesn't stray far:
   
   People who order a
   Triple genever make
   Juniperemptory
   Claims on the bar.<
7. (My contribution to a series of limericks composed, at my request, on the rhymes of "unshriven" and "unswiven"):
   
   The bereaved thus by guilt so beriven
   Prayed daily that he'd be forgiven:
   Ivan clove to his wife
   For all of her life
   But she died with her cleft yet uncliven.
   
   
8. There was once a roaming antelope
   Who returned to his wife, hight Penelope,
   And their home in a comb
   Where she wove at her loom
   The plot to the opera Partenope.
   
   
9. Abbreviated verse (the topic suggested by the unfolding of a conversation):
   
   Elizabeth Taylor was really hoopy, i.e.,
   Like Ford Prefect and his towel she'd always know where her hat is,
   And would certainly have underplayed some parts, e.g.
   Phyllis Dietrichson or Dorothy of "Oz" make a good sample,
   She'd've played them psychologically incorrectly, viz.,
   Altogether meek and mild; in a word, tamely.
   
   
10. That stylish young poet, John Keats,
    Was shocked when he first met Bill Yeats,
    For the latter was clad
    Like a suburban dad
    In tennies and t-shirt and sweats.
    
    
11. Jiggery-pokery
    Hapax legomena,
    Terms that appear only
    Once in a text,
    
    Often because of their
    Semelfactivity
    Mean lexicographers
    Must remain vexed.
12. Squiggily wiggily
    Ink-shooting creatures, if
    Wounded or sick or if
    Caught in a snare,
    
    Give themselves up to the
    Eightfold attentions of
    Octopodiatrist
    Medical care.
    
13. Ookily spookily
    summoning rituals
    ought to be over be-
    fore the first light:
    
    If there's no suitable
    antecrepuscular
    shadow surrounding, the
    demons don't bite.
    
14. Jiggery Pokery
    Friedrich von Schlegel schrieb
    Bücher ironisch, ro-
    mantisch, und dreist:
    
    Ein gar willkürlicher,
    dazu gebildeter,
    symphilosophischer,
    bildender Geist.

Sculptural realism, or, Michelangelo on knowing one's mind

As is well known, or at least, as is much said, Michelangelo described himself, in sculpting, as merely removing the marble obscuring the sculpture latent within it. (Or perhaps as removing the parts he didn't want. But let's go with the formula previously given.) We can give this a strong reading: the sculpture is already there in the marble and has only to be revealed by the sculptor. In that case, the sculptor can do well or poorly according to how well the thing, when declared done, actually does align with the latent sculpture. That is, the sculpture already in the marble gives the standard of correctness for the sculptor's activities, and it is a valid question, both for the sculptor and for appreciators of the result, whether the sculptor got it right. And that question stands regardless of how satisfied with the sculpture, considered as it were in its own right, anyone might be. Michelangelo's David: a masterpiece, without question, a virtuoso work with which anyone ought be satisfied. But perhaps in that block of marble there lurked—a statue of Perseus. Michelangelo, and we, might be perfectly satisfied with the sculpture. But it's wrong; irretrievably so, in fact.

No one really cares whether or not the sculpture in fact produced corresponds to what lay within the marble, which is as good a sign as any, I suppose, that no one actually believes that there is such a latent sculpture. The example occurred to me, though, during a talk at the APA on the subject of articulating one's thoughts, in which it was presumed that there is a real thought, had but not known, prior to its being put into words. The leading example was: after a seminar, or a colloquium, one is nagged by an inarticulate objection one can't quite put one's finger on, to which one wants to give words, and the leading presumption was a realist one: in such a case, there is a fully formed, determinate, articulated-in-itself (the way a skeleton is articulated; it has joints, verbal parts) thought that one really does have. The only problem is that one doesn't know its articulation. The task of "articulating one's thought" is the task of finding out what words correspond to the thought.

There are several consequences of this presumption. One is that when you think back about the subject matter of the seminar/colloquium, the point of doing so isn't (or isn't just) to figure out what you think about it, to formulate a thought about it. You think about the subject matter because you think it will help you accomplish the task you are actually set, which is to uncover the content of a thought you already had. If you work through the subject matter and come to an understanding with which you are wholly content, which you have articulated (you have given words to it), there's still the question: but is this the thought that I previously had?

I think that no one, when they've come to an understanding, a formulation, with which they're satisfied as regards the subject matter, actually goes on to ask that question. No one cares about it, any more than they care about whether Michelangelo got it right. Good thing, too, because how could you tell? People take having arrived at a response that presently satisfies them as a reason to stop deliberating; it resolves the mental itch that got them started. People speak as if they're trying to get at a thought already had, but they act as if they're trying to give shape to something as yet indeterminate, based on the hunch: there might be a thought to think here. And I think this is a pretty good reason to think that, really, people don't think that they have fully determinate, but unknown, thoughts, in this sort of case, anyway.

(Long-time readers of this blog will not be surprised to learn that I, of course, think that there is no determinate thought prior to the conclusion of the process of deliberation, and that the same goes for desires, as my several posts about Krista Lawlor's paper on desire probably suggested or possibly even said outright—it's been a while. Many years ago I actually used the same line of thought in talking about desires with her, for dissertation-related reasons: you might wonder "what flavor of ice cream do I want?", decide to get vanilla, be perfectly happy with it—and yet, on the view that holds that there was already a fully determinate but unarticulated desire, be wrong! You actually wanted chocolate.)

Prepare the receptacle

Here is an innocuous thought: in order for me to be able to make use of, or understand in any but the most etiolated sense, a bit of information, I must already be able to situate myself with respect to it. If I ask who put the bop in the bop-sheb-bop and am told "Kevin", this is helpful insofar as I can tell that it's the name of a person, but if that's all I know, it would be very curious to say that I know who did it. It's slightly better than a shorthand for "person who …" because the name "Kevin" might be intelligible to others as well, but as yet it functions, for me, as such a shorthand. If, emerging from the train station in a foreign city, I can see that I am at the intersection of Rue Georges Perec and Odos Ermou, and know that my hotel is 11 Hegelallee (cosmopolitan city), but am otherwise disoriented, then while I'm better off than if I knew only that I am "here" and my hotel is "there" (especially if I know that "11 Hegelallee" decomposes into a street number and a street name, but even if I don't, I might suspect that other people will recognize the unit as the stable name of a place, which they wouldn't for "there"), but it would be a stretch to say that I know where the hotel is in any robust sense (rather than that I know the name of where the hotel is, say).

So, comes now Ted Poston, in "Know How to Transmit Knowledge?", arguing that knowledge-that and knowledge-wh can be transmitted by testimony but knowledge-how cannot, in a series of examples that one wished confronted that innocuous thought a bit more full-on. He does give it a few sidelong glances, admittedly. In the first glance, he wishes to set aside examples of know-how apparently being transmitted via testimony such as the following: Sam knows how to tie the Bimini Twist, and tells John (an experienced fisherman) how to do so; John now knows how to tie it, too. The reason he gives is that "it is a general skill being applied to a specific novel case" (6) rather than a new skill cut from whole cloth. It is a case "in which a subject has preexisting practical knowledge that is then applied to a new case" (6). One might rather characterize it this way: it is a case in which the subject is prepared to make use of the testimony given. A good instance of knowledge-that being imparted by testimony, on Poston's view, is "(4) Bill knows how Obama will govern. (5) Bill tells Hannah how Obama will govern. So, (6) Hannah knows how Obama will govern" (5), yet anyone would think that Hannah had better be bringing an awful lot of background knowledge about the United States and its politics to bear in order to get anywhere with Bill's speech; that, in other words, she has some general knowledge about the subject matter being brought to bear on this one particular president.

Another possibility, perhaps, is simply that Bill is very patient, and takes a great deal of time to explain things to Hannah, essentially giving her the preparation as well as the information about Obama. Poston's glance in this direction is concerned not with preparation per se but with the complexity of the subject matter; he gives two (similar) examples. In the first, Terence Tao, who knows (all about) topology, tells Smith "all about" it (the "all about" is there because it doesn't count for Smith just to know "that topology concerns the mathematical study of spaces" (7)); then "if Tao tells smith all about topology then Smith will come to know topology, but Smith will not know as well as Tao. Once we control for this fact, the inference is good." (8; remember that control!). Or suppose "Sam knows that all non-trivial zeros of the zeta function have as real part 1/2. Sam tells Jones this. Assuming that Jones understands what is said (he understands the concepts expressed) Jones comes to know this. So the difference in learning is not a result of complexity" (8). If Jones the mathematician is in a position to just hear the words "all the non-trivial zeros of the zeta function have as real part 1/2" and get it, he seems to me to be in the same position as John the fisherman (it also seems to make the example remarkably bad if it's supposed to be about the complexity of the knowledge imparted—recall the mathematical joke that "trivial" is whatever you know the answer to. If Jones is that prepared, it can't be that complex for him). Suppose he isn't, though; suppose he's like Smith with respect to topology, or suppose he's, I don't know, an average fifth-grader; he doesn't even know about trigonometric functions. It would seem to be Poston's belief, which I hope is not his actual pedagogical practice, that fifth-grade Jones, if Sam just talks to him long enough (I suppose Sam can also make use of a blackboard, etc.), will come to understand about the zeta function. That is, Poston would seem to believe that the preparation necessary to understand "all the non-trivial zeros of the zeta function have as real part 1/2" can be imparted via testimony, with the testified-to party not needing to do anything.

How liberating!: if someone just talked to us skillfully enough, we would have no need of problem sets, homework, asking questions, any of that. Advanced mathematics can be learned entirely passively! Poston doesn't say that explicitly, of course, because it sounds absolutely bats, but I don't see how he can avoid it. If he acknowledges that in learning something, the learner too must act, then his argument would seem to fall apart: it would divide into cases where the learner is either already adequately prepared to simply hear something described or discussed, in which case testimony (without audience participation) suffices, and cases where the learner must take part in her learning. In those cases, sometimes the participation will amount to asking for clarification, asking about connections, mental reconstructions, and practicing; in others, it will amount to, er, asking for clarification, asking about connections, mental reconstructions, and practicing. The practice might be completing the square (and learning how to tell when to complete the square, which is something that someone learning all about high school algebra would seem to be learning, but which would also seem to be difficult to impart solely by testimony—lots of know-how (however theorized) goes into acquiring knowledge-that, or is implicitly present in what's characterized as knowledge-that) or it might be mounting the bicycle, whatever.

Recall Smith's inferior knowledge of topology, after being told all about it by Terence Tao. Two things come to mind here. First, if he can count as knowing topology even though he doesn't know it as well as his instructor, why should we be so quick to deny the validity of the inference "(7) Bill knows how to ride a bike. (8) Bill tells Hannah how to ride a bike. So, (9) Hannah knows how to ride a bike" (5)? She probably doesn't know how to ride a bike as well as Bill, but she might be better at it than someone who hadn't benefited from Bill's instruction. If Bill knows what he's talking about and is a good instructor (let's not lose sight of the fact that knowing something, whether it's -that or -how, is not the same as knowing how to impart that knowledge) who knows what pitfalls a beginner might encounter and can talk through them in advance, etc., she might fare a lot better than her uninstructed counterpart. She might not win any races, but I wouldn't put a lot of money on Smith passing topology exams, either. (You might think that with performing a triple Axel, someone with no experience ice skating will derive approximately no benefit from testimony. Seems plausible to me. But I also am very skeptical that someone with no experience of high school math will be able to be brought to an understanding of the zeta function solely from testimony.) Second, Poston says, plausibly, that Tao "knows because he has accumulated knowledge of many truths about topology but also has keen insight and skill" (8). Where did that skill come from? Possibly some of it is down to Tao's being super smart (but on the topic of raw mathematical genius, bear in mind the words of Tao himself), but probably a lot of it comes from hard work, deep immersion, and practice practice practice. Smith can work hard and practice, too; he might get better! But, again, the notion of practice here, and for that matter skill, in the realm of the transmission (or mastery) of knowledge-that, seems dangerous to Poston. Tao doesn't know better because he received better testimony.

One reason I buy that one doesn't count as knowing about topology for just knowing that it's the mathematical study of spaces is that one can be able to say that, even knowing what "spaces" means in this context, without having the first idea what a practicing topologist actually does. Of course, something similar is true of the sentence "all the non-trivial zeros of the zeta function have as real part 1/2"; someone could say that and be like Aristotle's drunkard reciting scientific proofs or Empedocles, or, more aptly, like Aristotle's students "who have just begun to learn a science can string together its phrases, but do not yet know it; for it has to become part of themselves" (in EN 7.3; sadly the Internet Classics Archive allows for no more exact citation). (Or like the Brazilian physics student Feynman encountered who could rattle off equations but not apply them to simple word problems.) So there's a lot of unacknowledged work going into the parenthetical about Jones "understand[ing] the concepts expressed", by my lights; it can't just be that Jones knows about the zeta function the way I know where my hotel at 11 Hegelallee is. But the beefier sort of understanding Jones must have strikes me as being intimately intertwined with Jones' knowing how to do things. And even without that, Poston already refers to Tao's knowledge of topology in ways that implicate skill. Poston quotes Noë on the fact that skills aren't acquired all at once but come gradually with practice; the same is true of knowledge-that, because … it implicates skills. Which suggests that if you can't transmit novel knowledge-how by testimony, then you also can't transmit novel knowledge-that by testimony, either. Which again suggests the breakdown of the argument into the two cases mentioned above: the subject is adequately prepared to receive the testimony, in which case testimony works, or isn't, in which case activity on the subject's part is required. So I'm unmoved: Poston seems unduly glib about the powers of testimony to impart knowledge in the knowledge-that case, in the very kinds of examples that concern him in the knowledge-how case.

Cavell, not Carell

What is called awkwardness?. Attention conservation notice: 11,000 words, many pettifogging, and many others digressing, about a five-year-old book.

Transformative Experience: Nonidentity Problem

Yonder we are having a book discussion thingy on Transformative Experience, with the chapters introduced/summarized/responded-to by individual commenters with an accompanying comment thread. I am not one of the volunteers for any of the weeks but, as the poster, had thought I might abuse my privileges to say something anyway. Since the things I have said expanded to great length, I have instead posted them here, below. They are something of a mess, having been said in haste.

Robert Louis Stevenson modernism shocker

I am fond of quoting a bit from Harry Mathews' interview in The Paris Review:

INTERVIEWER

Do you not care whether your stories make sense?

MATHEWS

I don't say there is no sense or no meaning. There is, but it's not one that exists outside of the work. Robert Louis Stevenson--and he's not exactly considered a modernist writer--once wrote: "The novel, which is a work of art, exists, not by its resemblances to life, which are forced and material, as a shoe must consist of leather, but by its immeasurable difference from life, which is both designed and significant, and is both the method and the meaning of the work." For me, that's it. He's really my favorite prose writer of all. His pithiness and efficiency--he says an awful lot in that one sentence.

And so I quoted it elsewhere, where the following was quoted in response:

How to get over, how to escape from, the besotting particularity of fiction. "Roland approached the house; it had green doors and window blinds; and there was a scraper on the upper step." To hell with Roland and the scraper! Yours ever, R.L.S. (to Henry James, 1893)

This seems to me to mirror exactly what Josipovici, at least, took Valéry's concern with sentences like "the Marquis went out at five" to be, in What Ever Happened to Modernism; it's too bad that (at least there) no notice is taken of this peculiar similarity—it would for one thing help Josipovici in his claim that modernism isn't a matter of stylistic habits.

Art and Desire

Here's an interesting bit from Amy Bauer's "Philosophy Recomposed: Stanley Cavell and the Critique of New Music", from the Journal of Music Theory's special issue on the fortieth anniversary of ♥ "Music Discomposed" ♥, which by chance I turned to after finally publishing the previous post:

For Cavell, there are no empirical, much less philosophical, guarantors for the value of art, the assessment of which relies on experience and a kind of knowledge “in feeling,” borne by conviction but resistant to prescription or prediction. (77)

Not interesting in itself in isolation, perhaps, but it seemed to resonate with the importance of "sticking" etc. for Lawlor.

More on "Knowing What One Wants"

Yes, I’m still concerned with “Knowing What One Wants”; what can I say? I write slow, especially when I write one or two days a week at most (and not for very long on those days, even). So! Recall, or learn hereby: Lawlor starts by describing three views all of which hold that “in normal cases, if one knows one’s own desire, that is the result of a constitutive, not a cognitive, relation between the attitude known—the desire—and the reflective attitude involved in knowing about it” (55). “Normal” cases means, roughly, cases where (as I’d like to put it) the knowledge can be self-ascribed first-personally; it excludes, e.g., taking one’s therapist’s word that one wants something. But, per Lawlor, in fact “[k]nowing what one wants can be a cognitive accomplishment, in the sense that one finds out about an independently constitute object of knowledge (one’s desire), through means that are routinely epistemic (namely, through inference)” (56).

This post is pretty long (and not very well organized!), so...

A few more double dactyls

The stream of versification has dried up somewhat, partly because of less, you know, inspiration, and partly because the plum-related stuff is now elsewhere. But:

Higgledy piggledy
Terence the austringer
Got himself tied into
All sorts of knots,

Wand'ring the heather with
Nothing about but an
Ataviscistical
Hawk and his thoughts.

And:

Higgledy Piggledy
Villainous henchmen must
Give up their lives in the
Service of crime;

Battling sidekicks, these
Deuterantagonists
Go on without any
Personal time.

Innocence & experience

A small thought about the paper that was also the subject of my previous post (and, don't you worry, is intended to be the subject of my subsequent post, at impractical length). Lawlor places a great deal of weight in §3 on what it feels like to a person attempting to figure out (as that person would put it) what they want; in particular, on the fact that it feels like they're figuring out what they want, i.e., what they in fact presently do desire though they don't know it. It seems to me that this use of how-it-feels presumes on its being both remarkably innocent and remarkably sophisticated.

Innocent the way Gombrich denied that there was an "innocent eye": that "the way it feels" is simply given, not colored by how, for instance, the general vocabulary for talking about desire might lead us to conceptualize our experience. "I don't know which one I want" when said of two dishes at a restaurant, for instance, doesn't suggest to me that there is one I want and I don't know which one that is (just as "I want a wife" doesn't suggest that there is a specific wife whom I want), but that's the form of phrase we have for talking about our desires or lack thereof. If one has a set of recurrent imaginings, feelings, etc. regarding a second child and is brought to reflect on them, "I don't know whether I want a second child" is how one is apt to put it; isn't that apt to influence whether or not one conceives of the recurrent whatevers as signs of an unknown desire, rather than something else?

Sophistication is the flip-side of innocence: if the way it feels isn't simply given, then we're sufficiently discerning to tell that this is the way having an unknown desire feels, and it's also not the way anything else feels. Recall the (apocryphal? from my perspective, anyway) anecdote about Wittgenstein, which I have from either Ted Cohen or David Hills, who, hearing someone explain that we shouldn't fault people for having thought the sun goes around the earth because "that is how it looks, after all", asked how it would look if the earth went around the sun (perhaps adding "while revolving", I don't know). Well, it would look the way it does look, one hopes, since, one believes, that's what it does do. How would you feel if you didn't have a desire unknown to you, but rather [competing explanation]? Maybe the same!

Evolutionary explanation, mimics, and the doctrine of double effect

Quite a title for what will actually be a slim post! Here's the sitch—we're trying to answer the question why certain "imagings" of images or sentences hold our attention and are experienced as contentful, telling us things, when "this is an illusion", because "images are not missives sent from oneself to oneself".

Here is a possible answer. Suppose that one's mind includes many system,s attentional, computational (comprised of many task specific computational modules), memorial, affective, visual, auditory, speech-producing and consuming, and so on. One also has self-monitoring systems, built to register bodily states and needs … The information stored and processed continually by all these systems is quite enormous; but attention is limited, as are resources … In this competition for agential, person-level, resources, it gives an attitude, a need, or an emotion a decided edge if it can cause representations that have a powerful pull on the attention. The attention is commanded by representations with auditory and visual aspects, and held by information that tells a coherent story. So if a desire can cause an image or images that catch and hold the attention, relevant systems of intention-formation may more readily engage in ways favorable from the perspective of the desire. … No agency needs to design the image so that it speaks just so about the desire. It is enough that having such effects in creature [sic] like us is a way for desires to get their way with us.

All this is from p 64 of Krista Lawlor's "Knowing What One Wants" and it is, seh allows, "entirely speculative". But if this is the account she's going to go with, it seems to open up some territory that ought to be acknowledged and addressed. (Does one address territory?) The account is evolutionary in spirit, I take it, in that desires need not to be conceived of as having designs or being capable of fashioning actual messages to us, it's just that the desires that happen to cause representations that are as-if-of the things the desires themselves are concerned with fare better in actually being acted on than other desires do, so … something something evolutionary pressure, I suppose; there seems to be a missing element to the story, given that there isn't a notion of reproduction at play that would explain why desires would come more often to tend to cause imagings that catch and hold the attention and that correspond in some systematic way to what the desires are of. Given a soup of desires, one that tended to catch and hold the attention might meet with greater success than the others, in that intentions and actions would be formed and performed that led to the desire's being fulfilled. But that doesn't mean that it will transmit that same tendency to its successor desires, whatever that notion might mean. Whatever, though; let us wave our hands over that question in the manner prescribed by ritual and custom. Here's a more interesting issue.

We know from the evolution of creatures that some of them are both poisonous and brightly colored, the coloration serving to warn predators of the poison. (Handy at the individual level, one must admit.) And one knows also that some other creatures have (as it were, not by design, etc.) cottoned on to the utility of bright coloration and taken the shortcut of just being brightly colored, and omitted to actually be poisonous—so much work! The coloration gives you most of the benefit of being both brightly colored and poisonous at a fraction of the cost. Couldn't something similar happen with desires, on this sort of account? The benefit that accrues to a desire that p of catching and holding the attention and intention is the benefit of my actually bringing it about that p, fulfilling the desire; this, however, will be a benefit to any desire that would be fulfilled by my doing whatever it is I'll do to bring it about that p, i.e., not only by desires actually about p. Suppose I harbor the perverse desire to degrade the soles of my shoes; couldn't it catch and hold my attention by causing representations as if of the pleasantness of going for long walks? Going on the walks will also affect my shoes, and such a representation might actually be more reliable, from the perspective of this desire, than a representation of the pleasures of down-at-the-heels shoes, which would be apt primarily to puzzle me. The desire that q, which I find distasteful, might clothe itself in representations of p, which I find more reasonable. Of course this as-it-were strategy is not without its risks, since I might hit on a way of bringing it about that p that doesn't bring q about too, but it might on the whole be as it were worth it to the desire that q, depending. So there seems to be a question, on this account, that faces any would-be agent inferring from representations to the desires that supposedly caused them: were these representations of doing this caused by a desire with the selfsame content (is that what I desire)? Or were they caused by a more vulpine desire, which comes to me with ovine representations? How could one tell? One might think that Lawlor is actually acknowledging this possibility, albeit not drawing attention to it, when she writes that "typically causing the right kind of images gets the desire a better chance of being fulfilled." One will likely assume, on first reading, that "the right kind of images" means the kind of images that will be interpreted to have the same content the desire has. But if the point of these images is to catch and hold the attention and thereby make more likely the undertaking of actions that will get the desire fulfilled, the right kind could well be quite other.

And for Lawlor, I think, the question is, suppose that the representations as if of doing p were actually caused by a desire that q, but the agent doesn't know this, and self-ascribes a desire that p. The agent might even then (mightn't she? if not, why not?) experience the "characteristic changes" (p 62) in her imagings that show the question to be settled; she experiences a "sense of ease" (p 59), the attribution "sticks" (p 57). What should we conclude about her? That despite the actual cause of the representations, her inference that she desires that p is correct? I'd be inclined in that direction, but I'm unmoved by Lawlor's position and paper overall anyway. If we do say that, then how do we justify it? If, on the other hand, we prefer to say that she's just mistaken, and really doesn't desire that p, only that q, then what are we to make of her ease, the attribution's stickiness, etc.? (Maybe we're to deny that in this case it could really happen that way.) The (limited, piecemeal) discussion of the attribution's sticking, once made, and the "characteristic changes" and whatnot after the reflection and inferring, seems to me to be a weak point in the account, one that serves as a bactrio-nasal inlet. This question doesn't actually, I suppose, require the possibility of the kind of mimicry described above (though I do think that's worth addressing)—the agent could just misinterpret the representations the desire that q caused along p-lines and find herself at ease with that interpretation. (Right? Or, again, if not, why not?) Maybe "misinterpretation" isn't really the right term, since by hypothesis these representations (and even "representations" isn't the right term, for the same reason) aren't messages or any kind of interpretandum in the first place—but the imaging characteristically caused by a q-desire can't guarantee its being taken qishly.

A bit later Lawlor writes that "whether or not one's desire actually causes one's imagings and other internal promptings is a separate question. The point I note here is that our inference is structured in such a way as to suppose that desires cause imagings and other internal promptings" (p 65). But how could this be a separate question? It seems rather central to me; if we're engaging in some kind of causal inference from an internal prompting to the existence of a desire that caused it, then the soundness of the inference seems to depend quite a bit on the desire's actually having caused the prompting. If the inferential pattern merely supposes that there are such causal relations, then, on the one hand, something that I take it is necessary to separate Lawlor's position from one like Taylor's, namely that the desire in question definitely already exists and is therefore decidedly not constituted by the interpretive activity of the agent is free to go by the wayside. (Lawlor wants to distinguish the inferential account from a constitutive account, and also describes the cognitive element of the inferential account. But someone who says, as Lawlor summarizes Taylor, that "knowing what one wants owes to the fact that self-interpretation … puts in place the very facts known" (p 51), will of course allow that there's cognitive activity associated with knowing what one wants. Hermeneusis doesn't come for free. The claim to deny is that the thing known preëxists the knowledge thereof.) One is free, in particular, to claim that the causal supposition is a dispensable manner of speaking, that what one essentially has is, say, a sandy mental irritant around which reflection and interpretation build up a pearly desire, which was not the cause of the irritation but the product of the interpretation. ("What's this grain of sand then" is of course a good question. But I think on the whole there are lots of advantages to thinking this way, among them that it can capture the path-dependence of reflection and satisfaction with its results in a way that taking the desire as independently constituted can't obviously do.) And even if we don't go that far, then, on the other hand, this pattern of inference does not seem like a very reliable way to go about getting self-knowledge—if our desires don't cause the internal promptings, then the inference is just structured wrong.

Judo flip!

Having learned of its existence I'm not sure how long ago, I am now at last reading The Golden Gate (whose author's name, as I have recently learned, rhymes with its title, and not with the name of the third biblical son); finding myself not quite sure what to make of it, I have done as I normally do in such situations, and tried to read the opinions of the more penetrating and informed: for instance, it boasts a blurb by the much-admired-by-me John Hollander, creator of the lines "O Bug bug bug bug bug that did require / The quietest devotions of our doubt" and the creator of the quite literally magisterial Rhyme's Reason, and no doubt many more serious verses as well. The review from which the blurb came is not available online, it seems, but many records of Hollander's and Marjorie Perloff's strong disagreement regarding the novel are; for instance, in this interesting paper about the receptions of The Golden Gate and Lyn Hejinian's Oxota (of which I had never heard before).

I was particularly interested in reading Hollander's take because he, I reasoned, clearly knows his formal verse, and apparently thought Seth's to be "expertly controlled", while I have been finding several cases of (to my mind) prosodic gracelessness; spondees choking up a line, say, or weird rhythms or weird enjambment being forced on a sentence, all in ways that call attention to the lines and their strictures—no Frost-like facility here. (Of course, it took me three chapters to finally notice that Seth's sonnets are in Onegin-like tetrameters, not classical pentameters, and didn't actually notice, but had to be informed, that they also hew to a strict scheme of masculine and feminine rhymes.* So my judgments regarding meter and such may not be worth much.) It seems likely, judging from the above-linked article, that both Hollander's and Perloff's review were made in a context of poetic strife of which I am largely ignorant, so perhaps both the former's enthusiasm and the latter's disdain are overstated. I've found more of Perloff's review online than Hollander's and at least one of her assertions—that nothing John says or does suggests that he's even heard of the Venerable Bede—is hard to reconcile with what else he's described as reading not much later in the book. And this bit of criticism seems perhaps overstated:

In its preference for signification over representation, Hejinian’s poetics [in her vaguely Onegin-inspired long poem Oxota] is antithetical to Seth’s in that, like John Ashbery, with whom Perloff contrasts Seth (“Homeward Ho” 44–45), Hejinian refuses the illusion of representation of reality, while accepting and exploiting the multiple possibilities for signification and reference in language. For Perloff, Seth’s work fails because the formal sound and visual devices of the Pushkin stanza are divorced from the representation, or indeed stifle it, so that the signifying possibilities of “language charged with meaning,” as Ezra Pound put it, are not exploited (28).

Is that the reason Seth's work fails, if it fails? Perloff pays it the backhanded compliment of saying that at least it sends us back to Byron and Pushkin, implying that their work does not fail. But it seems unlikely that the static and extremely restrictive Onegin stanza is married to the various situations described in Eugene Onegin (though I admit I haven't read it), suggesting that the reason Perloff cites can't really be right, as it would prove too much. So that's puzzling. The charge, though, that Seth not only is doing something he shouldn't be attempting but isn't even doing it well, does leave her open to this clever rejoinder, to the effect that he isn't doing that at all and he is doing what he's actually doing just fine:

Perloff singles out the unrealistic elements of Seth’s work apparently caused by the need to keep to Pushkin’s stanzaic form (“Homeward Ho” 39–42). It is also possible, however, to read the interference created by rhyme and rhythm as pointing toward the false claims to easy mimesis made not only by the apparently straightforward narrative of Seth’s novel but also by the nostalgic certainties that Perloff identifies in 1980s U.S. literary criticism and the culture at large (“Homeward Ho” 43–44). Indeed, a reading of the novel through its infelicities and failures might underscore the aporia at the novel’s heart. For all the shifts in love and bridging gestures of the novel, the nuclear threat remains, and the rule of law and strictures of verse triumph over “morality” and “direct” expression.

Zing! Perloff gulled by exoteric reading! On this take the apparent metrical solecisms, etc., are proper and necessary, drawing attention to the fact that something rules the text that's unconcerned with the niceties of narrative and the fates of Liz and John and Jan and Phil; they take us out of the simple pleasures of reading about the characters (and the simple characters of verse, for that matter) to remind us of the inhuman structuring rules, and thereby that we aren't getting a representation of reality. It would be nice if more were done to connect the formal aspect of this reading to the thematic claim about law (apter, one suspects, to speak of realpolitik or something like that) and morality, and for that matter it would be nice if the claim weren't tossed off in the final paragraph of the paper, since it's important for the paper's success that the reading be made to stick, or at least to appear plausible (and one might as well acknowledge that looking to the real-life Seth may not provide a lot of support for it). For instance: more could be made of the fact that the "I" of the narrative is ok with metafictional games (nowadays we have to call it something like that, even if in former days the author might more innocently or more serious have addressed his or her readers), interrupting the narrative in the middle of chapter four with an entirely unconvincing and unnecessary explanation for his failure to depict Ed and Phil having sex (had he just skipped straight to the following scene, the missing depiction would have been missed less), and beginning chapter five with five stanzas describing and defending the novel's genesis and form, in a way that more or less asserts the primacy of the form over the incidents it's used to relate. (Bonus: scan the line "Why, asks a friend, attempt tetrameter?". The extra two syllables are surely intentional, given the easy availability of the line "A friend asks, why tetrameter?".)

Instead of further substantiating that take on The Golden Gate, Edmonds makes a similar claim (in the opposite direction) about Oxota:

At the same time, while “representation” is rejected at one level in Oxota, at another level the novel aims to represent the experience of Hejinian in Leningrad, an experience ironically intertwined with the rejection of direct representation through the poetics of estrangement.

This is perhaps actually a rather obvious point (and one that could be bolstered by noting that Hejinian's poem is closer to being self-expressive, as well, and to represent something real, being autobiographical) and one might well think that a claim Hejinian makes about her poetics in a passage Edmonds quotes is more or less cheating: "I am free to signify place though not to represent it" strikes me as saying something like "I am free to represent place though not in the way you'd expect (unless you know my work in which case you might well expect precisely this)". Perloff's response to a further statement of poetic method Hejinian makes, too, seems rather overblown: "Once writing is no longer regarded as the vehicle that conveys an already present speech, every word, indeed every morpheme can be seen to carry meaning, to enter relationships with its neighbors". We surely didn't need langpo or its kin to be able to say this, did we? It seems to be the condition of poetry generally, not to mention of the lowest form of pun, the Tom Swifty. (For all the antiromantic rhetoric of the langpo crowd, and of some manifestos of which Hejinian is a signatory, that claim would be reasonably at home in the Athenaeum or slipped into Novalis's Monologue.) It's not even clear why writing has to be divorced from speech for this to be the case, as if one could never craft an utterance. (One couldn't play tricks with lineation or enjambment in speech, but speech has its own modes that writing doesn't.) I am confessedly unsure what to make of Perloff's various claims anyway (not having access to all the relevant texts is doing me no favors, I'm sure); I know she likes Ron Silliman's work, for instance, and that fondness seems undamaged by her acknowledgement that "Albany" exhibits "a razor-sharp realism of description". Nor, as far as I know, has she turned her back on Hejinian, one of whose who claimed that "The self as the central and final term of creative practice is being challenged and exploded in our writing", after her discovery (it took her until 1998, apparently—she shoulda asked me) "that we can easily tell a Charles Bernstein poem from one by Steve McCaffery, a Tom Raworth sequence from one by Allen Fisher, a Maggie O'Sullivan 'verbovisivocal' text from one by Susan Howe" (and presumably all of these from one by Lyn Hejinian). Not that someone who denied that poetry was the Authentic Immediate Expression of a Self would have to believe that his or her verse would be indistinguishable from someone else who issued a like denial—obviously—but she is putting this forward as something to be noted. (This line of inquiry, which seems to be preoccupied with the lyrical, is of course at right angles to anything involving the Seth, for which, as a third-person narrative verse, the appearance of an "I" at all is an intrusion. But perhaps it serves as a reminder to be careful about the programs of the programmatic, and not to oversell them.)

*I seem to be unable to retain the preferred terms.

Phonological tricks

In My Life in CIA, a pale sexton, who's avoided the sun to heighten his whiteness since the accidental death of his black ("like Siberian anthracite") lover, says of his new habit of remaining indoors and seeing after the church that employs him that he occupies himself "minding [his] keys and pews". We readers know that he says so as a witticism and not ingenuously because as he does he "smile[s] faintly". Nicely done, church-bleached sexton, and Mathews as well, we readers think, until, perhaps merely pretending not to understand the conventions of fiction, we recall that this book takes place mostly in Paris and the characters are, presumably, speaking French to each other. (The fact that some actual French words are occasionally interjected—on the order of "merde" and "adieu"—doesn't matter; those are just bits of color, clumsily left un-Englished to remind the reader of the setting.) So: what did the sexton really say, to bring the faint smile forth? Did it have the same subject matter? Was it also a pun? How impressed with Mathews' rendition should we be? I say "perhaps merely pretending" because it seems to me that there should be something French that the sexton could have said, more or less equally clever and meaning something more or less similar, if we're to attend not merely to the meaning of his words but to the words qua words, and their sounds etc., themselves, and that Mathews is getting off easy, doing something cheap, if he hasn't got an answer to the question. And partly, too, because Mathews seems like the kind of author who would have an answer to that question.

At this point you, varied reader, are no doubt thinking that while spooneristic puns do have something to do with sounds, it is not really a "phonological trick", and so the title of this post is a bit inept. That is a good thought. This post is not about My Life in CIA, though it is about a novel by Harry Mathews, and admittedly begins in a way that does not make its actual matter obvious. Consequently I will now reveal that it concerns a bit of the "Lewis and Morris" chapter of his earlier novel Cigarettes, and will even, in the next paragraph, reveal the bit itself. (Scandalous.) In the remainder of this paragraph I'll just give a bit of background—will do so, in fact, starting with the next sentence. Lewis, having read Morris's art criticism, is eager to enter his good graces, and Lewis's sister introduces them; they meet a few times thereafter but their relationship doesn't begin in earnest until Morris sees Lewis's photo in the paper: Lewis, and many others, were arrested when the police raided Lewis's crucifixion. (This is an objective genitive.) They then embark on a sadomasochistic affair in which Morris subjects Lewis to basically monthly humiliations and tortures, with plentiful verbal abuse, while, in between, getting him set up with an apartment and job and coaching him in his writing. (Late in the chapter Morris reveals that he gave several of Lewis's efforts to an editor of Locus Solus, the little magazine that, in real life, Mathews co-edited.)

At their last meeting, Morris has Lewis mix up a bunch of quick-setting cement, covers him in oil, and then makes a living statue out of him (with holes obligingly provided for his eyes, ears, and nose). He then, per usual, chews Lewis out, saying how (oratio obliqua) worthless and repulsive Lewis is, and, from the bottom of page 151 to the top of 152, such things as (oratio recta):

"Even if I don't like reading you the stations, I won't spread jam. So please, Louisa, get it and go. You're a mess, a reject, a patient—I could go on for days. And don't tell me—I have your nose wide open. I'm sorry. Spare me the wet lashes, it's all summer stock. Because the only one you've ever really been strung out on is your own smart self, and you always will be. And for what—to keep catching my rakes in your zits? Forget it, Dorothy. This is goodbye. Remember one thing, though. No matter what I've said to you, no matter how I've turned you out, the truth is"—Morris's eyes become wet; he turns a surprising shade of red—"the truth is, and I'm singing it out: I lo—

Morris's eyes become wet and he turns read not, or at least not necessarily, or not solely, because of the emotion involved in what he does not in the end say, but rather because, or at least in part because, of his weak heart, which has finally just now given out; he dies, leaving Lewis encased in the cement. Lewis manages to break free (by causing himself to totter back and forth) and call for help, bringing further infamy on himself: "Morris", we read on page 254, "might well in these consequences be completing his last aborted sentence, which Lewis had unhesitatingly grasped in its entirety: 'The truth is, I loathe you'."

The first time I read Cigarettes, I took it that Morris had been cut off in saying, finally, "I love you"; Lewis's revelation two pages later came as a shock. Note, though, that each interpretation makes semantic sense. "No matter what I've said to you" could refer to Morris's speeches to Lewis in their assignations, or in his encouragements afterwards. "No matter how I've turned you out" seems apter to involve unsavory slang than a metaphor for grooming, but, eh. At any rate, I was prepared to accept that Lewis's reconstruction was, after all, correct (and it does seem more in keeping with Morris's general M.O.). (So it was a bit surprising to read in this generally good paper the claim "Lewis (mis)interprets Morris’s dying words as “I loathe you,” thus confirming the pain, inadequacy, and self-hatred he so needed Morris to act out on him" (528), since it's far from clear that it's a misinterpretation—even allowing for the fact that Lewis himself is the narrator and not presenting everything with a totally even hand.) But really, isn't this a dirty trick Mathews has pulled? (Or perhaps it's Lewis who's pulled it. Still a dirty trick!) "Love" and "loathe" begin with the same two letters, but if Morris had reached a point in his utterance that it would be natural to transcribe as "lo—" (rather than "l—"), he would have reached the disambiguating vowel—wouldn't he have? The reader is lulled into thinking "love", or perhaps suspects, given the scene, that it's "loathe"—but it wouldn't be so unclear for Lewis, whose ears, recall, are unstopped. The reveal on p 254 doesn't just prompt a reassessment and reconsideration of what one had read before (meaning the matter that had been related before), it prompts a revisitation of the actual text, the letters themselves, that one had read, in a different sense, before: it was "lo", right? But then—

Anyway, it's dissatisfying.

A question about Frankfurt-style cases regarding so-called free will

Intended, as I understand it, to demonstrate the putative fact that moral responsibility does not require having been able to do otherwise, aren't the cases rather similar to one in which I pose you a dilemma like the following, and claim that you will do the same thing in either case (yet be blameworthy in one and not the other, of course)? "Either you pick up this gun in your hand, point it at so-and-so, and pull the trigger, or I will temporarily incapacitate you, put the gun in your hand, move your arm so that it's pointing at so-and-so, and curl your finger on the trigger so that the gun goes off."

Literary expose of the century!

John Barton Wolgamot gave his name to a Society in Michigan, founded, more or less, by Keith Waldrop; he also wrote and published (via vanity presses) the poem that was to provide the text and title of Robert Ashley's composition In Sara, Mencken, Christ and Beethoven There Were Men and Women. The same text was also published earlier under the title In Sara Haardt Were Men and Women, and he had been working, when he died, on a third work, also with the same text, but with a third title, Beacons of Ancestorship, that later became the title of a Tortoise album (who also named a track after the previous work, with "Men" and "Women" transposed). Waldrop reports that Wolgamot sent copies of the first two to Mencken, and that those copies were given to the Enoch Pratt Free Library (a catalog search on their website for "Wolgamot" does not currently give any results). For unknown reasons, the Encyclopedia of American Poetry identifies Wolgamot as a literary historian. Aside from that curiosity, basically everything one can find online about Wolgamot concurs with the information given in the poetry foundation link, a recollection by Waldrop (information substantially reproduced in this interview with Waldrop, though he can't quite keep his story straight). Very little actually goes beyond what's contained there; no Ashley or Tortoise fans, for instance, report having actually gotten their mitts on a copy in some library somewhere, or even having confirmed Waldrop's claim that the book is referred to in any account of Mencken's library. The story, or parts of it, is passed around; it comes up, for instance, in Kyle Gann's book on Ashley.

It seems quite probable to me that there never was a Wolgamot; that the name was made up (the family name, perhaps, derived from Rosmarie Waldrop's mother's maiden name, Wohlgemuth?). Looking just at the poetry foundation link, the story is really just too pat. No further copies are extant—no one remembers Wolgamot's name at the first publisher's, and Waldrop buys the last remaining copy the second publisher has. No one is likely to look through all of Mencken's jottings to find the one that Waldrop refers to (without giving any bibliographical information). Waldrop describes the way Ashley's piece was made (reading one page/sentence in one breath, then the next, editing out the spaces between the readings), and later in the story, when he finally meets Wolgamot and tells him that the poem was set to music, the only things Wolgamot is recorded as having said in response are that "it was hard to imagine reading his book out loud", but that "'it would have to be a sort of'—he hesitated, considered—'well, a breathless reading'"—what a nice confirmation for Ashley! Immediately prior to that we get a hypothesis and confirmation much closer together:

Ashley had done a formal analysis of the book, in an elaborate chart, showing that the book is in four movements-there was no sign of this, no markings-four movements of equal length. I was not entirely convinced. But the first thing Wolgamot said was, “You realize, this is in four movements.” And Ashley immediately brought out his chart, which Wolgamot wouldn’t look at. Just as he had no interest at all in hearing the composition.

Note that in the interview, Wolgamot is reported as having found the reading of his piece so imaginable that he at one point actually contemplated it himself:

Which reminds me: when Wolgamot heard that in Bob's composition the text was actually spoken, he said that at one time he had thought of reading it out loud. "But then I decided against it," he said. "I suppose that—if you did read it—it would have to be a kind of, well, breathless reading."

How odd!

Early on, Waldrop writes that he "claimed that the work was a funeral piece for Sara Powell Haardt, intimating, however, that while Sara was Mencken’s on earth, she was Wolgamot’s in eternity"; in the paragraph before, Waldrop mentions a phone call between Mencken and Waldrop. Then, during the meeting between Waldrop and Wolgamot:

I asked him if he had ever met Mencken. He said he hadn’t but, “I talked to him on the phone once.” I said I supposed, then, he had never met Sara Powell Haardt, and I could see Ashley was remembering my silly theory. And Wolgamot said, “No, I never met Sara Powell Haardt. I used her name, because her last name’s Haardt and my middle name’s Bart.” But he went on, “Of course, in the book, I represent myself as having an illicit relation with her. In a book like this, there has to be some love interest.”

The encounter with Wolgamot reveals no information not already stated or speculated about earlier (sometimes immediately earlier); speculations, moreover, are always confirmed, never disconfirmed, so that Ashley and Waldrop's powers of analysis and perception are emphasized. And since their theories about the structure of the bizarre text are confirmed by the text's eccentric author to be correct, we are encouraged to believe that the structure really is there—as we might not so easily or successfully be encouraged if Waldrop's liner notes just asserted of a text attribute to Ashley or himself that it was in four parts and perfectly suited for a "breathless" reading (not just Ashley's eccentric choice but the result of recognition of just what the text requires). But I suspect that the text really is by Waldrop or Ashley and that the whole Wolgamot story is false, false, false! And obviously false, in fact, in a way that makes its repetition somewhat baffling.

On a popular misconception concerning "literally"

Here is a thing which you may have observed. There are people about who don't like it when the word "literally" figures in a sentence whose overall thrust is figurative. It is contended that something has gone wrong, or at any rate it's not an ideal state of affairs. As far as I have been able to determine by arguing with people, the reasons are something like the following: (a) such sentences are (literally) false, or (b) they involve a misuse of the word "literally", or (c) at the very least it's desirable to have a word that functions the way the complainants think "literally" ought to function and no otherwise. So you may have heard it said, but I say to you that (a) such sentences are just as false without the word "literally" in them and no one objects to those, and (b) figurative uses are not misuses, and finally (c) this is not only not desirable, it is not possible.

Consider the following two sentences:

1. I was beside myself.
2. I could eat a horse.

On no occasion has anyone uttering the first been saying something which is, sensu stricto, true; some particular someone uttering the second on some particular occasion might have been, but it seems unlikely. We know what speakers of these sentences are getting at, of course, and they might therefore be conveying something true to us listeners: that they were very angry; are very hungry. What they are saying is, nevertheless, literally false.

Most people, being for the most part sensible, do not get in a tizzy about that. They don't respond, unless failing in attempts to be humorous, "no you weren't" or "no you couldn't". Nor does even the most persnickety person reply to (1) by saying that the speaker surely misunderstands the meaning of "beside" (or "myself" or any of the other words in the sentence).

How drastically does the situation change when we revise the sentences, add to the hyperbole a little bit!

3. I was literally beside myself.
4. I could literally eat a horse.

This is guaranteed to raise the hackles of a number of persons, though the precise reason for this horripilation is a little hard for me to make out. One consideration offered is that neither (3) nor (4) is (literally) true. But then, neither were (1) or (2), and, as already mentioned, no one really minds about them. One might account for the difference thus:

Everyone knows that "beside myself" in (1) and "eat a horse" in (2) are meant fancifully, figuratively; in a word (but not literally a word, hahaha) not literally. It isn't literally true, granted, but we know that we aren't meant to take the statement literally. But the speakers of (3) or (4) specifically direct us to take their words literally! They disclaim figurative intent about as clearly as they can!

This isn't really satisfying, though. For one thing, we don't get the same vociferous objections—or as far as I know any objections at all—to sentences such as the following:

5. I was honestly/really/actually beside myself.
6. I'm not joking/not kidding, I was beside myself.
7. I mean it; this is not hyperbole, it's the plain unvarnished truth: I was beside myself.
8. I'm not being figurative here: I was beside myself.

And they seem to be of basically the same kidney as (3). Granted, "honestly" vel sim. don't function identically to "literally"; they don't disclaim the figurative in the exact same way. (Obviously this caveat does not apply to (7) or (8).) But why does no one fulminate thus?

You aren't being honest, you're being hyperbolic! You weren't really or actually beside yourself, and you just said you were being honest, were really and actually beside yourself! You may not be joking precisely, but you're not being totally straight either, are you? It clearly is hyperbole and has many coats of varnish, and you just said the opposite! You are definitely being figurative, and you just said you weren't! Goddammit, I believed you!

(At last, one wishes to say, a practical use for the Oulipo! Evade misguided pedants through definitional literature!)

It's not really the falsity of (3) and (4), and in general other sentences in which "literally" is deployed to figurative effect, that annoys people, I take it. My impression is that the real complaint is that "literally" is being used incorrectly, that "literally" is unique in that it, unlike every other word, can only be used, well, literally. There is something offensive about using a word which means "not figuratively" with figurative intent.

It seems, too, as if it really does depend on the fact that, while "literally" means literally, it's being used non-literally that grates. After all, it would be odd to object that "infant" is being used incorrectly in the following sentence:

9. Tolstoy was a great moralizing infant.

It's true that "infant" doesn't mean "unrealistic, petty, egocentric, yet powerless despot" (or whatever we might think Mann meant to suggest regarding Tolstoy). But it's not misused. It is, in fact, perfectly aptly used. It's because "infant" means what it does—because it refers to, you know, infants—that its application to the adult Tolstoy does what it does.

It sure seems as if the same thing is happening with "literally"---that is, that it's because "literally" means "not figuratively" that it can be used to strengthen the use of a tired figurative trope. Let us quote from a scholarly article, whose bibliographic information I'll just give inline right here: "Literally speaking", Michael Israel, Journal of Pragmatics 34 (2002) 423–32. Ok? Here we go:

As I will argue, the word’s notorious misuse actually marks a natural development from its orthodox usage: people use the word in this way precisely because they do understand the notion of literal meaning, and they associate it, naturally enough, with plain speaking and honest expression. (424)

And later:

the folk model of literal meaning seems to be unchanged. In both cases, literal meaning is associated with directness, plain speaking, and, fundamentally, with truth. The shift itself seems to reflect little more than an equivocation between sentence meaning and speaker meaning. This sort of shift is, in fact, quite common with modal expressions whose basic function is to emphasize the fit between reality and the way it is described, and the examples in (10) show uses of really and truly which closely parallel the use of literally in (8):

(10) a. Her guacamole is truly out of this world.

b. She really pulled the wool over our eyes.

As Brugman notes, the adverbs here effectively signal ‘‘that the conventionalized nonliteral meaning [of a figurative expression] ... is being used in a strict sense’’ (1984: 34). (429)

The whole paper is worth a look.

The OED has a good expression of the use of "literally" here discussed; it signifies that "some conventional metaphorical or hyperbolical phrase is to be taken in the strongest admissible sense". It is easy enough to construct a notional origin for this use of the word: some set phrase is getting overused, worn out, bleached, and a speaker, reaching for it, wants to indicate to her listeners that she's not just saying mouthing something, no, she really means it. You could easily say "I could eat a horse" while not being very hungry, especially if it's becoming a conventional expression of hunger, so you say you could literally eat a horse. And, again, it's because "literally" functions as it does in its approved contexts that it works here too.

When, after all, would you use "literally" in the approved sense? When you are aware that your utterance might be taken otherwise than you intend, because some figurative sense is most plausible---or plausible enough, or if you just want to be careful to avoid misunderstanding available at all---and you wish to forestall it: I don't mean this thing that suggests itself, I mean what my words mean on their face.

The same thing is happening in (3) and (4), it's just that the location of the face, so to speak, has shifted. I want you to know that when I say "I was beside myself" I don't just mean "I was annoyed" or "I was ticked off"---I want you to know that I mean what my words mean on their face---where what they mean on their face is the figurative meaning, that I was enraged. (Rather, that is, than that I was merely ticked off.) Quoting Israel quoting Brugman: the conventionalized nonliteral meaning is being used in a strict sense. (What could be clearer?)

So, again, it's hard to make out the claim that "literally" is being misused. Firstly because there's no reason to think that a figurative use of a word is a misuse (I don't have a ``theory'' of the figurative so I may be skating on thin ice in characterizing the use under discussion as figurative but I think it's probably fine), and it's laughable to think that it would be wrong to use a word figuratively just because its literal meaning is "not figurative"---as laughable as thinking that it's wrong to apply a word figuratively to an adult because its literal meaning is "not an adult". And secondly because the non-literal use in question is exactly what you'd expect given the literal uses. It's the right use!

Some people with whom I've had this argument have, at this point, lamented the idea that we're "losing" the literal use of "literal". (They think to score points off me because I actually do think the loss of the "uninterested"/"disinterested" contrast would be a shame.) But we aren't losing the literal use of "literal", any more than sentences like (9) or the imprecation "don't be such a baby" have led us to lose our vocabulary for the very young.

And, of course, it's just not possible to keep a word from being used figuratively. Especially given that "literally" seems tailor-made for the use to which misguided pedants so object. Any proposed replacement, stipulated to mean "literally (literally!!!)", would be suborned to figurative purposes before long, by the exact same process that affected "literally" itself. It is, after all, useful. And I'm not aware of anyone attempting to use "literally" to indicate that her words were, in fact, to be taken literally and not figuratively at all who has been unable to do so.

That's right, it's more double dactyls

1. Rapidly rapidly
Runner Pheidhippides
Set out from Marathon
Swift as his name;

Died ent'ring Athens but
Won for his hurrying
Hemerodromical
Long-living fame.

2. Hippity Hoppity
Thomas Stearns Eliot's
Verses careened twixt the
Deep and the odd;

One of the latter's got
Equiriparian
Creatures compared to the
True church of God.

3. Higgledy Piggledy
Dolce far niente is
Charming indeed, but is
Counter to pride;

Rouse yourself now from this
Oblomovitical
Pastoral torpor, with
Olga your bride!

4. Watterson Watterson
Calvinist doctrine's con-
Cerned to distinguish the
Goats from the sheep;

Praedestinatio
Mirrors mundanity:
Strive to attain to the
Top of the heap!

Cauliflower sans Merci

In the Oulipo Compendium we read:

Transplant. This procedure was first used by Harry Mathews before his introduction to the Oulipo; it entered the Oulipian repertory during the preparation of the Atlas, in which it was described as a double lexical translation.

Two texts are chosen, of similar length but differing in genre. Each text is rewritten with the vocabulary of the other. Complete short examples are a virtual impossibility. Here are the subtitles and opening paragraphs of the two sections of Cauliflower sans Merci, where the source texts are (a) Keats' La Belle Dame sans Merci and (b) a recipe for the preparation of cauliflower with tomatoes:

And there follows indeed a short excerpt. But why "complete short examples are a virtual impossibility"? La Belle Dame isn't a terribly long poem and the Compendium contains many examples of moderate length; why not just give all of "Cauliflower sans Merci" as the example? Well, for whatever reasons, the editors, of whom Mathews was one, decided against that, which is terribly annoying, since the excerpt they do reproduce is tantalizing and it's not easy to get one's hands on the full text (it having been published in a small Canadian literary journal, "Atropos", that lasted, as far as I can tell, three issues). Until now, that is, for the full text is reproduced below, with the apparent errors from the original printing intact, but the original formatting as regards spacing, line indentation, etc. not intact. One may be interested to know that the table of contents for the issue classifies "Cauliflower sans Merci" as "fiction".

More than one frustration regarding "Honest Illusion"

The central thought in my solution to the interpretive puzzle is that valuing, in Nietzsche's recommended practice, involves the generation of "honest illusions". It can be thought of as a form of make-believe, pretending, or, the non-Nietzschean phrase adopted here, "regard … as": S values X by regarding X as valuable while knowing that in fact X is not valuable in itself. The motivation for this interpretive strategy arises, perhaps not surprisingly, from what I have called interpretive constraint (4), namely, the suggestion in Nietzsche's texts that there is some close connection between art, avoiding practical nihilism, and the creation of values.

So Hussain, on p 166 of "Honest Illusion: Valuing for Nietzsche's Free Spirits". The mentioned interpretive puzzle arises out of four constraints; the fourth, as indicated, is that the creation of values and art are closely related. The first three are (1) "A central task of Nietzsche's free spirits is the creation and revaluation of values" (158); (2) "Nietzsche's free spirit 'conceives reality as it is'" (158); and (3) "Nietzsche claims that nothing has value in itself and therefore that all claims of the form 'X is valuable [sc. in itself]' are false" (159; I added the bracketed material). I find this position implausible both interpretatively and substantively: interpretatively because several passages proffered in support seem to me to be better interpreted otherwise; substantively because it seems impossible to prevent the position from collapsing into one Hussain explicitly rejects, in which the free spirits come to believe that there really is value in the world.

In the pages following the blockquote with which this post begins, he attempts to flesh out the relationship of Nietzsche's writings on art to the pretense theory he attributes to Nietzsche. Here are (parts of) two he quotes, GS P4 and GS 299:

Oh, those Greeks! They knew how to live. What is required for that is to stop courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance … Those Greeks were superficial—out of profundity.

How can we make things beautiful, attractive, and desirable for us when they are not? And I rather think that in themselves they never are. here we should learn something from physicians, when for example they dilute what is bitter or add wine and sugar to a mixture—but even more from artists … Moving away from things until there is a good deal that one no longer sees and there is much that our eye has to add if we are still to see them at all; or seeing things around a corner and as cut out and framed; or to place them so that they partially conceal each other … all that we should learn from artists while being wiser than they are in other matters. For with them this subtle power usually comes to an end where art ends and life begins; but we want to be the poets of our life …

After quoting GS 299, Hussain writes that "it is the example of art that (i) shows us the psychological possiblity of regarding things as valuable even when we know they are not, and (ii) provides a source of techniques that, suitably refined, could help us succeed in regarding things as valuable outside the domain of art proper" (172). Art enables us "to engage in a simulacrum of valuing by regarding things as valuable in themselves while knowing they are not" (175).

But doesn't that actually run directly counter to the passages just quoted from Nietzsche? In the first place, GS 299 begins with a contrast between how things are in themselves and how we might wish them to be for us, without ever suggesting that their being thus and so for us consists in our taking them to be thus and so in themselves. When the physician sugars his medicine, rendering palatable for us something that by [sic] itself is not, we don't think that the medicine thereby becomes sweeter in itself, though the mixture is sweeter than the medicine is; in that sense he makes it—he makes what we confront, what we have to do with—attractive, and no one involved projects the attraction onto the unmixed drug, knowingly or not. Similarly, when we esteem as beautiful or attractive a tableau in which some thing is concealed by another, do we judge "this thing, of which I can see only a part, is itself beautiful"? Isn't it rather than the scene, in which many things that are themselves not beautiful are nicely arranged, is judged to be beautiful? After all—are we not to stop courageously at the surface? Even remarks to the effect that, e.g., "we do not always keep our eyes from rounding off something and, as it were, finishing the poem" (GS 107) do not directly support the reading. It is clear from context that this rounding-off is not the ever-present (hitherto ever-present?) coloration of the world with moral evaluation (in WP 260) with which Hussain immediately pairs it, since it is introduced by saying that "now there is a counterforce" (emphasis added). (Something similar could be said about, for example, the remark somewhere in BGE that we are more artistic than we know, because we perceive things as enduring. That illusion, if it is an illusion, can't be what's presently relevant, because we all already engage in it anyway.)

Substantively, while there is a brief discussion of whether the kind of make-believe that Hussain describes is actually practicable, I don't think it really gets at the issues very deeply. Recall that the free spirit's pretense has a certain content and purpose, having respectively to do with the real existence of values and the avoidance of nihilism (thereby enabling a certain kind of life for the free spirit). This makes the going about of the pretending a rather delicate business; it can't obviously can't be at the front of the free spirit's mind. The pretense that something is valuable in itself can't be accompanied by the thought "… not really, though"; if it is, the "simulacrum of valuing" (p 175) in which she engages will be too overtly pretended to serve its purpose. (In this respect the pretense is decidedly not like any pretense we engage in regarding artworks, which is severely delimited. We do not actually try, or pretend to try, or try to pretend, to talk to the people in novels or paintings. We may talk about them as if they were people, and point out interesting facts about their pretend actions or pretend clothing, but we implicitly recognize a point beyond which we do not carry the game. This, I think, is a large part of the reason the pretense is compatible with the acknowledgement that it's a pretense. If the free spirits' pretense contained inner limits like that, it could not play anything like the role in our lives that actual valuing does. The point here isn't that (as Hussain suggests) the free spirits' valuing, being pretended, wouldn't be like the valuing that had come before, in that, say, "a particular kind of seriousness and gravity that is part of traditional morality could not be regenerated within" it (175n43); it is, rather, that this pretense would seem, unlike the pretenses with reference to which it is developed, to have no "outside". (Unless of course the free spirits hop from valuational system to valuational system, but that seems to me to make the whole thing even harder to maintain.))

If the pretense can't be like that, it must be one in which for long stretches there are no occurrent thoughts about the pretense itself. However, engaging in a really thorough-going pretense is one of the things one would do if one wanted to end up actually believing that things have value in themselves—faking it is a time-honored technique for making it—and it's a constraint for Hussain that the free spirits don't do that. So they must both lose themselves in their pretense, and not get so lost that they end up falling for it: a hard needle to thread.

Part of the discussion in which feasibility is addressed runs thus:

In imaginative play, successfully regarding a pile of wood as the Bismarck under fire requires, or at least when one is, as we say, 'into' the game, engaging in certain actions, or pretend actions—ducking from the incoming shells (just tennis balls, of course), yelling at your gunners to fire back, and so on. It also requires certain physical responses: the increased heart beat, the sweating of palms, and an intense exclusive concentration.

However, as far as I can see, it doesn't require much further than that—and if we can say that doing that sort of thing (having that sort of involuntary physical response, engaging in certain voluntary physical actions in an appropriately engaged way) just is what "regarding a pile of wood as the besieged Bismarck" comes to, then we conspicuously don't need to say that the pretender pretends that the wood really is a ship. The players can just declare "that over there is the Bismarck and these are shells", thereby giving a bit of structure and narrative to what would otherwise be arbitrary; involvement in the game can then come from competitive spirit, or the fun of throwing tennis balls at your friends, or whatever, and no illusion, honest or dishonest, need enter into it.

Further versification

Three more double dactyls, a morale élémentaire on my constant theme, and a self-descriptive Beautiful In-Law:

1. Higgledy Piggledy
Hydriotaphia
Thomas Browne's essay on
Bodies in jars

Gives the opinion that
Sempiternality's
Simply not possible
Under the stars

2. Jiggery Pokery
William and Elwyn, the
Usage dictators whose
Book is confused:

"Ceteris paribus,
Sesquipedalian
Latinate verbiage
Shouldn't be used.

3. Higgledy Piggledy
Nufer the author has
Practiced negation in
Each of his books;

But that devotion to
Nonrepetitiously
Writing's just won him some
Mighty odd looks.

4. Here.

5. One lone noble son, foe of few,
One selfless fool (feels offense slow),
One swell fellow (woos belles well),
One new Solon, one boon,
We follow Ben Wolfson.
Wow!

An expression of a single frustration regarding one aspect of Pippin's treatment of action

Nicely recapped by R. L. Anderson:

… let us return to the expressivist account of successful action, which is nicely captured in Pippin’s paradigm examples of artistic intention. Suppose my intention is to write a good poem. Unfortunately, I am no poet, so my results are execrable. The power and interest of the expressivist identification of intention with action arise just here. Precisely because the character of my intention can be defined by the actual outcome of my activity, I run afoul of the lightning-flash identity argument when I insist that this is not the poem I intended to write. My actual poem does express my intention (where that is defined in terms of the process of action), so it is bad faith to disown it. What my discontent seeks is not fairly described as the good poem I intended to write; at best, what it wants is to have had a different intention altogether, one that could have produced a different, better, poem. The availability of this analysis depends on the thought animating the first horn of the dilemma—that the content of my intention is ineluctably defined in terms of the proper interpretation of the resulting action.

Right down to the tendentious "proper" in the last sentence. I think it's worth pointing out how weird the intention to write a good poem is, too, but that's probably inessential. (Obviously, I can only speak to the production of doggerel and parodies, but I don't think I've ever sat down to write anything with the goal of just writing a good X, and it seems like a bizarre way to take artistic intentions generally.)

Nehamas also makes use of this kind of creative example, if I remember correctly, and also uses specifically artistic creation (I believe I've heard him use specifically poetry, for that matter). It's a nice example for polemical purposes but a bad one, I think, for philosophical. It's good for polemical purposes because the bad poet who insists that he didn't mean to write this poem can't, if challenged with the question what poem he did mean to write, produce a different, better one and say: "well I wanted to write this one, see." (Of course, he can say "I intended to write a good poem, not this ungainly mess", or "I wanted to write a poem that would …"—and it's never really been clear to me why that isn't enough. We could call it the Travis Bickle Theory of Intention: "I don't see any other poems around here.") If he could have done that, he would have written that one. It obviously isn't a question of his reproducing an already existing poem, after all, and the only poem on the scene is the bad one actually produced.

That's not essential to the example, though; the example ought to work with any instance of incompetence. It ought to work equally well if I mess up the roasting of a chicken or the construction of a birdhouse, which are (or at least can be) exercises in copying models or following procedures. If the bird is burnt black, or the birdhouse a Escherian puzzle, and I say: "I didn't mean to do that", though, I can say what I intended: I point to the picture in my illustrated cookbook, or woodworking book, and say, "I wanted to make that". To deny that that is a sound expression of one's intention is bats; it would be like insisting that in order really to refer to something we have always to engage in the "singular stroke of eloquence" that Dr. Slothrop attempts in Tristram Shandy, whereby instead of giving the name of a thing one just produces the thing itself. "I wanted to build a [here I produce from my mantle a birdhouse]"—and even here, I could produce another birdhouse, not built by me, since I'm not trying to build an original birdhouse anyway.

To say that the shambles of a birdhouse I actually build "expresses my intention (where that is defined in terms of the processes of action)" begs the question, since clearly the upshot of the processes of action I engaged in—assuming I haven't been interfered with—can't be other than the upshot of those very processes. What might be meant in this case by saying my discontent with it really means that I wish to have intended something else? Does that mean, to have intended to produce a different birdhouse than the one exampled in the pages of my book? Not that. Perhaps it means that I wish to have had different sub-intentions in carrying out the construction project—e.g. that I should have intended to drive the nail in straight rather than incompetently? But that obviously gets us nowhere (I did intend to drive the nail in straight, I'll insist). I am not sure what other reasonable interpretations there are, here, or why we shouldn't just say that while I intended to do one thing, I was incompetent, and thus ended up actually doing something else. On Pippin's account it seems as if I always only execute my actual intentions just fine, and incompetence is isolated to my initial identification of what I'm about in the first place.

The actual birdhouse I end up building can still be plausibly claimed to "express my intention" in the following sense: I intended to build a birdhouse like the one in the book, acted on the intention, and produced this thing, which is very unlike it. And one could sensibly say that, therefore, it's bad faith for me to disown the birdhouse. It's not what I wanted but it is what I did (and if I want to get better at woodworking it would be advisable for me to try to understand what I did wrong). But that's consistent with denying that this thing is what I intended to produce, on any sane use of the concept of intention.

The dactylic guide to poets & philosophers

1. Hippity-hoppity
Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht, the
Diligent scholar and
Seeker of truth,

Has an epiphany---
Nonhermeneutically---
When in the presence of
Lithe-bodied youth.

---

2. Jiggery-pokery

R. Lanier Anderson
Reading his Nietzsche with
Rose-colored lens,

Makes out of Carter a
Paradigmatical
Instance of doctrines that
No one else kens.

---

3. Higgledy-piggledy
Robinson Jeffers, who
Lived in a tower that's
Hewn all by hand,

Quitted the polis, since
Megalopsuchia
Means being moderate
In loving man.

---

4. Imagist imagist
William C. Williams has
Gobbled the fruit you were
Saving to eat:

"Pardon my trespass and
Pflaumengefräßigkeit,
They were delicious, so
Cold and so sweet."

---

5. Higgledy piggledy
Der Allzermalmende
Made room for faith by de-
Stroying the schools:

Questions pertaining to
Transcendentalities
Can't be decided, by
Wise men or fools.

Is a colander solid?

By way of analogy, consider what is the practically rational response when we learn surprising things about the world, such as the fact that apparently solid objects are mostly empty space. It seems to me perfectly practically rational to act as if such objects are as solid as they appear, and to feel trusting in their apparent solidity, even if, when I reflect, I don't believe that they are solid (at least, not in the way they appear to be).

Imagine an old-school model of a salt crystal, a little cube, made out of little spheres of various sizes connected with little rods of various lengths. Is it solid? One way of taking the question is: are the components solid, as opposed to hollow: are the spheres more like ball bearings or table tennis balls; are the tubes dowels or pipes. But perhaps that's not what's meant; what's meant is: is the whole assembly solid. In that case, I find myself uncertain how to answer: what is meant by solid, in that question? Solid as opposed to what? But I might accept the following answer: construct the smallest (geometric!) solid that entirely encloses all the spheres and rods and whatnot, and observe that it's not the same stuff all the way through; it is, in fact, mostly air. Conclude, then, that it isn't solid, even though it's not quite right to say it's hollow or something like that either.

Perhaps something like that would underlie the assertion that "apparently solid objects are mostly empty space"; sc. merely apparently solid but actually not (or there's no point in mentioning it). A (merely) apparently solid iron cube, 1cm on a side, actually is not solid, being mostly empty space. Now there are some applications in which we would indisputably be justified in treating the cube as being "as solid as it appears" (more on which soon); for instance, we might calculate from its volume of one cubic centimeter and iron's density of so and so many grams per cubic centimeter that it has a mass of so and so many grams. This is perfectly in order; we aren't imagining that the cube fails to be solid by failing to be solid iron, that is, by being an iron exterior with an interior of copper, or air, or whatever. Our concern is one that would attach to the iron exterior, too; it too would really be mostly empty space. And this means that the suggestion that the cube isn't really solid itself doesn't affect the propriety of our calculation in the way one might have expected. The calculation that the cube is so and so many grams might be understood to be approximate on the grounds that, for instance, it probably isn't 100% pure iron. Maybe there's even a pocket of air in the cube! That would mean that we wouldn't be getting the right answer from the calculation, because of the non-iron in the cube. But in the ideal case where none of that happens, we aren't in danger of getting the wrong answer on the grounds that the cube isn't really solid, because the figure for density is derived from iron which is similarly mostly empty space—that's what solid iron is.

What is the solidity that the iron cube lacks? Is it that it's not the same thing all the way through? But isn't it?—assuming it's pure iron, isn't it iron all the way through? And the purity of iron isn't impugned by the fact that a chunk of the stuff has, in addition to atoms of Fe, space between the atoms of Fe. "Stuff" used advisedly in the previous sentence: the idea that a piece of iron isn't the same all the way through seems to come from an opposition to the idea of stuffs of things, as if iron, or anything else, could only be solid if the atoms were literally adjacent to one another. Though it's not clear what that would mean. After all, the atoms themselves are mostly empty space, too, right? The electrons aren't all touching the nucleus. (It's also not clear, actually, that one can't say that it's composed only of all the same thing, namely, Fe atoms. The empty space isn't an ethereal entity that also comes into the composition!) What, for that matter, is the solidity the iron cube appears to have? It looks impermeable by raisins; does it look impermeable by neutrinos? Or is it just that—in contrast to puffy gribenes—it looks as if it's not mostly empty space? (But then the puffs in the gribenes don't look as if they're empty space, they look like air bubbles. Air is also mostly empty space in the same way that iron is, but it doesn't look that way, does it?) It seems odd to say that it looks as if it has the solidity that would come from being nothing but Fe nuclei right next to each other.

"I don't believe they are solid (at least, not in the way they appear to be)" undermines itself: there doesn't seem to be another coherent way for them to be solid. On initial reflection, one may be inclined to say that cubes of pure iron aren't really solid, since they're mostly empty space; further reflection ought to lead one to the conclusion that that's just part of what it is for iron, or anything else, to be solid.

A further variation

A while ago I thought I'd write a blog post about §21 of Intention. Indeed, I've been thinking about doing such a thing for about 18 months. I have, as you may have discerned, not yet done so.

But I have expanded the list of poems rewritten to have, more or less, the content of "This Is Just To Say" (though this is not as good as the others):

Whoso list to snack, I know where is a plum,
But as for me, hélas, I may no more:
When last I did my housemate got so sore
I felt myself to be a no-good bum.
Yet had I by no means been stricken dumb:
"This is just to say I ate your fruit. For-
give me; it was delicious", said I, nor
was. Better in the end to just keep mum.

Who will these plums, I put him out of doubt,
As well as I may wind up in a jam.
There in marker, for him who would it eat,
Is written on a post-it round about:
Noli me edere, for breakfast I am,
And bitter for to taste, though I seem sweet.

On going the bloody hard way in eating ice-cream cones

Selected paragraphs from the introduction to How to Do Things Right by L. Rust Hills (wotta name!):

Now it may seem to some of you as you first get into this that the answers are harder than the questions, that the solutions in fact turn out to be far worse than the problems ever even thought of being. But that's because you don't yet understand the problems-and-solutions relationship. Anyone interested in doing something right, really right, is necessarily going to be much more intrigued by a problem than he is by a solution. If you are only interested in a solution—just any old simple solution—then the best thing to do is not even think about the problem. Most problems just go away—poof!—if you stop thinking about them.

Difference in degree of interest-in-the-problem creates the fundamental division of all mankind: between those who believe in getting things done, on the one hand, and those who believe in doing things right, on the other. Most of the complex problems we've got in this country today are the result of slap-dash, "can-do" men attempting to solve once-simple problems in careless ways that left a mess, left vicious half-solved problems, like wounded lions, in all our streets. …

Problems have their pride, you know, as well as a strong sense of self-preservation, and they quite naturally resist yielding up their existence to an inferior solution. But when a problem is confronted with a solution that demonstrates full appreciation and entire comprehension—matches it intricacy for intricacy, complexity for complexity, even absurdity for absurdity—then it gives way utterly to this flattery and understanding.

Since the "perfect" solution to a problem, the exact match-up, is unlikely to occur to anyone, a certain amount of overkill in problem-solving is quite obviously necessary. Thus what I present in this book (proudly) is a sequence of apparently complicated solutions to apparently simple problems. The fact that they may not work either is completely irrelevant. It's a whole new approach!

Having read his advice on "how to be kindly", in the first book of this three-book compilation, I am not quite sure what to expect in the third book, How to Be Good.

And this is the pen I use to write the recipes for my most delicious meals. I like to call it my

plume de nom.

Also, "heterostatic hypotension" is when you get all lightheaded on seeing someone else's proud, upright bearing.

I know neither of those is really up to the standards I used to pretend to maintain, but I'm rusty over here, sheesh.

Variations on a theme by Kenneth Koch

1. Then eat the cold plums, if that will move her;
If you can give yourself to the one half sucked out in your hand, give yourself to her too,
Till she cry "Lover, plum-eating, self-giving lover,
I must have you
beside the white
chickens!"

2. Do not say, my sweet, I am unkind
That I upset your day,
And having on your breakfast dined
I have just this to say.

True, your icebox now I loot
Of plums you'd set aside;
As cold and sweet as any fruit
That yet by me was tried.

Yet this nocturnal snack is such
As makes me none the worse:
I could not love thee, dear, so much
Had you ne'er inspired verse.

3. I ate the plums
That you were saving
Their sweetness was
What I was craving
Burma-Shave

The SEP entry on "Philosophy of Computer Science" is strange and wonderful

See for yourself if you don't believe me.

It is traditional for carping blog posts to work their way through their subjects line by line or at least section by section, which is (now that I review the article) indeed highly tempting. In fact, let's yield to the temptation, though only for some sections: §2.1, §4.1, and §6.1, though I also think §6.2 is not so hot. I will also now observe that the whole thing is quite superficial and proceeds mostly by way of rhetorical questions.

(After having written this post I realize that I didn't find a place to include this interesting post on undefined behavior, so I'll just stick it here.)

§2.1, "The Dual Nature of Programs"

I'll just consider the first and fourth paragraphs of this section. The first:

Many authors (Moor 1978; Rapaport 2005b; Colburn 2004) discuss the so-called dual nature of programs. On the face of it, a program appears to have both a textual and a mechanical or process-like guise. As text, a program can be edited. But its manifestation on a machine-readable disk seems to have quite different properties. In particular, it can be executed on a physical machine. So according to the principle of the indiscernibility of identicals (§3.3), the two guises cannot be the same entity. Of course, anyone persuaded by this duality is under an obligation to say something about the relationship between these two apparent forms of existence.

What, one wonders, do the authors mean by this. Consider the following:

1. Some source code lives always and forever in human-readable form; it is never compiled to anything else. I believe that PHP is (or was) like this. In that case, the source code can be executed on a physical machine (by an interpreter, but that's immaterial).

2. Some source code is never directly executed; it must be compiled. The executable can be executed on a physical machine; the source code cannot. (Or at least, not in the same way the executable can; there exist polyglot programs.) There doesn't seem to be any reason at all to balk at calling the source and the executable different entities, any more than there would be a reason to balk at calling the recipe and the cake different entities. (Or, perhaps less contentiously, calling Der Zauberberg and The Magic Mountain different entities, whatever one's ontology of fictional works is, or score and performance. (It occurs to me that this is perhaps not less contentious. But it should be!)) I take it the second paragraph is supposed to tell us why this is in fact problematic, and it does seem that, say, byte compilation is more like a series of transformations all of the same sort than performing a musical score is. But the evocation of the supposed peculiar difficulty is pretty unconvincing (also I don't think anyone refers to compilation as implementation).

3. Nevertheless, the means by which the authors seek to draw attention to the intuitive difference between source code and executable is faulty. True, one can write a program on a piece of paper, and edit it with a pencil and an eraser (or one could punch holes in cards oneself, I guess, with a steady hand) but more often one writes them using a computer, in which case it has, of course, "a manifestation on a machine-readable disk", which is, obviously, editable. And a compiled program is also editable, though not as easily.

It's also worth noting that even an executable is only actually capable of being run given a certain context; even something that has no language runtime or links to no external libraries will only be runnable by an operating system that understands its format (or by an emulator that does). This is independent of its representation on disk. (And for that matter its representation on disk is still the wrong thing to draw our attention to, because what we would presumably like to call the same file will be represented on a disk differently depending on the filesystem used.)

The fourth paragraph:

A slightly different perspective on these issues starts from the question of program identity. When are two programs taken to be the same? Such issues arise for example in attempts to determine the legal identity of a piece of software. If we identify a program with its textual manifestation then the identity of a program is sensitive to changes in its appearance (e.g. changing the font). Evidently, it is not the text alone that provides us with any philosophically interesting notion of program identity. Rather, to reach an informed criterion of identity we need to take more account of semantics and implementation. We shall return to this subject in §3 and §6.

This whole post actually really only exists because of the egregious badness of the fourth sentence in this paragraph: were it not for that I'd have found the article baffling but probably not been motivated to write about it. Here is the issue: the font in which source code is displayed is not a property of its text, any more than (e.g.) where the line wrapping occurs, or the color in which the text is displayed is. This is fairly close to exactly equivalent to arguing that if we individuate programs by their textual manifestations, then looking at your monitor through sunglasses creates a different program.

A much better example of a trivial change which we might not want to claim leads to a difference in program identity is the insertion of grammatically irrelevant characters—in many languages this can be done by fiddling with indentation or lineation—or by changing representations of characters. (Or even the insertion of comments, which are grammatically relevant.) But in the first case the reason for denying that they change the identity of the program seems close at hand—they're grammatically irrelevant, so they aren't really there at all. (Consider Lisp programmers, who traditionally incline to the view that the program is the AST, and that they're just writing a representation of the AST, and consequently occasionally claim that Lisp has no parentheses.) And really one can imagine a whole host of at least diverting questions here:

1. Have you got the same program after something that doesn't affect the AST but does make things clearer to the reader (e.g. alpha conversion (in the absence of quotation or other tricky things), or even just comments)?

2. After local changes that do affect the AST but shouldn't affect the semantics (e.g. eta conversion, though I believe in some type systems this can lead to different inferred types)?

3. After global changes that radically affect the AST but shouldn't affect the semantics (e.g. conversion to CPS in a language in which that won't completely trash the stack)?

4. Does the same source code compiled with different compiler optimization options produce different programs?

5. Is a polyglot quine the same program as itself?

§4.1, "Proofs in Computer Science"

It is averred that proofs in computer science are shallow and uninteresting, and do not employ mathematical abstraction, and this distinguishes them (to their discredit) from mathematical proofs. The sole example of a proof in computer science is one of the correctness of a straightforward algorithm for computing a factorial. It is obvious that all arguments in CS are about on that level, especially as regards abstraction. Or, I guess, look here. (I also wish to link to this post, which includes the marginally hilarious function definition

memoize :: Functor f => (forall a. (n -> a, [a]) -> f a) -> T f n
memoize f = let x = prop7 (f . lemma)
       in T (yoneda (fst x)) (memoize (snd x))

.) The cited statement about proofs in CS also seems hard to reconcile with the authors' reference to sophisticated type systems later, since one of the things people interested in sophisticated type systems are often interested in establishing is that the type system is sound and the type checker will terminate, which—as I understand it—tends to involve equally sophisticated logical systems.

§6.1, "Abstraction"

First, note the sentence "A more logical approach to the analysis of abstraction, that does have some strong advocacy (Wright 1983; Hale 1987).". Of course. We continue in a vein that makes one wonder if the authors actually know how "abstraction" is typically used in a CS context:

the conceptual investigation of abstraction in computer science is in its infancy. Colburn (2007) suggests that the distinction between abstraction in mathematics and abstraction in computer science lies in the fact that in mathematics abstraction is information neglect whereas in computer science it is information hiding. That is, abstractions in mathematics ignore what is judged to be irrelevant (e.g. the colour of similar triangles). In contrast, in computer science, any details that are ignored at one level of abstraction (e.g. Java programmers need not worry about the precise location in memory associated with a particular variable) must not be ignored by one of the lower levels (e.g. the virtual machine handles all memory allocations).

This is a shockingly terrible example of abstraction (but it seems to be a matter of information neglect on the part of the programmer), being just about the least abstract one could be. It doesn't even qualify as a toy example. One might also observe that frequently one wants to combine two values of the same type in such a way that the combining operation has a "default" that acts as an identity, without caring about precisely what the combination comes to or what the default is, and abstract over that. Naturally in order for this to be useful some specific operations will have to be defined—what would be the point, otherwise? But what would be the point of the exact same abstraction in mathematics if there were no particular mathematical structures that fulfilled it?

The extended stomach

JEH Smith, writing for the Chronicle, observes that "biologically speaking, all cooking is a form of extrasomatic predigestion, beginning a process of breaking down raw food through dicing, boiling, etc., that is subsequently continued by our digestive system". To make such an assertion is not, of course, to assert that, like the starfish, our stomachs are (even occasionally) outside our bodies.

Post Scriptum

HATRED of one's father at Victoria. Clapham, a nightmare of cream-painted plumbing and baths in the sky. Sorrow and Angst over the fish in the dining car. Then Dover, looking guiltily northward at the death of the spirit.

Which is to say, another way of looking at the role of objects and in particular that pesky carpet in Remainder is as an expression of Resistentialism.

Remainder is a book about Beisichsein

"[B]eing at one with oneself is an ideal with its roots in animal life", writes Terry Pinkard (Hegel's Naturalism, p 58), expressing an opinion which I too have long held [1]. (In fact, concern about some such idea has shown up in versions of research statements of mine, though such a concern has yet to manifest itself in much actual research, excepting an APA presentation on Schlegel and Nietzsche.) Why in animal agency? Because (again quoting Pinkard) "the animal acts in terms of the principles of its own nature", because (in a not uncommon trope that I always associate with Uexküll, since it was in him that I first encountered it) in the world of the animal there are only that-kind-of-animal-things, things whose significances are plain, and because for the animal there is no distinction between things as they are for it and things as they are in themselves. (Even the lark, says Heidegger, does not see the open.) The hungry animal seeks food, the endangered animal shelter, etc.; in their actions they do, as we would put it if talking of ourselves, what comes naturally. The only reason not to put it that way when talking of them is the suggestion that an animal might do something that does not come naturally, might do something not of its nature. (Uexküll, at least, was willing to recognize some plasticity in the natures of e.g. dogs; it's in their natures to acquire new objects, but even for him dogs are not able to see their objects as objects whose objecthood might thereby come into question.)

This is not to say, of course, that an animal always attains its end, or that every animal exhibits surefooted mastery of its environment, an impossibility given both predators and prey. Only that, on the one hand, its end is neither a question for an animal nor set before it as end, and on the other, its not having achieved its end is not something that could elicit a response such as: "Curses, foiled again!". One is at one with oneself at least partially in many accounts of absorbed activity, the fluent action (often confused with basic action, both by proponents and opponents of basic action) said to be characteristic of craftsmen: one is so to speak led on smoothly from one end to the other, successive actions being elicited by the objects worked upon, tools worked with, etc., the agency so to speak dispersed in the environment in a manner analogous to that of an animal—so long as nothing breaks down. But, of course, breakdowns are possible, and if one occurs, one will be called back to oneself, what one was doing now present to oneself as the unattained end. One could conceive of another model here, supra- rather than infrahuman, in which no breakdown is possible, not because the material is flawless, but because the actor is prepared in advance for all contingencies. No breakdown is possible for an animal because, no matter how unfriendly or alien the environment, its ends cannot be made problematic for it; no breakdown is possible for a god because no environment can be unfriendly or alien enough to recall it from action to contemplation. (Having the end is the same as accomplishing it. I suppose this elides the question of determining the end in the first place.)

Not only animals and gods have been thought to be at one with themselves in something like this fashion. The ancient Greek, for instance, "had not lost nature in his humanity" and was "at one with himself and happy in the sense of his humanity", says Schiller. Robert De Niro [2] "flows into his movements, even the most basic ones. Opening fridge doors, lighting cigarettes. He doesn't have to think about them, or understand them first. He doesn't have to think about them because he and they are one. Perfect. Real.", says the narrator of Remainder (p 24), having previously observed that De Niro "merge[s] with [the action] until he was it and it was him and there was nothing in between" (p 23). And just a page prior to that the narrator remarks that most of us—he formerly included—are like that with our basic physical abilities:

Walking, for example: now that's very complicated. There are seventy-five manoeuvres involved in taking a single step forward, and each manoeuvre has its own command. I had to learn them all, all seventy-five. And if you think That's not so bad: we all have to learn to walk once; you just had to learn it twice, you're wrong. Completely wrong. That's just it, see: in the normal run of things you never learn to walk like you learn swimming, French, or tennis. You just do it without thinking how you do it: you stumble into it, literally.

The narrator gradually regains his ability to walk without thinking of walking, but after beholding De Niro's perfection on the screen recognizes that in his larger deeds he's still as he was before his accident (one of the things he recognizes is that he was thus before his accident and not merely after):

Recovering from the accident, learning to move and walk, understanding before I could act—all this just made me become even more what I'd always been anyway, added another layer of distance between me and things I did. … I wasn't unusual: I was more usual than most.

The ambition and attempt somehow to overcome the state that he and more or less everyone else is in occupies, in one way or another, the rest of the book. At first he just looks for people who aren't "artificial", as he puts it; then, seeming to remember a non-artificial (but also nontrivial: not just walking) act of his, he seeks to reproduce it—on its face an odd approach since one dimension of what he finds objectionable is precisely the doubling of action in thought of action (lighting the cigarette perfectly, and thinking: "I'm lighting the cigarette perfectly", or even "I'm lighting the cigarette perfectly—like De Niro!"). But in fact something like this is the only reasonable way forward. After all: that's how we learn to walk, isn't it?—constant trials, until it's second nature.

Let us not concern ourselves with his many reenactments of scenes remembered or witnessed and concern ourselves henceforth with his original works—the bank heist and the back-and-forth plane flight. First, however, let us return to the imagined god-like Beisichseiende.

What makes the being of that being unattainable for beings such as we are? It's not for nothing that leading examples of fluent action occur in constrained realms—generally either the movements we use just for getting around, or some set of movements around which some kind of specialized practice has grown up: crafts, or sports, or the arts. (Not just movements, of course; these things involve, for instance, recognitional capacities as well. The ability to hear spoken English with comprehension, or, I suppose, tell at a glance that the jam has just set, for instance. But these still occur within constraints.) Importantly, first, when you've got some kind of practice, some things fall outside the practice and can be discounted; second, because the practice is set off within all of life, episodes in the practice can be returned to and events or actions within it reprised and, well, practiced. You can practice your fingering, or your performance of a given piece, and get better at it. And if, in the middle of a given performance, the ceiling collapses and you're knocked over by falling masonry, that does not reflect poorly on your abilities as (e.g.) a violinist: dodging falling objects is simply not within the violinist's remit. If you face a difficult decision in a chess game, you can, after losing, revisit the game (if you weren't recording it, you can revisit that decision) and see what responses were available to you at that point (or earlier). When you play your next game, you're starting over from the beginning: the games are disjoint events. The second doesn't happen later than the first in some scale of time native to chess. Consequently the same thing can happen again, and you can be better prepared.

You can't be practiced at life that way, something that people who recommend artistic self-fashioning would be advised to bear in mind: there are no trial runs, no repetitions of little bits that you can get better at, no seeing what went wrong after the fact and working out how to behave should the same thing occur again—it can't. The idiom which the genius of living would have to master includes every eventuality, falling ceilings included, and would have to get it right the first time, every time. Even if we discount a period of maturation, we could not possibly become able to encounter anything without breakdown, because there are just too many surprising things. (A theme that Millgram sounds vigorously.) Consequently we cannot expect that we, given that we are capable of the reflection and explicit bringing into view of ends as ends that characterizes breakdowns (i.e. given that we are not animals), will never actually be brought out of ourselves into such reflection (i.e. we are not divinely self-sufficient). This is also why I suspect the ideal of being at one with oneself of being a flight from the difficulties of the distinctively human [3]. (I once asked Rachel Barney about something not entirely unrelated to the preceding after a talk about the Stoics. She noted, in her reply, that the phronimos is rarer than the phoenix, and that there's only one of them at a time.)

De Niro can merge with all his actions (onscreen) because, duh, it's not really happening and do-overs are allowed. Outside of more or less artificial circumstances we cannot, in general, achieve a like merger with our action. The environment is, at least potentially, too recalcitrant. This is neatly dramatized by the bank robbery. The thing is rehearsed until all the participants have their parts down pat; these rehearsals happen, like practice chess games or any other rehearsal, in their own time, embedded within the lives of the pre-enactors. When they go out to actually rob the actual bank, they will, it is hoped, be perfectly at one with their actions, which in the interim will have become second nature to them. And there are some things that could conceivably arise (John McClane happens to be in the bank; a freak natural disaster sweeps through) that would not impugn their status as excellent robbers. In that respect the narrator's ambitions are realistic: the people he's assembling aren't to gain mastery at everything, but only in a limited arena. This in fact comes up explicitly in the early planning stages:

"I say 'ideally'," Samuels continued, "because this pattern is to both sides' great advantage. The robbers get their money and the bank staff don't get killed. What messes it all up is when a factor no one has anticipated and built into the pattern breaks in. … A have-a-go hero jumping one of the robbers, a hysterical woman who won't obey commands, someone who tries to run out fo the door …" (p 250; the second ellipsis is in the text.)

An extremely limited arena, in fact; the potential recalcitrance of the environment to our plans is demonstrated by something quite minor. During an early rehearsal (perhaps the first), one of the pre-enactors trips over a kink in the carpet. This is incorporated into the act and the pre-enactor becomes practiced at stumbling and catching himself. When rehearsals end, though, and the act is taken on tour to the actual bank, the carpet is flat, and the whole thing goes agley. The pre-enactors are brought out of their practiced movements and must come to understand the situation they now find themselves in before they can act, choosing to abandoning the ends they were previously absorbed in (one of them calls out for the "re-enactment" to stop, not yet having figured out that it's not a re-enactment and the others in the bank are unwilling co-participants). [4] It is appropriate that the narrator ends up in the highly constrained environment of an airplane, flying back and forth without setting down: here, at least, is an environment not specially set apart from the rest of the world which he can fully take in. (Until, after the book ends, the issue of fuel becomes pressing.)

[1] Obviously not only I; many have held it for much longer: "We love in [animals etc.] the tacitly created life, the serene spontaneity of their activity, existence in accordance with their own laws, the inner necessity, the eternal unity with themselves", quo' Schiller.

[2] I thought, prior to checking, that the narrator has this thought about John Wayne.

[3] Perhaps I should add "when this is individualistic", at least until I finish Pinkard's book—though societies also clash and I can't say I've ever been incredibly satisfied with e.g. McDowell's explanation of Aristotle's seeming lack of curiosity about, say, the customs of the Massagetae.

[4] I don't believe I noted this before but the narrator, throughout all of this, is in just the state of mind that he disliked at the beginning of the book, standing apart from it all and assessing it. I suppose that he more wants to observe fluid action than to partake of it himself—or he's in the double bind of wanting to partake of it and to appreciate himself partaking of it. He also, in his assessment of his fallen employees ("I looked at Two and Five lying on the floor. They seemed now less like acrobats than sculptures. The bag that had slipped from Five's hand and the gun that now lay beside Two's looked to me like wedges of surpluis matter stripped away to reveal them."), reminds me more than a little of Rönne: "Trotzdem verrichtete er weiter, was an Fragen und Befehlen zu verrichten war; klopfte mit einem Finger der rechten Hand auf einen der linken, dann stand eine Lunge darunter; trat an Betten: guten Morgen, was macht Ihr Leib", in "Gehirne", "Auf allen Tischen standen Geräte, welche für den Hunger, welche für den Durst", in "Die Eroberung".

Why tolerate Mark Johnston's religion?

I have not read Why Tolerate Religion?, but I have read its NDPR review and its bibliography, as a result of which I am unsurprised by the reviewer's assertion that the book "manifests little engagement with serious history of religious thought". I suspect, again based on the bibliography, that it does not manifest a great deal of engagement with the history of thought about religion; in particular, I wish the review had spent more time not simply critiquing the "four features that he says are, or may be, distinctive of religious belief and essential to religion as such" but going into how Leiter identifies them, and their broad adequacy. Is it true, in fact, that all the things we are apt now to call religions issue in categorical demands for action? Is that true of everything discussed in The Golden Bough, for instance (I don't know if Leiter observes a difference between myth and religion)? Is it true that Religion after Idolatry manifests culpable failures of epistemic warrant on Johnston's part? (Manifesting such a failure isn't itself one of Leiter's features, but it seems from the review that they jointly entail such a manifestation.)

Neglect of thought about religion is unfortunate in part because if one does want to come up with a catalogue of features characteristic of religion one has to start from some understanding of what religion is, to get one's topic into view, even if that understanding will be revised and sharpened as the investigation proceeds. But without study one is apt to simply recapitulate (in this time and place) a vulgar Christianity, as it latterly understands itself. (Latterly because, obviously, what was considered to be religion, or a religion, has not been constant; JZ Smith mentions in "Religion, Religions, Religious" that in the early 16th century, for instance, "religion" was just a category of customs and rites, not of beliefs, which (in the case of the beliefs of members of cultures encountered by Europeans abroad) "could simply be recorded as 'antiquities'"; that they yonder believe such-and-such about the world would not have made it into an account of their religion. That's reaching way back for a point that could also be made just in the 20th century with the increasing prominence of evangelicalism.) The idea that all religions essentially issue categorical demands for action and involve "explicitly or implicitly" a "metaphysics of ultimate reality" seem particularly likely to have such an origin. (I'm curious about that implicitness: it clearly has to be there because it would be absurd to claim that all religious beliefs involve a metaphysics of ultimate reality. But how implicit is the metaphysics allowed to be, and how determinate must it be? Implicit and indeterminate enough that just about any ordinary belief also implicitly involves such a metaphysics?)

A different (and excellent) Smith essay, "God Save This Honorable Court", demonstrates the ways that "a notion of self-evidence derived from using lay understandings of varied forms of Christianities" leads people (in the case of the essay, Supreme Court judges) to try to press the unfamiliar into familiar molds, assimilating Santeria to Christianity, and to not examine the familiar, illustrated with a series of Durkheimian takes on Lynch v Donnelly. It is very long, but I'm going to quote a substantial section of it, because I only wrote this post because I wanted to quote it (in what follows, ellipses in square brackets were introduced by me, and other ellipses were introduced by Smith into material he's quoting):

I quote, without intervening comment, two extracts from the majority opinion in Lynch v Donnelly … the first may be taken as an ethnographic description, the second as a statement by native informants. […]

Each year, in cooperation with the downtown retail merchants association, the city of Pawtucket, R.I. … erects a Christmas display as part of its observance of the Christmas holiday season. The display is situated in a park owned by a non-profit organization and located in the heart of the shopping district. The display comprises many figures and decorations traditionally associated with Christmas, including, among other things, a Santa Claus house, reindeer pulling Santa's sleigh, candy striped poles, a Christmas tree, carolers, cut out figures representing such characters as a clown, an elephant, a teddy bear, a talking wishing well, hundreds of colored lights, a large banner that reads "Seasons Greetings," and a creche. The creche has been on display for forty or more years. It consists of the traditional figures including the Infant Jesus, Mary and Joseph, angels, shepherds, kings and animals, all ranging in height from five inches to five feet. The crech is positioned in a central and highly visible location, an almost life sized tableau marked off by a white picket fence.

[…]

The display engenders a friendly community spirit of goodwill in keeping with the season. The display brings into the central city shoppers and serves commercial interests and benefits merchants and their employees. It promotes pre-Christmas retail sales and helps engender goodwill and neighborliness commonly associated with the Christmas season. It invites people to participate in the Christmas spirit, brotherhood, peace, and to let loose with their money.

[…] Let us begin by granting for purposes of argument the finding of fact by the Court: that the display consists of the copresence of sacred and secular items. In the Court's reasoning, religion would be present only if the exhibit consisted entirely of sacred symbols; that is to say, for the Court, following some generalized Christian prototype, religion is the sacred. Durkheim might reject both the Court's premise and its conclusion, while accepting its finding of fact. For Durkheim, religion is the oppositional relationship of sacred to profane. The presence of both are required for there to be religion. […]

In the case at hand, the native informant predictably stressed the economic and pragmatic consequences of the display. This understanding was, from Durkheim's view, erroneously accepted as true by the Court. The informant claimed that the exhibit "benefits merchants and their employees", it "serves commercial interest" […] Durkheim might remark that embedded in this economic discourse is a second language of sociality, specifically tied to a particular season. […] As translated by Durkheim, members of the Pawtucket society usually live dispersed in their separate homes, following individual biological and economic pursuits For Durkheim, this is the fundamental social translation of the profane. By contrast, in the shopping center, these same folk come together to "participate" in what Durkheim would define as a "moral community", his translation of the sacred. […] The coming together "into the central city" is a ritual that resignifies the sacred. In Durkheim's sense of the term, this coming together in the shopping center constitues Pawtucket's 'church'.

From this perspective, Durkheim might go on to argue two reinterpretations of the native informants' account. Both would reject the Court's understanding that Pawtucket's beliefs are secular. On the one hand, Durkheim might argue that, in religion, the experience of the collectivity is objectified, often as an impersonal force, sometimes as a supernatural being. In the native's erroneous understanding, it is this force (or being) rather than the coming together that is thought to "engender" the powerfully experienced sentiments of collective life. In Pawtucket, this objectification is variously named the "Season", the "Christmas Season", or the "Christmas Spirit". This is a sacred power in that it can be profaned. Think of the canonical example of Scrooge.

Alternatively, Durkheim might argue that as these sentiments are "engendered" by this periodic coming together, seasonal shopping in Pawtucket constitues that society's religious ritual.

Later Smith has Durkheim observing that while all come together to shop at the mall, after doing so they "disperse to their individual homes and denominational houses of worship, a dispersal that likewise markes the profane". (For all that Smith refers to mistaken objectifications of the collectivity as impersonal forces or supernatural beings, I'm not sure there's an objectionable metaphysical view underlying the informant's claim that the display engenders goodwill, etc.)

Failure to abstract

I have recently read Eric Marcus' Rational Causation, a book about which on the whole I wondered whether anyone who had not read the Rödl and Hornsby (and to a lesser extent Steward) to which he makes frequent reference would get a lot out of, and whether anyone who had would get much more than he or she had already gotten out of the other authors: and in general whether Marcus will find a receptive audience for his goal of showing that one can "resist the naturalistic approach [without] accepting dualism, epiphenominalism, or eliminativism" among anyone who wasn't already inclined to believe just that. But rather than saying anything interesting about the book on the whole I am in typical fashion going to niggle about something very minor and unimportant.

So! In the fifth chapter, when talking about object identity, Marcus somehow manages to avoid statements of the form "'object' and 'state' are formal categories", but much of what he does say points in that direction. A state is a thing with a principle of instantiation; an object is a thing with a principle of identity. Objects persist (and exist); states obtain and are exemplified. But saying something like "an object has a principle of identity" is explicitly not saying that anything that's an object has the same principle of identity that anything else that's an object has; rather, "objects instantiate sortals and … to instantiate a sortal is at least in part for there to be a principle of identity that determines the conditions under which the object persists. Objects, however, do not instantiate principles of identity as such, but rather only insofar as they are particular sorts of objects" (p 187). Ok: Goats and desks do not have the same principles of identity. Thus also the emptiness (but not total emptiness) of simply identifying something as an "object": this is a "dummy sortal" because it just identifies the formal category to which the thing being talked about belongs—we're talking about something that persists, has a principle of identity, has parts, etc., and not something that is, like a state, negatable, capable of instantiation, etc. That's not, by any means, not to say anything, but it is not to say anything about the particular principle of identity of what we're talking about (if we are talking about something with a particular principle of identity).

That all seems agreeable. But it makes the following argument, from only 15 pages later, utterly baffling:

Can the particularity of states be established by assimilating them to objects? Few would argue that states are objects. First, the concepts of part-hood and composition have no univocal application to objects and states. Second, objects and states do not have the same relation to space. Objects compete for space with other objects. (p 202)

But the concept of part-hood—like principles of identity!—doesn't have univocal application to objects and objects. The sense of "is the same as" is ineluctably informed by the identities of its relata; what it takes to be the same goat over time isn't the same as what it takes to be the same baseball game over time. The same, I would have thought, is the case with relations of part-hood: what it is for a goat to have a part is not the same as what it is for a desk to have a part, so why can't there be a different again way for being blue to have a part? It wouldn't do to object that we can't find a sense of part that attaches to states the way we do for one that attaches to goats because many particular states, which will (or at least in principle could) all have their own different ways of determining part relations, are ranged under the still formal category "state", whereas the many animals that fall under the category "goat" have the same way of determining part relations. First of all, we could just as well have taken not "goat" but "animal" as a leading example, which seems to get us close to a desired parallel. Second, to say that states are objects is just to say that any state has all the formal features that any (other!) object has, and that leaves it open that being a state is still further determinable. The relevant determinates may have further formal state-specific features in common, or there may be common ways that all states fulfill the formal requirements of objecthood. (Marcus at one point says that "both objects and states can be said to persist", but they persist in different ways, which seems to block this move for him, anyway.)

Here is an extended analogy. One might deny that complex numbers can be classed as numbers because there is no univocal sense of addition that applies to complex numbers and to reals, rationals, integers, and natural numbers. (For simplicity's sake let us deal specifically with addends, not numbers, and assume that there is a univocal sense of addition that applies to reals, etc.) It is true that there is no univocal sense of addition that applies to complex numbers and real numbers—to add complex numbers one performs the pairwise addition of the real and imaginary parts, and real numbers don't have real or imaginary parts, so one can't add them the way one adds complex numbers—but it is, at least, not clear why this means that complex numbers can't be addends. Whatever things we think an operation must exhibit to count as addition—let's say as a first stab that it be binary, commutative, associative, and symmetric, and have an identical left and right identity (which we might give the name $\emptyset$)—we can find for complex-number-addition:

1. $(a + bi) +_{complex} (c + di) \equiv (a +_{real} c) + (b +_{real} d)i$
2. $\emptyset \equiv 0 + 0i$

This is notationally confusing, since the $+$ in $a + bi$ doesn't really represent addition at all, so we might prefer to represent complex numbers as ordered pairs, in which case we will immediately see that the members of the pair don't have to be—as they were with complex numbers—real numbers, but anything that is itself an addend:

1. $(a_1,b_1) +_{a,b} (a_2,b_2) \equiv (a_1 +_a a_2) + (b_1 +_b b_2)$
2. $\emptyset_{a,b} \equiv (\emptyset_a, \emptyset_b)$

So we can say that ordered pairs of addends are themselves addends, even though "ordered pair of addend" is a determinable; we could get away with doing this at a stroke because all the determinate ordered pairs of addends are addends in structurally similar ways. There is absolutely no univocal sense of addition that applies to both real numbers and ordered pairs of complex numbers and strings, but we can add pairs of the former and pairs of the latter up just the same.

The problem with states and part-hood isn't that any sense of "having a part" that could apply to states wouldn't also apply to (other) objects, it's that there's no appropriate sense of having a part that applies to states in the first place. That's the challenge to someone who wants to claim that states are objects: objects generically have features $x$, $y$, and $z$, which relate to each other in such-and-such fashion and exhibit the following further properties—so now you must show me how states do that. Of course one could respond to this demand by disputing the formal characterization of objects—something to which Marcus' main argument may be vulnerable. As mentioned above, he says that both states and objects persist, but whereas objects exist, states obtain, and those are distinct things:

[B]ecause existing and obtaining are distinct, the sorts of presence and persistence that characterize objects and states are also distinct. Here, on my view, is the difference. In the case of a state, e.g., Jones's believing that Nixon was a genius, the presence of the belief is Jones's exemplifying a universal; and its persistence is his continuing to do so. In the case of an object, e.g., Jones himself, presence is just the continued existence of a particular at a time; and its persistence is its continued existence over time. (p 203)

One could put the thought like this, I think: objects and states are both—let's say—things, the salient formal feature of which is that things persist. But objects persist by existing, and states persist by obtaining. (There seems to be a further thought that the existing of an object is primitive (presence is existence at a time; persistence is existence over time) while the obtaining of a state is a matter of the exemplification of the state by something else (by an object? or just anything?), but that doesn't seem to the point to me.) Now one could resist this by attempting to establish that actually it's objects which persist and some sub-class of object which exist (and which is disjoint from states). If all that amounted to were a shuffling of labels around, there wouldn't be much point in it; but there might be some point if the thing now called "object" (which persists) retained some of the features of what was formerly called "object" (which exists).

Alexandrines

An alexandrine is a bit of light verse about Alexander the Great, right? Mithradates Eupator asked, on Facebook, about the identity of the first woman who slept with Alexander, revealing only that she was from Larisa, so I composed a limerick:

There once was a girl from Larisa
who went by the name of Melissa
with whom Alexander
began to philander
and was hotter than a plate of harissa.

And a double dactyl:

Tacitus flaccidus
The girl from Larisa who
Bonked Alexander and
Found him not Great,

Got from his teacher an
Aristotelian
Lesson in unity
On her next date.

And was so pleased with them that I decided to reproduce them here, which I now have done.

Wunderbar

"Please, let me explain.

"Like many of my countrymen, in my youth I was a great fan of tales of the American West, though my first exposure to such stories came via the series of films adapted from Karl May's novels of Winnetou and Old Shatterhand; only later, when I was able to watch them without dubbing or read them in the original, did I experience Westerns that actually came from America. When I was young you would hardly have guessed, to watch me playing at Cowboys and Indians with my friends, that I, but not they, would continue to be influenced into my adulthood by these tales of a frontier and its civilization: our play was of no great intensity, and certainly no more intense on my part than on theirs; it was, moreover, highly labile, not characterized by a particular devotion to that specific kind of make-believe.

"Something about those first films must have made more an impression on me than I realized at the time, however, and when I became aware that they were part of a genre unto themselves I set out quite deliberately to learn more about it, first tracking down May's novels, then other German Westerns (Red Westerns not exempted), and of course, as soon as I was up to the language, American Westerns. I did not care too much for the so-called "Revisionist" Western; I always preferred the earlier, if you will classical, takes, the heroism and ruggedness of their protagonists. My favorite of all, as you well know, was Jack Shaefer's famous novel, and the film, starring Alan Ladd, that was made of it.

"To bear such an uncanny resemblance to Ladd as you do is something that, I'm sure, most people would be far from regretting. You must surely have thought yourself lucky more than once! And for most people it would indeed have been a piece of good luck. I count it a piece of good fortune that I met you. You, I think, are more likely at this point to find it unfortunate. I of course recognized the resemblance straight off, and visions of you as Ladd in the role from which he was, for me, inseparable immediately began playing in my mind. I did not anticipate—could not have anticipated!—that you might ever have objected to what I saw as playful attempts to make you over in his image—and besides, they brought me such pleasure!

"I have since seen the film Vertigo, in which something not entirely dissimilar takes place; I can, now, recognize in it something untoward. But this recognition has, sadly, not been accompanied by a release from my obsession with Westerns and their characters. For as long as you are part of my life, I will never be able to see you except as a stoic gunfighter, translated out of his native time and place into, happily, mine. Whoever you are to your coworkers, your friends, your family, that is no matter: bei mir bist du Shane."

What is the formula on which the series [1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 …] is based?

My intermittent and slow progress through The 25 Years of Philosophy has brought me to the point (p 257) at which Förster raises the question in the title. Let others worry about the fact that any number of formulae can generate any finite sequence of numbers and rest satisified, for the moment, that such alternative formulae are often objectionably weird. My question is more prosaic. Förster claims that "there is no doubt that the path from the series to the formula lies in studying the transitions", and follows that up with a footnote saying that "an intellectual re-production of the transitions between 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, is necessary is order to realize that, form the third element in the series onward, every number is the sum of the two preceding numbers; hence the next number must be 34, and we are dealing with the formula for the Fibonnacci series, f_n = f_n-1 + f_n-2."

Ok. Let's grant that recognizing the recurrence relation is necessary to arrive at the formula for the series. But: why must the formula for the series explicitly be one that recapitulates the recurrence relation? Mightn't the right formula for the series be the closed form, f_n = (φⁿ - ψⁿ)/√5? The two formulae agree everywhere, but so do the competing definitions of a circle on the one hand as "a figure in which all the lines drawn from the center to the circumference are equal to each other" and on the other as "a plane figure described by a line of which one end is fixed while the other is moveable", which is evidently something of moment, since only the second "is adequate and … expresses the efficient cause" (p 95). Certainly the formula given by the recurrence relation is the one we're apt to come up with first, is easier to calculate with, and corresponds to the way the Fibonacci sequence was actually made known in the first place. But the closed-form solution is actually pretty easy to understand (though it may have been hard to arrive at), and there are other cases in which we would likely consider the closed-form expression the right one and the recurrence relation strangely indirect.

Consider the following sequence, for example: 0, 1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36 … Attendance to the transitions instantly reveals that the difference between successive numbers in the sequence are successive odd numbers, that is, that f₀ = 0 and f_n = f_n-1 + 2n-1. But I suspect that most people with the mathematical sophistication to recognize that would also be able to identify the following closed-form formula: f_n = n². Of course it is easy to get from the first of these to the second: the recurrence relation is simple enough that one can quickly see that f_n is the sum of the first n odd numbers. Since the sum of the n odd numbers is equal to the sum of the first n numbers plus the sum of the first n-1 numbers*, we have n(n+1)/2 + n(n-1)/2 = n².

In the case of the Fibonacci sequence we're unlikely to produce it by the closed-form expression, whereas we're unlikely to produce square numbers via the recurrence relation (a product of familiarity? I'd likely produce triangular numbers via the recurrence relation). But it seems to me that, quite aside from how one would write down the numbers, one grasps the sequence as a whole via the closed form better or more than via the recurrence relation. Why isn't that the formula for the sequence? After all, the recurrence relation defines each element of the series in terms of other elements.

* you can convince yourself of this fact, if you need to (I did), by gazing upon the following table:

1 2 3 4 5 ...
0 1 2 3 4 ...
1 3 5 7 9 ...

I suppose the more formulaic interpretation of this table is that the second column represents n, and the top n+1, so the third is 2n+1, i.e., the nth odd number.

What does it matter who's talking?

As is widely acknowledged, I know a thing or two about hermeneutics, and in particular the interpretation of literary texts. And, given the procedure followed in the effort linked in the preceding sentence, one might justifiably think I had at least some sympathy for the valorization of the critic/reader seen in, for instance, Victorian theorists of plagiarism (Recommended [1]) and, say, "What is an Author?", as well as the extremely moderate pushback evinced by Nehamas in his "The Postulated Author". Let us consider the last-mentioned, its moderateness and the question of its satisfactoriness, as a jumping-off point for much aimless rambling.

Nehamas is writing against a "radical pluralism" in interpretation according to which any two are equally good, or at any rate, neither of any pair is a more accurate recovery of the real meaning of the text. (One might be better than another for other reasons.) But at the same time he wants to resist the idea that what we're about when we interpret a text is just the recovery of the meaning that was—as it were—put there by an act of intending one meaning over another by the author. (Or: that the author meant something by the text, and we recover that—the thing the author meant.) The rejected position as characterized is pretty extreme, I think—the author is supposed to have performed an act of meaning. (All the worse if the author is supposed to have performed an "original" act of meaning, if that means that the author isn't beholden to his language—which seems to be the position that Barthes, for instance, argues against.) Against the first opponent Nehamas insists, quite rightly, that it won't do just to say, when confronted with one interpretation, "of course there are other possible interpretations, too, you know"; if one wants that to have any teeth, it must continue: "for instance, this one, which I am about to lay out …", at which point one can actually compare the two and see if they are plausibly matched competitors. Against the second he acknowledges that even the most banal, surface-level meaning is not simply there to be given to the reader but is itself also the product of an interpretive process. A summary part of the way through (pp 140–41):

Just as in scientific explanation there are no data immune to revision, so in literary criticism there are no readings impervious to question. But the fact about science does not show that apparently competing scientific theories are incommensurable and that therefore we cannot judge between them or that each such theory concerns its own distinct world. Similarly, the point about criticism does not show that different interpretations of a text are, even if apparently incompatible, equally acceptable or that a text has as many meanings as there are interpretations of it. Readings are neither arbitrary nor self- validating simply because they are all subject to revision. Newer readings are always guided by the strengths and weaknesses of those which already exist; and though this process may never stop, it is not for that very reason blind.

And a bit later on (p 144): "Meaning does not therefore reside in texts independently of all interpretation, there to be discovered once and for all or, if we are not lucky, to be forever lost; but this is not to say that it is fabricated. The critical monism which I advocate is a regulative ideal and identifies the meaning of a text with whatever is specified by that text's ideal interpretation." Ah! An ideal interpretation! Now we will see, perhaps, what it matters who's talking, or why it matters that we take it that some particular one be talking, or, finally, why it, literary meaning, isn't just fabricated. Or perhaps one ought to emphasize things differently: why it isn't just fabricated, but is in fact governed by a regulative ideal, an ideal that Nehamas then goes on to describe—how we move from reading to reading, and how we can't. Here, if he's going to differentiate himself from Foucault, is where things will get interesting. But I can't see how he does it.

Like his predecessors Nehamas differentiates between an author and a writer; shopping lists of Faulkner's had a writer but not an author (they would not be considered to be "by" Faulkner, for instance); for Nehamas the author is a postulate, something which allows him to say that "Meaning therefore depends on an author's intentions even if a writer is not aware of it." (145) without falling into the second of the rejected positions. The "author" is just the locus of the intentions assigned in interpretation, so there's no harm in saying that meaning depends on an author's intentions (we might think to capture the priority better by saying that an author's intentions depend on meaning, but I can't see that it matters much). "The author is postulated as the agent whose actions account for the text's features; he is a character, a hypothesis which is accepted provisionally, guides interpretation, and is in turn modified in its light." So far so good; nothing here with which Foucault would need to disagree, as far as I can tell, anyway; being the locus of authorial intentions is a leading function of the author.

But wait! There's more! The author isn't just an organizing principle postulated by the reader to be the "meaner" standing behind the text. The author bears some relation to the writer, though the precise relation is a bit obscure. On the one hand: "the postulated author [must] be historically plausible; a text does not mean what its writer could not, historically, have meant by it. For example, we cannot attribute to particular words meanings which they came to have only after the writer's death." (145). On the other, "in constructing the author of The Metamorphosis, we shall have to consider his close relation, perhaps his identity, with the author of The Castle" (147)—perhaps his identity? Maybe Nehamas just means this: perhaps we'll have only to consider Kafka_M's close relationship to Kafka_C, but perhaps we'll have to consider the identity of the two, without disputing that in either case they are identical, but it sure reads as if the identity of the writers doesn't necessarily lead to the identity of the authors. Which might lead one to wonder: if my interpretation of The Metamorphosis can ignore features of Kafka-the-writer as revealed in a study of The Castle, then why can't it ignore things that Kafka could or could not historically have meant? (Perhaps we learn that Kafka was unaware of something to which I think he's alluding in The Metamorphosis by looking at manuscripts of The Castle. If the author of the latter is the author of the former, then, for Nehamas, that sinks my interpretation—but if the two are merely closely related, well!)

One difficulty is the unclarity in what "its writer could not, historically, have meant" comes to. In many cases we have only general historical facts to go by. (I claim that word X means Y in this Elizabethan poem. You respond that the word isn't attested in that meaning until 100 years later. We can't very well ask anyone to explain what the word means in the context of the poem. But even this lexicographical argument is only so strong: words are used in a given sense prior to being attested in writing in that sense (and we're often wrong about the earliest attestation; lots of words in the OED are being antedated, thereby robbing Shakespeare of many first uses—which he had because people looked to Shakespeare first), and if you claim that the word isn't attested with meaning Y in the relevant period, I'll claim right back that it is—right here, in this poem.) But not always. Suppose that Larkin comes to me—suppose its the early 1980s, too—and says "I meant no such thing by "fuck you up". I meant that your parents do you harm, not that they beget you by means of a fucking." Well, could he, historically, have meant that they beget you by means of a fucking, your mum and dad? He didn't mean it. The words were available in that sense when he wrote, so someone could have. Nevertheless, someone might allege (Nehamas, following the Nietzsche of Life as Literature, might allege!) that Larkin couldn't have. But even if we agree that in whatever sense is relevant Larkin could have, we might reasonably ask what difference that makes, if we also agree that he didn't.

The difficulty here is this: why do we have to attend to what a writer could historically have meant? Suppose we're discussing Sonnet 73, and I claim that "choirs" is a metaphor twice over: it's a metaphor once for the branches in which the birds once sang, and, punning on "quires", for the sheets of paper on which he once wrote his poetry. You might resist this interpretation by claiming (falsely, in fact, but let's pretend, arguendo, truly) that "quires" is a newcomer to English. Why does that scupper my interpretation? If the answer is that the truth of your claim indicates that Shakespeare-the-writer couldn't have meant the pun, what of it? We are agreed that interpretation is not the recovery of what was meant by the person who wrote the text.

Now it is true, as a matter of fact, that we are not likely to accept my interpretation if your claim is correct. No matter how interesting an interpretation is, it is unlikely to satisfy us if we think that it couldn't describe what the writer was up to; we have to consign it to the bin labelled "pretty to think so". (Or not; after all, this is part of the reason we are confident in rejecting the claim that Poe was talking about Princess Di when he asked "Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car?".) But that, again, is something that Foucault can acknowledge. The concept of an author isn't useful just because it serves as the locus of intentions for a text, it also embodies "a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses; in short, by which one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of fiction" ("What is an Author?", 119). And he acknowledges (on the same page) the utility of this limitation:

It would be pure romanticism … to imagine a culture in which the fictive would operate in an absolutely free state … I think that, as our society changes, at the very moment when it is in the process of changing, the author function will disappear, and in such a manner that fiction and its polysemous texts will once again function according to another mode, but still within a system of constraint …"

Nehamas, it seems to me, is describing a system of constraint, a system that limits the interpretations that we find satisfactory or even minimally acceptable. But I have a hard time seeing why the methodological strictures he lays down amount to anything more than a description of what happens to be current critical practice, rather than guidelines that any interpretive practice would have to be beholden to, lest they produce interpretations that are simply wrong. And any justification of those strictures would, I think, be very difficult for him to pull off, without falling into the writer-as-meaner paradigm.

One ought to ask what our interest in literary interpretation is. Here is an interesting case. It seems to me that the "author" whose death Barthes announces in "The Death of the Author" is not that dissimilar from the artist whom Danto portrays, distinctly more positively, in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: someone to stand apart from and behind the work, making it mean what it means, such that it forever more has that meaning. (Which is why if you said, pointing to a red canvas, that it depicted the crossing of the Red Sea (the Israelites having already crossed, and the Egyptians having been drowned), you could be wrong—that red canvas is actually that clever bit of Moscow landscape, "Red Square"—even though they're visually indiscernible, they've been given different meanings by their painters.) Suppose we take such an attitude not only to visual artifacts but, with Barthes' foe, written works as well, and consider what happens when someone quotes Richard III: "now is the winter of our discontent". That utterance is verbally indistinguishable from (part of) Shakespeare's text, yet note: we either have to say that the utterer has, though he has made no mistake regarding any individual word he has said, misquoted Shakespeare, or that he has not said anything at all yet—because in the play, "is" is an auxiliary, not the main, verb. If someone says "now is the winter of our discontent", he's using Shakespeare's words, but in a significance of his own. (Or anyway: not in Shakespeare's significance.)

The literary text is out there and can be taken up again and anew in different ways by each new comer; one of the reasons to resist the view of interpretation on which we're just trying to recover what the writer put there is that it gets our interest in such texts wrong. (It also raises the question: well why didn't the writer just tell us that?) This isn't just another instance of my occasionally aired frustration with the idea that artworks are supposed to make statements, since sometimes we are interested in works, especially prose works, for some meaning or other. But those meanings can be as personal as you please. Perhaps they're prompted by the work, or perhaps it seems as if the work has now given us the words to express (or properly experience) something for the first time. But such a significance is one the work has for the reader, and it is not arrived by digging up what the writer is supposed to have left there.

In this respect literary works really do, I think, have some of the features that Pippin (and at least sometimes Nehamas) like to ascribe to intentional actions generally. Cavell in fact explicitly discussed the two together, in "A Matter of Meaning It" (apologies for the length of the quotation, I am writing this by the seat of my pants, you know):

On my interpretation of La Strada, it is a version of the story of Philomel: the Giulietta Masina figure is virtually speechless, she is rudely forced, she tells her change by playing the trumpet, … Suppose I want to find out whether Fellini intended an allusion to Philomel. If I ask him, and he affirms it, that may end any lingering doubts about its relevance. Suppose he denies it; will I believe him take his word against my conviction that it is there? In fact, my conviction is of the relevance is so strong here that, if I asked Fellini, I would not so much be looking for confirmation of my view as inquiring whether he had recognized this fact about his work. … [T]ake a stock example: you know that firing a gun is making a lot of noise, but only in special circumstances will make the noise be (count as) what it is you are intending to do. But perhaps that is irrelevant: "It is still true that anything you can be said to have intended or be intending to do is something you know you are doing. Either Fellini did or did not know of the connection with the Philomel story. If he did not know then it follows that he did not intend the connection. If he did know then that connection may or may not have been intended by him. In all these cases, what he knew and what he intended are irrelevant to our response. It is what he has done that matters." But it is exactly to find out what someone has done … that one investigates his intentions … There is a child asleep in that house; or terrified by noise; or the noise is a signal of some kind. Suppose he hadn't known. Very well, it can be pointed out to him; and now, should he go on firing the gun, what he is doing will be differently described. We might say: his intention will have altered. … SUppose Fellini hadn't thought of Philomel. How am I to imagine his negative response to my question—when, that is, I find that it doesn't matter what he says? Am I to imagine that he says, "No. I wasn't thinking of that," and there the matter drops? But one would not accept that even in so simple a case as the firing gun: he may not have thought of it before, but he had better think of it now. I am not aesthetically incompetent (any more than I am morally incompetent when I point out that a child is asleep or terrified)…" (Must we mean what we say?, pp 230–32; bolding added)

Some of this is, I think, confused—if I find out something new about the house next to which I am firing my gun, then I "had better think of it now" when I consider whether or not to keep shooting, and if I do keep shooting, I can't very well plead ignorance. (I might still plead double effect!) With respect to what is Fellini supposed to think of the connection Cavell points out? Whether or not to continue being the person who directed La Strada? His direction is in the past—and Cavell doesn't suggest that my finding out about the child in the house changes the character of the shots already fired. The intentions are a red herring in the retrospection of the action: I the firer can freely acknowledge that the shots frightened the child and that I executed the shots, without needing to acknowledge that I am at fault for frightening the child or that I did so intentionally. The shots and their actual effects in the world are in that respect independent of what I was intentionally doing.

How is it supposed to stand with La Strada? Cavell insists that he is not aesthetically incompetent, and puts that on a par with his not being morally incompetent either, but we needn't think that his finding a parallel to the story of Philomel in La Strada is like his finding a frightened child in the house. (It's significant that Cavell draws the parallel between aesthetic and moral competence, and not aesthetic and perceptual competence.) He discerns certain things in La Strada, and certain salient similarities in the story of Philomel, and he can present those even to Fellini, in such a way that even Fellini must acknowledge, or if not dispute, Cavell's case. (Even someone who finds a personal significance in a work of art ought be prepared to defend how he comes by that interpretation to someone else, even if neither party manages to convince the other. Otherwise we have a "feeble rejoinder, a retreat to personal taste" (WMM 91)—haven't we? "Well, I like it", shorn of an interpretive "because …".) And Cavell doesn't need to confront Fellini—or the shooter—with what he's discovered about the film or the house, though that might, admittedly, be satisfying.

If I am interested in a movie, or a literary work, I am probably not interested (except for academic reasons) in the attitudes of its writer. I am likely interested in what I can make of the work, and in doing so I need not take the writer's attitudes to be dispositive at all. I will care about the strength of the case I can make for the significance I find in the work—and so will take other interpretations and objections to my own into account—in that respect I will deploy the concept of the author as a unified locus of intention for the work. But why should I care, in principle, about the writer's intentions, or even what it's historically plausible for the writer to have intended? The text is there; I can take it up.

[1] Irrelevant for present purposes but that book contains a great quotation from E.F. Benson: "Indigestion is the mother of remorse; shellfish bring near to us the sense of sin."

ok!

I guess I will probably never write that post reflecting on having taught Nietzsche. Instead I am reduced to noting two of the many things that bothered me in reading the secondary literature (both, oddly, involving Aaron Ridley). One is a bit from Ridley's Nietzsche's Conscience in which he quotes GM III.27, "in the end the call always goes forth to the lawgiver himself: submit to the law you proposed", to describe (and support his description of) the taming and interiorizing of the warlike nobles—they become administrators, which means less time to release their untoward urges in battle etc., and this comes to involve the promulgation of codes of law rather than one-off decisions, and eventually they too must submit to the law. But the context of the quotation is quite different: in the context in which he says what I've just quoted, Nietzsche is giving voice to an oft-repeated theme of his, that Christianity brought itself down. Immediately prior to mentioning the call that goes forth he quotes a long passage from GS 357 to that effect; immediately after he reiterates it: "Christianity as dogma perished of its own morality; in this manner Christianity as morality must now also perish."

The second comes from "Nietzsche on Art and Freedom", which makes much of BGE 188, using it to support the claim that for Nietzsche freedom means something like the mastery under constraint (under the tyranny of capricious laws!) characteristic of great artists, virtuoso musicians, and, as Ridley notes, fluent speakers of a language. I think there are various problems with the positive thesis and the argument, but Ridley uses the passage in a way that abstracts from its context in an odd way. Consider this claim of his:

My quotation from section 188 picked it up at the point at which Nietzsche mentions language, and speaks of ‘the metrical compulsion of rhyme and rhythm’. But we needn’t appeal to poetry to see what he means. A person who insisted, for example, that ‘submitting abjectly’ to the ‘capricious’ rules of grammar and punctuation inhibited or limited his powers of linguistic expression would show that he had no idea what linguistic expression was

Perhaps so! But Nietzsche speaks of languages—he doesn't speak of speakers. In fact in that passage he is very much unconcerned with individuals. The "long unfreedom of the spirit" isn't the means by which those spirits became free, it's the means by which the European spirit became strong, ruthless, and subtle. The "obedience over a long period of time and in a single direction" gives rise to such things as virtue, art, music, and dance—not virtuous persons, artists, musicians, or dancers, though certainly also them (how not?). And it ends quite explicitly:

"You shall obey—someone and for a long time: else you will perish and lose the last respect for yourself"—this appears to me to be the moral imperative of nature which, to be sure, is neither "categorical" as the old Kant would have it (hence the "else") nor addressed to the individual (what do individuals matter to her?), but to peoples, races, ages, classes—but above all to the whole human animal, to man.

188 is in part five, "Natural History of Morals"; it makes sense that it wouldn't discuss the individual but, instead, what sort of process led to the customs we now have—a long process of shaping, perhaps not disanalogous to, but on a much larger and generic scale than, artistic training. The very next section, 189, starts off mentioning "industrious races"; the closing four sections are explicitly general. And one might wonder what Nietzsche means by "art" in these sections, anyway—§192 (and others on a similar theme elsewhere) suggest that the bar for being an artist is really quite low.

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.)

I do not want to moralize

Robert Pippin (in "How to Overcome Oneself: Nietzsche on Freedom"):

…Nietzsche adds something that is easy to overlook.

How is freedom measured, individuals as in nations? By the resistance which has to be overcome, by the effort it costs to stay aloft. One would have to seek the highest type of free man where the greatest resistance is constantly being overcome.

Nietzsche here is most interested in a sort of psychological self-relation as constitutive of freedom … But what is this sort of self-relation? What counts as self-mastery in this sense? (pp 76f)

But nothing so far cited has explicitly referred to self-overcoming or -mastery; the resistance in the quotation is not obviously inner or coming from one's self. Later:

But the agency issues seem to me clearly present. This is so even though neither Nietzsche nor Zarathustra ever simply encourages us to "overcome yourselves." (The issue seems to be the proper acknowledgement and endurance of the self-overcoming character of life, an orientation that itself, as we shall see, has several social and historical conditions for its possibility.) (p 80).

Now Nietzsche, Gay Science 304 and 305:

304. By doing we forgo.—Basically I abhor every morality that says: "Do not do this! Renounce! Overcome yourself [überwinde dich]!" But I am well idsposed toward those moralities that impel me to do something again and again from morning till evening, and to dream of it at night, and to think of nothing else than to do this well, as well as I alone can! …

305. Self-control [Selbstbeherrschung]—Those moralists who command man first and above all to gain control of himself thereby afflict him with a peculiar disease, namely, a constant irritability at all natural stirrings and inclinations and as it were a kind of itch. Whatever may henceforth push, pull, beckon, impel him from within or without will always strike this irritable one as endangering his self-control: no longer may he entrust himself to any instinct or free wing-beat; instead he stands there rigidly with a defensive posture, armed against himself …

Let it be hastily said that Pippin can and does, of course, adduce plenty of Nietzschean texts in favor of his position and I am pretty sure it can be rendered workable in the light of GS 304 and 305: but it's rather remarkable that they are not mentioned at all in the paper.

Is Infinite Jest experimental?

Two events of about a week ago conspire, at a temporal distance, to produce this post; they are a conversation (or set of conversations) about fiction on a self-conscious quest for something new¹, in the course of which I was reminded of an album by Tatsuya Nakatani, or rather its liner notes (also by Nakatani), and this post of Adam Kotsko's, in which he refers to David Foster Wallace as an author of experimental fiction.

Is he, though? Is Wittgenstein's Mistress, described by Wallace as "pretty much the high point of experimental fiction in this country", experimental fiction? (It's certainly a high point of something.) The relevance of Nakatani's liner notes is this: at one point in the text (I can't quote exactly since the CD (Primal Communication) is buried in a box somewhere), he raises the question of what kind of music it is that he plays. It isn't, he says, jazz, and that is surely true, though the kind of thing he does is ultimately derived genealogically from jazz. Nor, he says, is it "free improvisation", and there's truth to that as well; I bought the CD after hearing him perform a solo percussion performance, a single uninterrupted set of about 40-50 minutes), and the CD itself is a solo percussion performance, uninterrupted, about 50 minutes, and recognizably the same general program as the performance I had heard. (You can hear something cut from the same cloth yourself.) IIRC he doesn't directly address the "non-idiomatic improvisation" tag, but that's not really a useful classification anyway in various ways, and arguably it wouldn't fit either. He goes through some other candidates, and mentions along the way that he doesn't consider what he plays to be experimental music either, because he knows what he's doing.

Generally, of course, people call music "experimental" based on how it sounds, not based on the performer's attitude toward it, with the result that the same fate has befalled "experimental music" that tends to befall any stylistic classifier that has a preexisting descriptive content (e.g. "modern"; "noise"—I believe I've mentioned before on this very blog a complaint I encountered long ago, that the classics of noise, things like Metal Machine Music, don't sound noisy anymore, not like today's noise—nothing fails like success); it's the great virtue of tags like "rock" or "jazz" that they don't, or anyway, to the extent that they do, it's pretty tenuous. But I like Nakatani's take on it; anyway, if "experimental" were just a stylistic term, there would be no sense in Adam's (perhaps accurate) contention that experimental fiction is regarded as a resented duty. It might be a duty because important cultural work is being done there, it's the matrix whence new techniques, new concerns, new whatevers emerge; but if it just means (in the musical case) noisy, arrhythmic, aharmonic, amelodic, perhaps painful to hear, then why should anyone be concerned? No one need take an interest in the things that freak the squares, because they freak the squares. And that kind of thing could simply become old hat, after all, once it is no longer experimental in the sense of pushing forward. Similarly, natch, in the literary case; certainly, no one producing texts like "Welcome to the Funhouse" now could plausibly be said to be writing experimental literature. A resented duty because—let's face it—these are experiments that can fail, and certainly can fail to have lasting interest (something that I suspect is true of the Barth), whether failures or success.²

And this idea that one's own sense of trying something out, trying to figure out how a technique does or can be made to work, as a component of the result's being experimental, chimes, I think, with something else I find sympathetic, namely, Josipovici's take on what renders something modernist—a sense that certain prior methods can't simply be used anymore, that there's a problem, in fact, about the enterprise as a whole: so that, again, merely stylistic criteria can get it wrong.

So we would require a certain amount of self-doubt or uncertainty regarding what one is up to, and this, given what we know about him, Wallace probably did have. Though really his writing seems too assured, in general, for me to give that much weight; anyway, I'm not really interested in diagnosing whether or not Infinite Jest is experimental. (For the most part I would say: no, it's just long.) Wittgenstein's Mistress, too, seems so much the product of someone who knows precisely what he's after that it's hard for me to look on it as experimental, though, again, it was the first book in that telegraphic style that Markson published. (Surely, though, he had it down by The Last Novel!) Contrariwise: Nufer's Never Again doubtless is an experiment, an experiment in trying to write a novel in which no word appears more than once, and, though he did do that, and there are lessons to be learned from it and the effects he's led to employ, I think it must be judged a failure, since it is nearly unreadable and mostly unengaging. (It is nevertheless exciting, though.) We would also require, as the remark about someone producing Barth-like stories these days indicates, that it actually be new; techniques formerly experimental have become part of the common vocabulary these days (free indirect discourse: once experimental, now ubiquitous). This is on the one hand a further objection to the purely stylistic (or … auditory?) construal of "experimental", since that construal, I think, can't account for this Barthian fact, whereas the reason that one couldn't experiment along Barthian lines anymore is that (though one personally may be fumbling with that kind of authorial intervention) we now know how it's done. Even if most people still find it off-putting. But the non-stylistic construal is perhaps uncomfortably teleological (not, to repeat myself, that I think that the person experimenting need have the telos of enriching the common stock of techniques). And it too could be seen to encourage something like philistinism: since it wishes to say that the experiments can also be failures, it thereby gives someone who doesn't care about experimental stuff a good excuse for ignoring it: why not wait until they've got their stuff sorted out, anyway?³ And really I think it's a good question why one would be interested in the new (music, literature, etc.), just as such—which is probably why "experimental" so often does slide into a description of a style: the style that was new at the time the person employing it liked it.

Having now run out of steam, I will unceremoniously conclude this post, without any real conclusion.

1. Prompted by the desire for a literary parallel to the sorts of compositions Cavell mentions in "Music Discomposed"; suggestions from others included Caucasian Chalk Circle, the nouveau roman, and the theatre of the absurd; from me myself, "Welcome to the Funhouse", Never Again, and Roussel.

2. Their successes would often result in part in their being taken up more broadly, though it is not necessarily the case that that's what the experiments would be for, as in fact has happened with music in many cases; jazz musicians mining avant-garde European compositions for krazy harmonies, or various kinds of actually pretty out-there pop/hip-hop production in the last decade being prominent examples. (If I knew more about the latter I could produce more, or any, examples offhand; I think, actually, the the Bomb Squad long ago had pretty advanced production techniques, whence Ken Vandermark's dedication of a tune to Hank Shocklee.) Dodecaphony is a staple of movie soundtracks! At one point in one of the conversations mentioned in the first paragraph of the post I thought it would be amusing to consider "Reading Barth after Duck Amuck", but it turns out that—in a reversal of the way these things usually go—Barth's stories really did come after Duck Amuck, by over a decade.

3. Though as long as I'm being irenic, it's not as if I think people should be interested in experimental stuff. I myself prefer things that I think are successes! Even if many of those things would fall under the "stylistically experimental" label.

A technique that was old before it became avant-garde

Here is the description of the procedure in Steve McCaffery's "Dark Ladies" (nb link goes to a PDF download):

The Dark Ladies emerged from the deletion then reconstruction of Shakespeare's sonnets. Only the end-rhymes and their sequence are retained, italicized [except in at least one case] and embedded throughout the freely reconstructed poems. Each poem comprises two versions of each sonnet, [sic] the first, preserves the end-rhymes in reverse order; the second in their proper one. I allowed myself the liberty of removing some archaicisms and replacing them with their current synonyms; hence "thou" becomes "you" and "becomest" becomes "becomes".

One can question the aptness of the word "reconstructions" there, and also, I think, the interest of the reconstructions; after all, it's not too hard to write to a list, even if the items in the list have to appear in order. But the interest is diminished not only because the content of the reconstructions is so hodgepodge and is somewhat incoherent, but also because a very similar idea has been seen before, with niftier results, too.