I too have my indignant hours, but I hide them because impotent indignation is ridiculous. Because I couldn't be proud, I became humble to save myself the shame of becoming mean.
His tenderness is melancholy tinged with decency, his tranquility has the flavour of resignation.
Born to love, damned to indifference.
People speak ill of lotteries without thinking that they are the only form of speculation known to the poor. To ban the Sunday draw would be to deprive men and women whom reality has given nothing anyway of the entire field of dreams.
Reason, put to sleep so clumsily, let its cry ring out more than once in the middle of the orgy of heartfelt emotion.
In winning a loving heart, you gain a fruitful grateful field, where you reap more in happiness than you sow in hopes.
Too much trust often proves stupid, too much mistrust always proves a misery.
The experience had excited both his heart and his mind, like a stone thrown into a swamp.
The wild shoots of his mean spirit shot up suddenly as he was struck by the sunbeams of unexpected good fortune.
Too weak either to better himself or become a total scumbag, he wanders along the broad path between regret and impenitence.
Ivy-like soul which has to have something to coil round and in its needy coiling takes every stick for a cedar tree.
The body is the stubborn worshipper of life and rebels against the soul's graveyard hankerings.
He has a son - you know the sort of thing that happens to so many fathers.
In his case faults and weaknesses are wild flowers, not poison weeds.
Ghosts whose spirits stray about after the bodies they've sloughed off have been laid in earth are not that terrifying. But the innumerable ghosts who have buried their spirits - who have carried their better selves to an earthly grave and pursue their haunting activities in broad daylight by means of bodies without the least trace of spirit or wit - now, they're scary.
Superstition and fear are the Muses of feeble spirits.
To be done with the interregnum of boredom and set mind, spirit, wit on the throne again.
To avoid frightening people, fate sometimes assumes the mercurial expression of pure chance.
The nightingale of love likes best to strike up its song in the dark grove of the forbidden - only rarely on the military road of duty.
The past is my capital, memory the interest I live off.
The deeper I plumb the dark domain of my ideas, the more surely I come upon the abyss of my contradictions.
Love is a dream, marriage a business.
We lost what was ours by nobler means than she won what's hers.
Illusions take leave of the human heart slowly, in single drops.
Don't take the false steps of the spirit for necessities of the heart.
Female enthusiast gazes at the moon and recalls the time when she and the earth still had something in common.
A true businessman is a great oddity - what we're talking about is a man who has forced his entire being into the columns of a double-entry account - who has made of himself an artificial calculating machine - who has torn his heart painfully from his breast, has trampled all the fair flowers of life into the ground just as he has its illusions, who has put down pebble-mix over his earthly portion of the garden of paradise so he can stack up bundles of saleable produce - having become an artifical being, hearkening no more to the nightingale's song, etc. . .
While reality howls like a storm the ideal slumbers serenely in the whisper-filled chamber of the imagination.
How lavishly he expresses in twenty sublime words what can be said in a single syllable - he's obviously gifted as an author.
(Trans. C.S.)
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Monday, December 21, 2009
Adam Soboczynski: Down with Bologna! (Die Zeit, November 26)
[For all who look on with consternation at that vast process of macadamisation (astroturfing?) taking place within Australia's once-venerable universities, voilà a comment about the mother of all attempts to wind back universities' social and intellectual functions, taking place in Europe. Some of the most malign effects are being felt in the nation that, in a grand act of cultural high-mindedness some two centuries ago, gave birth to the modern university system. However the endeavour to contest bureaucratic efforts to consign higher education to the iron cage would appear to be Europe-wide. CS]
Is the noble student idler making a comeback? For years universities have been trying to make better, more efficient human beings out of German students. Their cumbersome degrees have been made tauter, their performance is now being controlled down to the finest details, their timetables are tightly packed. But recently the damned good-for-nothings have been blocking the lecture theatres and taking to the streets with all sorts of colourful demands: They don’t want to pay student fees. They say new courses are over-regulated and should be abolished. They say they can’t freely grow and thrive. In short: German students want the idle life again.
And they are completely justified. There’s an honourable tradition at German universities, mainly in the humanities, of studying a bit of this and that with no particular direction. Apart from anything else, it also goes back far too far to be eliminated within a few years. When the American writer Mark Twain visited Heidelberg in 1878 he was amazed how few regulations there were at German universities. Students, he noted, “are not admitted to university for a determinate period of time and so it’s probable that they’ll switch courses. They don’t need to sit exams to be admitted to university. . . They just pay an admission fee of five or ten dollars, receive a student card that gives them access to the university’s facilities and that’s all there is to it. They choose the subjects they want to study and enrol in the course, but they can also take a break from coming to lectures when they like.”
Ten years ago, these observations, made over 130 years ago, would still have characterised German students exactly. Fashionably put, the idle life was the student’s sole psychological indicator. And the idle life, if you look at it properly, by no means meant laziness (which there no doubt was as well), but a way of life that was bound to conjure up social envy: German students happily stopped coming to seminars given by uninspired professors. With a keenness that went beyond all reason, they devoted themselves to their own particular likings, expressed their preferences for the classes of charismatic lecturers (which in those days they could still for the most part freely choose), read Kafka stories with curious abandon and then two semesters later handed in a 60-page assignment that was not just accepted without complaint but also given top marks – something that today would already be impossible for logistical reasons.
If a few of the official tasks that the student idler had to complete were unpleasant, then they were the kind of business he sat through with mocking lack of interest – end-of-semester grades had no bearing on the grade he graduated with. He was hard-working in a way you can only actually call idling in the sense of actively idling around, being on the look-out. And now and again it was precisely those students who had favoured wild, undirected or unforced ways of thinking, disruptive individualism or originality, who went on to careers. Those who shunned precisely what today’s universities consider their holiest values: set courses with set contact hours and set fees, professionally relevant practice-exercises, standards of comparison and control, an administrative apparatus that runs rings round itself in its mad desire to evaluate and accredit; mechanical attempts to attract funds from third parties via time-consuming applications; inter-disciplinary go-getting which has a whiff of the collective farm about it and is the opposite of self-contained intellectualism and learned poise (these have no measurable market-value and so are scorned).
In other words, there was a degree of disorder, of stubborn self-assertion, of smoke-blown lack of bourgeois conformity within universities which couldn’t but incense the reformers who came to widespread prominence in the 90’s, the well-schooled financial advisers, who were concerned about German competitiveness. It was regularly commented that the reformers’ zeal had its origins in the very latest brand of free market radicalism. Indeed, no one actually even took the trouble to conceal it in the new bachelors and masters degrees: student performance is calculated according to “workload”, that is to say according to the amount of labour involved, students collect “credit points”, universities’ stated aims are defined using the plastic language of “mobility”, “flexibility”, “practical relevance” and “competition”.
Is the noble student idler making a comeback? For years universities have been trying to make better, more efficient human beings out of German students. Their cumbersome degrees have been made tauter, their performance is now being controlled down to the finest details, their timetables are tightly packed. But recently the damned good-for-nothings have been blocking the lecture theatres and taking to the streets with all sorts of colourful demands: They don’t want to pay student fees. They say new courses are over-regulated and should be abolished. They say they can’t freely grow and thrive. In short: German students want the idle life again.
And they are completely justified. There’s an honourable tradition at German universities, mainly in the humanities, of studying a bit of this and that with no particular direction. Apart from anything else, it also goes back far too far to be eliminated within a few years. When the American writer Mark Twain visited Heidelberg in 1878 he was amazed how few regulations there were at German universities. Students, he noted, “are not admitted to university for a determinate period of time and so it’s probable that they’ll switch courses. They don’t need to sit exams to be admitted to university. . . They just pay an admission fee of five or ten dollars, receive a student card that gives them access to the university’s facilities and that’s all there is to it. They choose the subjects they want to study and enrol in the course, but they can also take a break from coming to lectures when they like.”
Ten years ago, these observations, made over 130 years ago, would still have characterised German students exactly. Fashionably put, the idle life was the student’s sole psychological indicator. And the idle life, if you look at it properly, by no means meant laziness (which there no doubt was as well), but a way of life that was bound to conjure up social envy: German students happily stopped coming to seminars given by uninspired professors. With a keenness that went beyond all reason, they devoted themselves to their own particular likings, expressed their preferences for the classes of charismatic lecturers (which in those days they could still for the most part freely choose), read Kafka stories with curious abandon and then two semesters later handed in a 60-page assignment that was not just accepted without complaint but also given top marks – something that today would already be impossible for logistical reasons.
If a few of the official tasks that the student idler had to complete were unpleasant, then they were the kind of business he sat through with mocking lack of interest – end-of-semester grades had no bearing on the grade he graduated with. He was hard-working in a way you can only actually call idling in the sense of actively idling around, being on the look-out. And now and again it was precisely those students who had favoured wild, undirected or unforced ways of thinking, disruptive individualism or originality, who went on to careers. Those who shunned precisely what today’s universities consider their holiest values: set courses with set contact hours and set fees, professionally relevant practice-exercises, standards of comparison and control, an administrative apparatus that runs rings round itself in its mad desire to evaluate and accredit; mechanical attempts to attract funds from third parties via time-consuming applications; inter-disciplinary go-getting which has a whiff of the collective farm about it and is the opposite of self-contained intellectualism and learned poise (these have no measurable market-value and so are scorned).
In other words, there was a degree of disorder, of stubborn self-assertion, of smoke-blown lack of bourgeois conformity within universities which couldn’t but incense the reformers who came to widespread prominence in the 90’s, the well-schooled financial advisers, who were concerned about German competitiveness. It was regularly commented that the reformers’ zeal had its origins in the very latest brand of free market radicalism. Indeed, no one actually even took the trouble to conceal it in the new bachelors and masters degrees: student performance is calculated according to “workload”, that is to say according to the amount of labour involved, students collect “credit points”, universities’ stated aims are defined using the plastic language of “mobility”, “flexibility”, “practical relevance” and “competition”.
Sunday, December 6, 2009
The Art of Having Something to Say: Part 6: Schopenhauer
“Oh, for a spot of old-fashioned misanthropy in this unhappy world of notional positivities, of personal and home improvement, of progress that is less than half believed in, of universal fellowship and respect that never seem to work out. . .”
If we were not all so excessively interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it.
He who does not enjoy solitude will not love freedom.
Everybody’s friend is nobody’s.
Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.
Every parting gives a foretaste of death; every re-meeting a foretaste of the resurrection. That is why even people who are indifferent to each other rejoice so much if they meet again after twenty or thirty years of separation.
When dealing with fools and blockheads there is but one way of showing your intelligence – by having nothing to do with them.
We have not so much to find a correct mean between the two views as rather gain the higher standpoint from which such views disappear of themselves.
Excluding those faces which are beautiful, good-natured, or intellectual – and these are few and far between – I believe that a person of any sensibility hardly ever sees a new face without a sensation akin to shock at encountering a new and surprising combination of unedifying elements.
humour . . . to do honour to which in the midst of this mercilessly ambiguous existence of ours hardly a single page could be too serious. . .
All truth passes through three phases. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
The animals are the damned of this earth and human beings their devilish tormentors.
The inexhaustible activity of thought! finding ever new material to work upon in the multifarious phenomena of self and nature, and able and ready to form new combinations of them, - there you have something that invigorates the mind, and apart from moments of relaxation, sets if far above the reach of boredom.
In solitude, where everyone is thrown back upon his own resources, what a man has in himself comes to light; the fool in fine raiment groans under the burden of his miserable personality, a burden which he can never throw off, whilst the man of talent peoples the waste places with his animating thoughts.
By a peculiar weakness of human nature, people generally think too much about the opinion which others form of them; although the slightest reflection will show that this opinion, whatever it may be, is not essential to happiness. Therefore it is hard to understand why everybody feels so very pleased when he sees that other people have a good opinion of him, or say anything flattering to his vanity. If you stroke a cat, it will purr; and, as inevitably, if you praise a man, a sweet expression of delight will appear on his face; and even though the praise is a palpable lie, it will be welcome, if the matter is one on which he prides himself. If only other people will applaud him, a man may console himself for downright misfortune or for the pittance he gets from the two sources of human happiness already discussed [what he is in himself; what he possesses]: and conversely, it is astonishing how infallibly a man will be annoyed, and in some cases deeply pained, by any wrong done to his feeling of self-importance, whatever be the nature, degree, or circumstances of the injury, or by any depreciation, slight, or disregards.
The world as representation, if we consider it in isolation, by tearing ourselves from willing, and letting it alone take possession of our consciousness, is the most delightful, and the only innocent, side of life. We have to regard art as the greater enhancement, the more perfect development, of all this; for essentially it achieves just the same thing as is achieved by the visible world itself, only with greater concentration, perfection, intention and intelligence; and therefore, in the full sense of the word, it may be called the flower of life. If the whole world as representation is only the visibility of the will, then art is the elucidation of this visibility, the camera obscura which shows the objects more purely, and enables us to survey and comprehend them better. It is the play within the play, the stage on the stage in Hamlet.
Ah, the life of a professor of philosophy is indeed a hard one! First he must dance to the tune of ministers and, when he has done so really well, he can still be assailed from without by those ferocious man-eaters, the real philosophers.
There still exists the old fundamentally false contrast between spirit and matter among the philosophically untutored who include all who have not studied the Kantian philosophy and consequently most foreigners and likewise many present-day medical men and others in Germany who confidently philosophise on the basis of their catechism. But in particular, the Hegelians, in consequence of their egregious ignorance and philosophical crudeness, have recently introduced that contrast under the name “spirit and nature” which has been resuscitated from pre-Kantian times. Under this title they serve it up quite as naively as if there had never been a Kant and we were still going about in full-bottomed wigs between clipped hedges and philosophising, like Leibniz in the garden at Herrenhausen, on “spirit and nature” with princesses and maids of honour, understanding by “nature” the clipped hedges and by “spirit” the contents of the periwigs. On the assumption of this false contrast, we then have spiritualists and materialists. The latter assert that, through its form and combination, matter produces everything and consequently the thinking and willing in man, whereat the former then raise a great outcry.
Not fame, but that which deserves to be famous, is what a man should hold in esteem.
Light is not visible unless it meets with something to reflect it and talent is sure of itself only when its fame is noised abroad.
He who deserves fame without getting it possesses by far the more important element of happiness, which should console him for the loss of the other.
When modesty was made a virtue it was a very advantageous thing for the fools, for everybody is expected to speak of himself as if he were one.
The present alone is true and actual; it is the only time which possesses full reality, and our existence lies in it exclusively. Therefore we should always be glad of it and give it the welcome it deserves, and enjoy every hour that is bearable by its freedom from pain and annoyance with a full consciousness of its value.
If we were not all so excessively interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it.
He who does not enjoy solitude will not love freedom.
Everybody’s friend is nobody’s.
Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.
Every parting gives a foretaste of death; every re-meeting a foretaste of the resurrection. That is why even people who are indifferent to each other rejoice so much if they meet again after twenty or thirty years of separation.
When dealing with fools and blockheads there is but one way of showing your intelligence – by having nothing to do with them.
We have not so much to find a correct mean between the two views as rather gain the higher standpoint from which such views disappear of themselves.
Excluding those faces which are beautiful, good-natured, or intellectual – and these are few and far between – I believe that a person of any sensibility hardly ever sees a new face without a sensation akin to shock at encountering a new and surprising combination of unedifying elements.
humour . . . to do honour to which in the midst of this mercilessly ambiguous existence of ours hardly a single page could be too serious. . .
All truth passes through three phases. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
The animals are the damned of this earth and human beings their devilish tormentors.
The inexhaustible activity of thought! finding ever new material to work upon in the multifarious phenomena of self and nature, and able and ready to form new combinations of them, - there you have something that invigorates the mind, and apart from moments of relaxation, sets if far above the reach of boredom.
In solitude, where everyone is thrown back upon his own resources, what a man has in himself comes to light; the fool in fine raiment groans under the burden of his miserable personality, a burden which he can never throw off, whilst the man of talent peoples the waste places with his animating thoughts.
By a peculiar weakness of human nature, people generally think too much about the opinion which others form of them; although the slightest reflection will show that this opinion, whatever it may be, is not essential to happiness. Therefore it is hard to understand why everybody feels so very pleased when he sees that other people have a good opinion of him, or say anything flattering to his vanity. If you stroke a cat, it will purr; and, as inevitably, if you praise a man, a sweet expression of delight will appear on his face; and even though the praise is a palpable lie, it will be welcome, if the matter is one on which he prides himself. If only other people will applaud him, a man may console himself for downright misfortune or for the pittance he gets from the two sources of human happiness already discussed [what he is in himself; what he possesses]: and conversely, it is astonishing how infallibly a man will be annoyed, and in some cases deeply pained, by any wrong done to his feeling of self-importance, whatever be the nature, degree, or circumstances of the injury, or by any depreciation, slight, or disregards.
The world as representation, if we consider it in isolation, by tearing ourselves from willing, and letting it alone take possession of our consciousness, is the most delightful, and the only innocent, side of life. We have to regard art as the greater enhancement, the more perfect development, of all this; for essentially it achieves just the same thing as is achieved by the visible world itself, only with greater concentration, perfection, intention and intelligence; and therefore, in the full sense of the word, it may be called the flower of life. If the whole world as representation is only the visibility of the will, then art is the elucidation of this visibility, the camera obscura which shows the objects more purely, and enables us to survey and comprehend them better. It is the play within the play, the stage on the stage in Hamlet.
Ah, the life of a professor of philosophy is indeed a hard one! First he must dance to the tune of ministers and, when he has done so really well, he can still be assailed from without by those ferocious man-eaters, the real philosophers.
There still exists the old fundamentally false contrast between spirit and matter among the philosophically untutored who include all who have not studied the Kantian philosophy and consequently most foreigners and likewise many present-day medical men and others in Germany who confidently philosophise on the basis of their catechism. But in particular, the Hegelians, in consequence of their egregious ignorance and philosophical crudeness, have recently introduced that contrast under the name “spirit and nature” which has been resuscitated from pre-Kantian times. Under this title they serve it up quite as naively as if there had never been a Kant and we were still going about in full-bottomed wigs between clipped hedges and philosophising, like Leibniz in the garden at Herrenhausen, on “spirit and nature” with princesses and maids of honour, understanding by “nature” the clipped hedges and by “spirit” the contents of the periwigs. On the assumption of this false contrast, we then have spiritualists and materialists. The latter assert that, through its form and combination, matter produces everything and consequently the thinking and willing in man, whereat the former then raise a great outcry.
Not fame, but that which deserves to be famous, is what a man should hold in esteem.
Light is not visible unless it meets with something to reflect it and talent is sure of itself only when its fame is noised abroad.
He who deserves fame without getting it possesses by far the more important element of happiness, which should console him for the loss of the other.
When modesty was made a virtue it was a very advantageous thing for the fools, for everybody is expected to speak of himself as if he were one.
The present alone is true and actual; it is the only time which possesses full reality, and our existence lies in it exclusively. Therefore we should always be glad of it and give it the welcome it deserves, and enjoy every hour that is bearable by its freedom from pain and annoyance with a full consciousness of its value.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Review: Harry Redner's Aesthetic Life: The History and Present of Aesthetic Cultures
Harry Redner’s account of aesthetic life in his book of the same title is one to which the classic dictum of Lichtenberg applies: Good taste is either that which agrees with my taste or that which subjects itself to the rule of reason. Replace “good taste” with the more awkward “sense of aesthetic value” and you have Redner’s guiding insight in a nutshell: giving an account of what art is means avoiding all artful pleas for one’s own taste. It means submitting taste to multi-dimensional critical scrutiny on the highest intellectual level. Redner, in short, always has his reasons at his disposal. In Aesthetic Life he is never tempted to evade careful explanation of his whys and wherefores with picturesque rhetorical gestures or baroque theoretical artifice, or by sprinkling the names of the classics across the page.
The book’s subtitle, “the history and present of aesthetic cultures”, gives further clues to his intentions. The key to Redner’s aesthetics is the idea that aesthetic life is historically and socially formed - thus pre-formed, reformed and deformed – in ways that can be generalised about. The present becomes something like a necessary perspective on these socio-historical travails; aesthetic history for Redner cannot but be the history of the present, which for him means a tale told from the point of view of a time, our own, when the coherence and indeed the practical survival of aesthetic life are radically in question. The argument follows the pattern of Ethical Life (2002), which culminated in the claim that contemporary ethics is subject to a number of painful and historically unprecedented paradoxes, in large part because of the way free markets and the activities of modern states have displaced and rationalised (often rationalised away) the multiple ethical ideals of the past.
In each of the major divisions of this new book, Redner deploys a suite of basic aesthetic categories. They provide the machinery of his view of aesthetic life and his method in large part is to explain what he means by them, put paid to associated theoretical misconceptions, then deploy the machinery in his own account of how art works. The latter he does with some flair and considerable intellectual afflatus.
In Book 1 he presents what he calls the elementary aesthetic qualities, as well as a three-fold division between the constitution (composition, construction, fabrication), presentation (performance, exhibition) and reception of art. The aesthetic qualities include, among others, humour, beauty, form, design, expression (musical and dramatic) and verisimilitude. Redner thinks of them as something like the raw material of our experiences of art, anthropological universals which play a part in everyday life but are also aesthetically elaborated in line with the guiding ideas of individual cultures. (Simplifying considerably, jokes are the source of comedy; daily sing-song develops into honed musical art; speech-making and yarn-spinning flow over as epic narratives and novels; proverbs and the metaphorical tidbits of day to day speech take on definite aesthetic form as poetry; and they each do so in ways that fit with the evaluative interpretations that dominate a culture’s view of reality.) A highlight of this part of the work is the swift and effective overhaul Redner performs on the problem whether aesthetic qualities are subjective or objective, roughly – is beauty (or humour or any basic dimension of aesthetic value) in the eye of the beholder or in the beautiful object itself? The answer is neither and both. Beauty is not statically either in the beholder or the object, it comes to inhere in the beholder and the object because of the way social norms and aesthetic standards are absorbed by individuals, then subsequently transformed and sent into social circulation again. Another way of putting it would be to say there is no fundamental subjective (inner, psychological) or objective (outer, material) grounds to which to reduce judgments about whether something is beautiful, funny etc. Aesthetic judgment is intersubjective, taking place within a framework of evaluative interpretations that are supplied but not mechanically determined by a wider culture. So at last that old chestnut has been plucked from the fire of philosophical wrangling. . .
Book 2 makes a categorial distinction between art, high art and great art – forms between which Redner intends to make no invidious comparison. By “art” pure and simple he means the aesthetic life of tribal peoples, as well as the folk and popular arts of historical cultures. “High art” is the product of literate civilisations which do things like create cities, form states and found elaborate social institutions. “Great art” is high art raised to a higher power of self-consciousness and loosened from its traditionalist moorings. The great art traditions, among which Redner includes those of Greece-Rome, China-Japan, India, Islamic Persia and modern Europe, are the traditions which develop a sense of their own historicity and a self-reflexive language of aesthetic criticism, together with a strong sense of the individual artistic personality. (In cultures that support a great art tradition the notion of artistic personality begins to shape what it means to be an individual in the first place.)
Book 2 takes us right up to the threshold of the present, with the aesthetically fateful twentieth century just closed. The main fact of recent aesthetic history for Redner is that the great art tradition of modern Europe has been brought to a (somewhat definitive) end, having been subject in the course of the twentieth century to a severe devaluation of its highest aesthetic values; though multiple threads of the tradition are still there to be grasped, by century’s end no strong sense of art’s purpose or direction remains intact. Here is where Redner sees a role for criticism, which, as the argumentative apparatus of Book 3 tells us, is the concerted artful practice of analysis, interpretation and evaluation. Great criticism comes into existence – at least it did so at the height of the European great art tradition - when critics formed the vital point of interconnection between practicising artists and academic scholarship. A re-vitalised criticism is what aesthetic life is crying out for today given the pervasive sense that aesthetic value judgments have nothing but a flimsy subjective basis and the enormous question mark posed by the dominant cultural institution of our times – a homogenised culture industry of elephantine global proportions.
The book’s subtitle, “the history and present of aesthetic cultures”, gives further clues to his intentions. The key to Redner’s aesthetics is the idea that aesthetic life is historically and socially formed - thus pre-formed, reformed and deformed – in ways that can be generalised about. The present becomes something like a necessary perspective on these socio-historical travails; aesthetic history for Redner cannot but be the history of the present, which for him means a tale told from the point of view of a time, our own, when the coherence and indeed the practical survival of aesthetic life are radically in question. The argument follows the pattern of Ethical Life (2002), which culminated in the claim that contemporary ethics is subject to a number of painful and historically unprecedented paradoxes, in large part because of the way free markets and the activities of modern states have displaced and rationalised (often rationalised away) the multiple ethical ideals of the past.
In each of the major divisions of this new book, Redner deploys a suite of basic aesthetic categories. They provide the machinery of his view of aesthetic life and his method in large part is to explain what he means by them, put paid to associated theoretical misconceptions, then deploy the machinery in his own account of how art works. The latter he does with some flair and considerable intellectual afflatus.
In Book 1 he presents what he calls the elementary aesthetic qualities, as well as a three-fold division between the constitution (composition, construction, fabrication), presentation (performance, exhibition) and reception of art. The aesthetic qualities include, among others, humour, beauty, form, design, expression (musical and dramatic) and verisimilitude. Redner thinks of them as something like the raw material of our experiences of art, anthropological universals which play a part in everyday life but are also aesthetically elaborated in line with the guiding ideas of individual cultures. (Simplifying considerably, jokes are the source of comedy; daily sing-song develops into honed musical art; speech-making and yarn-spinning flow over as epic narratives and novels; proverbs and the metaphorical tidbits of day to day speech take on definite aesthetic form as poetry; and they each do so in ways that fit with the evaluative interpretations that dominate a culture’s view of reality.) A highlight of this part of the work is the swift and effective overhaul Redner performs on the problem whether aesthetic qualities are subjective or objective, roughly – is beauty (or humour or any basic dimension of aesthetic value) in the eye of the beholder or in the beautiful object itself? The answer is neither and both. Beauty is not statically either in the beholder or the object, it comes to inhere in the beholder and the object because of the way social norms and aesthetic standards are absorbed by individuals, then subsequently transformed and sent into social circulation again. Another way of putting it would be to say there is no fundamental subjective (inner, psychological) or objective (outer, material) grounds to which to reduce judgments about whether something is beautiful, funny etc. Aesthetic judgment is intersubjective, taking place within a framework of evaluative interpretations that are supplied but not mechanically determined by a wider culture. So at last that old chestnut has been plucked from the fire of philosophical wrangling. . .
Book 2 makes a categorial distinction between art, high art and great art – forms between which Redner intends to make no invidious comparison. By “art” pure and simple he means the aesthetic life of tribal peoples, as well as the folk and popular arts of historical cultures. “High art” is the product of literate civilisations which do things like create cities, form states and found elaborate social institutions. “Great art” is high art raised to a higher power of self-consciousness and loosened from its traditionalist moorings. The great art traditions, among which Redner includes those of Greece-Rome, China-Japan, India, Islamic Persia and modern Europe, are the traditions which develop a sense of their own historicity and a self-reflexive language of aesthetic criticism, together with a strong sense of the individual artistic personality. (In cultures that support a great art tradition the notion of artistic personality begins to shape what it means to be an individual in the first place.)
Book 2 takes us right up to the threshold of the present, with the aesthetically fateful twentieth century just closed. The main fact of recent aesthetic history for Redner is that the great art tradition of modern Europe has been brought to a (somewhat definitive) end, having been subject in the course of the twentieth century to a severe devaluation of its highest aesthetic values; though multiple threads of the tradition are still there to be grasped, by century’s end no strong sense of art’s purpose or direction remains intact. Here is where Redner sees a role for criticism, which, as the argumentative apparatus of Book 3 tells us, is the concerted artful practice of analysis, interpretation and evaluation. Great criticism comes into existence – at least it did so at the height of the European great art tradition - when critics formed the vital point of interconnection between practicising artists and academic scholarship. A re-vitalised criticism is what aesthetic life is crying out for today given the pervasive sense that aesthetic value judgments have nothing but a flimsy subjective basis and the enormous question mark posed by the dominant cultural institution of our times – a homogenised culture industry of elephantine global proportions.
Friday, October 23, 2009
The art of having something to say: Part 5 - Nestroy
For followers of the ongoing debate about the VCA taking place on this page – can anyone hear echoes of Sharman Pretty in the little interchange between A and B I’ve got down as my first quote from Nestroy? It seems the Melbourne University breadth agenda was invented in mid-nineteenth century Austria. If only the Dean of VCAM could be as clear in her fatuousness as this. Charming!
For those of you not in on the joke, Nestroy (1801 – 1862) was an actor-cum-satirist, who’s never caught on in English because half his characters speak a picturesque essentially untranslatable Austrian German. Everyone who’s studied German knows the tremendous verb “durchwursteln” which denotes the Austrian national trait of “muddling through” (literally “sausage-ing through”, or, if you like, “getting by in the shape of a sausage”. You know how when things go wrong in English they go “pear shaped”, well, in the glory-days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire when they went right they went sausage-shaped.) Well, there are a whole lot of silly sausages sausage-ing through and coming out with some fairly porky untranslatable pronouncements in Nestroy.
Nestroy’s favourite two kinds of play are Possen (farces) and Travestien (travesties). Most come with songs – think Keating The Musical, but with more dialogue and the full range of comic plot devices that would probably be considered artificial and lame nowadays – servants insinuating themselves into balls by putting on disguise moustaches, Biblical heroes being seduced by men dressed up as women, clothes-baskets with stolen babies in them being mistaken for clothes-baskets with washing in them, etc etc.
For more of an idea, you need only have a look down a list of titles:
“Banishment from the Realm of Magic, or: 30 Years in the Life of a Lump”
“Freedom in a Cultural Backwater”
“There’s No Cure for Stupidity”
“The Girl from the Suburbs, or: Honesty Keeps You Keeping On”
“The Confused Magician, or: The Faithful and The Fickle”
“The Magic Journey into the Age of Chivalry, or: Embarrassing High-Spirits”
“Theatrical Tales of Love, Intrigue, Money and Stupidity”
“Big Chief Evening-breeze, or: The Gruesome Banquet”
“The Miller, The Collier and The Furniture Removalist, or: The Dream of the Shell and the Kernel”
Anyone who wants to try Nestroy out in English should look up “A Man Full of Nothing”, “The Talisman” and “Love Affairs and Wedding Bells”, translated – and “fondly tampered with” – by Max Knight and Joseph Fabry for Ungar in the 1960’s.
***
A: I’m a product of the school life. My education is tenuous but extremely widespread: a smattering of geography, a fraction of mathematics, a molecule of physics, just an idea of philosophy, a germ of medicine, and a pinch of the law.
B: How charming! You have learned much but not lost yourself in details. The mark of the true genius!
A: Ah, this explains why there are so many geniuses in the world!
Is there a better opportunity to make someone you hate unhappy than to marry him?
Man is a being who occupies the highest stage of creation, who even claims to have been made in the image of God – but God is probably not very flattered. Man is an insect, because he stings, bites, bugs you, gives you the creeps and is often for the birds. He’s also a fish, because he gets into deep water and does horrible things in cold blood. No less is man a reptile, for he’s a snake in the grass. He’s a bird, too, because he lives in the clouds, often makes a living out of thin air, and gets upset when he cannot fill the bill. And, finally, man is also a mammal, because he’s a sucker.
This is the moment I’ve anticipated and dreaded at the same time. I face it, if I may say so, with knee-shaking bravado and bold trembling.
It’d be great to be Fate. You could sit round picking your nose doing nothing all day and still get the credit for everything.
In a castle in the air even the janitor in the basement has a view of heaven.
It’s probably a will-o’-the-wisp, but I find it entertaining all the same.
It’s really a matter of the heart but all the heart does is flutter and dump problems into the lap of the head even if the head is up to its neck in trouble. I’m done in.
If you’re a man with seventeen diplomas on your wall, a science at the tip of each finger, five languages at the tip of your tongue, and an extra helping of ambition between your ears, you can expect fate to present you with a fat slice of the good life on a silver platter – that’s commonplace. But if your only diploma is from reform school, you have nothing at the tips of your fingers but your prints, no language but what you were born with, and your only ambition is to be unemployed – and you still haven’t given up the idea of getting rich . . . there’s something grandiose in that. To face Lady Luck like a cross between a pan-handler and a freedom fighter, to hold out your hand when you haven’t a leg to stand on, that is noble gall, an enviable itch. I appreciate myself – and why not?
For those of you not in on the joke, Nestroy (1801 – 1862) was an actor-cum-satirist, who’s never caught on in English because half his characters speak a picturesque essentially untranslatable Austrian German. Everyone who’s studied German knows the tremendous verb “durchwursteln” which denotes the Austrian national trait of “muddling through” (literally “sausage-ing through”, or, if you like, “getting by in the shape of a sausage”. You know how when things go wrong in English they go “pear shaped”, well, in the glory-days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire when they went right they went sausage-shaped.) Well, there are a whole lot of silly sausages sausage-ing through and coming out with some fairly porky untranslatable pronouncements in Nestroy.
Nestroy’s favourite two kinds of play are Possen (farces) and Travestien (travesties). Most come with songs – think Keating The Musical, but with more dialogue and the full range of comic plot devices that would probably be considered artificial and lame nowadays – servants insinuating themselves into balls by putting on disguise moustaches, Biblical heroes being seduced by men dressed up as women, clothes-baskets with stolen babies in them being mistaken for clothes-baskets with washing in them, etc etc.
For more of an idea, you need only have a look down a list of titles:
“Banishment from the Realm of Magic, or: 30 Years in the Life of a Lump”
“Freedom in a Cultural Backwater”
“There’s No Cure for Stupidity”
“The Girl from the Suburbs, or: Honesty Keeps You Keeping On”
“The Confused Magician, or: The Faithful and The Fickle”
“The Magic Journey into the Age of Chivalry, or: Embarrassing High-Spirits”
“Theatrical Tales of Love, Intrigue, Money and Stupidity”
“Big Chief Evening-breeze, or: The Gruesome Banquet”
“The Miller, The Collier and The Furniture Removalist, or: The Dream of the Shell and the Kernel”
Anyone who wants to try Nestroy out in English should look up “A Man Full of Nothing”, “The Talisman” and “Love Affairs and Wedding Bells”, translated – and “fondly tampered with” – by Max Knight and Joseph Fabry for Ungar in the 1960’s.
***
A: I’m a product of the school life. My education is tenuous but extremely widespread: a smattering of geography, a fraction of mathematics, a molecule of physics, just an idea of philosophy, a germ of medicine, and a pinch of the law.
B: How charming! You have learned much but not lost yourself in details. The mark of the true genius!
A: Ah, this explains why there are so many geniuses in the world!
Is there a better opportunity to make someone you hate unhappy than to marry him?
Man is a being who occupies the highest stage of creation, who even claims to have been made in the image of God – but God is probably not very flattered. Man is an insect, because he stings, bites, bugs you, gives you the creeps and is often for the birds. He’s also a fish, because he gets into deep water and does horrible things in cold blood. No less is man a reptile, for he’s a snake in the grass. He’s a bird, too, because he lives in the clouds, often makes a living out of thin air, and gets upset when he cannot fill the bill. And, finally, man is also a mammal, because he’s a sucker.
This is the moment I’ve anticipated and dreaded at the same time. I face it, if I may say so, with knee-shaking bravado and bold trembling.
It’d be great to be Fate. You could sit round picking your nose doing nothing all day and still get the credit for everything.
In a castle in the air even the janitor in the basement has a view of heaven.
It’s probably a will-o’-the-wisp, but I find it entertaining all the same.
It’s really a matter of the heart but all the heart does is flutter and dump problems into the lap of the head even if the head is up to its neck in trouble. I’m done in.
If you’re a man with seventeen diplomas on your wall, a science at the tip of each finger, five languages at the tip of your tongue, and an extra helping of ambition between your ears, you can expect fate to present you with a fat slice of the good life on a silver platter – that’s commonplace. But if your only diploma is from reform school, you have nothing at the tips of your fingers but your prints, no language but what you were born with, and your only ambition is to be unemployed – and you still haven’t given up the idea of getting rich . . . there’s something grandiose in that. To face Lady Luck like a cross between a pan-handler and a freedom fighter, to hold out your hand when you haven’t a leg to stand on, that is noble gall, an enviable itch. I appreciate myself – and why not?
Thursday, October 15, 2009
The art of having something to say: Part 4 - Kraus
Seeing that the fifth of the four reader comments that The Great Stage has elicited so far was spoken in praise of the Karl Kraus quote at the top of last month’s big VCA piece, here, mid-week, are some more Kraus translations, with the promise of reams more if someone can find me a publisher:
The aphorism never coves itself with truth, it is either half true, or one-and-a-half times true.
Only he is an artist who can make a riddle out of a solution.
Why does many a man write? Because he does not possess enough character not to write.
Ethics is running up against the limits of language.
Psychoanalysis is that mental illness for which it regards itself as therapy.
The world has been defeaned by deadly intonation. It is my conviction that events no longer come to pass, that instead clichés do the entire work of their own accord. Or if events are supposed to come to pass all the same, without being scared off by clichés, then they will cease once the clichés are shattered. The matter is befouled by the language. Our time stinks of its phraseology.
Progress, under whose feet the grass mourns and the forest turns into paper, from which newspaper plants grow, has subordinated the purpose of life to the means of subsistence and turned us into the nuts and bolts of our machines.
Where will I find the time not to read so much? . . .
Nationalism – that love which binds me to the numbskulls of my nation, to those that p*ss upon my ways and desecrate my language.
For the first time in the world SHE wants it all and HE wants nothing but her, the gulf between the sexes widens, making room for a whole lot of misery and moralism.
There are metaphors in the language of love too. Those who are illiterate call them perversions and abhor poetry.
Sex can be brought into connection with everything in heaven and earth, with holy religion and sweaty armpits, with the music of the spheres and hurdy-gurdies, with prohibitions and lumpy skin, with the soul and with corsetry. One gives these linkages the name perversions. They have this to be said for them – that they put you in possession of the whole thing when you only have part at your disposal.
The greatest ill in the world is the force impelling one to fritter away one’s inner vitality on material things that are supposed to serve that inner vitality.
If you’re getting panicky in the slaughterhouse of middle-class life, maybe you should grasp the opportunity and desert to the war.
If someone steals something from you, don’t bother going to the police, who won’t be interested, nor to a psychoanalyst, who will only be interested in one thing, that it is actually you who have stolen something.
The egghead who can’t pass by a single one of the riddles of the world without re-stating the riddle as if it were nothing but his humble opinion wins a reputation for modesty. The artist who turns his thoughts ecstatically to something as inconspicuous as a trellis or a cobblestone is considered a smartarse.
The report’s distortion of reality is the truly faithful report on reality.
Journalism, which has driven Spirit into its own stall, has in the meantime taken command of its pastures. The hack would like to be a full-blown published author. Selections of occasional pieces appear. One is stunned that the book-binders don’t find them going to pieces in their hands during production. Bread is baked out of crumbs. What is it though that makes the hack hope for attention from posterity? Continued interest in the material he “selects”. When a man blabs on about eternal themes shouldn’t he merit being heard for all eternity? This fallacy is journalism’s living element. It always has big ideas within its reach; in its hands eternity itself becomes topical; if it weren’t that eternity just as easily becomes an anachronism too if you let a journalist near it. The artist gives shape to daily events, to the very hour and minute. The occasion for his work may be as limited and conditioned as you like by time and place, his artwork is all the more limitless and free the further it bears itself beyond that occasion. It ages confidently in the present; it rejuvenates itself over decades.
Language is the divining-rod that discovers the well-springs of thought.
The thought is out there but it doesn’t occur to anyone. The prism of material life has diffused it, it lies scattered about in its linguistic elements: - the artist binds them together in the thought.
Woe betide an age in which art doesn’t make the earth less cocksure of itself, in which the artist and not mankind faints before the abyss separating the artist from mankind!
Culture comes to an end when barbarians erupt out of its midst.
The aphorism never coves itself with truth, it is either half true, or one-and-a-half times true.
Only he is an artist who can make a riddle out of a solution.
Why does many a man write? Because he does not possess enough character not to write.
Ethics is running up against the limits of language.
Psychoanalysis is that mental illness for which it regards itself as therapy.
The world has been defeaned by deadly intonation. It is my conviction that events no longer come to pass, that instead clichés do the entire work of their own accord. Or if events are supposed to come to pass all the same, without being scared off by clichés, then they will cease once the clichés are shattered. The matter is befouled by the language. Our time stinks of its phraseology.
Progress, under whose feet the grass mourns and the forest turns into paper, from which newspaper plants grow, has subordinated the purpose of life to the means of subsistence and turned us into the nuts and bolts of our machines.
Where will I find the time not to read so much? . . .
Nationalism – that love which binds me to the numbskulls of my nation, to those that p*ss upon my ways and desecrate my language.
For the first time in the world SHE wants it all and HE wants nothing but her, the gulf between the sexes widens, making room for a whole lot of misery and moralism.
There are metaphors in the language of love too. Those who are illiterate call them perversions and abhor poetry.
Sex can be brought into connection with everything in heaven and earth, with holy religion and sweaty armpits, with the music of the spheres and hurdy-gurdies, with prohibitions and lumpy skin, with the soul and with corsetry. One gives these linkages the name perversions. They have this to be said for them – that they put you in possession of the whole thing when you only have part at your disposal.
The greatest ill in the world is the force impelling one to fritter away one’s inner vitality on material things that are supposed to serve that inner vitality.
If you’re getting panicky in the slaughterhouse of middle-class life, maybe you should grasp the opportunity and desert to the war.
If someone steals something from you, don’t bother going to the police, who won’t be interested, nor to a psychoanalyst, who will only be interested in one thing, that it is actually you who have stolen something.
The egghead who can’t pass by a single one of the riddles of the world without re-stating the riddle as if it were nothing but his humble opinion wins a reputation for modesty. The artist who turns his thoughts ecstatically to something as inconspicuous as a trellis or a cobblestone is considered a smartarse.
The report’s distortion of reality is the truly faithful report on reality.
Journalism, which has driven Spirit into its own stall, has in the meantime taken command of its pastures. The hack would like to be a full-blown published author. Selections of occasional pieces appear. One is stunned that the book-binders don’t find them going to pieces in their hands during production. Bread is baked out of crumbs. What is it though that makes the hack hope for attention from posterity? Continued interest in the material he “selects”. When a man blabs on about eternal themes shouldn’t he merit being heard for all eternity? This fallacy is journalism’s living element. It always has big ideas within its reach; in its hands eternity itself becomes topical; if it weren’t that eternity just as easily becomes an anachronism too if you let a journalist near it. The artist gives shape to daily events, to the very hour and minute. The occasion for his work may be as limited and conditioned as you like by time and place, his artwork is all the more limitless and free the further it bears itself beyond that occasion. It ages confidently in the present; it rejuvenates itself over decades.
Language is the divining-rod that discovers the well-springs of thought.
The thought is out there but it doesn’t occur to anyone. The prism of material life has diffused it, it lies scattered about in its linguistic elements: - the artist binds them together in the thought.
Woe betide an age in which art doesn’t make the earth less cocksure of itself, in which the artist and not mankind faints before the abyss separating the artist from mankind!
Culture comes to an end when barbarians erupt out of its midst.
Sunday, October 11, 2009
The Science and Politics of Global Warming: Actualities and Possibilities
Two Public Lectures – no.’s 11 and 12 in the series “Global Warming: Science and Politics in Troubled Times”
Delivered, Trades Hall, Carlton, June 8 and 15, 2009
***Lecture No.11***
In which are set out more and more far-reaching considerations about modern society’s faith in science. The grim actualities of the relationship between science and politics summarised.
***Lecture No.12***
In which further grim climate change realities are painted in vivid chiaroscuro.
(To be followed shortly by:
***Lecture No.13***
In which the manifold possibilities for change in Australian society’s response to climate change and in the relationship between science and politics are canvassed.)
There were, you’ll remember, to be two parts to the penultimate section of the course dealing with climate change contrarians, the first revolving around the issue of knowledge and authority, the second revolving around the whole issue of faith in science – whether it’s right to say there is an element of quasi-religious faith involved in doing science, whether, as many of the contrarians say, climate science is particularly faith-based and whether the attitude to the deliverances of climate science in society at large is worryingly (pathologically) faith-based. It’s that last aspect of the problem I want to turn to begin with today – whether the attitude to the deliverances of climate science in society at large is worryingly (pathologically) faith-based. It brings us back to the very start of the course, to the man who, I said right at the beginning, sets out the problems of science and politics as they relate to global warming in a wide-ranging and incisive way, John Lanchester. Here he is again, you’ve already heard this and probably you’ve read the article it comes from in the meantime:
“When we come to sum up how we got to this point, there is one other factor to add to the politicisation of science and the reporting of science. It is a deeper, murkier consideration, and it bears on the way our society is in thrall to science and at the same time only partly understands it. Our material culture is based on science in a way so profound that our attitude to it approaches a kind of faith. Arthur C. Clarke said that ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ This is a remark beloved of sc-fi fans, and endlessly quoted in discussions of what might happen if there were ever to be contact between humans and aliens (or time travel etc.) Its real sting is that it is a description of the world we already inhabit. Electric light and power, and tv, and computers, and fridges, not to mention cars and planes and lasers and CD players and dialysis machines and wireless networking and synthetic materials, are things we take on trust: we don’t know how they work, but we’re happy to benefit from using them. We may have a rough understanding of scientific method, and even a rough Bill Brysonish sense of some of the science involved, but that is about it; our attitude contains significant components of faith and trust and incomprehension, while at the same time we are grateful for the wonders modern science has brought us.
Our faith-based contentment with science has been challenged before, most particularly by the invention of nuclear weapons. But with global warming, science is bringing us catastrophic news, and is doing so, moreover, on the basis of predictions. . . about the future which demand urgent and radical action in the present. It’s not like being told about some scientific breakthrough, waiting a few years, and then having the breakthrough manifest itself in the form of a technology that gradually becomes more useful over time. The issue of global warming is the opposite of that: we are required to act on the basis of the faith in science which is one of the fundamental underpinnings of our society, but the faith has never been made quite so explicit before, and the need to act radically, urgently and expensively on the basis of scientific models is testing that faith to the full and beyond." J. Lanchester, “Warmer, Warmer” London Review of Books, March 22, 2007
There are several very simple points in there which are useful in seeing how contrarians get the wrong end of the stick when talking about global warming as the source of a new religious dogmatism, as well as a point about how the specialised, theory-bound, rarefied world of science relates to the wider social world. The first point is that the attitude you might take towards the content of climate science (or any science) – the amount of faith involved in your attitude to it – will differ markedly depending on whether you’re a climate scientist or not, and probably it will differ depending on whether you’re a scientifically educated or a non-scientifically educated member of the general public. The further you get from the field itself, the greater the element of faith involved. Nor is the faith of the non-scientifically educated members of the general public unwarranted: it’s a consequence of the fact that we live in a scientifically and technologically advanced society which has a certain division of labour, between scientific experts and non-experts. Unless we want to junk the idea of scientifically and technologically advanced society and unless we want to take the trouble to educate everyone to the point where they have a robust scientifically-independent mind of their own, then faith in the deliverances of science is going to be a cultural given. That’s a point that Lanchester is making in this passage and in the article at large. But there’s an equally great point relating particularly to climate science – the point that the faith we as a society are implicitly being asked to show in its deliverances is not something separate from the belief (amounting sometimes to no more than passive acceptance, sometimes to active appreciation) that we manifest in our everyday dealings with the ensembles of equipment. The faith we as a society of non-experts are being implicitly asked to show in the deliverances of climate science is, Lanchester is saying, the darker side of a quite ordinary everyday faith.
Can we get a bit further with this issue of faith in science? Let me at least say something briefly about the issue of faith in science among scientists – the issue of whether scientists themselves, or “the scientific enterprise” as you might loosely call it, requires any noteworthy manifestation of faith. Rather than saying something myself, I let Oreskes, who in a way has been another of the heroes of this course, say something, and I’ll see what I can get out of it:
“No scientific conclusion can ever be proven, and new evidence may lead scientists to change their views, but it is no more a ‘belief’ to say that earth is heating up than to say that continents move, that germs cause disease, that DNA carries hereditary information, and that HIV causes AIDS. You can always find someone, somewhere, to disagree, but these conclusions represent our best current understandings and therefore our best basis for reasoned action.” - Oreskes, “How do we know we’re not wrong?"
The first thing she says there may seem rather surprising: “No scientific conclusion can ever be proven.” Isn’t the hallmark of scientific conclusions that they’re proven – you might ask. Or that they’re backed up with rigorous experimental evidence? Perhaps Oreskes would be better off saying “no scientific conclusion can ever be definitively proven.” Let’s take it that that’s what she means. Why can’t scientific conclusions be definitively proven? Because of what she says next – because new evidence could be discovered or new theories developed which put the old theories in the shade or put old evidence in a new broader context. All of you who are versed in the history of science will know that that’s how paradigm shifts in the sciences often occur – by re-contextualising old theories and old evidence. Classically that’s what happened in the twentieth century in the switchover from classical to post-classical physics, from Newtonian mechanics to quantum mechanics. The old Newtonian laws weren’t abandoned, abrogated or declared invalid. Instead they were recognised as limit cases of more general laws, applicable to some – a very large number but not all – the phenomena of physical reality.
Why is it important for us that scientific conclusions can’t ever be definitively proven? Because it means that there is an element of something that might, with qualification, be described as faith in science that’s native to the enterprise itself. And it means that the contrarian argument that “climate science is based on quasi-religious faith” contains a grain of truth, unfortunately just not the truth the contrarians think it contains. All science, I’m saying, contains an element of faith, so naturally climate science does too – though it would be putting it far too strongly to say all science is based on faith. The question then becomes what this element of faith is? And answering that question clearly is important or else the contrarians can get away with the argument that the element of faith in operation in climate science because it’s a science like any other is actually a sign that’s it’s a corrupt science or a pseudo-science that’s been hijacked by political agitators who believe religiously that Western Civilisation is evil. (Even more generally, answering the question what the element of faith is is important because without a clear answer Christian naifs the world over are going to be able to argue that, if what they believe on faith is essentially the same as what people believe on a scientific basis, then there’s no difference between taking the Bible literally and taking the facts of Nature literally. (In fact the Christian naifs I’m thinking of usually go further than that. Having purportedly established that the scientific evaluative standpoint is just as faith-based as their own evaluative standpoint, they assert the superiority of what they believe on faith, because their faith-based belief system gives the world a coherent and striking metaphysical and ethical meaning, which other purportedly faith-based belief systems like the sciences can’t generate and which they in general don’t see it as their job to generate.)
I ask the question again: What is this element of faith that becomes manifest in the fact that scientific conclusions can never be definitively proven? A large part of it is the faith that science is usable, precisely faith in science’s application to practical situations in spite of its non-definitive nature – the faith namely that our assessment of the scientific facts is not going to be completely overthrown any time soon and that our assessment says enough about the way the world is in reality to enable us to act in the world.
Friday, October 9, 2009
The art of having something to say: Part 3
Proverbi Napoletani
Working on another thumping climate change piece this week, so instead of a huge wall of interpretation, here are some more short sayings, this time from magnificent sordid Naples, city of mother-love, false priests and sympathetic animals. CS
Ammore sincero dura na vita e renne allere.
Love that is sincere lasts a lifetime and fills the lover with high spirits.
Chi tene mamma, non chiange.
If you have a mother, you have no need to cry.
‘E figlie so’ piezze e’ core.
Sons are like pieces of the heart.
‘O figlio muto ‘a mamma ‘o ‘ntenne.
A son who holds his tongue is understood by his mother.
P’ ‘a sora zita ‘o frato è nu miezu marito.
To a sexy sister a brother is already half a husband.
Quann’ ‘e figlie fottono ‘e pate so’ futtute.
Once the children are f*cking, the parents are f*cked.
‘O parlà chiaro è fatto pe l’amice.
Clear speech was made for friends.
Si nun vuo’ perdere l’amico, nun ‘o mettere â prova.
If you don’t want to lose a friend, don’t put him to the test.
È viecchio sulo chi more.
Don’t say you’re old till you’re dead.
‘O viecchio ha da murì, ‘o giovane pô murì.
An old man must die, a young man can die.
‘A monaca d’ ‘e Camaldole muscio nun ‘o vuleva, ma tuosto dice che la faceva male.
The Camaldolean nun said she didn’t like it floppy, but when it was hard it hurt.
Cazzo ‘ntustato, sempe rispettato.
A stiff pr*ck is always respected.
‘A vita è n’affacciata ‘e fenesta.
Life is short, like a glance out the window.
Dicette ‘a morte: - Se ‘n Catania vaie, ‘n Catania vengo.
Death said – If you’re going to Catania, I’ll come to Catania.
Casa accunciata, morte apparicchiata.
An orderly house is a mortuary waiting to happen.
Chi ‘int’ ‘a chiesa s’ammacca ‘o pietto ‘e ponie, è fauzo e demonio.
He who beats his breast in church is false and is a demon.
Chi nun rispetta ‘o Criatore, nun pô rispettà ‘a criatura.
He who has no respect for the Creator has no respect for His creatures.
Dicette Dio ‘nfaccia a Dio: - Lasammo fa’ a Dio.
Even God sometimes turns to God and says – Bah, leave it to God.
Working on another thumping climate change piece this week, so instead of a huge wall of interpretation, here are some more short sayings, this time from magnificent sordid Naples, city of mother-love, false priests and sympathetic animals. CS
Ammore sincero dura na vita e renne allere.
Love that is sincere lasts a lifetime and fills the lover with high spirits.
Chi tene mamma, non chiange.
If you have a mother, you have no need to cry.
‘E figlie so’ piezze e’ core.
Sons are like pieces of the heart.
‘O figlio muto ‘a mamma ‘o ‘ntenne.
A son who holds his tongue is understood by his mother.
P’ ‘a sora zita ‘o frato è nu miezu marito.
To a sexy sister a brother is already half a husband.
Quann’ ‘e figlie fottono ‘e pate so’ futtute.
Once the children are f*cking, the parents are f*cked.
‘O parlà chiaro è fatto pe l’amice.
Clear speech was made for friends.
Si nun vuo’ perdere l’amico, nun ‘o mettere â prova.
If you don’t want to lose a friend, don’t put him to the test.
È viecchio sulo chi more.
Don’t say you’re old till you’re dead.
‘O viecchio ha da murì, ‘o giovane pô murì.
An old man must die, a young man can die.
‘A monaca d’ ‘e Camaldole muscio nun ‘o vuleva, ma tuosto dice che la faceva male.
The Camaldolean nun said she didn’t like it floppy, but when it was hard it hurt.
Cazzo ‘ntustato, sempe rispettato.
A stiff pr*ck is always respected.
‘A vita è n’affacciata ‘e fenesta.
Life is short, like a glance out the window.
Dicette ‘a morte: - Se ‘n Catania vaie, ‘n Catania vengo.
Death said – If you’re going to Catania, I’ll come to Catania.
Casa accunciata, morte apparicchiata.
An orderly house is a mortuary waiting to happen.
Chi ‘int’ ‘a chiesa s’ammacca ‘o pietto ‘e ponie, è fauzo e demonio.
He who beats his breast in church is false and is a demon.
Chi nun rispetta ‘o Criatore, nun pô rispettà ‘a criatura.
He who has no respect for the Creator has no respect for His creatures.
Dicette Dio ‘nfaccia a Dio: - Lasammo fa’ a Dio.
Even God sometimes turns to God and says – Bah, leave it to God.
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
The art of having something to say: Part 2
19 proverb-like utterances from Herr Nietzsche. Work them into conversation at your own risk. Commentary is surely superfluous.
Cynicism is the only form in which mean souls touch honesty.
In declining cultures only the actor arouses great enthusiasm.
That which is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.
An animal which could speak said: Humanity is a prejudice of which we animals at least are free.
He who possesses little is so much the less possessed. Praised by a moderate poverty.
Whosoever has at some time built a new heaven has found the strength for it only in his own hell.
All truth is simple: Is that not a compound lie?
Without music, life would be a mistake.
To have to combat one’s instincts – that is the formula for decadence: as long as life is ascending, happiness and instinct are one.
He who despises himself still nonetheless respects himself as one who despises.
We are from the very beginning illogical and thus unjust beings and can recognise this: this is one of the greatest and most irresolvable discords of existence.
He who cannot find greatness in God will never find it. He must either create it or deny it.
Terrible experiences make one wonder whether he who experiences them is not something terrible.
The golden fleece of self-love is proof against cudgel blows but not against pinpricks.
Not every end is a goal. The end of a melody is not its goal; however, if the melody has not reached its end, it would also not have reached its goal. A parable.
A joke is an epitaph on an emotion.
We possess art lest we perish of the truth.
In every religion, the religious person is the exception.
The same drive which calls art into life as the completion and perfection of existence, which seduces the living into living on, also brought into being the Olympian world in which the Hellenic "will" holds up before itself a transfiguring mirror. So the gods justify the life of men be living it themselves - the only adequate theodicy!
Cynicism is the only form in which mean souls touch honesty.
In declining cultures only the actor arouses great enthusiasm.
That which is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.
An animal which could speak said: Humanity is a prejudice of which we animals at least are free.
He who possesses little is so much the less possessed. Praised by a moderate poverty.
Whosoever has at some time built a new heaven has found the strength for it only in his own hell.
All truth is simple: Is that not a compound lie?
Without music, life would be a mistake.
To have to combat one’s instincts – that is the formula for decadence: as long as life is ascending, happiness and instinct are one.
He who despises himself still nonetheless respects himself as one who despises.
We are from the very beginning illogical and thus unjust beings and can recognise this: this is one of the greatest and most irresolvable discords of existence.
He who cannot find greatness in God will never find it. He must either create it or deny it.
Terrible experiences make one wonder whether he who experiences them is not something terrible.
The golden fleece of self-love is proof against cudgel blows but not against pinpricks.
Not every end is a goal. The end of a melody is not its goal; however, if the melody has not reached its end, it would also not have reached its goal. A parable.
A joke is an epitaph on an emotion.
We possess art lest we perish of the truth.
In every religion, the religious person is the exception.
The same drive which calls art into life as the completion and perfection of existence, which seduces the living into living on, also brought into being the Olympian world in which the Hellenic "will" holds up before itself a transfiguring mirror. So the gods justify the life of men be living it themselves - the only adequate theodicy!
Sunday, October 4, 2009
Review: Corinne Grant at the Comic's Lounge
To one side of the conformism of public and workaday life, Australians are capable of much wry fun. They acknowledge many of the better jokes made at their expense, not just the cheap ones made compulsively by ferrets like Rove. At the Comic's Lounge in North Melbourne the better jokes can be heard. Last night I felt as if I heard some of them, told by Corinne Grant and Adam Richards, the secret of whose art seems to me to be in positioning themselves to one side, though never too far to one side, of the comic and workaday conventions to which comedians and the rest of us conform.
On the tram north from the city, two likely lads tried out some malign humour of their own on me. Were they speeding? Not in the literal sense of the word. The no. 57 tram to West Maribyrnong was taking them to the showgrounds for a party at that slow speed Melbourne trams like best, somewhere between walking and cycling pace. With a druggy nonchalance, one of them asked me what my name was. When told, he informed me I was lying: with a nose like mine my name had to be Pinocchio. I told him it was a dud of a joke and asked whether he had another. His friend did, but it turned out to be worse: was I some kind of f*cking emo? If not, why was I wearing all that black? My nemeses had bright knitted tea-cosies on their numbskulls, the ones with the long dangly bits at the side – ideal for hanging them with, I thought; I said – couldn’t they see the blue shirt beneath my inky cloak and – two substandard jokes on the trot did they want to have one last try or quit without further disgracing themselves? Next, something interesting happened. They realised I was ready with half-decent comebacks and wasn’t going to pretend to ignore how obnoxious they were being like everyone else on the tram. A little wave of universal bruverhood rippled across the scene. For the rest of the trip we played a game of ethnic 20 questions (I tried to guess what part of the world they came from, they tried the same out on me); they complimented me and my date on our respective choice of companions for the evening; they even asked for invitations to the wedding. I said they’d only be getting invites if they could guarantee they wouldn’t wear woolen bonnets. Not to be outdone, the lovely CW (my date) chimed in – maybe they should promise that they would wear the knitwear, so the wedding guests would know when the Moroccan village idiots had arrived. The village idiots doubled over with laughter, acknowledging they’d been dealt a couple of palpable comic hits. I shook CW’s hand, then theirs, told them not to f*ck too much sh*t up at the Showgrounds and got down in front of the North Melbourne Townhall. As the tram rounded the corner into Abbotsford St, village idiot no. 1 was hanging from the handrails and swinging his feet up into the faces of those around him.
We enter the Comic’s Lounge and head upstairs. Our names are crossed off a list and we push out into the lounge bit – a red carpeted space with some couches, a bar and lots of mirrors. The comedy takes place through some swinging saloon doors, in a room with a low ceiling big enough to host a big Greek wedding. There are trestle-tables at the back and round numbers for more intimate gatherings up the front. On all of them there’s plenty of Comic’s Lounge paraphernalia. About the only annoying thing about the place is the way it spruiks itself before, during and after the show.
. . . Enter Corinne Grant. She opens with a routine about "LOL" – don’t stick it at the end of a text message saying you heard your friend’s grandma died. Grant has already extracted from someone in the front row the confession that they thought LOL meant “lots of love”. Clattering pearls of laughter. Grant is clearly pleased – she hunches forward as though she’s got stomach cramps, a deliberately forced grin on her face – the compulsiveness of public laughter itself seems to be getting a grilling. Before handing over to Gab Rossi for his bracket, she’s up on the comic heights twice more. The first thing in her sights up there are aging hippies who make their own soap (out of squeezed together leftovers, creating what she calls “a pube sandwich”). Then it’s the turn of school-age white gangsta rappers on PT (whom she forces herself not to laugh at in case their fragile adolescent d*cks drop off). Let’s not say Rossi lowers the tone – the tone isn’t that high to start with. (One of his opening gags is “I woke up this morning and saw a great pair of tits – and I thought – I gotta lose some weight.”) But Grant is in another league. She’s the unpretentious wise-cracking blonde, unbuttoned on most topics, straight-laced about a few – the girl-next-door raised to the power of 10. Rossi by contrast is the patriotic male slob, the sub-normal bloke whose one character trait – not necessarily a redeeming one – is that once he’s poured out the slop-bucket of his mind in public, he has the rudimentary honesty to own the contents. Half-way through his bracket he regales us with his reasons for being a tea-totaler. The first is that he doesn’t need to drink to get himself to the point where he’ll flop his chop in public – give him $2 and he’ll do it anyway. As funny as that is, it’s a touch too consciously low-brow. (A paradox for Australian humorists: though obscenity is one of the most powerful kinds of subversiveness, what are you subverting if you’re playing that card to an audience for which obscenity itself is de rigueur?)
On the tram north from the city, two likely lads tried out some malign humour of their own on me. Were they speeding? Not in the literal sense of the word. The no. 57 tram to West Maribyrnong was taking them to the showgrounds for a party at that slow speed Melbourne trams like best, somewhere between walking and cycling pace. With a druggy nonchalance, one of them asked me what my name was. When told, he informed me I was lying: with a nose like mine my name had to be Pinocchio. I told him it was a dud of a joke and asked whether he had another. His friend did, but it turned out to be worse: was I some kind of f*cking emo? If not, why was I wearing all that black? My nemeses had bright knitted tea-cosies on their numbskulls, the ones with the long dangly bits at the side – ideal for hanging them with, I thought; I said – couldn’t they see the blue shirt beneath my inky cloak and – two substandard jokes on the trot did they want to have one last try or quit without further disgracing themselves? Next, something interesting happened. They realised I was ready with half-decent comebacks and wasn’t going to pretend to ignore how obnoxious they were being like everyone else on the tram. A little wave of universal bruverhood rippled across the scene. For the rest of the trip we played a game of ethnic 20 questions (I tried to guess what part of the world they came from, they tried the same out on me); they complimented me and my date on our respective choice of companions for the evening; they even asked for invitations to the wedding. I said they’d only be getting invites if they could guarantee they wouldn’t wear woolen bonnets. Not to be outdone, the lovely CW (my date) chimed in – maybe they should promise that they would wear the knitwear, so the wedding guests would know when the Moroccan village idiots had arrived. The village idiots doubled over with laughter, acknowledging they’d been dealt a couple of palpable comic hits. I shook CW’s hand, then theirs, told them not to f*ck too much sh*t up at the Showgrounds and got down in front of the North Melbourne Townhall. As the tram rounded the corner into Abbotsford St, village idiot no. 1 was hanging from the handrails and swinging his feet up into the faces of those around him.
We enter the Comic’s Lounge and head upstairs. Our names are crossed off a list and we push out into the lounge bit – a red carpeted space with some couches, a bar and lots of mirrors. The comedy takes place through some swinging saloon doors, in a room with a low ceiling big enough to host a big Greek wedding. There are trestle-tables at the back and round numbers for more intimate gatherings up the front. On all of them there’s plenty of Comic’s Lounge paraphernalia. About the only annoying thing about the place is the way it spruiks itself before, during and after the show.
. . . Enter Corinne Grant. She opens with a routine about "LOL" – don’t stick it at the end of a text message saying you heard your friend’s grandma died. Grant has already extracted from someone in the front row the confession that they thought LOL meant “lots of love”. Clattering pearls of laughter. Grant is clearly pleased – she hunches forward as though she’s got stomach cramps, a deliberately forced grin on her face – the compulsiveness of public laughter itself seems to be getting a grilling. Before handing over to Gab Rossi for his bracket, she’s up on the comic heights twice more. The first thing in her sights up there are aging hippies who make their own soap (out of squeezed together leftovers, creating what she calls “a pube sandwich”). Then it’s the turn of school-age white gangsta rappers on PT (whom she forces herself not to laugh at in case their fragile adolescent d*cks drop off). Let’s not say Rossi lowers the tone – the tone isn’t that high to start with. (One of his opening gags is “I woke up this morning and saw a great pair of tits – and I thought – I gotta lose some weight.”) But Grant is in another league. She’s the unpretentious wise-cracking blonde, unbuttoned on most topics, straight-laced about a few – the girl-next-door raised to the power of 10. Rossi by contrast is the patriotic male slob, the sub-normal bloke whose one character trait – not necessarily a redeeming one – is that once he’s poured out the slop-bucket of his mind in public, he has the rudimentary honesty to own the contents. Half-way through his bracket he regales us with his reasons for being a tea-totaler. The first is that he doesn’t need to drink to get himself to the point where he’ll flop his chop in public – give him $2 and he’ll do it anyway. As funny as that is, it’s a touch too consciously low-brow. (A paradox for Australian humorists: though obscenity is one of the most powerful kinds of subversiveness, what are you subverting if you’re playing that card to an audience for which obscenity itself is de rigueur?)
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
The art of having something to say: Part 1
Instead of a mid-week post, 13 proverbs translated (mis-translated) from the German. Commentary to follow.
Wer sich zum Schaf macht, den fressen die Wölfe.
He who plays the sheep will be eaten by the wolves.
Wenn die Schafe blöken, fällt ihnen das Futter aus dem Maul.
When the sheep bleat, their fodder falls out of their mouths.
Ein dienstfertiger Dummkopf ist gefährlicher als ein Feind.
An officious idiot is more dangerous than an enemy.
(Or, more loosely: An officious political animal is more dangerous than the fiend.)
Gleiches muß durch Gleiches geheilt warden.
(Loosely: Like is healed by like, love by love, and life through death.)
Es irrt der Mensch solang er strebt.
Man errs as long as he stirs (strives).
Das Kind beim echten Namen nennen.
To call the child by its true name.
Im Trüben ist gut fischen.
No better fishing than in the murky waters.
Den Mond am Tage suchen.
To seek the moon in the midday sky.
Die Weiber haben das Weinen and Lachen in einem Säckel.
Women have laughter and tears in the bag.
Besser ein kleiner Herr also ein große Knecht.
Better a little master than a great slave.
Den Nackten kann man nicht ausziehen.
You can’t ask a nudist to do striptease.
Wenn der Kuchen schwätzt, sind die Krümmelchen ruhig.
When the cake makes speeches, the crumbs quieten down.
(Or: When the cake makes speeches, peace descends among the crumbs.)
Tue recht und scheue niemand.
Do the right thing and shun no man.
(Arrant mistranslation: Do the right thing and spare no one.)
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Public Lecture: Science, Society and Democracy in the Era of Climate Change
Concluding Oration to “Images of Nature: Ethics and the Environment” – Part 1 of the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy’s “Global Warming: Science, Politics, Ethics” series
Delivered at the Trades Hall, Carlton, July 22, 2008I’ve talked often in the second half of the course about what I’ve called the three fundamental projects of modernity: science and technology (seen as one project), the capitalist economic system and liberal democracy. When I first talked about them I tried to show that the cultural drive that led to these three things becoming fundamental came from a peculiar ethical sphere, the sphere of Protestantism, with its work ethic and its essentially ascetic idea of duty.
[The moralistic drive of Calvinist Protestantism] was directed to the fulfilment of duty – not to live in the world, but to work in the world – for “the valuation of the fulfilment of duty in worldly affairs is the highest form which the moral activity of the individual can assume.” As Weber’s studies show, this resulted in the channelling of the full thrust of Christian moral motivation into inner-worldly activities that served as the driving force to implement the new developments of the modern world, particularly to capitalism, but also to science and technology and liberal politics. . . Redner, p. 176
To wind up I want to make some broad generalisations about the images of Nature that each of these fundamental projects of modernity imply. Given that each of the three fundamental projects is still with us, I want then to try to fulfil my promise from two weeks ago and say something about the particulars and perversities of the reactions taking place within each of the fundamental projects to the alarming environmental predicament we find ourselves in today.
My starting point for talking about all this is actually one of my endpoints from last week. We saw last week that for Redner culture is always technological, that technology for him goes part of the way to actually defining culture rather being external to culture or antagonistic to it, because culture, on Redner’s definition, is always made up of a technical, an ethical and a representational element. In a similar sense, I said last week, for me nature is always also culture. Nature and culture might in other words look like polar opposites, but the polarity, under close scrutiny, breaks down, in the same way the polar opposition between technique and culture breaks down. Our image of Nature is always a cultural image. There is no Nature which is strictly speaking or completely external to us (though of course there are physical systems that are more or less subject to human observation, understanding, influence and use. Nature is something that culture has always already gone to work on. That is, I understand, a vague slightly windy philosophical pronouncement. Let me give it now a more tangible meaning by saying roughly how the three keystones of modern culture, our societies’ fascination with science and technology, its economic system and its liberal democratic political system constitute or pre-form our image of Nature.
The claim that our image of Nature is always a cultural image is maybe most difficult to accept in the case of science. Science, according to a certain received picture, is the objective knowledge of Nature. And technology according to the same received picture is something like the objective mastery of Nature, based on the knowledge science provides us with.) But the received picture, I would argue, is distinctly one-sided. Nature in the case of science is already a cultural category in the sense that knowledge of nature and its physical laws is not only the object of scientific research, but also the object of society-wide expectations and meanings, expectations and meanings that get attached to the scientific enterprise of research into Nature from the beginning. The same is doubly true of technology, it is inseparable from the societal meanings and expectations it is imbued with, especially from the Industrial Revolution onwards, because technological innovation is the dynamo in many ways of the entire process of industrialisation and the industrial-scale domination of Nature. Industrialism, according to my thumbnail definition in Week 9, is best understood as technological innovation harnessed so as to enable the production of goods on a mass basis. Industrialism, in other words, is what supplies the field of expectations through which the projects of scientific representation of nature and technological manipulation of it are interpreted.
So can we speak of an overall image of Nature here? At the risk of overgeneralising you could say that the image of nature involved in the process of giving scientific representation a meaning through technical manipulation and industrial production is an image of nature as purely an object of domination. (You’d incur the risk of over-generalising of course because the image of nature as object of domination is hardly characteristic of science, technology or its industrial and economic applications in anything like the same way.) Another way of putting it would be to say that the image of nature involved in the process is thoroughly disenchanted. With scientific representation and technical manipulation as our main modes of relating to Nature, we have taken enormous strides away from the magical and mythical modes of relating to the nature which, in vastly different ways, enabled us to imagine ourselves as a part of it. This is not to say, however, that disenchantment, or an attitude of domineering instrumentalism, are in any way the inevitable or uniform products of scientific representations of Nature. If the disenchanted, rational, methodical investigation of the natural world which is both the cause and effect of modern science has on the one hand led to enormous possibilities of technological and economic use of Nature, it has, paradoxically, also led to an enormous expansion of our sensibility towards nature. It is through science that the variety, complexity and in a sense the depths of Nature are known in a new way. Science need not be the prelude to rampant instrumentalism. And anyone who looks at David Attenborough communing with tree ferns or canoodling with turtles and sees nothing but a prelude to the invasion of bulldozers and pharmaceutical companies; or who thinks Attenborough is just providing entertaining kitsch for stupefied cultural consumers should put down his social theory textbook and get a breath of fresh air. Scientific representation of Nature in this permutation has clearly made possible a sort of re-enchantment of Nature, a second secular enchantment that bears only a superficial resemblance to pre-modern mythic experiences of Nature, which themselves often bear only passing resemblance to each other.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Age Review of Damon Young's Distraction: A Philosopher's Guide to Being Free
We live in an age not given to deep or extended reflection. The phenomenon of lifestyle philosophy is part of a sporadic and slightly tortured effort by philosophers to make themselves relevant to such an age. For better or worse, philosophy stopped being what it once was, the much vaunted queen of the sciences, several centuries ago. And the times are definitively over when a literary or philosophical education was seen as a necessary preparatory to life in the wider world. A fair portion of academic philosophy has coped with that by remaking itself in the image of a technical discipline, with its own sub-disciplines, journals and professional cadres. Lifestyle philosophy has struck out in the opposite direction. Its working assumption is that philosophy can be made as applicable to everyday life as the individual lifestyle philosopher dares to make it.
Damon Young's Distraction is very much in this vein. Subtitled A Philosopher's Guide to Being Free, it takes up the perennial theme of individual liberty and does something with it very much along the lines of Alain de Botton or John Armstrong. It shares the attractions and the pitfalls of Armstrong's work, which at its best can give readers a gentle introduction to a philosophical theme but at its worst reduces the history of ideas to something colourless and quaint, a sort of boutique blandness.
Young argues that distraction is the very opposite of freedom - it is what robs us of our authentic selves and radically narrows our ability to give shape to individual character. This all seems unambiguously true; we live in times that are rife with diversions of dubious value, a seemingly endless array of trivia. For Young, we can all be happier, healthier and wiser if we concentrate on what we truly value, and the lives and works of great philosophers and artists apparently show us how we can go about it - they're quintessentially edifying, or so the argument goes.
In seven chapters Young surveys the areas of contemporary life where distraction exercises its devilish and humdrum charms - in the world of work, in our dealings with technology, in war and politics. But he also takes us on a Cook's tour of Western cultural history in search of a cure. This is where the problems begin. The meanings of thousand-page novels, philosophical systems and their authors' lives are condensed into paragraphs or single sentences - the meaning of T.S.Eliot's life is that "hard work pays off", with Marx it's that "in the economy there's no such thing as a free lunch", while Plato's idealistic disaffection with the Greece of his day suggests to Young we shouldn't "flinch or close our eyes" when confronted with "the opportunity to live".
The potted versions of the lives seem slightly irrelevant to Young's theme and he often strains to derive much coherent, reflective meaning from them. Too often the result is stereotyped life-stances that Young plays off against one another. Thus too much romanticism in life is a consistent no-no. On the other hand, adhering too strictly to reason, order and principle underplays the importance of emotion and imagination. Yes, indeed. But can any of the great philosophers really have recommended a life of unadulterated romance or the reasoned eradication of passion? Young writes as if they might have, so he can guide us to the middle ground, from which freedom gently beckons.
The difficulty is not so much Young's style, which is at times lively and (maybe a touch predictably) amusing. It's a problem with his self-help-y point of view. The overall cast of Distraction isn't equal to the grand idea of a new book about freedom. Flattening writers' lives into a digestible series of underpsychologised set pieces isn't enough to make a compelling case about liberty or individuality in our times.And even if we'd like to think that the wisdom of past ages could be transferred into our personal philosophical bank accounts without further ado, the question remains whether the historical context of an Eliot or a Plato's life was so different from our own that the project of letting them speak to us directly is bound to fail.
Young is right that we live in distracting times. But is more freedom or self-realisation quite the solution? There are good reasons to think the opposite but they don't get a look in. Might not some of our ills - from stockmarket turmoil to climate change - be the byproducts of the very liberty Young advocates? To see that, the cruel problem of freedom needs to be grasped from a less comfortable point of view than that of Distraction.
Damon Young's Distraction is very much in this vein. Subtitled A Philosopher's Guide to Being Free, it takes up the perennial theme of individual liberty and does something with it very much along the lines of Alain de Botton or John Armstrong. It shares the attractions and the pitfalls of Armstrong's work, which at its best can give readers a gentle introduction to a philosophical theme but at its worst reduces the history of ideas to something colourless and quaint, a sort of boutique blandness.
Young argues that distraction is the very opposite of freedom - it is what robs us of our authentic selves and radically narrows our ability to give shape to individual character. This all seems unambiguously true; we live in times that are rife with diversions of dubious value, a seemingly endless array of trivia. For Young, we can all be happier, healthier and wiser if we concentrate on what we truly value, and the lives and works of great philosophers and artists apparently show us how we can go about it - they're quintessentially edifying, or so the argument goes.
In seven chapters Young surveys the areas of contemporary life where distraction exercises its devilish and humdrum charms - in the world of work, in our dealings with technology, in war and politics. But he also takes us on a Cook's tour of Western cultural history in search of a cure. This is where the problems begin. The meanings of thousand-page novels, philosophical systems and their authors' lives are condensed into paragraphs or single sentences - the meaning of T.S.Eliot's life is that "hard work pays off", with Marx it's that "in the economy there's no such thing as a free lunch", while Plato's idealistic disaffection with the Greece of his day suggests to Young we shouldn't "flinch or close our eyes" when confronted with "the opportunity to live".
The potted versions of the lives seem slightly irrelevant to Young's theme and he often strains to derive much coherent, reflective meaning from them. Too often the result is stereotyped life-stances that Young plays off against one another. Thus too much romanticism in life is a consistent no-no. On the other hand, adhering too strictly to reason, order and principle underplays the importance of emotion and imagination. Yes, indeed. But can any of the great philosophers really have recommended a life of unadulterated romance or the reasoned eradication of passion? Young writes as if they might have, so he can guide us to the middle ground, from which freedom gently beckons.
The difficulty is not so much Young's style, which is at times lively and (maybe a touch predictably) amusing. It's a problem with his self-help-y point of view. The overall cast of Distraction isn't equal to the grand idea of a new book about freedom. Flattening writers' lives into a digestible series of underpsychologised set pieces isn't enough to make a compelling case about liberty or individuality in our times.And even if we'd like to think that the wisdom of past ages could be transferred into our personal philosophical bank accounts without further ado, the question remains whether the historical context of an Eliot or a Plato's life was so different from our own that the project of letting them speak to us directly is bound to fail.
Young is right that we live in distracting times. But is more freedom or self-realisation quite the solution? There are good reasons to think the opposite but they don't get a look in. Might not some of our ills - from stockmarket turmoil to climate change - be the byproducts of the very liberty Young advocates? To see that, the cruel problem of freedom needs to be grasped from a less comfortable point of view than that of Distraction.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
A naturalist and a gentleman: ABR review of Tom Frame's Evolution in the Antipodes: Charles Darwin in Australia
‘The tension between religion and intellectual knowledge definitely comes to the fore,’ says Max Weber, ‘wherever rational empirical knowledge has consistently worked through to the disenchantment of the world and its transformation into a causal mechanism.’ Darwinism, or so one version of the history of modern culture goes, is the culmination of the process of disenchantment, the last step in the transformation of the world into a causal mechanism.
Where the great minds of early modern science concur in thinking that scientific study of the creation acquaints human beings better with the majesty of the creator, Darwin’s theory of natural selection seems to dispose of the creator without further ado. The famous core of it is the hypothesis that undirected biological change acts as a creative force, generating new species and ensuring that those that are best adapted to their environments have the greatest reproductive success. As plain as it sounds, the implications are startling – species need no longer be thought of as immutable creations of divinity; man himself no longer appears minted in the image of God; the earth, as a whole, acquires a distinctively modern natural history that dispenses with all notion of divine provision for human needs and aspirations. ‘It is like confessing to murder,’ Darwin wrote in an 1844 letter to Joseph Dalton, as the new theory put him on an unavoidable collision course with the proponents of a one-off biblical creation.
Is Darwinism true but deadly to all forms of Christian belief, as it is sometimes claimed to be? Is the causal mechanism it invokes hostile to religious and ethical meaning per se? These are the questions which motivate Tom Frame in Evolution in the Antipodes: Charles Darwin and Australia. But as the title suggests, they are far from Frame’s sole preoccupation. The first half of the book gives us a highly readable history taking in the formation of Darwin’s mind, his visit to Australia and a range of Australian reactions to his ideas – from the elegant pro and contra of the colonial period to the arid productions of the Creation Science movement. While in the second half of the book Frame gives the social history of Darwinism a contemporary edge by referring it back to his 24-carat question of meaning – how radically has Darwinism changed what it means to be Christian – Evolution in the Antipodes is informative and consummately fair-minded in its dealings with both past and present.
Darwin’s visit to Australia on the Beagle in early 1836 provides Frame with his main historical point of orientation. The brief Australian sojourn was something of a working holiday, with Darwin’s time divided between social obligations, field trips and exchanges with local naturalists. His account of his experiences for The Voyage of the Beagle (1840) gives as good an indication as any of his general mindset. The Voyage contains a fair amount of amateur cultural anthropology, some of it with an ugly undertone belonging squarely to the Age of Empire. Aboriginal Australians Darwin unhesitatingly calls ‘men in their lowest and most savage state’. Missionary Christianity he thinks of as an unambiguous force for moral improvement in the Pacific. (Frame presents it all neutrally as the sort of cultural chauvinism typical of Darwin’s day.) On a different level, but equally of its time, is Darwin’s commendation of the life of the sea-going naturalist – a veritable hymn to wholesome Protestant activity:
In a moral point of view, the effect [of the sea-going naturalist’s life] ought to be, to teach [a man] good-humoured patience, freedom from selfishness, the habit of acting for himself, and of making the best of every occurrence.
Nothing Darwin observed in Australia, Frame tells us, made any special contribution to the theory of natural selection as it was to emerge after his return to Britain. Curiously, Darwin seems to have been unreceptive to his Australian surrounds – unwilling to imagine his way into the physical environment and repelled by its apparent lack of form. His notes about what he saw are a mixed bag – some useful grist for his evolutionary mill, some high-toned visions of a future Australian civilisation and some unconscious rehashings of his own Victorian present.
Frame’s chapter on Darwin’s own religious feeling is especially good. On the existence of God, Darwin was nothing less – though nothing more – than agnostic from his late-thirties onwards. Natural selection, however, led him to unreserved scepticism about the existence of hell, the notion that God reveals himself in nature, and especially the divine inspiration of the Bible. What is notable, though, is that, in spite of this, his personal morality remained well within the orbit of Christian teachings. Unlike some of his followers, Darwin never seems to have questioned whether altruism is the supreme ethical capacity of human beings (though he thought that it could be accounted for as an evolutionary extension of the social instincts of animals). The man himself was a naturalist and a gentleman, an orthodox Victorian one, or, as Frame puts it, an adherent of basic Christian principles, if not a Christian believer. Thinking through the consequences of his new theory for religious belief seems simply not to have been part of what he considered his scientific business. Frame demonstrates conclusively that Darwin’s shift away from his youthful Anglicanism was no lurch towards militant atheism. ‘The habit of looking for one kind of meaning [of the naturalistic variety] deadens the perception of another [religious meaning]’ – as Darwin himself joylessly puts it on mature reflection.
Anyone with a rough feel for the history of ideas will infer that Darwin’s doubts about conventional religious belief emerge from a standard background in Enlightenment philosophy and biblical criticism, mediated by one or two layers of polite English free-thinking. In the light of Frame’s account, treating Darwin himself as ‘the devil’s chaplain’, as some of his contemporaries did, seems ridiculous. But Darwin’s reticence about religion cuts both ways. Chapter nine of Evolution in the Antipodes shows just how unwilling he was to go out of his way to deprive others of their grounds for belief, something the militant Darwinians of our own era could learn from, if they agree that Darwin was something more than a supreme scientific mind. The vulgarity of many a neo-Darwinian criticism of vulgar superstition – kicking obsessively at everything that resembles a metaphysical crutch – is something Frame manages to quietly censor just by sketching more and less moderate possibilities of contemporary Darwinian thought.
Later in the book, Frame ventures into the dark realms of Creation Science and its neighbouring states of extremity, the lunar landscape of biblical literalism, multiplying religious factions and argumentative vicious circles. The debates Evolution in the Antipodes re-enacts between well-funded creationists and testy professors of biology bring out the best in no one. With the existence of God and His relationship with His creation at stake, the parties slug it out with all the paraphernalia of modern marketing at their disposal. The outcome – though Frame hesitates to say so himself – is not so much a nil-all draw but an unedifying game whose players all deserve red cards, a situation in which public discourse of the divine and the natural is cheapened.
So, if the universe was not created by God ex nihilo, and if human beings were not created in God’s image, do we still have reason to believe in God, especially in a Christian God who is loving and all-powerful? The answer suggested by Darwinism and insisted on by some Darwinians is in the negative. Frame’s point in Evolution in the Antipodes is that the negative answer can be taken for granted too easily. Yes, Christian belief is still possible, more than that it is still reasonable, he wants to say, but not without a reinterpretation of the nature and meaning of the deity and His relationship to His (supposed) creation. The trouble with where Frame winds up in the book is that the reinterpretation has not quite taken shape, though the landmarks in the Australian history of the reinterpretation have been generously surveyed. Frame, an Anglican bishop, is very much a believer in the reasoned road to God. Faith for him is an amalgam of observation, reflection and inspiration, a sort of affectively enriched empiricism. His God is one who enacts, or in some sense is, the continuous and ongoing process of creation, an immanent Being quite close to the God of pantheism.
It is a shame there isn’t space for Frame to give us his reflections on some alternatives – for instance that of drawing the dividing line between matters of fact and matters of faith more starkly (the path of a Kierkegaard, for whom faith totally transcends any scientific findings). Frame, in the end, is probably unwilling to take this turn because his is primarily an ethical religiosity, one inclined to appeal to rational knowledge, rather than make Christianity’s moral imperatives into inscrutable commandments of God.
That said, Evolution in the Antipodes remains a superb layman’s introduction, both to Darwin and to one side of Australian intellectual history. It pinpoints the way Darwin’s main ideas were influenced by the intellectual, social and scientific debates of his own day, the way those ideas acted on society and the way society continues to act on itself in the light of its understanding of them. Darwin himself, one feels, would have been bemused to see the mutation of natural selection from an approach to definite scientific problems to an all-purpose attitude, something more than a set of theoretical tools, but less than a philosophy.
Above all, Frame’s use of sources is second to none; Evolution in the Antipodes effortlessly assimilates an enormous array of materials into one coherent line of historical interpretation running from the late eighteenth century to the present. In its way, it is a model of a type of book we need more of in a world where science has its cultural meanings imposed on it by its social surrounds and where the sheer complexity of the scientific enterprise opens an ever wider field to arbitrary assertions of irrational meaning. All in all, this is a thoughtful work of popular science that puts the science in a broad cultural context while also allowing it to appear to one side of all cultural controversy.
Where the great minds of early modern science concur in thinking that scientific study of the creation acquaints human beings better with the majesty of the creator, Darwin’s theory of natural selection seems to dispose of the creator without further ado. The famous core of it is the hypothesis that undirected biological change acts as a creative force, generating new species and ensuring that those that are best adapted to their environments have the greatest reproductive success. As plain as it sounds, the implications are startling – species need no longer be thought of as immutable creations of divinity; man himself no longer appears minted in the image of God; the earth, as a whole, acquires a distinctively modern natural history that dispenses with all notion of divine provision for human needs and aspirations. ‘It is like confessing to murder,’ Darwin wrote in an 1844 letter to Joseph Dalton, as the new theory put him on an unavoidable collision course with the proponents of a one-off biblical creation.
Is Darwinism true but deadly to all forms of Christian belief, as it is sometimes claimed to be? Is the causal mechanism it invokes hostile to religious and ethical meaning per se? These are the questions which motivate Tom Frame in Evolution in the Antipodes: Charles Darwin and Australia. But as the title suggests, they are far from Frame’s sole preoccupation. The first half of the book gives us a highly readable history taking in the formation of Darwin’s mind, his visit to Australia and a range of Australian reactions to his ideas – from the elegant pro and contra of the colonial period to the arid productions of the Creation Science movement. While in the second half of the book Frame gives the social history of Darwinism a contemporary edge by referring it back to his 24-carat question of meaning – how radically has Darwinism changed what it means to be Christian – Evolution in the Antipodes is informative and consummately fair-minded in its dealings with both past and present.
Darwin’s visit to Australia on the Beagle in early 1836 provides Frame with his main historical point of orientation. The brief Australian sojourn was something of a working holiday, with Darwin’s time divided between social obligations, field trips and exchanges with local naturalists. His account of his experiences for The Voyage of the Beagle (1840) gives as good an indication as any of his general mindset. The Voyage contains a fair amount of amateur cultural anthropology, some of it with an ugly undertone belonging squarely to the Age of Empire. Aboriginal Australians Darwin unhesitatingly calls ‘men in their lowest and most savage state’. Missionary Christianity he thinks of as an unambiguous force for moral improvement in the Pacific. (Frame presents it all neutrally as the sort of cultural chauvinism typical of Darwin’s day.) On a different level, but equally of its time, is Darwin’s commendation of the life of the sea-going naturalist – a veritable hymn to wholesome Protestant activity:
In a moral point of view, the effect [of the sea-going naturalist’s life] ought to be, to teach [a man] good-humoured patience, freedom from selfishness, the habit of acting for himself, and of making the best of every occurrence.
Nothing Darwin observed in Australia, Frame tells us, made any special contribution to the theory of natural selection as it was to emerge after his return to Britain. Curiously, Darwin seems to have been unreceptive to his Australian surrounds – unwilling to imagine his way into the physical environment and repelled by its apparent lack of form. His notes about what he saw are a mixed bag – some useful grist for his evolutionary mill, some high-toned visions of a future Australian civilisation and some unconscious rehashings of his own Victorian present.
Frame’s chapter on Darwin’s own religious feeling is especially good. On the existence of God, Darwin was nothing less – though nothing more – than agnostic from his late-thirties onwards. Natural selection, however, led him to unreserved scepticism about the existence of hell, the notion that God reveals himself in nature, and especially the divine inspiration of the Bible. What is notable, though, is that, in spite of this, his personal morality remained well within the orbit of Christian teachings. Unlike some of his followers, Darwin never seems to have questioned whether altruism is the supreme ethical capacity of human beings (though he thought that it could be accounted for as an evolutionary extension of the social instincts of animals). The man himself was a naturalist and a gentleman, an orthodox Victorian one, or, as Frame puts it, an adherent of basic Christian principles, if not a Christian believer. Thinking through the consequences of his new theory for religious belief seems simply not to have been part of what he considered his scientific business. Frame demonstrates conclusively that Darwin’s shift away from his youthful Anglicanism was no lurch towards militant atheism. ‘The habit of looking for one kind of meaning [of the naturalistic variety] deadens the perception of another [religious meaning]’ – as Darwin himself joylessly puts it on mature reflection.
Anyone with a rough feel for the history of ideas will infer that Darwin’s doubts about conventional religious belief emerge from a standard background in Enlightenment philosophy and biblical criticism, mediated by one or two layers of polite English free-thinking. In the light of Frame’s account, treating Darwin himself as ‘the devil’s chaplain’, as some of his contemporaries did, seems ridiculous. But Darwin’s reticence about religion cuts both ways. Chapter nine of Evolution in the Antipodes shows just how unwilling he was to go out of his way to deprive others of their grounds for belief, something the militant Darwinians of our own era could learn from, if they agree that Darwin was something more than a supreme scientific mind. The vulgarity of many a neo-Darwinian criticism of vulgar superstition – kicking obsessively at everything that resembles a metaphysical crutch – is something Frame manages to quietly censor just by sketching more and less moderate possibilities of contemporary Darwinian thought.
Later in the book, Frame ventures into the dark realms of Creation Science and its neighbouring states of extremity, the lunar landscape of biblical literalism, multiplying religious factions and argumentative vicious circles. The debates Evolution in the Antipodes re-enacts between well-funded creationists and testy professors of biology bring out the best in no one. With the existence of God and His relationship with His creation at stake, the parties slug it out with all the paraphernalia of modern marketing at their disposal. The outcome – though Frame hesitates to say so himself – is not so much a nil-all draw but an unedifying game whose players all deserve red cards, a situation in which public discourse of the divine and the natural is cheapened.
So, if the universe was not created by God ex nihilo, and if human beings were not created in God’s image, do we still have reason to believe in God, especially in a Christian God who is loving and all-powerful? The answer suggested by Darwinism and insisted on by some Darwinians is in the negative. Frame’s point in Evolution in the Antipodes is that the negative answer can be taken for granted too easily. Yes, Christian belief is still possible, more than that it is still reasonable, he wants to say, but not without a reinterpretation of the nature and meaning of the deity and His relationship to His (supposed) creation. The trouble with where Frame winds up in the book is that the reinterpretation has not quite taken shape, though the landmarks in the Australian history of the reinterpretation have been generously surveyed. Frame, an Anglican bishop, is very much a believer in the reasoned road to God. Faith for him is an amalgam of observation, reflection and inspiration, a sort of affectively enriched empiricism. His God is one who enacts, or in some sense is, the continuous and ongoing process of creation, an immanent Being quite close to the God of pantheism.
It is a shame there isn’t space for Frame to give us his reflections on some alternatives – for instance that of drawing the dividing line between matters of fact and matters of faith more starkly (the path of a Kierkegaard, for whom faith totally transcends any scientific findings). Frame, in the end, is probably unwilling to take this turn because his is primarily an ethical religiosity, one inclined to appeal to rational knowledge, rather than make Christianity’s moral imperatives into inscrutable commandments of God.
That said, Evolution in the Antipodes remains a superb layman’s introduction, both to Darwin and to one side of Australian intellectual history. It pinpoints the way Darwin’s main ideas were influenced by the intellectual, social and scientific debates of his own day, the way those ideas acted on society and the way society continues to act on itself in the light of its understanding of them. Darwin himself, one feels, would have been bemused to see the mutation of natural selection from an approach to definite scientific problems to an all-purpose attitude, something more than a set of theoretical tools, but less than a philosophy.
Above all, Frame’s use of sources is second to none; Evolution in the Antipodes effortlessly assimilates an enormous array of materials into one coherent line of historical interpretation running from the late eighteenth century to the present. In its way, it is a model of a type of book we need more of in a world where science has its cultural meanings imposed on it by its social surrounds and where the sheer complexity of the scientific enterprise opens an ever wider field to arbitrary assertions of irrational meaning. All in all, this is a thoughtful work of popular science that puts the science in a broad cultural context while also allowing it to appear to one side of all cultural controversy.
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
Age review of John Armstrong's In Search of Civilisation
John Armstrong’s In Search of Civilisation runs two intersecting arguments. The first is that civilised culture comes into existence where material and spiritual prosperity mutually enhance each other. The second is that “any ambitious account of civilisation has to be an account of how we should live, individually and collectively.”
The emphasis there is on the “should”. Armstrong says at the outset that he is not much interested in civilisation as an historical or sociological phenomenon. What he’s after is the essence of civilisation and the essence of civilisation, he hopes, can function as a source of cultural idealism in a world in which such idealism feels like it is under permanent attack.
Out he comes and says it, with his characteristic directness: philosophy can and should be the basis of all civilised aspirations, the goal of philosophy being the realisation that the good, the beautiful and the true are one . . . Civilisation ought to make us wise, kind and tasteful. And the purpose of the economy is to promote exactly that.
Armstrong basically wants to define civilisation as whatever makes personal self-development possible. Within that limited compass, he has plenty to say. How you deal with the little things in life and how you enjoy yourself are under-recognised parts of what it is to be civilised. Healthy civilisations are those which imbue routine activities with the qualities of works of art. Civilised societies are those which help individuals develop a sense of sophistication and refinement. They support “good accumulation”, money-making with a sense of higher purpose. They even improve the quality of relationships.
As in his earlier Secret Power of Beauty, Armstrong’s strength is in condensing complicated thinking into the clearest simplest terms. In Search of Civilisation contains a topnotch 2 page summary of Freud’s case in “Civilisation and Its Discontents” and a mildly amusing modern adaptation of Aristotle’s ethics.
He’s also good at teasing out both sides of cultural conflicts that materialise partially in individual life. His chapters on “decadence” and “barbarism” genuinely do something with those over-wrought nineteenth century terms; if you thought you could do without your inner bogan or your inner dandy then according to Armstrong you mistake the way modern civilisation necessarily produces both.
Several of Armstrong’s observations have a sort of low-key reflective heft: the specialised world of art scholarship can be as culturally dispiriting as plastic statuettes of Michelangelo’s David; a bit of old-fashioned sublimation of desire is not just good but downright noble.
There are a couple of problems with tone. For one, Armstrong can sound sanctimounious when he speaks on behalf of his readers. When he assumes too easily that his own professed longing for civilisation resonates with “our” deepest needs and concerns, “our” humanity, he sounds like Tony Blair transported into a philosophy tutorial.
Though not exactly irrelevant to his theme, the grace, charm and material comfort of Armstrong’s own way of life are put on display with a mite too much self-satisfaction, gently suggesting that he himself embodies the civilised ideal his book sets out to explain.
One-dimensional expressions of ardour for civilised things are a second problem. Armstrong’s intention is clearly to avoid dry philosophical technicality. But surely he might have found other ways of doing so than avowing that he is “penetrated to the depths of his soul” by so many things? Sometimes the intrusions of authorial personality simply seem, well, a bit embarrassing. They make the book too much about Armstrong and not enough about civilisation.
“Perhaps we are inescapably marked – when it comes to ideas – by early life. . . My deepest fear is of loutish bullying and, close second, of appealing for help and being told the problem lies in me. Uncritical emphasis upon ideas like difference and equality is terrifying. . .”
There are also some broader failings related to the substance of Armstrong’s thinking about civilisation. Because he chooses not to engage with the problem of civilisation historically, he doesn’t acknowledge that the very concept might have changed radically under modern social conditions.
His stated aim is to re-make the “tarnished idea” of civilisation. But how is this possible without recognition that we live in an increasingly globalised world that has all but effaced former boundaries between cultures? How does it differ from nostalgia if it doesn’t face up to the paradoxes with which technology confronts the aesthetic and ethical ideals of old?
Because Armstrong doesn’t qualify his argument about the virtues of materialism, he overestimates the way economic success can be a neutral second pillar of civilisation alongside spiritual prosperity. The possibility he doesn’t consider is whether contemporary economic life in a high-tech globalised world has a radical potential to act as a sort of acid for dissolving the forms of culture and civility that ground the life of civilised communities.
The results are all around us. The “civilising” content of the cultural past is re-packaged as another sort of economic product. As that content is made available in relatively cheap standardised form to masses of people the world over, it is evacuated of a large part of its meaning. Nor is the high-minded re-assertion of the civilising mission of high culture likely to do any good under such conditions. High culture is well and truly catered for as a niche product within a mass market, which is ultimately where Armstrong’s work takes its place. - It is not just that the petunia in the onion patch is unlikely to convince the onions to become petunias. We’ve got to the bizarre point where the petunia’s attempts to convince the onions sow the seeds of more onions.
Armstrong’s sections on the contribution of material prosperity to civilisation represent the real weakpoint of his thought. Where the rest of his book is often psychologically canny, in the sections on culture’s relationship to money Armstrong wants to deal with a large-scale social conundrum without bothering with the detail of how societies work. His few nods in the direction of economics are unconvincing.
Nor does the book engage enough with the collective side of the enterprise of civilisation that on Armstrong’s account is supposed to be the complement to the individual side. The organisations and institutions of civilised life hardly make an appearance. But without them the book’s notion of civilisation looks more like a personal idyll than a coherent ideal.
The emphasis there is on the “should”. Armstrong says at the outset that he is not much interested in civilisation as an historical or sociological phenomenon. What he’s after is the essence of civilisation and the essence of civilisation, he hopes, can function as a source of cultural idealism in a world in which such idealism feels like it is under permanent attack.
Out he comes and says it, with his characteristic directness: philosophy can and should be the basis of all civilised aspirations, the goal of philosophy being the realisation that the good, the beautiful and the true are one . . . Civilisation ought to make us wise, kind and tasteful. And the purpose of the economy is to promote exactly that.
Armstrong basically wants to define civilisation as whatever makes personal self-development possible. Within that limited compass, he has plenty to say. How you deal with the little things in life and how you enjoy yourself are under-recognised parts of what it is to be civilised. Healthy civilisations are those which imbue routine activities with the qualities of works of art. Civilised societies are those which help individuals develop a sense of sophistication and refinement. They support “good accumulation”, money-making with a sense of higher purpose. They even improve the quality of relationships.
As in his earlier Secret Power of Beauty, Armstrong’s strength is in condensing complicated thinking into the clearest simplest terms. In Search of Civilisation contains a topnotch 2 page summary of Freud’s case in “Civilisation and Its Discontents” and a mildly amusing modern adaptation of Aristotle’s ethics.
He’s also good at teasing out both sides of cultural conflicts that materialise partially in individual life. His chapters on “decadence” and “barbarism” genuinely do something with those over-wrought nineteenth century terms; if you thought you could do without your inner bogan or your inner dandy then according to Armstrong you mistake the way modern civilisation necessarily produces both.
Several of Armstrong’s observations have a sort of low-key reflective heft: the specialised world of art scholarship can be as culturally dispiriting as plastic statuettes of Michelangelo’s David; a bit of old-fashioned sublimation of desire is not just good but downright noble.
There are a couple of problems with tone. For one, Armstrong can sound sanctimounious when he speaks on behalf of his readers. When he assumes too easily that his own professed longing for civilisation resonates with “our” deepest needs and concerns, “our” humanity, he sounds like Tony Blair transported into a philosophy tutorial.
Though not exactly irrelevant to his theme, the grace, charm and material comfort of Armstrong’s own way of life are put on display with a mite too much self-satisfaction, gently suggesting that he himself embodies the civilised ideal his book sets out to explain.
One-dimensional expressions of ardour for civilised things are a second problem. Armstrong’s intention is clearly to avoid dry philosophical technicality. But surely he might have found other ways of doing so than avowing that he is “penetrated to the depths of his soul” by so many things? Sometimes the intrusions of authorial personality simply seem, well, a bit embarrassing. They make the book too much about Armstrong and not enough about civilisation.
“Perhaps we are inescapably marked – when it comes to ideas – by early life. . . My deepest fear is of loutish bullying and, close second, of appealing for help and being told the problem lies in me. Uncritical emphasis upon ideas like difference and equality is terrifying. . .”
There are also some broader failings related to the substance of Armstrong’s thinking about civilisation. Because he chooses not to engage with the problem of civilisation historically, he doesn’t acknowledge that the very concept might have changed radically under modern social conditions.
His stated aim is to re-make the “tarnished idea” of civilisation. But how is this possible without recognition that we live in an increasingly globalised world that has all but effaced former boundaries between cultures? How does it differ from nostalgia if it doesn’t face up to the paradoxes with which technology confronts the aesthetic and ethical ideals of old?
Because Armstrong doesn’t qualify his argument about the virtues of materialism, he overestimates the way economic success can be a neutral second pillar of civilisation alongside spiritual prosperity. The possibility he doesn’t consider is whether contemporary economic life in a high-tech globalised world has a radical potential to act as a sort of acid for dissolving the forms of culture and civility that ground the life of civilised communities.
The results are all around us. The “civilising” content of the cultural past is re-packaged as another sort of economic product. As that content is made available in relatively cheap standardised form to masses of people the world over, it is evacuated of a large part of its meaning. Nor is the high-minded re-assertion of the civilising mission of high culture likely to do any good under such conditions. High culture is well and truly catered for as a niche product within a mass market, which is ultimately where Armstrong’s work takes its place. - It is not just that the petunia in the onion patch is unlikely to convince the onions to become petunias. We’ve got to the bizarre point where the petunia’s attempts to convince the onions sow the seeds of more onions.
Armstrong’s sections on the contribution of material prosperity to civilisation represent the real weakpoint of his thought. Where the rest of his book is often psychologically canny, in the sections on culture’s relationship to money Armstrong wants to deal with a large-scale social conundrum without bothering with the detail of how societies work. His few nods in the direction of economics are unconvincing.
Nor does the book engage enough with the collective side of the enterprise of civilisation that on Armstrong’s account is supposed to be the complement to the individual side. The organisations and institutions of civilised life hardly make an appearance. But without them the book’s notion of civilisation looks more like a personal idyll than a coherent ideal.
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