Gilles Bouche: Copenhagen - What Could Have Been

The following text is a translated and slightly adapted version of the second part of a two-part piece which I wrote while the Copenhagen climate change conference was taking place and which was published on the website of Forum magazine – the magazine which, very roughly and mutatis mutandis, comes closest to being Luxembourg's  Monthly. It was born of a feeling of frustration with much of the media coverage of the conference – including the coverage by said magazine. What frustrated me was what seemed to me an absence of analysis, a failure to understand or even make an effort to understand the science and politics of climate change, a fortiori a failure to help or even make an effort to help the reader to such an understanding, hence a failure to fulfil what seemed to me one of the main functions of journalism taking climate change as its topic – the function of continuously working at closing the gap between scientists and nonscientists, politicians and nonpoliticians, experts and non-experts. What frustrated me was what seemed to me a failure of journalists to do their job as mature and rational people should want to do their job and to treat their readers as mature and rational people should want to be treated.

Journalists indeed tried to close a gap, but not the one between experts and nonexperts. They tried to close the gap between nonexperts present and nonexperts absent. Instead of informing, they entertained. They tried to capture the atmosphere of the conference, they tried to give us a sense of what it was like to be there, of what it would have been like to be there, of what we were missing out on by not being there. The conference as experience, the conference as spectacle. Instead of cutting through the confusion, journalists were happy to express their inability to do so as the truth about the conference, as what was to be experienced at the conference.

A telling anecdote: Well toward the end of the conference, a journalist blogging for New Matilda, one of the better magazines, found the time to ask a scientist what he was thinking about the 1.5 degree C guardrail, the target advocated by many developing countries. The scientist bluntly said that meeting this target was virtually impossible. The current atmospheric composition, without any further increase in atmospheric CO2, is already bound to lead to a global temperature increase of 1.3 degree C. This answer clearly left the journalist flabbergasted, which he would not have been, had he cared to have a glance at the literature.

The question which I tried to answer tentatively in the article was: How can one assess whether an agreement reached in Copenhagen is a good agreement? What criteria should an agreement meet? I considered two criteria: what I called “adequacy” and “fairness”. Talking about adequacy is fairly straightforward. One mainly has to listen to what scientists have to say. The science constrains the choice of an adequate target (such as the 2 degree C and the 1.5 degree C guardrails) and determines the choice of the means (in form of a CO2 emissions budget and CO2 emissions reductions) necessary to meet the target. Talking about fairness is more difficult, for obvious reasons. It presupposes a some conception of ethics, and ethics is a mess.

In the article, I mostly confined myself to relating the position of the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU), which advises the German government, as laid out in its excellent special report Solving the Climate Dilemma: The Budget Approach. The WBGU recommends a principle-based attitude to fairness and identifies three main principles: the principle of equity, the principle of financial capacity, and the principle of mitigation capacity. The basic idea behind a principle-based approach to the distribution of emissions rights is of course that emissions rights should be distributed according to certain principles, but also that divergences from the distribution thus obtained are admissible, but should be justified, notably by invoking further principles. The advantage of a principle-based approach is hence that one starts with simplicity and introduces complexity step by step. Though of course, I do not think that the same issues cannot be approached from many different angles.

Finally, I refer to, resp. recommend, the following literature:

McKinsey & Company, An Australian Cost Curve for Greenhouse Gas Reduction (February 2008).

http://www.mckinsey.com/clientservice/ccsi/pdf/Australian_Cost_Curve_for_GHG_Reduction.pdf

PIK et al, RECIPE: The Economics of Decarbonization (2009). http://www.pik-potsdam.de/research/research-domains/sustainable-solutions/research-act-intl-climate-pol/recipe-groupspace/working-papers/public-working-papers-from-the-recipe-project/?searchterm=recipe

WBGU, Solving the Climate Dilemma: The Budget Approach (July 2009). http://www.wbgu.de/wbgu_sn2009_en.pdf

WBGU, The Minimal Compromise in Copenhagen: A Target – But Still No Plan of Action, (20 December 2009). http://www.wbgu.de/wbgu_presse_09_05e.html

***

What are the hallmarks of a good agreement? (Trans. CS)

In part 1 of this post I suggested that an agreement in Copenhagen can be assessed on at least three general criteria: according to appropriateness, fairness and effectivenss. Whether an agreement is appropriate depends firstly on whether the chosen target and secondly on whether the chosen means are appropriate.

Appropriateness

There is an important asymmetry between overall targets and the means of achieving them. The choice of target is constrained by scientific facts, though it is not completely determined by them. It is and remains a political decision, reflecting a value-judgment (which doesn’t mean that we can’t rationally or critically discuss said value-judgment). Scientists only make pronouncements about the conditions for reaching a given target and what the consequences of the target are, i.e. what leads to the target being reached and where the target itself leads in its turn. The choice of target itself is the business of political decision-makers.

Two targets have been going the round in Copenhagen, both expressed in terms of an upper limit on global temperature increase relative to preindustrial times. The EU and the G8 among others are advocating the adoption of a 2 degree C guardrail, originally recommended by the WBGU (German Advisory Council on Climate Change) in 1995. The Alliance of Small Island States, whose very existence is threatened even in the unfortunately optimistic scenario of a 2 degree C temperature increase, insist on the adoption of a more stringent upper limit of 1.5 degree C. They enjoy the support of many developing countries and indigenous peoples.

Either target will be difficult to meet. To this day, global temperature has already increased by 0.8 degree C relative to preindustrial times. The current atmospheric composition is set to lead to a global temperature increase of 1.3 degree C over the next decades - an increase of 2.4 degree C if the cooling effect of short-lived polluting particles - the so-called global dimming - is discounted.

While science constrains, but does not determine the choice of target, the choice of means (at a general level which doesn’t exclude differing transpositions to less general levels) is completely determined by science relative to a politically determined target. Hence scientists at the WBGU tell us that, IF we are to have a 67% chance of remaining within the 2 degree temperature barrier, we will have to remain within a global CO2 budget of 750Gt for the period 2010 – 2050, with very low emissions or even negative emissions after 2050. In 2050 annual global per capita emissions should average 1t. If you commit yourself to the target but not the means, you either hold a different scientific view (which of course has to be scientifically based if it’s to be genuinely scientific), or you’re being straightforwardly irrational.

In all probability no global CO2 budget will be settled on at Copenhagen. Instead, reference will likely be made to the recommendations of the fourth IPCC report and commitments to national reduction targets. So to assess whether an agreement is appropriate given the picture provided by the WBGU you have to do a few calculations and derive a commitment to a global budget from commitments to national reduction targets. However, deriving a commitment to an exact global budget is impossible because of the way national reduction targets are currently formulated.

National Reduction Targets

At least three kinds of target are in current use: Annex I countries such as the US and the EU (the latter of course acting as a unified bloc) formulate reduction targets in the form of percentage reductions of annual emissions volumes over specified time-periods, in the case of the EU over the periods 1990 – 2020 and 1990 – 2050. Most non-Annex I countries with reduction targets on the table formulate these in the form of percentage reductions of annual emissions volumes relative to a Business As Usual projection within a specified timeframe. Many non-Annex I countries, e.g. China and India, formulate reduction targets in the form of percentage reductions in the CO2 intensity of national economic production, i.e. reductions of emissions volumes divided by GDP, again within a specified timeframe.

The way Annex I countries formulate their reduction targets already makes deriving a precise global CO2 budget impossible. To do so you would need a precise emissions trajectory. Stipulating a lowering of emissions by 30% by 2020 relative to 1990 restricts but doesn’t determine the emissions trajectory within the relevant timeframe. It would be theoretically possible to meet the target by doing nothing until 2019 and then suddenly lowering emissions by 30% in the final year. This would result in an emissions trajectory corresponding over the entire timeframe to emissions volumes far higher than for a scenario involving continuous reductions. In general it’s the case that the earlier reductions are undertaken, the lower the volume of emissions.

Clearly other additional factors make deriving an exact CO2 budget impossible, e.g. the fact that many non-Annex I countries don’t have to put any emissions targets on the table at all - understandably so, in the context of the Kyoto Agreement.

Fairness

Comparisons between the reduction targets of different Annex I countries – which is to say comparisons between reduction targets formulated on the same model – are already quite complicated. Assume we want to compare the targets of the US and the EU. The EU has put a 20 – 30% emissions reduction on the table for the period 1990 – 2020. The US has put a 17% emissions reduction on the table for the period 2005 – 2020. To compare the two targets, the thing to do is to calculate them relative to the same timeframe. Which timeframe do we choose though? If we take 1990 – 2020, we get a reduction target for the US of – 3%. If we take 2005 – 2020, we get a reduction target for the EU of 13 – 24%. This means: if we take 1990 as a base-year, the American target looks very modest indeed, something that the European media gladly points to time and again, as if the American preference for a different base-year involved the USA in a simple sleight-of-hand. They nearly had us fooled! If you take 2005 as a base-year, then the future efforts the US and the EU have indicated they are ready to impose on themselves seem to be roughly in the same ballpark. This still doesn’t mean that the burden of effort is fairly distributed. Shouldn’t the EU be rewarded for past efforts?

It gets even more complicated though. Reduction targets thus specified only relate to national emissions totals, not national per capita emissions. If, on the other hand, you look at per capita emissions over the period 1990 – 2020, then it turns out that the EU is putting forward a reduction of 24 – 33%, the US a reduction of 29%. The two targets are in the same ballpark. If you take per capita emissions over the period 2005 – 2020, then the EU reduction target of 14 – 25% contrasts with a far more ambitious American target of 27%. The game has changed. And the reason for that is clear: population is rising in the US (as it is in Canada and Australia) and is stagnating in the EU.

This, however, doesn’t mean that the US is in better stead ethically or environmentally than the EU. (At most, it means that the EU could take on a little more, maybe also that the Europeans need to get down off their high horse.) What’s important of course is not just percentage reductions of per capita emissions, but above all absolute per capita emissions; on that front the American numbers (20 tonnes per capita per annum) are well above European numbers (9 tonnes p.c p.a). The EU is again in a bit better stead.

The calculations get more complicated again when financial capacity and mitigation capacity are brought into the equation. Per capita GDP in the US is about twice as high as in the EU (since the latter’s eastward expansion) – which might lead you to think the US was capable of achieving greater reductions. (Mind you, you’d have to take into account other economic factors as well such as national indebtedness.) On the other hand, it could be claimed for example that the US (along with Canada and Australia) have fewer opportunities for mitigation in the transport sector because of longer-distance transport needs. See how complex the issue gets.

As a provisional conclusion we can state that the unsystematic way national emissions reduction targets are formulated makes evaluating an agreement according to the criteria of appropriateness and above all fairness a difficult business. Couldn’t we do all this better? Couldn’t we use a very simple algorithm to derive national reduction targets (in the form of national CO2 budgets) from the global budget? This is precisely what the WBGU suggests in a special report. However, before we turn to the details of the proposal, we need to turn quickly to another question.

Ethics and Cynicism

There is an important asymmetry between the criteria of appropriateness and fairness. It is clear that the criterion of appropriateness will play an effective role in the negotiations in Copenhagen. Many nations might have different views about which goal is appropriate, above all whether 1.5 degrees C or 2 degrees C is an appropriate upper limit. No one though disputes that an agreement needs to be appropriate. Otherwise we plainly wouldn’t need an agreement.

Poetry Translations 1: Heine

On Teleology

God gave us legs and gave us two

So we’d be good at shooting through

Picture what would be our lot

- our personhood fixed to one spot

To be a station-ary chump

All we’d need would be a stump.

God gave us a pair of eyes

To see the world both clear and wise

To take on faith all that we read

A single eye’d be all we’d need

God gave us eyes that numbered two

So we’d be happy checking out

All He created round about

To suit the human point of view.

When checking out life on the street

The wise man with both eyes discerns

The chances uncouth folk we meet

Will tread upon our aching corns

Which have caused us painful passion

Since pointy shoes have been in fashion.

God gave us a pair of hands

To do double good throughout all lands

Not so we’d be doubly grasping

Precious metal ‘ever heaping

Into chests and cupboards too

As certain folk are wont to do

(We could give their names as well

Yet that’s what we dare not tell

Yes, we’d gladly see them hung

Yet it’s from them art’s funding’s wrung,

From these great men, the philanthropes,

The source of our financial hopes.

A German oak’s no tree from which

To fashion gallows for the rich.)

God thought with one nose we’d be right

Because with two we’d have to fight

To get a wine glass near mouth or head

We’d have to snort our wine instead.

God made one mouth the routine

Because two mouths would be unclean

With one mouth the son of earth

Still babbles ceaselessly from birth

With double mouth and double craw

He’d eat and lie a whole lot more

Now when he’s munching on a pastie

He stays beneficially mute

With two mouths things would get nasty

He’d munch while uttering lies to boot.

With two ears we are endowed

By the Lord who thus avowed

His great belief in symmetry

Nor are ours as large as He

Gave our good grey plodding friends

The donkeys with their wide rear ends.

He gave us both ears ‘cause He knew

That Mozart, Gluck and Haydn too

In stereo sound right and true.

If nothing topped the maudlin tone

That sounds from the haemorrhoidal zone

Of the ass-like Meyerbeer

All we’d need would be one ear!

Having wound up thus my speech

To my refined Teutonic blonde

She gave a sigh and did respond

Really, Heinrich, how you squelch

Meaning from th’ Creator’s deeds

As if a lumpen loaf of bread

Could guess thoughts in a baker’s head.

And yet man asks forever why

When he sees things gone awry.

My friend, I heard you state your thesis,

Your admirable exegesis

Of how the Lord with good intent

We human beings from heaven sent

Two ears, two legs, two eyes to roll

While giving us not more than a sole

Exemplar of mouth and nose

But tell me - how could He propose

- Lord God, Creator of All Nature -

To give His favourite two-legged creature

That single scabrous dangling prop

With which a male can never stop

Trying to pass on wretched genes

Or – relieving himself by similar means.

My friend, why not here duplicate

Where duplication’s what we need

To cover functions which indeed

Are most vital for the state

As for folk of every sort -

For all society, in short.

These two functions do contrast

In a way that’s unsurpassed,

Condemnable and largely base -

They frankly shame the human race.

Think of a girl of lively feeling,

Dead for shame and mentally reeling,

When she finds her male ideal

Equipped with something so surreal,

When he who’s set her heart aflutter

Turns out to worship in the gutter.

Psyche shudders when Amor,

The little angel, shy of light,

The morning after in the raw

Turns all her girlish dreams - to shite.

My graceful Hun had said her last

But I said, sweetheart, not so fast,

You of feminine persuasion

Haven’t any thought to spare

For one whole side of the equation

God solved with economic flair:

- how the gadgetry he made

Could serve needs grand and quite clichéd,

- how mothers’ cares and profane lusts

Could both be served by well-formed busts. . .

Simplicity’s itself refined

When every part is well combined,

When what we use when on the can

Assists with the ascent of man,

When on the self-same bagpipes play

The self-same yokels, glum and gay,

When paws and claws both fine and brute

Can strum upon the self-same lute,

When through the self-same vapours, rivets

Each man sings and yawns and pivots:

When one bus does just as well

To transport both of us to Hell.

---

Zur Teleologie

Beine hat uns zwei gegeben
Gott der Herr, um fortzustreben,
Wollte nicht, dass an der Scholle
Unsre Menschheit kleben solle.
Um ein Stillstandsknecht zu sein
Gnuegte uns ein einzges Bein.

The Art of Having Something to Say: Part 7: Nestroy: Part 2

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.)

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”.

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.

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 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?