cheese it, the cops!

one more bit of the postscript (the translations here are by swenson and lowrie, now superseded by the hongs' translation, which is at any rate not as felicitous as english prose):

In a merely subjective determination of the truth, madness and truth become in the last analysis indistinguishable, since they may both have inwardness. Nevertheless, perhaps I may here venture to offer a little remark, one which would seem to be not wholly superfluous in an objective age. The absence of inwardness is also madness. The objective truth as such is by no means adequate to determine that whoever utters it is sane; on the contrary, it may even betray the fact that he is mad, although what he says may be entirely true, and especially objectively true.

I shall here permit myself to tell a story, which without any sort of adaptation on my part comes direct from an asylum. A patient in such an institution seeks to escape, and actually succeeds in effecting his purpose by leaping out of a window, and prepares to start on the road to freedom, when the thought strikes him (shall I say sanely enough or madly enough?): "When you come to town you will be recognized, and you will at once be brought back here again; hence you need to prepare yourself fully to convince everyone by the objective truth of what you say, that all is in order as far as your sanity is concerned." As he walks along and thinks about this, he sees a ball lying on the ground, picks it up, and puts it into the tail pocket of his coat. Every step he takes the ball strikes him, politely speaking, on his hinder parts, and every time it thus strikes him he says: "Bang, the earth is round." He comes to the city, and at once calls on one of his friends; he wants to convince him that he is not crazy, and therefore walks back and forth, saying continually: "Bang, the earth is round!"

But is not the earth round? Does the asylum still crave yet another sacrifice for this opinion, as in the time when all men believed it to be flat as a pancake? Or is a man who hopes to prove that he is sane, by uttering a generally accepted and generally respected objective truth, insane? And yet it was clear to the physician that the patient was not yet cured; though it is not to be thought that the cure would consist in getting him to accept the opinion that the earth is flat. 

there's plenty to be said for kant, hegel, schelling, fichte, etc. however, putting the thing gently, they just didn't write this well. if he has a predecessor as a writer and a thinker, it's schiller. but schiller is not anywhere near the thinker that sk is.

existential hilarity

so i sort of promised i'd try to give some examples of kierkegaard the comedian. let's try this, from the concluding unscientific postscript:

It is now about four years ago that I got the notion of wanting to try my luck as an author. I remember it quite clearly; it was on a Sunday, yes, that’s it, a Sunday afternoon. I was seated as usual, out-of-doors at the cafe in the Fredricksberg Garden. I had been a student for half a score of years. Although never lazy, all my activity nevertheless was like a glittering inactivity, a kind of occupation for which I still have a great partiality, and for which perhaps I even have a little genius. I read much, spent the remainder of the day idling and thinking, but that was all it came to.

So there I sat and smoked my cigar until I lapsed into thought. Among other thoughts I remember these: “You are going on,” I said to myself, “to become an old man, without being anything, and without really undertaking to do anything. On the other hand, wherever you look about you, in literature and in life, you see the celebrated names and figures, the precious and much heralded men who are coming into prominence and are much talked about, the many benefactors of the age who know how to benefit mankind by making life easier and easier, some by railways, others by omnibuses and steamboats, others by the telegraph, others by easily apprehended compendiums and short recitals of everything worth knowing, and finally the true benefactors of the age who make spiritual existence in virtue of thought easier and easier, yet more and more significant. And what are you doing?” Here my soliloquy was interrupted, for my cigar was smoked out and a new one had to be lit. So I smoked again, and then suddenly this thought flashed through my mind, “You must do something, but inasmuch as with your limited capacities it will be impossible to make anything easier than it has become, you must, with the same humanitarian enthusiasm as the others, undertake to make something harder.” This notion pleased me immensely, and at the same time it flattered me to think that I, like the rest of them, would be loved and esteemed by the whole community. For when all combine in every way to make everything easier, there remains only one possible danger, namely, that the ease becomes altogether too great; then there is only one want left, though it is not yet a felt want, when people will want difficulty. Out of love for mankind, and out of despair at my embarrassing situation, seeing that I had accomplished nothing and was unable to make anything easier than it had already been made, and moved by a genuine interest in those who make everything easy, I conceived it as my task to create difficulties everywhere.

 

imperialisms of pleasure

i have to say that one of the disconcerting tendencies of human beings is to take a source of their pleasures or entertainments to harbor the entirety of life and significance. so you listen to literature professors and they theorize or even at this point take it as obvious that narrative or story-telling is our fundamental nature, and then after that they blow it up into everything, so that we and the world actually consist of stories. perhaps they've read too much harold bloom, or just too much, period. or say you're lady gaga or some other fashion freak: then you're arguing that clothes can make you into whomever you want to be, or that alexander mcqueen entirely changed the landscape of human identity. or even say you're a philosopher...then you think no one can live without wrestling with kant's moral theory. or you're a physicist and everything is made of numbers. or perhaps you spend all your time on your computer and the world turns out to be made of information. i'll just say: the fact that you love a good story had better be enough, because once you inflate it into a theory of everything, it's just ridiculous. that you enjoy x, or are moved by x, does not make x into the meaning, essence, and full extent of human experience or the universe. shakespeare didn't invent the human, dude: it's plenty that he invented good plays. it's quite seriously as though i said the the world is a country song, or a soap opera, or a baskteball game, or an azalea bush, or a deck of cards, or a cast-iron frying pan. i might make a nice riff out of such a statement, and it might express my passion for tammy wynette. but as a serious assertion it'd just be jive. there are many human pleasures, many human identities, many and varied objects in the world, and the excellence of any one of them doesn't make it into everything. try to make your own predilections a bit less . . . imperialistic. 

addicted to the state

the more that governments depend on the vices of their citizens, the wackier stuff gets. as i've often said, after gambling and addictive substances are monopolized or taxed at a high rate and revenues level off, you can expect government to become your panderer or pornographer. the nyt says they're "raising money from people who enjoy a drink or two." but of course they're raising much more money per capita from people who enjoy or at least imbibe seventeen or eighteen, or who never stop at all. then they'll require to you to buy health insurance, i guess.

plagiarized by terrorists

i have to admit, the idea of flying explosive model planes into the capitol had occurred to me, long about 1974. we got pretty far in our plan to stink-bomb the place (a better idea), but never quite got it together.

daddy, tell me a story.

obama: "telling a story to the american people is just as important as policy."

killed by cupcakes

oy, the tragedy.

At midday, hundreds of students dressed in black lay down in Sproul Plaza, silently demonstrating support for SB185.

supposedly, they cut short the die-in because it was hot.

toughen up, cupcake

there are a lot of things that one might should get offended about, but the affirmative bake sale at berkeley isn't one of them. it didn't employ any racist slurs, and in terms of actual baked goods it discriminated most against white men. so, is your view that the college republicans can't express opposition to affirmative action? or that they can't express their opposition satirically or with an analogy? or perhaps the view is that they shouldn't be able to express their opposition so cleverly, or so humorously, or so effectively. i'd suggest instead trying to show why the bake sale isn't a good analogy for college admissions. so far i don't hear people doing that, just creating a hostile-learning-environment style argument for the repression of satire.

there's been a lot of stuff like this:  Joey Freeman, vice president of External Affairs of the Associated Students of the University of California, said, "It really was deeply hurtful to lots of members of our college community." of course, hurting people is wrong. selling them cupcakes, however, appears to do little actual harm, though i admit a person might be hurt by almost anything at a bad moment. regard it instead as perfectly protected political discourse, and respond to it.

 

do the same to assad

moore skewers james

i'll give an example of a g.e. moore takedown, this one of william james's version of the pragmatist theory of truth, as expressed by james in "pragmatism's conception of truth."

It is almost certainly false that all our true ideas are useful, and almost certainly false that all our useful ideas are true. But I have only urged what seem to me to be the most obvious objections to these two statements: I have not tried to sustain these objections by elaborate argument, partly for a reason I now wish to state. The fact is, I am not at all sure that Professor James would not himself admit that both these statements are false. I think it is quite possible he would admit that they are, and would say that he never meant either to assert or imply the contrary. He complains that some of the critics of Pragmatism are unwilling to read any but the silliest of possible meanings into Pragmatism; and, perhaps he would say that this is the case here. I certainly hope that he would. I certainly hope he would say that these statements, to which I have objected, are silly. For it does seem to me intensely silly to say that we can verify all our true ideas; intensely silly to say that every one of our true beliefs is at some time useful; intensely silly to say that every idea which is ever useful is true. I hope Professor James would admit all these things to be silly, for if he and other Pragmatists would admit even as as much as this, I think a good deal would be gained. But it by no means follows that because a philosopher would admit a view to be silly, when it is definitely put before him, he has not himself been constantly holding and implying that very view. He may quite sincerely protest that he never has either held or implied it, and yet he may all the time have been not only implying it but holding it - vaguely, perhaps, but really. A man may assure us, quite sincerely, that he is not angry; he may really think that he is not, and yet we may be able to judge quite certainly from what he says that he really is angry. He may assure is quite sincerely that he never meant anything to our discredit by what he said - that he was not thinking of anything in the least discreditable to us, and yet it may be plain from his words that he was actually condemning us very severely. And so with a philosopher. He may protest, quite angrily, when a view is put before him in other words than his own, that he never either meant or implied any such thing, and yet it may be possible to judge, from what he says, that this very view, wrapped up in other words, was not only held by him but what was precisely what made his thoughts seem to him quite interesting and important.

this skewers not only james, but many a pragmatist of my acquaintance. the view is initially formulated in a sharp, seemingly pretty clear, way. press on it just a little, though, and it slips away into an endless chase through what 'working' or 'working in the long run,' really means. he adjusts his account to deal with every new counter-example, until he ends up counting more or less just what a correspondence theorist would count as true.

[passage is from moore's essay "william james' 'pragmatism,'" collected in philosophical studies.]

hacking syria

anonymous rocks.

hard to decide between the irrational cults

i like the basic argument of this piece, which associates suspicion of excessive government power with insane irrational apocalyptic cults. surely, in the 1930s, educated, rational persons - people then who were like the readers of the new york times are today - looked at, say, the great war, or the governments of hitler, mussolini, and stalin, and concluded that the world's big problem was insufficient government power, too little state spending, etc. and a bit later, there must have been something that explains how people living in the era of death camps, forced collectivization, and atom bombs could reach "anti-government" conclusions; perhaps they were hallucinating, or were being manipulated by demagogues.

meta-partisanship

one of my favorite things about american politics is the hyper-partisan argument about who is more partisan. so say you get debbie wasserman-schultz on your cable program and you ask her why congress can't agree on anything. and she says the democrats tried to come to a reasonable compromise, but the vicious idiots on the other side wouldn't agree to anything because they're pandering to their extremist base. same the other way round. it's meta-partisanship. now i think they should argue about who's to blame for the fact that they're blaming each other for being partisan, etc. this is a lovely example of performative self-contradiction: a hyper-partisan denial that you yourself are partisan. somehow, all these people have forced themselves to became dolts. partisanship is polling badly. conclusion? we can win if we can blame the other side for it. it's devotion merely to political strategy all the way up and down, and what's really cool is that this relentless empty strategic rhetoric makes any decent american hate her representatives and despise the political system and possibly the concept of democracy. well, they certainly are despicable every day, right there on your television set. all they could possibly be trying to do is manipulate you. extreme cynicism is the only humanly possible or even vaguely rational or morally decent response. check out, is my advice to you.

g.e. moore

also i've been reading g.e. moore, who i'm beginning to think is in his own weird way one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century. i started in to reading all his papers again because i was reading my own manuscript and realizing that moore - vaguely remembered from grad school - was actually central over and over. first of all, his "proof of the external world": here is a hand and here is another, which i regard as entirely decisive. and then his view about beauty - that beauty is a feature of a situation embedding both subject and object - was a model for my treatments of value.

he's a hard-ass realist: a complete believer in the everyday world. that's where i'm at. really his papers collected in philosophical studies and philosophical papers were the death of idealism in the british academy: what he does to f.h. bradley is similar to what the state of georgia did to troy davis. but he's just as fatal to the phenomenalism of mill or russell or carnap, for example. these papers were really the lynchpin of the onset of analytic philosophy and philosophy of language. he's not given enough credit for that; the voice of the best analytic philosophy is fully realized in his papers. he's remembered now primarily for principia ethica, pretty much the least interesting of his writings for my money. even there he's a vague figure to the present, and undervalued.

he is an extremely idiosyncratic stylist: disarmingly conversational and always first person, so that he uses itals to emphasize the words that give the sentence its rhythm in spoken english. but also oddly clotted. he's always issuing wild disclaimers: "i have no idea whether this is true or false; for all i know it's true; i could well be entirely mistaken, etc" before the total evisceration. really the stuff is extremely jocular, almost a slapstick routine or a parody - the right term might be 'high burlesque' - where he seems to proceed with punctilious care, piling up fine distinctions until you suddenly realize in the last paragraph that he's just landed you with a thud in the ordinary world.

i think actually ordinary language philosophy was more or less entirely prefigured in his work, which constantly defends ordinary uses of words against introduced funny philosophical senses. so when bradley says that time isn't real, he means that there really is no such thing, which means that one event never occurs before or after or at the same time as any other. indeed, he means that nothing ever happens at all. you know, then 'maybe that's not what bradley means when he says that time isn't real; i really have no idea, but if he means what most people mean when they say that unicorns aren't real, for example...' he even sort of leaves out the last nail: well, i think stuff does happen, don't you? so perhaps something has gone wrong in bradley's argument.

also my all-time hero j.l. austin, i'm realizing, really must have gotten a lot of his schtick from moore: the hilariousness or even vicious wit, the piling up of little distinctions until he completely collapses your house of cards, the implicit affirmation of the everyday world.

 

one big glowing thingummy

watcha readin, crispy? (yo sorry for no watchareadins; i've been too busy reading, writing etc)

i've been sampling parfit's on what matters and dworkin's justice for hedgehogs. i think that the parfit is quite the little slog, and that's only volume one. 'best work in ethics since sidgwick,' said the times literary supplement (i think phillip petit was the reviewer). parfit sent out the manuscript to 250 philosophers (supposedly) and responded with revisions. perhaps that shows: it's bristling with replies to objections from offstage. the dworkin is written more engagingly, but dworkin's always half-lawyer, and this can't have the philosophical dimensions of parfit. on the other hand, dworkin is remarkably sharp: a good thinker.

at any rate, both these books, putting the thing at its most general, bring all human values together in one big glowing thingummy. parfit's argument is that all the major western moral theories (utilitarianism, kantianism, contractualism, and so on) are - despite what their proponents thought - basically compatible. and dworkin seeks to suggest the reconciliation of aesthetic and political values along with those. that's more like neo-platonism than postmodernism! we might not want to go quite so far in the opposite direction, and i'll just signal that the situation is a lot more fragmented and equivocal than they want to make it: we're still just muddling through.

few downsides

obama, susan rice etc all say that a un recognition of a palestinian state won't actually achieve a palestinian state. of course, but that's definitely not the only possible effect they'd be hoping for. as i say, it already gives more leverage. even a vote would make the situation clearer. and the whole thing is placing immense international pressure on israel, already. i say: keep right on.

paki bashing

alright, mike mullen said of the group the us holds responsible for the attack our embassy in kabul last week “The Haqqani network ... acts as a veritable arm of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency.” now how can you think that and also continue to work with pakastani security at all? many of the recent observations about us/pakistan relations say that we're stuck with each other. really? stuck? when their intelligence services are lobbing rocket-propelled grenades into our embassy? we're stuck without each other, i'd say, tied together in a knife fight.

now i suppose the theory has always been that the power structure in pakistan is divided (at any rate, it seems incomprehensible). but more likely it's a matter of plausible deniability by the political figures. one reason to say this is that power in a state tends to centralize; you're unlikely to have a real serious contest for power between the executive and the intelligence services or the executive or the intelligence services and the military that isn't resolved somehow: by a civil war, coup, buyoff, etc. no doubt there are competing centers of power, but rival groups conducting entirely different foreign policies or who are at war with completely different people? it's not sustainable. if i was in the cia or something trying to figure out what's going on, i'd try to trace the money of the political figures: where it's going (offshore is a good bet), but where it's coming from. that might give you a better idea of the actual flow of authority.

bent

one thing i don't understand about these executions: why the family of the victim and also the law enforcement people are entirely immune from evidence of innocence: free of doubt even when serious doubts have been raised. how can you just want someone, anyone to pay? surely to take any satisfaction in justice/vengeance, it is all-important that you actually get the right person. i can understand wanting the person who killed your son or whatever to die. and i think that some people deserve death. what i can't understand is manifesting along with these attitudes an indifference to the evidence: if troy davis was innocent, well then the person who killed you son is still running around. why work on producing in yourself total certainty in the face of good reasons not to be certain? i guess there must be some psychological mechanism involved because you see this all the time: whomever is the suspect, however flimsy the evidence, the family of the victim just wants a conviction/maximal punishment.

Sine qua non pop music...

Crispin used to be a rock and roll critic. So he can relate to this. If you read Crispin, you can probably relate to this. If not, why are you reading this? 

Anyway, since only Robots read the Defeatists, I felt that this bit of aesthetic information needed to reach a wider audience. And, he made the mistake of giving me the keys to Storm a half dozen years ago, and I occasionally have to take it out for a spin. 

Steve Simmels over at Powerpop has nailed it again, and I feel compelled to acknowledge our alien overlords. David Alan Coe wrote the ultimate Country Song in "You never called me by my name" and everything since has paled...He said once that "Nobody says nothin' that Hank Williams didn't sing." Well, now we know that the soft rock equivalent of Hank Williams is...Journey.

pa rocks the un

however much hillary or susan rice might whine, and however much perry and bachmann - with their intensely bizarre fundamentalist support for israel (fundamentalist among other things in being unquestioning) - might snipe, the palestinian approach of applying for recognition as a state in the un has been quite the little stroke of genius. it gives a huge dose of publicity to their situation. it gives them actual negotiating leverage, and you'd have to think that obama is up there today making offers. and it shows the basic non-existence of us support of palestinian statehood: we're good with it as long as it remains a vague hope for the distant future. all in all, a tactical coup.

assassinate your head

i've often wanted carefully to wire myself up and detonate my own head, if it doesn't explode on its own. but i think when push came to shove it'd be hard to push the button. of course, it is a difficult choice whether to blow up your head or your crotch, a la the "underwear bomber." both my head and my crotch have caused me numerous problems. but honestly, i don't know where they come up with a whole stream of people who are willing to do stuff like that. seems like hard work.

ask, tell

thank god that legal closet thing is over.

focus group that shit

'balanced approach,' 'job creators,' 'their fair share,' 'class warfare,' etc etc: it's gotten to the point at which people don't use catch-phrases; catch-phrases use people. indeed, the very existence of people whose every utterance is part of a collective unanimous anonymous mumbling, is in question. certainly their existence, if any, is redundant. maybe instead of asking a focus group whether they respond positively to 'job-creators,' they should focus-group the question of whether they'd like to hear that coming out of their televisions continuously for the next six months.

robots rain death on hipsters

the two top trending stories on washpost: a future for drones: automated killing and are hipster glasses over?

oppress me

i hope when the shooting war comes it's straight republicans vs democrats. then the choice will be simple: corporation or state? (tim geithner will be fighting against himself, like jim carrey in liar liar). in such a situation, though we don't know who will win, we can at least be assured that we won't be free at the end of it. freedom makes me anxious.

turn and fire

i'm not really into a left-right shooting war, since i don't know which side i'd be on, and i don't want to get caught in the crossfire. but let's get andrew breitbart and matt taibbi shoot it out on national television. thanks, tom.

bachmania, contd.

it takes a bold presidential candidate to come out foursquare against the arab spring. we've got to back up our very own autocrats, for god's sake. i'm looking for a president who only asks, with regard to hundreds of millions of people in a gigantic region: how does this affect israel? because she's going to convert the jews and rapture them up.

solyndra and winning the future

"The future is here," Obama declared. and now the future is over. we've been forcibly returned from friedman/gore fantasyland to the present. time travel turned out to be difficult. soon the past will be here. that you're throwing half a billion dollars at your own fundraisers tends to undermine you amazing stimulus, and make us see why that stuff didn't work very well.

destroying sarah

it's amazing how much a lot of people i know - especially the women - hate sarah palin. right. but as gleeful as her destruction might make you, you'd better think about joe mcginniss's approach. hounding her, harassing her, moving in next door to her, watching her through the windows with a pair of binoculars, going through her trash, and now publishing her alleged sexual history. without assuming this crap to be true, i would contemplate how you'd feel if someone took this approach to hillary or whomever, or to yourself. let's just say that with regard to most women i know, the 80s might look bad as a series of headlines, etc., and if everyone takes this approach to the female politicians on the other side, we'll end up ejecting all non-nuns from the political system. this would be a victory for patriarchy, which of course i warmly endorse, but i'm not sure the level of discourse is being raised by pointing and howling 'slut!' or photoshopping a red 'A' onto someone's cute outfit. before you get pissy with sarah for always attacking the media, you might want to think about what the media actually has done to her. it's frigging ridiculous.

catalogue criticism

a good argument for legalizing fully automatic weapons.