i expect there will be no quibbling when i assert that the best book title since gutenberg is i am a genius of unspeakable evil and i want to be your class president. and the book of which that is the title - which i'm reading to jane - actually pays off. matter of fact the volume also has the best first sentence in the history of publishing: "Someday you will beg for the honor of licking my feet."
the persona of the seventh-grade, pudgy genius permits the author - josh lieb - to do many little transgressive things. as an example, he's an extremely sharp critic of the literary material being shoved his way by his pathetic teachers, e.g. fahrenheit 451:
Actually, I read the book when I was two. And even then I knew it was regurgitated bird pap, fit only for morons and seventh graders. In case you're lucky enough to have escaped it, Fahrenheit 451 is one of those books that is about how amazing books are and how wonderful the people who write books are. Writers love writing books like this, and for some reason, we let them get away with it. It's like someone producing a TV show called TV Shows are the Best and the People Who Make Them are Geniuses. [footnote 2: Probably the name of Aaron Sorkin's next project.]
or
The hot sandwich that greets me when I get home is perhaps the highlight of my day. It's "A Small, Good Thing." [footnote 15: To quote the title of an awful short story. Why do people insist on ranking it among Carver's best work? It's a perfect showcase for everything that's wrong with his fiction.]
yesterday, e.j. dionne was all over (e.g. npr and msnbc) calling paul ryan a 'radical'. (as i've said a hundred times, if you're an op-ed columnist and you're simply appropriating the soundbit rhetoric of someone's political campaign - simply mirroring this week's 'talking points' - you should just slink off in disgrace and find another career.) today dana milbank calls ryan a 'fanatic.' look if this is your approach, surely you oughtn't to object if allen west calls you a commie. milbank enthusiastically endorses catholic bishops' condemnation of ryan's budget ("The rebuke of Ryan is a credit to the Catholic leaders"). from that, he draws this bizarre conclusion: "However much Ryan may wish it, God does not take sides in politics." er, i haven't heard ryan wishing along those lines, but the bishops surely do, and milbank praises them for doing so in the surrounding sentences. well, applying our own most deeply-held beliefs to ourselves is not one of the great strengths of our species.
this austerity thing is interesting. so no doubt in some respects cutting government spending exacerbates an economic slowdown. that seems obvious: cut the post office budget, they lay off workers who collect unemployment, stop consuming much of anything, etc. then cut their benefits and they really don't consume and require a variety of other services, and so forth., krugman makes this argument every week. now on the other hand you have to ask yourself, what levels of debt are actually unsustainable or themselves have disastrous effects (like, now 50% of your budget is interest payments, which you can't spend on stimulus or programs to help the newly-huge needy). or, people just will not lend you money anymore and then your forced into truly draconian austerity mode. you could reach the point at which it is simply impossible to continue almost anything the government does. i have to say, any given person's position on this depends on whether they're right or left. left=government can solve all our problems, and i don't think krugman would ever acknowledge a level of debt in a recession to be unsustainable; he might wave in that direction, but when push comes to shove, he thought greece was doing just fine until germany started demanding budget cuts, and that the whole thing would have worked out. if you're a right-winger (unlike me, i declare) or an anti-statist (like me), then you think it will turn out differently, because you want it to turn out differently: you'll take any lever to reduce state power, and believe more or less anything that would support you in that project. i can't unveil the objective facts. all i can do is note that people's empirical claims are predictable from the political philosophy which they held long before the current problems, which is plenty to provisionally discredit both sides. that a given level of debt at this time and place is unsustainable is a question to which all the machinery of right-wing or left-wing thinking developed previously is irrelevant. it's an empirical question.
just saw michelle bachmann on cnn. after calling leon panetta the secretary of state (ok i too am subject to a slip of the tongue), she was responding to wolf's question about whether or when she's going to endorse romney. her response: "in the words of the lion in the wizard of oz, 'all in good time, my pretty.'" sweetheart, that'd be the witch.
i realize that charles taylor is sort of a relativist, sort of a post-modernist, sort of a 'we-are-the-stories-we-tell' linguistic constructivuist, and (this is getting bad, i know), sort of a hegelian. still i wouldn't necessarily regard these as war crimes, though possibly the designation 'crimes against humanity' makes sense.
watcha readin, crispy? the 'magisterial' (i.e. long) biography: jonathan edwards: a life, by george marsden. really, edwards conducted quite the amazing life, though i have to say that, even with the vast materials brought to bear by marsden, something mysterious stiill lurks at the center. and though the life is filled with incident, it's certainly in the thought and writing where edwards' heart lay.
rarely has the idea of reactionary progressivism had more purchase. edwards was in many ways a radical figure, but in the guise of a 'revivalist,' constantly engaged in the project of preserving the most hard-assed calvinism: totally opposed to any hint of free will, convinced of total human depravity, an advocate of god's apparently entirely arbitrary grace. these were still the orthodoxies of his chiildhood; the eighteenth century seemed to set itself to explode them all and develop a far more 'optimistic' intellectual structure. from this point of view, edwards attacked not only deists, 'arminians,' etc. but the establishment churches of new england. he was a spearhead of the radical 'new lights' and a friend and fan of the rather democratic and individualist rock star george whitefield, spearhead of the 'great awakening.'
indeed edwards as pastor at northamption, mass., in 1825-26 partly gave rise to the awakening that swept both england a new england. edwards' book a faithful narrative of the surprising work of god told the story of how almost everyone in the town had apparently been 'saved.' what might be hardest for the modern reader to swallow is the extreme darkness of edwards' preaching, even as it brought people to christ. he taught that one should always - literally, always - be aware of one's own soon-to-come death and of the likelihood of eternal punishment (described in excruciating detail), and above all of the fact that we all deserve infinite punishment even if we live the most exemplary lives possible. the event that really ended the northampton revival was a suicide of a particularly earnest believer: one joseph hawley, who was completely convinced of his irremediable depravity. but even immediately afterwards, edwards could blame satan and preach, "There is no expressing the hatefulness and how hateful you are rendered by [sin] in the sight of Gid. The odiousness of this filth is beyond all account because 'tis infinitely odious. You have seen the filthiness of toads and serpents and filthy vermin and creatures that you have loathed and of putrefied flesh. . . . Your filthiness is not the filthiness of toads and serpents or poisonous vermin, but of devils which is a thousand times worse," etc.
again, though there were many disputes, an exile from northampton to an indian outpost, a rise to the presidency of princeton (which he hardly liived to realize), the real climax of the life are the late works that edwards lived to complete, and marsden presents them as the climax also of the biography. this could be be bathetic, but i think the work amply sustains this treatment. what's most amazing is the comprehensive, and -believe it or not - stunningly optimistic vision articulated in the nature of true virtue (1857.)
[God is] the foundation and fountain of all being and all beauty; from whom all is perfectly derived, and on whom all is most absolutely and perfectly derived, and on whom all is most absolutely and perfectly dependent; of whom, and through whom, and to whom, is all and all perfection; and whose being and beauty is as it were the sum and comprehension of all existence and excellence: much more than the sun is the fountain summary comprehension of all the light and brightness of the day. . . . True virtue most essentially consists of benevolence to Being in general.
really where edwards arrived by extreme applications of logical acuity applied within a scriptural framework, was an ecstatic religious vision of merger with god and all being. rarely has a more extreme set of contradictions been held so firmly in suspension.
i'm glad that the pulitzer people finally figured out that fiction sucks. somebody made that shit up. naw fiction can be good and amusing and absorbing. all you professors have to stop pretending it can transform lives though. i know you had a big experience with catcher in the rye when you were 14 and realized that life sucks (something tells me you'd have realized that anyway eventually). but really it's ok for entertainment to be entertaining without being the meaning of life. ulysses changed human consciousness forever, or at least seventeen people's consciousness for a few hours, insofar as staring at ink stains is a different conscious experience than not, and staring at these ink stains a different conscious experience than staring at those. we'll get by until next year without a pulitzer winner.
after the seventeenth time this week you heard 'this is not who we are' from leon panetta, the secret service, the gsa, you surely surely eventually have to get to the question: well, who are we?
The work of Thomas Kincade - who died on April 6 - and Damien Hirst - whose work is currently represented in a major retrospective at the Tate Modern in London - look entirely different. Kincade painted (or supervised others who painted) pretty and pointedly banal pre-modernist landscapes. Hirst creates extravaganzas of post-modern provocation. But they have evoked a common response: revulsion. They are perhaps the two most widely-hated artists of the era. For many critics and professors, Kincade and Hirst serve as emblems of all that has gone wrong with art or perhaps the world.
What people hate about Kincade and Hirst can be summed up in a single word: cash. Both men became wealthy doing their art, and neither has seemed ashamed about it. The attackers usually merely sneer at the images, which they regard as beneath contempt. But the fundamental impulse of the attack is political.
Since Marx, the politics of much of the world has been conceived along the left-right spectrum, or as a left-right duality. This opposition can be crystallized as state vs. capital. The rhetoric of the current presidential campaign relentlessly prosecutes this apparently exhaustive dichotomy: Obama against Romney will come down – rhetorically, anyway – to the relative roles of government and the private sector.
Neither Kincade nor Hirst needs a government grant. Because they are both shamelessly entrepreneurial, Kincade and Hirst code right-wing. And the American professoriate and art establishment – which are, roughly, unanimous in their politics – believe that commercialism pollutes art. This is an application of the general principle that capitalism pollutes everything it touches.
The modernist conception of art comes to us from the same period as the left-right political spectrum, and was dominant in the West from, say 1860 to 1960. But it is still fundamental to the way our culture understands what art is. It contrasts art in one direction to mere popular entertainment, which panders to the false consciousness of ‘the masses’ induced by capitalism and distracts people from their oppression (Adorno is a good representative of this view). In the other direction, modernism contrasts art to industrial mass production, in which the worker is alienated from his work and its product. Art is unalienated labor and authentic consciousness.
But both Kincade and Hirst collapse the distinctions. Both produce their works in a quasi-industrial manner. Hirst is an entertainer, Kincade a kind of interior decorator.
If Kincade is a pre-modernist and Hirst a post-modernist, their commercialism could be considered part of an attack on these modernist notions, and hence part of the meaning of their work. This doesn’t necessarily make their art good, but it makes the relation of their work to art institutions and ideologies interesting. Were I running the Tate Modern, I’d be tempted to follow up the Hirst blockbuster with a Kincade blockbuster, during which the art might be deaccessioned to tourists at reasonable prices.
In both politics and art, the left/right dilemma as between state and capital, regulatory bureaucracy and banker, authentic and commercial, “public” and “private,” presents a rather miserable choice: all you get to do is choose your oppression. Also it is luridly false to a situation in which these entities are utterly intertwined. Also it doesn’t help us figure out what is and what is not good art.
The leftish alternative to selling your art at the mall or auctioning it off to rich people is not a pure realization of an authentic vision; it is an archipelago of gigantic public and quasi-public institutions: non-profit foundations funded by the world’s richest people as emblems of their transcendence of mere commerce; government endowments; huge buildings made of marble or glass; public and private art schools and university art and art history departments. In imagination, these institutions insulate art from mere money. In reality, they are systems of simultaneous patronage and exclusion, roughly as pervasive and as ideological as the Renaissance papacy or a Stalin-style Ministry of Socialist Realism.
One thing that makes Hirst compelling is that to a Kincade-scale commercialism he adds layers of post-modern irony: it’s not clear, for example, whether his famous crystal skull is an obscene object of conspicuous consumption, a vanitas indicating that even rich people die, or a parody of the whole idea of aesthetic value. That he’s coining money might be represented as itself a piece of performance art, or even as a pointed critique of the role of money in the art world.
For such reasons, Hirst cannot be dismissed by the professoriate in quite the way Kincade can be, and even the people who hate him most find themselves returning to his work again and again trying to say why, exactly. At a minimum, Hirst sustains an extraordinary range and depth of interpretation, which keeps the interpreters in business even as they express their loathing.
And though the Tate is not a for-profit institution, it’s using the controversy around Hirst to do a bang-up business in its gift shop.
Kincade, on the other hand, painted by a kind of polling: he tried to give people what they actually enjoyed having on their walls: a pretty, hyper-traditional picture that was painted by someone (though not necessarily by Kincade). But here the leftish art world might ask itself a question: what, exactly, is wrong with that? And one might remark that, in despising the aesthetic sensibilities of most people, the denizens of that world are expressing an elitism that comports badly with other aspects of their politics.
At any rate, though the role of commercialism in art is certainly a problem, it’s not the only problem, and perhaps not at the moment the worst problem. We might also worry about the thoroughly interlocked roles of foundations and state agencies and mega-museums and universities in commissioning and funding and buying and selling art, and in telling us what art is and what it’s for and what we should enjoy and how.
Meanwhile, in both art and politics, we might want to think about how the left-right spectrum excruciatingly simplifies or just falsifies an immensely complicated situation. We might think about how mechanical it is, how repetitive, how little imagination, pleasure, profundity, originality, freedom, or openness it makes available. Politics articulated in these terms, and not the cute, mute objects of Hirst and Kincade, is the actual opposite of art.
Crispin Sartwell teaches at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA. He is the author of Political Aesthetics (Cornell, 2010)
this here is complete horseshit. and the idea that there is a difference in the political psychologies of left and right has even gone brain. notice the irresistable undertow of self-praise that accompanies these notions: that conservatives have a bigger irrational-fear zone, or that liberals are more open to experience. i want you to feel good about yourself, but i'd suggest therapy rather than "science." the academic left is absolutely unanimous and each person believes what she believes for reasons of social cohesion. actually open-minded people questing for new experiences would not chant the same litttle cliches in unison. really this is the most pitiful way imaginable to defend your political positions: it would be irrelevant to the truth of the positions even if it were true, which it isn't. put em in a scanner and the self-deception lobe lights up like hong kong at night.
if a white scientist tells you that white craniums are bigger, or if a man tells you that men have a bigger reasoning facility and women a bigger emotional region, you should just ignore it and let it blow over. the american academic leftist is achingly desperate to belong epistemically and yet is a monster of hubris. that anyone could possibly disagree with themselves is a bizarre fact that needs some sort of explanation, and there can be only one: our opponents are cognitively defective. they might as well just scream 'tard!' and have done. if you are making grants for this kind of 'research,' stop right now. at an absolute minimum, if you are going to do any sort of research on 'political psychology,' you need to make sure the researchers are politically diverse. the fact that that would basically not be possible with american academic psychologists shows precisely how open-minded they are.
no doubt everyone sort of entertains the notion that disagreement with themselves is a pathology. like i assert that there's something defective about people who think lou reed made good records. say i proposed to show that with empirical studies, scientifically...
the idea that there are brain differences between liberals and conservatives is frigging pathetic, and it shows why it matters what you know when you start: dude the left-right political spectrum was invented at very earliest in the french revolution. it had no purchase in american politics until the late 19th century. there have been many other ways of conceiving the political spectrum. it is a textbook case of the sort of problems i outline below: we're going to imprint momentary cultural fads or mistakes into your very biology. people's political positions correlate to things like income levels, state or region of residence, gender, race, sexual identity, and so on: so you'd better be willing to connect all of these with brain configuration. now we're really, really in interesting territory, the territory that begins to show that the researchers are actually reactionaries, which they could prove by self-dissection, which would also do the world and human knowledge a favor. i'm going to put it like this: until you can do something less self-serving and less historically ignorant, until you can actually show some openness to new ideas or experiences, i'm not even going to look at the 'data.' really if someone's paying me i'll try to smash the methodology. (well, it's psychology; the methodology comes pre-smashed.) but there's no more need for that than there is to sift through the pile of shit bit by bit to account for the stench. that there is a pile of shit there is evident from the smell, and we don't need to do the chemical analysis.
so say the neurology folk started, more or less unquestioningly, with freud. i predict they'd find the id region; maybe they have. if they started with demon possession they'd find the demon regions etc. what you're detecting is only as good as the theory you bring to bear. say it's the dsm...
now, it's not that they're not seeing anything. and i actually think that at the more careful or open-minded levels they are starting to realize what i believe certainly to be the case: the systems are far far more connected than they might have thought. so, for example, i don't think that reason and emotion are separate functions or states or activities. now if you start with the presumption that they are - that is, you sort of start with some greek philosophy or something, on a superficial read - no doubt you'll find centers of animal irrationallity and centers of higher cognitive functions etc. oops that is a mistake: you started with a theory or a cultural nostrum or a star-trek spock v bones conceptual structure. but that's not to say that you couldn't learn something else if you really loooked without treating the distinction as a full-fledged unquestioned dogma. 'higher cognitive functions': in that phrase lurks an entire bourgeois value system or the part of the culture where the kids have to go to college, or something; or maybe it's just the pride of the ph.d. doing the research.
if you think there can be linguistic processing units in the human head that aren't at the same time rage processors or desire processors or visual and auditory procesors, i say you're tripping. not that there's a wire running between them: they just are not distinct. and if you just think of this whole thing as software running on hardware, i say you'll be working with an entirely different metaphor after awhile, like descartes thought of the whole thing in terms of hydraulic lifts, or when they figured it had to be a clockwork, or was a lot like a big industrial facility. i think - i want to say i know - that we are far more coherent and interconnected than that, and with the outside world, and that if there are modules we will find them not, you know, recapitulating descartes or an ethics where reason makes you good and animal instinct makes you bad and so forth. if it were science, you would not know what you were looking for, and you would not find what you expect. to study the human brain, you're going to have to think like an alien who hasn't absorbed, say, the presuppositions of western culture or latest fad in psychiatry. you're going to have to think like someone who never went to grad school...
as you may have noticed, i am an enemy of pleasure: not necessarily as an experience, but as a kind of uber-explanation of human behavior and certainly as the center of any sort of ethical theory. really a lot of the stuff i've seen in cognitive science and psychology just starts out with the flat assumption that only pleasure and pain can possibly motivate anyone to do anything. now, pointing up the problems with this would be a simple way of showing that a lot of the brain-image psychoscience of the current period cannot do without philosophy, and also is really ham-fisted and...wrong.
so: ok: after people shoot heroin, they want to keep shooting heroin. from this we conclude that shooting heroin is pleasurable (just like...taking a warm bath, cuddling, looking at gauguin's paintings, s&m, television, chocolate, horror movies, accomplishment etc: dude, are you kidding? you're going to start with the assumption that these are fundamentally identical experiences, or that they just must have something in common? reflect and start again.). anyway, shooting up must light up the 'pleasure center' of the brain, which is located relative to the rest of the brain as the entertainment aisle is located relative to the rest of the wal-mart. or it releases endorphins: the pleasure chemicals! you start with this question: what is the one explanation of why we do or want anything we do or want? since this is a bizarrely wrong question-begging question, everything that falls out after that is useless, or perhaps the word i'm groping for is 'false.' as old ludwig might say: don't assume they must have something in common, but look and see, or in this case, reflect.
now, i am a materialist and i think that mental states are identical to phsyical states (but on my view not only of the brain, but of the organism in the world). however, say there are such things as endorphins and they are released identically when you reach orgasm, finish writing your book, look at the earth from space, and listen to minor threat. that would not convince me that these are the same sorts of experiences or that i am seeking them for the same reasons. i don't think there is any one thing to be explained, so i'm not liable to be impressed by the explanations, and if you're telling me that the similar release of similar chemicals shows otherwise, i say you've got a long long way to go to nail that down at all. and if you're proving they're the same by brainscanning, i say this hasn't changed the way i think about these experiences at all or made them any more similar to one another than they were before. it might be an interesting result, but to see why we'd have to start with a lot richer encounter with and reflection on human experiences in a world.
really the brain research is completely compromised by the categories you start with, which are some kind of parade of cultural prejudices or ham-handed simplifications. this happens over and over in this sort of research on all kinds of questions. but you can't argue with science, you irrational tool! right, but that pleasure thing came from nowhere in the realm of science. it came from bentham or maybe oprah or maybe an absolut vodka ad.
what if there are many things people want, including many things that are not psychological states? what if there are many desirable and desired psychological states? 'pleasure,' once it encompasses all these experiences, is just a blank or variable meaning 'whatever people seek' or 'whatever psychological state people expect to get out of what they seek.' but now you've reified it into a thing, and as a thing to be explained, when really it should be a question that needs to be addressed before you go looking for it in people's heads. you have not gotten away without a prior theory or set of concepts, and also you've opted for an extremely primitive unidimensional taxonomy.
as the term is actually used, i think 'pleasure' might be ok for one dimension of the experience of taking a warm bath or eating milk, as opposed to dark, chocolate. i think for things like shooting heroin or having intense sex or looking at the earth from space, or running marathons, or working for decades to master the violin, you're just going to need entirely different accounts of motivation. but what these may be is not something you're going to find out with an mri. some beautiful things are pleasurable, but some are disturbing, awe-inspiring, challenging or induce despair and weeping instead of the vague grin and unfocused eyes of the pleasure-ridden.
centering pleasure like this is an artifact of the period when everything had to retreat into the subject, when nobody was in contact with anything but their own sensations (in my opinion, the brainy approach to psychology still labors under this devastating theoretical handicap). so if i wanted to know why you did what you did, i had to appeal exclusively to your internal states. you had a sensation/impression/idea and then a pleasure with regard to it. but no: desires, enjoyments etc are relations of human beings to stuff outside their heads. you can see the problem by the claim that both horror movies and pedicures must engage the same internal state insofar as people seek them out. start the other way round: with qualities of the object. then work up the relation. if you're going to do an mri scan, better scan the whole theater: the other people, the popcorn stand, the projector etc. no but we are concerned with what is actually accessible in the experience of the subject! dude, the popcorn stand out there in the lobby is actually accessible in the experience of the subject. really, deny that and then think about what you've just said and whether you actually believe it. otherwise you can't have any popcorn.
and here i'll just say it and try to pay off at a later date: a utilitarian moral theory that rests on hedonism is impossibly bad, just completely misguided. but to start with just think about what happens to a bentham/mill/sidgwick utilitarianism if - as is (er, obviously) the case - pleasure is not the only thing we seek and pain is not the only thing we avoid. well then 'happiness' construed as a life of much pleasure and little pain just is not the empirically-obvious real telos.
Like monarchs, angels, and comedians, concepts fall, and rarely has a concept taken a more tragic or comical tumble than beauty. Once, it inhabited the sphere of ultimate value, glittering in the empyrean along with truth, goodness, and justice (all of which were considered by Plato or the romantic poets to be the same thing). Long about 1910, it got kicked downstairs to the department of hairstyling. From eternal essence it got demoted to superficial appearance.
Beauty’s pratfall was registered both in the arts and in philosophy. Picasso or De Kooning didn’t paint to make beautiful things; they painted to transform the world. And probably the last great treatments of the topic in philosophy – at least until recently – were Santayana’s Sense of Beauty (1895) and Benedetto Croce’s Aesthetic (1902).
The reasons for the indignities heaped on beauty are complex. One of them is that, beginning in the eighteenth century (for example in Hume and Kant), beauty was conceived more and more as a subjective matter, and as conceptually connected to pleasure. By the time Santayana wrote his dissertation, he could argue that beauty was actually a kind of mistake: the person who experiences beauty attributes his own subjective pleasure to the object that causes it. If beauty is entirely subjective or in the eye of the beholder, then not only is it not an eternal concept, it is not a concept at all: ‘beauty’ means whatever anyone thinks it means, and hence it means nothing.
In Romanticism and Modernism, the artist – think Beethoven, Van Gogh, Giacometti – was conceived as a genius, his works emerging inexplicably from his superhuman-but-ill skull to re-make human experience. The idea that someone like that was working to bring people pleasure would have seemed in the era an intolerable trivialization of art; we could leave that task to the entertainment or cosmetics industry. So beauty, conceived as a source or even a variety of pleasure, came to seem an unworthy goal.
And it came to be associated with what we would now call right-wing politics: with the architecture and visual expressions of the Catholic Church, with the French monarchy and its rococo kitsch, with capitalism and its robber-baron art patrons, with the Third Reich (for example in Leni Riefenstahl’s undeniably beautiful film Olympia). The left turned against beauty as a whole, and in the realm of concepts beauty was pitted against justice, luxurious ornament or conspicuous consumption against subsistence for the poor and education for the masses.
Indeed, the association of beauty and pleasure with fascism is one of the darkest episodes in the history of human consciousness. Arthur Danto, in The Abuse of Beauty, one of several important recent philosophical treatments of the topic, quotes Max Ernst, recalling the dadaists after World War I: “We had experienced the collapse into ridicule and shame of everything represented to us as just, true, and beautiful. My works of that period were not meant to attract, but to make people scream.”
Yet even after the fall, beauty has never ceased to be a fundamental human experience or even one of the reasons life is worth living. And if the beauty of a rose or a sunset seems exhausted or clichéd as a subject of art, poetry, or philosophy, we have never ceased to experience such things as beautiful, perhaps with as much purity as ever, with as much of a sense of a renewal of commitment to life and to the world.
And though such a venerable dimension of human experience and of the arts could never be entirely neglected, beauty seems to be in revival both in art and in philosophy. The first steps in making beauty viable would be to detach it conceptually from pleasure and to treat it as more than merely subjective.
Indeed, to hold that when I find a flower or a song beautiful, I am delectating my own internal states, is a horrendous solipsistic distortion. If I say that the night sky is beautiful, I want to celebrate it, not myself, and though I may be registering pleasure (though also perhaps, many other things: awe, love, freedom, fear), I am talking about the night sky, not me, or else the point of the thing is completely lost. Indeed, the idea that I am fundamentally pursuing my own pleasure in seeking out or making beautiful things is, I would say, not only obviously false, but sad: love of things outside myself is not the same as love of myself, or else it is essentially meaningless.
We ought to re-connect beauty to the experience not of pleasure, but of love and longing, which has been traditional since the Greeks. Plato made that connection in the Symposium, and Sappho famously said that the most beautiful thing is what one loves. But love and longing are ways of reaching out into the world: ways of devoting oneself to things and people. In love or longing, one moves toward what one loves or longs for, not into oneself, or else the love is a delusion. In the words of the Everly Brothers’ beautiful song, love hurts, and to account for love merely in terms of pleasure is extremely wrong.
Though pleasure seems fairly straightforward, human beings have dark and twisted longings, and much of the art of the twentieth century might even be beautiful in a dark or twisted way.
Alexander Nehamas makes some of these points in his book Only a Promise of Happiness. And Elaine Scarry, in Of Beauty and Being Just, tries to answer the political objections: the Greeks conceived justice as a harmonious or symmetrical arrangement of elements or forces, which is also the way Aristotle or the architect of the Parthenon conceived beauty.
In short, beauty is being re-enriched as a concept, and insofar as we still long and still love, we still seek beautiful things. Perhaps beauty is not eternal. But it appears to have picked itself up from its pratfall, bruised but ready for more.
Crispin Sartwell teaches at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA. He is the author of Six Names of Beauty (Routledge 2006).
i have no particular interest in the rock 'n roll hall of fame, and actually i think the hallofame concept might usefully be restricted to sports; it doesn't make sense in what we might think of as the arts. also i often disagree with the selections (i'm not a fan of guns 'n roses (what's up with ''n' this mornin?)), though i often don't. however, there is no quibbling with the choice of the great freddie king:
this emphasizes covers of trad country songs and also slower tempos. well, that's where i feel she's at her best, though i would certainly entertain other approaches.
watcha listenin to crispy? i'm obsessed at the moment with the louvin brothers' incomparably beautiful and intense song 'satan's jewel crown.' i'm an atheist, but let's just say i yearn hopelessly for god anyway, or at any rate for redemption. ira louvin, i would say, was your classic addict, and the degradation and infinite longing to which such a thing gives rise are completely expressed in this lyric. maybe i don't believe in god, but i feel that satan is real. or let me put it like this: i sort of have the inner life but not the cosmology of a puritan: the whole deal: sin. self-loathing, desperation, the possibility of redemption but not from within.
here is a link to an especially amazing performance of the song by emmylou harris. this is more or less what she looked and sounded like when i used to see her in coffeehouses and such around dc in the early seventies; how could you not have a transcendent crush? her love could redeem you, even if you didn't want to be redeemed. well i still feel that way about emmylou.
Hey, baby, Crusader AXE here. I know I owe a follow-up and I'm working away at it in between playing the guitar poorly and corresponding with my Russian ballerina stalker from the Kalashnikov factory, but somethings take precedence. Allen West has gone the full McCarthy down in Florida, claiming that he's heard that 80 members of the Democratic Congressional Delegation are card carrying communists. How quaint...while duelling pistols would have been in order back in the day these clowns long for, West should remember that Burr and Jackson won their duels. Anyway, congratulations to Crispin on winning the coveted Duns Scrotus Award for Philosophical Magic and enjoy. In the spirit of full disclosure, I should point out that the Defeatists did endorse Gus Hall, long time chair of the American Communist Party, back in 2008. Mr. Hall was very pleased, but couldn't make the nominating convention because Satan wouldn't let him out of hell, where he'd resided since 2000. Previously, we had endorsed a ticket of Cthulhu and Crispin. I'm kind of thinking Allen West and Levi Johnson's mom for this year's ticket, but we're open as always for suggestions. I gotta say, as I get older, Roger Miller gets A. Deader and B. Far More Profound...
well my old teacher (at u of maryland, '76-'80), the poet reed whittemore, died a few days ago. the death was not surprising: the man was born in 1919. he was a quiet and gentle person, so when the blades came out you were shocked. everyone got cut anyway. he was a wonderful teacher, and introduced us in the most vivid way to twentieth-century poetry, many of the great figures of which had been his friends/mentors/contributors to his magazines etc (e.e. cummings, for example; william carlos williams -probably his hero and closest poetic compatriot (his bio of williams was titled poet from jersey (just right for the extreme matteroffactness of both his subject and himself); ezra pound, whom reed talked about visiting in st. elixabeth's asylum). he supervised my honors thesis, which was a "theory of poetry" (for god's sake) and i was the poetry ed of the college literary magazine under his direction. i wrote many gigantically-ambitious poems that sucked, thinking of him as my only audience. i don't blame him for the suckiness. he tried to help, but i wouldn't listen.
his poems were maybe not the utter apex of the century, though he did get a lot of recognition too. they were extremely prosaic: flat, almost, in a way that became a fashion decades after he'd perfected the style. it was a sort of anti-poetry: in a way it was an argument that the tradition of poetry in english was pretentious, grandiose, affected; he always emphasized that the rhythms of ordinary language were poetic enough to be getting on with. he did hit many grand themes - god, truth, love, nature - but always to puncture their grandness or bring them down to earth. also he often just wrote a little joke. both on paper and in person, he was about the least pretentious major literary figure who ever existed. i don't think he thought that poetry could save the world.
ok ive been re-reading for the first time in twenty years or more his book the mother's breast and the father's house. it's amazing how so many of the lines come at me now with an air of extreme inevitability or so much familiarity that they seem like my own internal monologue. i'll type in a couple.
Haiku #1
A traditional haiku has seventeen syllables.
Hasn't it?
Rocks
Is the world a dream?
--The waking is always to facts that are like rocks
And lives that are like rocks
To poverty that is not an abstraction but a great rock
To sickness and loneliness and loss and emptiness
That are all rocks.
Is love a dream?
--It would be clever to say that one must climb up the other
rocks to arrive at the love rock.
Or that love is a rock hidden in life's moss
But to say such things is to be out of love
If there is love
and I think there is
It survives the saying only with difficulty
It needs prayer rather
I will not play with it
But of the rocks that are hateful to man and surround him
So that it is as if he were deep in a great rock canyon and calling
for help and only to rocks
Of such rocks it is safe to speak
They need to be hammered at through the ages by man in his
prison suit
They need to be broken up into smaller and smaller rocks.
A Teacher
"And gladly wolde he lerne, and gladly teche."
He hated them all one by one but wanted to show them
What was Important and Vital and by God if
They thought they'd never have any use for it he was
Sorry as hell for them, that's all, with their genteel
mitt romney fills me with revulsion. however, i suppose it's a good thing that there's no chance rick santorum will be president of the united states until at least 2017.
everyone seems to be calling for the head of marlins manager ozzie guillen, who expressed admiration for fidel castro. this is just ridiculous. am i called upon to agree with the politics of of the coaches of the sports teams i root for? or they with mine? i realize this is a sensitive subject in miami, but the man's opinions are irrelevant to anything and everything, including the conduct of his team and anybody's dealings with cuba. on pardon the interruption last night, the usually delightful kornheiser and wilbon were asking how people would respond if guillen praised hitler or bin laden. now, i am very not a fan of totalitarian marxists, i.e. marxists. but those comparisons are silly.
i'm joining forces with the santorums to do something about this evolution business, a la edward wilson. (henry thanks for the correction!) really if we were far more cooperative than we are - in precisely the same environment - evolutionary theorists would have less than no trouble explaining that, and likewise if we were far more competitive or aggressive. if everyone did art all the time, or if there was no such thing...no prob. that is, you've got a wee little issue with empiricalness (or possibly empiricity). (once again: our idea of art goes back at absolute most to the renaissance, more likely the 18th century. baby it is not genetic.) look, you just start with the idea that natural selection has to explain everything. really? does it explain why i just tripped over that tree root? or why my forebears have been doing so for eons? does it, in other words, explain my clumsiness, my ugliness, my indifference, my psychosis, my psoriasis, etc? does it simultaneously explain, let's see, democracy, communism, and fascism? does it explain the income tax, the protestant reformation, and rihanna's hairstyle? oh it's got to. no, no it doesn't. every change in the organism is accompanied by a thousand 'unintended' or irrelevant or non-adaptive or counter-adaptive effects. the idea that everything has an explanation, and that all the explanations must appeal to a single principle, is much more a religious than a scientific orientation. it has the same form as an appeal to god's will: everything can be explained by one thing, which we just stipulate in advance. someday we'll wonder how we ever thought this. you reason from effect to cause, but the cause is a single dimension of explanation that is assumed to obtain prior to any detailed examination of the effect: it's apriorism or something. or we're just pretending it's not an infinitely complicated mess out here.
it's funny but i hear 'radical' as a positive term. i remember my mom in the 60s/70s insisting that she was not a liberal, she was a radical. so if democrats are going to constantly call republicans 'radical,' they're gonna up my tendency to listen to what the republicans are saying. i'm teaching a course on american radicalisms, left and right, and it's been an incredibly rich and often extremely courageous and inspiring history. so 'calling radicalism by its name' - the headline of the times editorial linked above - rings strangely (and i must say, dangerously) to me. it's like calling communism by its name or something: it sounds like something you say just before you launch on your program to marginalize or repress someone's position. i'll just say that the average person out here in rural pa is to the right of mitt romney by a ways, and that you'll be repressing, or at least dismissing as bizarre, a significant proportion of the population. it's like insulting someone by calling them 'out of the mainstream': well, the mainstream is an extraordinarily banal, unreflective, and easy place to be. but it's a good place to be if you're satisfied with our current conditions and our current political discourse. or if you think peer pressure might be wrong with drugs or crime, but is the only reasonable way to come to believe anything. admittedly the american educational system is completely dedicated to these twinned approaches.
here's a useful piece of statistical information: According to the American Psychological Association, approximately "40% to 80% of school-age children experience bullying at some point during their school careers." possibly the apa is using forward-looning rather than backward-looking statistical techniques. instead of reporting what has actually happened, the statistics try to make something happen in the future; they are antedata. at any rate, i won't even need a grant to agree: ditching approximations, -17% to 136% of children have been bullied. it's an epidemic!
Highjacking Crispin's site again with JJ Cale and Chuck Prophet, Thomas More and Thomas Hobbes, the Navajo, the Army, Paul Ryan and Tora Bora...it just doesn't get better than this. I think at times there's a better class of reader here than at the other places I babble...certainly the comments I get over at Veteran's Today give me a lot of pause. Anyway, this has been a complex piece to get my teeth into...for a variety of reasons. So, here we go...
Civilized costs more than hard, brutish and short...
The number of broken promises and bad judgments made over the last 30 years is incredible. Each bad judgment ends up causing more broken promises. However, the majority of the problems I see – crumbling infrastructure, lousy schools, increased long-term unemployment, mounting debt, lagging modernization, lack of a coherent energy plan and so on and on and on as well as what has happened to Native Americans, Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsman, Civil Servants, Labor Unions, and on and on comes from the idea that we don’t have the wherewithal to pay for what we need to do. That is bullshit.
To be educated, a person doesn't have to know much or be informed, but he or she does have to have been exposed vulnerably to the transformative events of an engaged human life. Thomas More
Can you say AN/PDR-27R? ALPHA-NOVEMBER-PAPA-DELTA-ROMEO-TWO-SEVEN-ROMEO?
Recent Comments