Samir Chopra's Blog, page 111

The Perils and Pleasures of the Scatological

Warning: Please do not continue reading if scatological references and language upset and offend you.

A couple of weeks ago, I traveled with some friends to upstate New York. We were on a Members’ Appreciation trip organized by the farm that supplies our local community supported agriculture collective (CSA) with its beef, pork, chicken and lamb. As we sat together on that early morning MTA train, suitably fueled by caffeinated concoctions, it quickly became apparent that stories of urination and defecation–sometimes public, sometimes spectacular, sometimes embarrassing–were gaining considerable mileage, provoking considerable chuckling, guffawing and chortling. I spun out a few stories myself; indeed, I may have been one of the ‘worst’–or ‘best’ depending on your perspective–offenders. And as our train rolled on, and through, the bucolic landscapes of New York farmlands, the air turning blue–or perhaps brown and yellow–in our corner of the coach, I was reminded yet again of the curious attraction of the scatological tale and joke.

Talk of shitting, pissing, farting, sharting, and the like comes easily to some; equally facile are the offended responses of some. It is still not quite clear to me what accounts for this difference. One conventionally drawn line has been between men and women’s tolerance for this species of conversation. A dozen or so years ago, after a friend and I had finished laughing our heads off at a suitably shit-stained joke, my girlfriend asked, “Why is it that men find such jokes funny?” My friend responded, ‘What is it about women that prevents them from getting the joke?” But it is not clear to me such genderized lines can be easily drawn. My company during my ride upstate was a mixed sex group, with contributions and appreciation roughly equally shared, so conventional stereotypes about the relative tolerance for, and indulgence in, this variant of humor certainly seemed up for contestation and redefinition. And neither does class or income explain the relative differences in tolerance. The rich–in the right company and circumstances–talk of their shit and piss just as much, or as little, as do the middle-class and the poor. (Based on some rather unscientific sampling.) So do the young and old. And of course, even the supposedly highly cultured and sophisticated, like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, no less, have been known to give wings to their scatological flights of imagination.

Perhaps reveling in the scatological provides relief and release from daily, clenched-cheek, full-bladder, strictures on conversation and expression; perhaps tales of answering–in staggering variety and manner–nature’s many calls are one more way of emphasizing our sometimes malodorous connections with it; perhaps in recounting our incontinences, we make ourselves more human; perhaps as Freud noted, we are still proud of our ‘productions.’ Those of us that do indulge in these walks on the wild side might be entitled to look askance at those who refuse to let go and hold on tightly, veins popping, reluctant to acknowledge the ubiquity of the arse-wipe and pee-stain, desperately hoping to maintain the carefully crafted image of the pristine human, well above the fray and the spray. If only they’d relax and let the ease flow over–and under–them.

Note: While my diaper changing experiences in recent months have certainly induced new appreciation in me for scatology, they have not been my sole inspiration for this post. But they do deserve a post of their own. On which, as for many other issues, more anon.

William Pfaff on the Indispensability of Clerical Leadership

In reviewing Garry Wills‘ Why Priests? A Failed Tradition (‘Challenge to the Church,’ New York Review of Books, 9 May 2013), William Pfaff writes:

How does a religion survive without structure and a self-perpetuating leadership? The practice of naming bishops to lead the Church in various Christian centers has existed since apostolic times. Aside from the questions of doctrinal authority and leadership in worship, there are inevitable practical problems of livelihood, shelter, and finance, propagation of the movement, relations with political authority, and so forth. Clerical organization seems to me the pragmatic and indeed inevitable solution to the problem of religious and other spontaneous communities that wish to survive the death of their founders or charismatic leaders.

These are interesting and revealing assertions. Pfaff assumes that ‘religion’ is synonymous with ‘organized religion’; from this premise follow the rest of his conclusions. Pfaff does not indicate what he takes to be the extension of ‘spontaneous communities’; presumably these would include–as ‘charismatic leaders’ would seem to indicate–cults of all stripes. It might be that for Pfaff what distinguishes a ‘spontaneous community’ or a cult–as the early Christians would have been so regarded–from religions is more a matter of their endurance and organization than their content.  Two ‘spontaneous communities’ then, for Pfaff, could be similar in theistic and doctrinal, especially eschatological, content, but only the one with the requisite organization and endurance would count as a religion. A cult flowers briefly and dies out; a religion endures.

Pfaff’s conflation of ‘religion’ with ‘organized religion’ suggests that religions are properly thought of as organizations of sufficient complexity–in social, economic and political dimensions–to necessarily require some form of binding, cohesion and direction by ‘leadership’. Tantalizingly enough, we are not told how such a leadership is to be formed or selected from among the ranks of the followers; its ‘legitimacy’ to command, direct, and regulate its followers is left as an open question. (Pfaff does not address the issue of whether the survival of such an entity is desirable or not for the society that plays host to it.) But maybe not; is it the case that the legitimacy of the priesthood is derived entirely from its indispensability? A sort of ‘sans moi le deluge‘ argument, if you will.

This analysis of the necessity of clergies for the maintenance and propagation of religion also suggests leadership could be contested; rival contenders could stake their claims based on their alternative strategies for the continued flourishing of the religion.  This is not unheard of in organized religions; the Sunni-Shia schism in Islam dates back to a succession dispute, which even if not argued for on precisely these grounds, was still the kind that would be entailed by Pfaff’s claims of the indispensability of leadership.

So an interesting picture of organized religion emerges from Pffaf’s claims: its very survival relies on the creation of a space which could play host to a species of political dispute; this survival also requires ‘finance,’ ‘propagation’ and ‘relations with political authority.’ In short, it must be a political actor itself in the society in which it is embedded.

At the very least, this would seem to indicate organized religion should be treated like any other political force in society, and not one requiring special protections or immunities.

The All Too Inevitable Denouement of the Trayvon Martin Story

In commenting on the murder of Trayvon Martin last year, I wrote:

The killing of Trayvon Martin is a classically American nightmare: a suburb somewhere, a dark night, a young black man on the streets, guns in the hands of people who imagine it will make them safer, calls to 911 that provide grim, brief, staccato evidence of a deadly, preventable encounter. And at the end of it all, a dead man, grieving parents, a police force and a city administration making mealy-mouthed responses. When we reach that stage, a sickening sense of deja vu strikes, for we have memorized the rest of the script: a little outrage that soon blows itself out, some protest marches, featuring as usual, some ‘leaders’ of the black community, bland, banal responses from the police force, and a meandering march toward ‘justice,’ which, more often than not, ends in miscarriage.

Well, that familiar script has played out as predicted and the anticipated miscarriage of ‘justice’ is here: George Zimmerman has been acquitted of second-degree murder and of manslaughter; Trayvon Martin‘s parents are left grieving and inconsolate, resigned to spending the rest of their lives mourning a young life cut short. And the rest of us reduced to raging impotently, if eloquently at times, on social media timelines and playing parlor games in which thought experiments involving a white Trayvon Martin and a black Zimmerman are devised, with the same outcome every time: Zimmerman going to the gallows or heading for a life sentence in prison.

A few weeks, months or years from now, Trayvon Martin’s name will acquire some obscurity, and blend in with Yusuf Hawkins, Amadou Diallo, and oh, take your pick: a grim roll of black men who get shot on the streets, and whose killers always, somehow, manage to walk; his portrait will join those flashed at the rallies that will soon, again, be held for some other victim of the over-hasty, over-eager policeman or home-brewed vigilante.  Zimmerman will go back to his life, still armed and dangerous. If the perversity of our culture will play out in some of its most gruesome manifestations, we might see him again, perhaps on a talk show, or a book release event, justifying his unhinged reactions on that fatal night.

In the post from which I’ve quoted above, I also wrote:

[T]he final pull of the trigger, as in this case, was merely the spearpoint of a weapon that had been aimed at Trayvon Martin’s head for a very long time. Zimmerman lives in a society infected by racism; when he finally shot Trayvon, he wasn’t acting alone; he was accompanied by anything and everything that has conspired to make it the case that young black men in this country are taking substantial risks when they venture out alone into a dark street.

The ‘anything and everything’ includes legal statutes like Florida’s stand-your-ground law, but even more importantly, it includes the structural racism which made it possible for those thought experiments I allude to above to be run so easily.

That structure needs, and will take, some tearing down.

General Petraeus Goes to CUNY: Nobel Prize Winners, Eat Your Heart Out

The initial reaction to the hiring of General David Petraeus to teach at CUNY’s Macaulay Honors College was one of astonishment at the salary–$150k for one semester–offered; this has since devolved into looking askance at the source of the funds and an inquiry into whether such expenditure was the best possible for a public university that is always struggling to make ends meet. (For a full round-up, please check Corey Robin‘s posts on this subject.). And since the course description for Petraeus’ course has been made available much skepticism has been directed at what seems like an exceedingly skimpy course, at best a generic international relations elective.

Petraeus is not teaching a specialized seminar for graduate students, or faculty, or anything like that. He is teaching sixteen undergraduates a senior year special topics elective. Presumably, his salary is a function of what CUNY perceives his worth to be, based on his experience and education. The weekly rate for Petraeus is not unheard of when it comes paying very accomplished academics; for instance, last year, the Wolfe Institute for the Humanities, as part of its Hess Scholar in Residence program, brought Sean Wilentz, the distinguished Princeton historian to the Brooklyn College campus for a  week; the amount paid to him–from the Hess Foundation–worked out to about the same rate as paid to Petraeus. But in that one week, Wilentz attended half-a-dozen faculty panels, some undergraduate classes and three working luncheons, and delivered a talk. In sharp contrast Petraeus will teach his regular class, once a week, just like any other adjunct would. (I presume he will have a TA, unlike adjuncts.)

With that in mind, here are some alternative scenarios for CUNY to ascertain what its market pricing for highly skilled and experienced teachers might be. Bear in mind we know nothing about Petraeus’ teaching abilities; he is just a highly educated and experienced military man.  So, what would CUNY pay for a distinguished academic , the winner of the highest honor in his or field, to teach a class in their special domain?

Consider the following examples:

A Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry to teach Concepts in Nanochemistry

A Nobel Prize winner in Physics to teach a Quantum Mechanics seminar

A Nobel Prize winner in Economics to teach Special Topics in Microeconomics

A Nobel Prize winner in Literature to teach Creative Writing: Advanced Techniques

A Noble Prize winner in Physiology or Medicine to teach Recent Advances in Genetics

A Fields Medal winner to teach Advanced Algebra: Groups, Rings and Fields

An Academy Award winning director to teach and direct a film in co-operation with Film Studies majors.

Would CUNY pay any of these 150,000 dollars to teach the class specified? Remember that CUNY does not have, like some other universities in the US, Nobel Prize winners in its ranks. If it was to secure the services of such a luminary, it would almost certainly hold it out as an attraction for its ‘best’ students–as it seems to be doing in the case of this Honors College seminar. My guess is that if CUNY was feeling generous, it would pay the folks above $20,000.  Maybe.

So, why the special treatment for Petraeus? As I said yesterday in my last post on this subject, it’s because bringing Petraeus, a powerful member of the governmental-military-corporate complex, to CUNY, will open the doors for folks in CUNY administration to get close to cushy consulting gigs in Washington DC, with the Pentagon, with the military, with all those folks in industry that Petraeus is, as we speak, networking with right now. They will have Petraeus here for a semester, and that is plenty of time to give him a copy of their CVs over a cup of coffee or dinner. Once he goes back to his regular tramping of the corridors of power, he will be able to take care of those who took care of him.

So, it bears repeating: this hiring decision has nothing to do with the students at CUNY; it has everything to do with folks in power taking care of each other.

Mark Twain on General Baby

In 1879, at a banquet in Chicago, given by the Army of the Tennessee to their commander General Ulysses S. Grant, Mark Twain rose to propose a toast to a oft-ignored ‘minor’ entity:

You soldiers all know that when that little fellow arrived at family headquarters you had to hand in your resignation. He took entire command. You became his lackey, his mere body-servant, and you had to stand around too. He was not a commander who made allowances for time, distance, weather, or anything else. You had to execute his order whether it was possible or not. And there was only one form of marching in his manual of tactics, and that was the double-quick. He treated you with every sort of insolence and disrespect, and the bravest of you didn’t dare to say a word. You could face the death-storm at Donelson and Vicksburg, and give back blow for blow; but when he clawed your whiskers, and pulled your hair, and twisted your nose, you had to take it. When the thunders of war were sounding in your ears you set your faces toward the batteries, and advanced with steady tread; but when he turned on the terrors of his war-whoop, you advanced in the other direction, and mighty glad of the chance, too. When he called for soothing syrup, did you venture to throw out any side-remarks about certain services being unbecoming an officer and a gentleman? No. You got up and got it. When he ordered his pap bottle and it was not warm, did you talk back? Not you. You went to work and warmed it. You even descended so far in your menial office as to take a suck at that warm, insipid stuff yourself, to see if it was right — three parts water to one of milk, a touch of sugar to modify the colic, and a drop of peppermint to kill those immortal hiccoughs. I can taste that stuff yet. [links added]

As the remarks about the ‘little fellow’, the ‘pulling of whiskers,’ the ‘soothing syrup,’ and the ‘pap bottle’ hopefully make clear, Twain is referring to babies. And what must have provoked a storm of guffaws at the banquet would have been the rueful recognition–on part of the fathers, and perhaps mothers, if women were invited to Army banquets–that Twain was right: when the baby calls you to heel, you obey and conform.  General Baby embodies that ironic mix of utter helplessness with total control: it might be unable to even roll over on its belly but it can make a grown adult get down on all fours quite easily.

Among the many ‘warnings’ I received from parents as my wife and I awaited the birth of our daughter last year was that we would look back on the time before she arrived as one filled with limitless, capacious time, free of care and responsibility; we’d wonder at how we occupied all those waking hours, so free of constraint. They were right: I’m still amazed–as I struggle to read a few pages or scribble a few notes during her nap hours–at how utterly ‘unproductive’ I was in those years. What was I doing with myself in all that time? After all, I wasn’t adjutant to General Baby then.

The good thing about this particular commander is she also has the power to make those worries seem rather trivial, to force your attention back to her most pressing need and to make it yours.

The greatest trick General Baby ever pulled was convincing you that in serving her, you were serving yourself.

CUNY Board of Trustees and General Petraeus: Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?

The ‘General David Petraeus is teaching at CUNY for a ludicrous amount’ scandal has been brewing for a while now. To catch up on its all its salacious, rage-provoking details, you could do worse than check out Corey Robin‘s coverage. In brief: cash-strapped urban public university invites retired US military figure to teach one course for an astronomical salary–the funding source for which remains dubious. This is the same university whose infrastructure is in disrepair, which cannot adequately fund research conducted by its faculty members, nor keep tuition for its students from rising every year. (To add final insult to injury, check out the poorly-written, skimpy course description of the Petraeus dropping, er, offering.)

A few years ago, I attended a CUNY Board of Trustees meeting. (I have attempted, in the past, on this blog, to provide some background on these worthies.) During the meeting, the subject of the generous pay packages for CUNY top administrators, which were in sharp contrast to the meager raises then being offered to CUNY faculty, came up. The faculty union representative pointed out the impropriety of sharply increasing salaries for adminstrators at a time when faculty were not even being paid cost-of-living increases. Benno Schmidt, now Chair of the Board of Trustees, and possibly Chair back then as well, spoke up sharply: ‘The faculty needs to learn that in order to get good work done at the university, you need to pay good money. If they think that’s expensive, they’ll find out just how expensive it is to not pay good money’. (This outburst was followed by an anti-union rant by the notorious Jeffrey Weisenfeld, which was met with much head-nodding by the worthies seated around the table.)

I’ve never forgotten that meeting or that statement. There was no way to efface the memory of the belligerent, pompous expression on Schmidt’s face, simultaneously suffused with the smug satisfaction of the worst kind of sanctimonious hybrid: the businessman-priest.  There, in that attitude, that defiance, that anger at the union representative who had dared speak up, was encapsulated a great deal.

Higher education is a cash cow; there’s gold in them thar hills. University administrators know this, which is why, in recent times, they have swelled their ranks and their salaries at the expense of everyone else in the business. All those MOOC companies lining up to get the fat online education contracts from soon to be privatized public universities–once the greatest advertisement in the world for public education–know this. And like any other sector of the American economy the educational one showcases economic inequality: students, adjuncts, faculty all make do with very little, while the ‘management’ gets richer and richer.

And most importantly, this management class takes care of its own. They ensure generous retirement packages for each other and when they see a brother looking for a new gig, especially after a scandalous hiccup or two, like Petraeus, they run to help. Besides, the backscratching will go the other way too. After all, won’t Petraeus, down the line, take care of, somehow or the other, his new buddies on the CUNY Board of Trustees too? Connections to the halls of power, perhaps some consulting at the Pentagon or the CIA, down the line?

CUNY administrators and the members of the Board of Trustees aren’t just doing this to raise the university’s profile; they are doing this because they are good networkers.

The Vale of Tears: From Babe to Adult

There are times when I hear my little baby girl crying yet again–perhaps when she is hungry, or tired, or needs a diaper changed, or perhaps worse of all, has been ‘put down’ to sleep for one of her daily naps–and the thought crosses my mind that it makes perfectly good sense for our species to be one afflicted by ‘common unhappiness’ throughout our lives. How could we not, when we spend so much of our initial time on this planet wailing and bawling, expressing our terror and anger at this unfeeling, uncaring and mysterious world?

This is a rather superficial thought, especially when you consider that it is infected with the genetic fallacy: an infancy of tears does not necessarily entail an adulthood or even a childhood similarly afflicted. But still, one of the most common reassurances offered to anxious parents in this domain–to address the speculation expressed above–that “They all turn out pretty well in the end, don’t they?” isn’t particularly, well, reassuring. For I, like many others, do see ample evidence of psychological, psychic, and emotional dysfunction in the world of adults, dysfunction that one is all too easily tempted to posit as an explanatory factor for the visible and vivid failings on the political and moral fronts of our times. You’ve heard it before: a helpless being, terrified and alone, at the mercy of his hopefully-benign-and-loving caretakers, matures via a long process involving repeated traumas of separation, abandonment, rejection, and harsh disciplining, into a deeply conflicted, neurotic, self-and-other destructive entity. The world becomes the stage for the resolution of his neuroses; we, the sufferers of his miserable thrashings about.

In expressing this worry, this fear that the childhood experience of utter helplessness and sporadic, gut-wrenching anxiety and panic might translate into long-term afflictions I’m merely joining the ranks of generations and legions of anxious, guilt-ridden parents. (In seeking to use these experiences to explain the pervasive sense of ‘things falling apart’ in the wider world, I’m leaving the parents behind and flirting with a rather more  ambitious crowd of theorizers.) The problem, of course, is that it is all too easy to engage in that most common of human activities: to try to imagine, for a moment, what another human might feel like, given the presumption of a roughly similar inner life and outwardly directed first-person perspective. Our success at doing this forms the basis for our empathetic experiences and underwrites the resilience of many of our personal relationships and codes of ethical conduct. And so, we cannot but speculate on what it might be like for a baby: alone, surrounded and enveloped by a sensory field of unknown dimension, subjected to pains and discomforts and discombulations. Comforts, too, yes, especially of the breast, the cuddle, the hug, and the kiss, but the mystery and terror of it seem overpowering and dominant.

Perhaps the only reassurance that I can offer myself at least, is that the baby’s perspective is nothing like mine, that she does not have the experiences that I do, equipped with language, a richer arsenal of concepts (especially ones like ‘fear’ and ‘anxiety’), and perhaps most importantly, more extensive experience with the unwillingness of this world to offer any confirmation that things will just turn out just fine. Perhaps the baby’s fears are mild ones, just expressed loudly and piercingly; perhaps the real fears are the ones we experience when we’ve grown up enough to understand more of this world of unconscious action and unforgiving consequence, of laws drafted without human consultation.

On Being a ‘Professional Philosopher’, Contd.

In my previous post on being a professional philosopher, I had emphasized the scholarly world: publishing, writing, theoretical orientation etc. Today, I want to take note of another very important duty of the modern professional philosopher: teaching.

Most philosophers in the modern university teach a mixture of classes: the introductory ‘service’ courses, which in many curricula form part of some sort of ‘Core’; required ‘bread-n-butter’ courses that fulfill the requirements for a major; and lastly, some advanced electives, either on specialized topics or particular philosophers. The requirements for a major tend to be organized around the chunkiest, most conventional, divisions of philosophical subject matter: metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, social and political philosophy, philosophy of science, logic, ethics, and perhaps aesthetics. (And of course, ‘period’ courses like ancient philosophy, medieval philosophy and modern philosophy.) Anything else generally goes into the ‘elective’ category: American philosophy, Asian philosophy, philosophy of physics, advanced logic, pragmatism, etc. That is, philosophy curricula bear the imprint of a very particular understanding of their division into ‘areas’; later, in graduate school, these will become ‘areas of specialization’ or ‘areas of expertise’ for job market CVs.

The syllabi for these courses also show a conventional understanding of their content, which is why published anthologies for both introductory service courses (taught to non-philosophy majors) and required courses for majors are so widely available. The reading lists of these anthologies show a great deal of commonality and given the onerous teaching loads of most philosophy professors–unless they happen to have a low teaching load at a rich private university–almost always ensures the adoption of the path of least resistance: the selection of a generic anthology for teaching.  Among required courses too, metaphysics, epistemology, social and political philosophy are very often taught using anthologies with fairly conventional reading lists; there is also sometimes a broad understanding of which topics are to be given emphasis even in a period class (for instance classes on modern philosophy invariably concentrate on metaphysics and epistemology via Descartes, Locke, Hume, Berkeley, Spinoza and Kant; there is little note of the social and political philosophy, ethics or aesthetics of the same period.) There is often more creativity visible as you move up the curricular food chain: electives and special topics seminars generally are blessed with more creative syllabi.

The readings for philosophy classes are almost always drawn from ‘philosophy’ texts written by men. Despite the increasing presence of women in the modern philosophy world, they do not figure prominently in reading lists. And neither does material from other sources: novels, political pamphlets, public commentary, poems, movies, artworks (unless in specialized contexts like aesthetics courses).  The corpus of ‘philosophy’ thus acquires a distinct definition for the student and the professor alike.

Without actively changing syllabi, teaching assignments or curricular reform on an ongoing basis, most philosophy professors will teach the same material organized in the same way quite frequently, if not all the time. Many philosophy professors prefer teaching in their own ‘areas’, thus minimizing the time spent transitioning from their scholarship to the teaching; most will not like to teach a new or unfamiliar subject area (indeed, they will often not be so assigned); very often, the inclination on both fronts–the administrative and the professorial–is to get a ‘lock-on’ and stay there. Administrative requirements for minimum enrollment for classes ensures anyway, that most electives will not be offered and when they are, will not run because of lack of enrollment. (Departments guard their course offerings zealously; if another department wants to offer a ‘related’ course, it must seek approval from philosophy. For instance, a History of Hellenic Political Thought offered by say, history or classics, will need clearance from philosophy.)

Teaching as a professional philosopher requires generally, the provision of a list of readings and some written assignments to students; these are often accompanied by exhortations that students concentrate on the primary sources and disdain secondary ones (at least until the primary has been adequately tackled). Students are asked to ‘write like philosophers’ and often given handouts that tell them how a ‘philosophy paper’ is to be constructed, how arguments are to be analyzed and so on. The conduct of a class is also supposed to follow a generalized template: read the material before class, discuss arguments with professor in class. (Thanks to the volatility of insufficiently disciplined, conformist or trained student bodies, this template is very rarely followed.)

This definition of the subject matter of philosophy via its preparatory reading lists into particular subject areas,  emphases and valorizations is part of the education of a professional philosopher; it is where the community comes to realize the discipline’s boundaries, those that will be preserved and fought for in the broader world by departments, professional societies, and publication fora.

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Bronowski on the Actively Constructed Good (in the Beautiful)

At the conclusion of The Visionary Eye: Essays in the Arts, Literature and Science, Jacob Bronowski writes:

You will have noticed that the aesthetics that I have been developing through these six lectures are in the end rather heavily based on ethics. And you might think that I belong to the school of philosophers who say that the beautiful must be founded on the good. But that traditional formulation in philosophy will not do. My view is that there is a no such thing as a single good, and that ethics consists of a clear and unsentimental register of values which cannot be arranged into a single hierarchy, to be called the “good.” I do not think that anywhere in life we can isolate an ultimate supreme value. The thing about life really is that you make goodness or you make the experience for yourself by constantly balancing the values that you have from moment to moment. And you have to have profound moments like that which Einstein had and you must make profound mistakes, but you must always feel that you exploring the values by which you live and forming them with every step that you take. On that I think the beautiful is founded. That, I think, is what the work of art says.

Some of the confusion about the existence of something called The Good can, of course, be blamed on Aristotles‘ opening line of the Nichomachean Ethics.¹ That is easily cleared up but some traces persist in notions like either the existence of a supreme value among Bronowski’s ‘register of values’ or even the existence of values by themselves, assured of an uncontaminated state of being (the basis of the fact-value distinction, one now discredited by pragmatist and indeed, most post-analytic philosophy).

So Bronowski is right, to reject the notion of a single good or supreme value, but he is still reliant on a problematic notion, that of the autonomous existence of values. But his view is redeemed, partially, by his constructive notion of ‘goodness’: an active, manipulation, balancing and weighing up of (fact-laden) values that informs our lives and conceptions of the good on an ongoing basis. An ethical life is not one measured and evaluated by its deviation from the mean of the Good Life; rather, its very progression along the trajectories made for us by our balancing acts informs us what the Good Life might be for someone like us, in situations like ours. The Good Life is a dynamically contested concept.

The aesthetics of the good, the contours of the Good Life that Bronowski alludes to above are visible in the works of the artist; here, in them, these balancing acts are brought alive for us. They enable the inspection of the values of artist, his highly idiosyncratic judgment of their relationship to each other. The people we interact with on a daily basis provide their lives for such evaluation; the artist does so by means of his hopefully-enduring works. The classic works of art are those that continue to provide such instruction long after their creators are gone.

Notes: 

1. The Nichomachean Ethics begins:

Every art and every kind of inquiry, and likewise every act and purpose, seems to aim at some good: and so it has been well said that the good is that at which everything aims.

Paul Valéry on the Indispensability of Avatars

Paul Valéry is quoted in Stephen Dunn‘s Walking Light (New York, Norton 1993) as saying:

I believe in all sincerity that if each man were not able to live a number of lives besides his own, he would not be able to live his own life.

Valéry’s stress on the sincerity of this claim for the necessity of multiple personalities and selves is required, obviously, in case our first response is to ask which one of his selves is speaking.¹ But with that out of the way, we can get down to inquiring into the grounds for such a pressing need: Why is this multiplicity desirable? Why disdain a coherent, unitary, integrated, self? Or at least, why imagine that to maintain the appearance of one life, one self–for that is all that appears to remain in Valery’s imagining–many others are needed and necessary?

Perhaps because Valéry has noticed, like many of us do, that to want to take on many lives, to imagine living them in all of their particular details, appears as an essential component of our days and nights, that the taking on and trying out, of a new self is an integral part of our appreciation of the arts, and indeed, of others. If we empathize, it is because we can imagine ourselves as another; if we gaze in wonder at a painting depicting the joy, or sorrow, or daily tedium of another, it is because our imaginative capacity has revealed itself in our taking on the beings of those depicted on the canvas in front of us; if we feel ourselves captivated by a novel’s characters it is because we have allowed ourselves to feel themselves in us, to become them while we read.

Perhaps it is also because Valéry notices the difficulty in maintaining a coherent narrative of the self through our past and present, when physical appearances are fleeting, where psychological change is almost as continuous as our external transformation, where the attenuation, modification and alteration of the face(s) we present to our daily circumstances is a never-ending task requiring much careful attention and customization. More importantly it is a task we revel in, not one we resent. If there is a stable self, it appears at best as a convenient, fictional foundation for all the performances staged on it.

So the Internet didn’t create avatars or make them more popular; it just gave them another space to be shown and displayed in. It wasn’t and isn’t any different from all the other spaces in which we put on our personas: the office, the bedroom, the playing field, the performing stage. It lets us pretty up the avatar-construction and the showing and telling, but the activities it facilitates are not considerably different from those that take place in physical spaces: the artful posturing, the careful selection of profiles, the self-regulated speech–a Twitter feed or a Facebook timeline with a ‘personality’ can often function just like a feigned accent, a dressing-up, a personality makeover.

From many one, or rather, to approximate one, many. To convey the appearance of a self, one must appear to have many.

Notes:

1. As Adam Phillips does in Terrors and Experts pp. 81.