Samir Chopra's Blog, page 125

Babies and Personal Identity

As a professor of philosophy I have taught personal identity several times; almost always in introductory classes; mostly via John Locke, David Hume, and the Buddha, and by relying on standard examples in the literature (the Ship of Theseus for instance). Invariably, I begin my class discussions of  personal identity by saying something along the lines of, ‘We are used to pointing to a photograph and saying “Hey, that’s me when I was three years (or six months or six weeks) old” and our listeners will believe us in most cases. But what is it that licenses such a claim? The entity we are pointing to doesn’t look exactly like us; it sure doesn’t behave like us; its physical composition is entirely different. So what gives?’ And then, we’re off and rolling. Brain transplantation, teleportation, and the movie Big (among others) follow. I have much sympathy for the ‘forensic’ aspects of personality that Locke alludes to, and for Buddhist and Humean no-self theories, and some of my students, gratifyingly, do cotton on to what it is about these theories that is simultaneously insightful and perplexing. Teaching personal identity allows me, most pleasurably, to delve into topics that are the most close to our hearts but which are often condemned to the margins in the more rarefied regions of philosophy; it is where metaphysics and ethics come together.

These days as I spend most of waking–and sometimes half-awake–hours with my almost-seven-weeks-old daughter, I’m reminded–again and again–of that introductory example of the baby in the photograph. I am aware of her changing, rapidly, all too rapidly. I marvel at her transformation from just-more-than-fetus to infant, as pounds and inches add on, as she starts to respond to more environmental stimuli like sound and light and touch, dishes out ‘social smiles’ when confronted with the cooing expressions of her father, mother, and aunt, and emits sounds, which in the grand imaginations of a hopeful parent, are not just stifled cries but genuine attempts at communication. And I wonder what she will ‘turn into,’ what she will ‘grow up to be’, what she will ‘become.’ I try to extrapolate, sometimes, from her current features, to what she might look like a year from now or even later. I speculate about the friends she will make, and how they will ‘transform’ her so that the girl who leaves home in the morning for school will come back a ‘different’ one in the afternoon.

These speculations run out soon enough, and I urge patience on myself. For I am dimly aware that the girl I play with now, whose crying sometimes reduces me too, almost to tears, will not be the ‘same’ girl years later. The one I play with now, who has a nickname I dare not share for fear of being considered soft in the head, will be replaced by someone else. That other girl will look at the gigantic collection of photos her parents put together and perhaps say the same thing: ‘Lookit me – I was kinda cute, wasn’t I?’ She’ll be right, of course. But for now, I want to make sure I make the most of my limited time with this special guest, one who will soon be replaced by another one, as yet another stage of the inevitable process of ‘her growing up’ comes to be.

Note: Here is a post in which I describe a childhood thought experiment with personal identity.

Henry James on the ‘Fatal Cheapness’ of the Historical Novel

Reviewing Colm Tóibín‘s The Master, a ‘novelistic portrait’ of Henry James, Daniel Mendelsohn writes:

”The Master” is not, of course, a novel about just any man, but rather a novel about a figure from the past about whom we know an extraordinarily great deal, through both his own and others’ memoirs, books and letters. As Toibin well knows, ventriloquizing the past is a dangerous affair for a novelist who wants to be taken seriously: just to remind you, he has an indignant Henry tell his supercilious and critical brother (who has suggested he write a novel about the Puritans) that he views ”the historical novel as tainted by a fatal cheapness.” (‘The Passion of Henry James’, New York Times, June 20, 2004)

Tóibín‘s line is originally James’; he really did hold such views about the historical novel, so it is particularly appropriate that the subject of Tóibín‘s historical novel be James.

In Rachel Cohen‘s A Chance Meeting, we learn–in the chapter describing the encounters between Henry James, Annie Adams Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett–that Jewett had sent to, and received praise from, James her collection of short stories The Queens Twin and other Stories. Emboldened by his description of some of the stories there as ‘perfection’, she sent him a copy of her work in progress, The Tory Lover:

Set in Maine and in England during the Revolutionary War, the novel was meant to reclaim a certain historical sense for her town in much the way that she and her sister, Mary, worked to restore their old house and those of their neighbors in a newly preservationist time. [A Chance Meeting, pp. 88]

James’ reaction was sharp and critical, even as he made sure to couch his remarks in the consoling form of being made ‘as a fellow craftsman & a woman of genius & courage’:

The ‘historic’ novel is, for me, condemned, even in cases of labor as delicate as yours, to a fatal cheapness….You may multiply the little facts that can be got from pictures & documents, relics & prints, as much as you like–the real thing is almost impossible to do, & in its absence the whole effect is as nought; I mean the invention, the representation of the old consciousness, the soul, the sense, the horizon, the vision of individuals in whose minds half the things that make ours, that make the modern world were non-existent….Go back to the country of the Pointed Firs, come back to the present palpable intimate that throbs responsive, & that wants, misses, needs you, and God knows, & that suffers woefully in your absence. [A Chance Meeting, pp. 88]

What makes this criticism of James simultaneously perspicuous and limiting is his concentration on the ‘invention, the  representation of the old consciousness’. These remarks are perspicuous because James rightly focuses on that which is most inaccessible to the novelist, but they are limiting because the difficulty of that task of imaginative recreation is precisely that which intrigues the novelist and engages and involves him. Even the failures of the novelist in these attempts at inhabiting the ‘soul, the sense’ of another might make for a noble endeavor, one visible and pleasurably palpable to the reader.

Narrowing the American Dream to Exclude the American Worker

My sister-in-law works as a labor organizer for the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). I’m proud of the work she does and remain resolutely convinced that her efforts to facilitate the unionization of workers count among the most important contemporary attempts to reform the American workplace and reduce income inequality. But because she works on behalf of organized labor, she also encounters, on occasion, some of the knee-jerk, reflexive, unthinking hostility toward unions that is so common among American workers and the American middle-class, who seem determined to ignore, marginalize, and sometimes actively work against, the one entity that could do the most to rescue them from their ever-worsening economic decline. Last week or so, on telling someone she worked for the AFSCME, her interlocutor baldly said to her face, ‘That’s like working for organized crime.’

Right. You could call that ‘false consciousness‘ and move on. But what I find most revealing about that kind of remark–and it is not that different from the standard hostile missive sent organized labor’s way–is its straightforward exclusion of the worker-who-wants-to-unionize from any aspiration to a supposedly common ‘dream’, the ‘American’ one. For in that dream, everyone is an entrepreneur, doing the best for himself, scraping out, by any means possible, the best possible configuration of economic and material affairs for themselves and theirs.  Those that succeed at this combination of hustle and hard work, always supposedly achievable by chutzpah and the nose to the wheel, are the American ideals, the success stories to be recounted, and the idols to be built for future generations to venerate and cherish.

Everyone, except, it seems, for the worker. When he does the best for himself, by ensuring a regulated workplace that pays attention to his health and safety, or by monitoring the hours worked, and asking for overtime or compensation pay for hours worked over those contracted for, or by ensuring appropriate pension schemes, health benefits and vacation times, he is castigated and described as a leech singularly responsible for the decline of the American economy. Budgets fail to be balanced and crisis stalks the land. Turns out, everyone can be an entrepreneur and do whatever they can to meet the bottom line, except for those that work for bosses.

So for now, in the grab-bag of tricks and tactics that are allowable to the worker in his effort to play the part of the American hero doing the best for himself, he is to be studiously denied access to worker collectivity. Rather, workers must place themselves at the mercy of the entity that manages and manipulates them, who are then free to give the fullest expression to their entrepreneurial spirit. Praise is theirs alone; the castigation, the calling-out, the vilification are reserved for the unionizing (or unionized) worker.

Note: Linda Greenhouse reminds us of the Supreme Court’s role in marginalizing labor unions. Of course, these decisions are easier to make within a particular social context, one created by the attitudes described above.

BDS at Brooklyn College: A Sobering ‘Success’ of Sorts

All is well or so it would seem. Corey Robin reports on the latest developments in the BDS-at-Brooklyn brouhaha:

Now that the mayor, the New York Times, and just about everyone else have come down hard on all the government officials and politicians who tried to force my department to withdraw its co-sponsorship of the BDS panel, the “progressive” politicians have issued a second letter (their first is here) to Brooklyn College President Karen Gould, in which they backpedal, backpedal, backpedal pull back from their earlier position. No longer, it seems, must we “balance” this panel or withdraw our co-sponsorship. [second letter in Robin's post]

That it took a billionaire mayor to explain these simple matters to our progressive leaders is, well, what can one say? This entire episode has been an instructive example in courage and cowardice, shame and shamelessness. Much congratulations go to the mayor, to President Gould, to the students who organized this panel, and above all to my colleagues in political science, who stood absolutely firm on principle throughout an extraordinarily difficult time, and to our chair Paisley Currah, who led us throughout it all.

The BDS panel, featuring Judith Butler and Omar Barghouti will go on tomorrow as planned. The panel is still c0-sponsored by the Political Science department. Again, as I said above, all is well.

Or so it would seem. While this turn of events is rightly viewed by those who fought hard to turn back the Dershowtiz-Hikind-invertebrate City Council politician combine as occasion for celebration, what this entire business portends for the future of academic freedom on the American campus is, I think, a little more grim.

Consider this. Massive amounts of political pressure utilizing media resources was brought to bear on an academic department of a public university to ensure ostensibly, the ‘mere withdrawal of sponsorship’ from a panel discussion on campus. It was never that, of course. The pressure brought on Brooklyn College from the outside was an attempt to regulate discourse on campus. And in that, I fear it has succeeded in many ways.

For one, this event does not make the controversial panel discussion on campus more likely. It makes it more unlikely. Which department or university administration wants to go through this fiasco again? Will university administrators now ask academic departments to clear their sponsorships with them? (Academic freedom you say, but I can see administrators gearing up to couch such ‘requests’ in as vague but demanding language as possible.) Turning back this latest assault on Brooklyn College took a very determined group of faculty; will every university facing a similar crackdown be able to count on such resilience? Even at Brooklyn College, no other department dared co-sponsor the event in solidarity with the political science department; will any of them try to sponsor anything similar down the line? I do not know if the coalition acting against Brooklyn College seriously thought they could shut the BDS panel down; what they might have done is merely played the long game, knowing that even if this panel goes forward, there is little chance anything like it will happen for a long time at Brooklyn College, or anywhere else, for that matter.

Academic Freedom and Syllabus Construction: The Question of ‘Endorsement’ and ‘Balance’

My focus here on this blog, before the weekend’s traveling-imposed break, was academic freedom and on ignorant attempts to severely attenuate it at Brooklyn College. These attempts have relied on two patently dishonest, obfuscatory tactics: equating ‘sponsorship’ with ‘endorsement’ and with proposing ‘balance’ as a valid desideratum for academic content. Today, I want to offer some clarification of ‘academic freedom’ by analogizing the Brooklyn College Political Science department’s act of sponsoring a talk on the BDS movement to a professor’s humdrum, mundane, weekday task of  including an item on a reading list for a class. Or more generally, by analogizing a department’s selection of academic and intellectual offerings to its students to a professor’s preparation of a syllabus.

So, first, consider my Political Philosophy seminar from last semester. Its reading list featured, among others, Burke, Maistre, Paine, Sieyes, Arendt, Walzer, speeches from Robespierre and Saint Just, excerpts from the Federalist Papers. And so on. Am I ‘endorsing’ these writings? Or ‘sponsoring’ them by including them on my reading list? Or am I ‘merely’ indicating to my students these writers are worth reading for a variety of reasons, historical, cultural, intellectual? These are ‘required’ readings for my class; have I somehow put a seal of approval or ‘endorsement’ on them? Do I intend to ‘indoctrinate’ my students? But what happens to these writers when they ‘meet’ my students? I don’t know. They might find Maistre reasonable or Robespierre utterly pellucid or Burke a raving lunatic. I can’t predict. But I do place the readings on my reading list because in my considered assessment of the class, this would be something valuable to read for those considering Political Philosophy. To say this is to do no more than state the obvious: professors add readings of all kinds, all the time, to their reading lists. Their students might or might not respond favorably to those same readings; class discussions can result in a professor’s ‘favorite’ being torn to shreds. A few years ago, I included Susan Okin in a reading list for a philosophy of feminism class; some of my best and brightest mounted a withering critique of Okin that caught me completely by surprise. Inclusion on a reading list is always an invitation to read, discuss and consider. That is all; do with it what you will. You have read the original; make up your mind.

Or consider the question of balance. Do I always have balance in my readings? No. In the fall of 2010, I taught Problems in the Philosophy of Psychology. I decided I would teach the class with an emphasis on psychoanalysis. I decided further, to teach the class with a concentration on Freud. So I had now made two executive selections about the scope of the class. I had narrowed its focus to psychoanalysis and within that to Freud. There are thus, already, two grounds for complaint from those who would want  balance: Why concentrate on psychoanalysis? Why on Freud within psychoanalysis? Why not Jung, Adler, Klein? And then, it gets worse for those would want balance. During the semester, I ‘only’ read a variety of selections from Freud’s corpus along with Jonathan Lear’s little expository book on Freud. But this seems problematic too: Why not read the Popper-Grunbaum critiques of Freud? Why not the feminist critiques? Someone from a science department could conceivably object that I was indoctrinating my students in a pseudo-scientific cult; someone from women’s studies could complain I was propagating sexist, misogynist propaganda. Why didn’t I include anti-Freud voices in my reading list? Surely, I should provide my students some balance? By teaching a whole class on Freud, wasn’t I endorsing him, his writings, his views on women and the appropriate therapeutic treatment of mental disorders, the role of the unconscious in science and philosophy of mind? Heck, wasn’t I endorsing his cocaine use too?

I taught a whole class on Freud and psychoanalysis because I considered Freud and his writings important enough to  the philosophy of mind and psychology to deserve. But why leave out anti-Freud critiques? Because there was enough of Freud to read; because I wanted our readings to be direct and unmediated and to get a chance to be critical on our own and not be guided too much by other critique; and so on. None of these responses of mine are knockdown responses to these objections to my choice of possible syllabi. The next member of the philosophy department that teaches that class will almost certainly devise a very different reading list. But my responses are adequate if taken on good faith and at face value. I was able to expose my students to some important ideas in the philosophy of mind and psychology by doing some very close critical readings of Freud: we considered the problem of the unconscious in great detail; wondered skeptically about Freud’s extravagant claims for psychotherapy, his being prone to the sexism of his times, and so on.

My syllabi are imperfect; they represent compromises between a variety of competing imperatives. They recognize that professors encounter students at a variety of moments, in a variety of ways, that their students’ education takes place over a period of time, that they will need to encounter many different ideas and ways of thinking if they are to think for themselves, that they should read a lot and write a lot if they are to try to make sense of all that confronts them in this complex world. My duty at any given moment is to think about how I can aid in this process: by pointing my students to a variety of topics and writers they should confront and take on. Sometimes these writings will make them uncomfortable, sometimes they will enrage them, sometimes they will confirm prejudice, sometimes reinforce an old one or dispel it. I cannot control my students’ reactions; I can simply point them in one direction.

The freedom I need as I navigate, with my imperfect and incomplete knowledge, among the various choices available to me, and the constraints I face, as I try to work with  my students is called ‘academic freedom’; it’s what lets me do my job.

BDS, Brooklyn College, and Dismissing Dershowitz (For the Last Time)

Some more direct consideration of comments on my BDS at Brooklyn College and Dershowitz posts (here; here; and here). These are now settling into a familiar pattern of repetition of the same claims again and again and again, so rather than responding to each one of the comments directly, I will address them en masse here; my interlocutors will know who is being addressed. There is an accusation of ad-hominem argument (conveniently made, I suspect, to change the subject and to detract attention from Dershowitz’s bullying and thuggish tactics) and also the ludicrous suggestion that departments not sponsor ‘polarizing’ topics.

The problem, in general, seems to be that the commentators so concerned about logical fallacies, despite being folks apparently capable of writing voluminously, repetitiously and tediously, seem also to lack elementary reading skills. They do not seem to have read my responses to the accusation of ad-hominem argument and neither do they seem to have read Patrick S. O’Donnell’s responses. They seem unaware of the actual understanding, considerably more sophisticated and nuanced and I daresay, literate, than theirs, of fallacies that logicians, philosophers and rhetoricians of all stripes seem to possess. For instance, philosophers of argumentation such as Doug Walton (Toronto) writing on classical fallacies, including ad hominem, have described them as not always fallacious in the ways so quickly imagined. So, as already pointed out by Patrick, I seem rationally justified in being skeptical of claims made by a notorious liar on the ground that these are very likely to be a lie. (Despite my response, I’m heartened by the attention shown to logical fallacies by these commentators; despite their misunderstanding of the concept, the fact that it is even on their radar is a heartening thing.)

But there might be a far more fundamental problem at hand. Despite all the accusations of ad-hominem argumentation, an accusation onto which they have lacked desperately, lacking any point of their own to make in the case actually under consideration (a favored tactic of those unable to address an argument is to change the subject), they have yet to demonstrate that there is an ad-hominem argument at hand. The fact that I describe Dershowitz as a pro-torture plagiarist in the same passage of text where I argue that his characterization of the parameters of debate is a ludicrous one, and that he does not understand the concepts of freedom of speech and academic freedom, does not mean that characterization played any role dismissing his claims. (For instance: ‘You sir, are a knave! Your argument, to which I now turn, is false. Here is how etc…’) As they seem to be so enamored of the accusation, they should please demonstrate systematically, my argument in premise-conclusion form, and point me to the premise that does the ad-hominem work.

Lastly, I have already addressed the claim that the Political Science dept. needs to ensure ‘balance’ or not sponsor ‘polarizing events’ in my post yesterday, so I will not address those claims again. Please read the posts. If you repeat yourself, you are a troll, and I will not feed you.

Note: I’ve just noticed that Patrick S. O’Donnell has responded wonderfully well to the same points as I did above. Thank you.

BDS at Brooklyn College, Academic Freedom, and Dershowitz’s Censorship

Yesterday’s post on Alan Dershowitz‘s attempt to intimidate the Brooklyn College Political Science department into withdrawing its sponsorship of an event on the BDS movement, featuring Judith Butler and Omar Barghouti, generated some interesting comments. I will offer some brief responses here.

Jared Michaelson worries about departments sponsoring ‘polarizing’ debate:

The concern is this: a political science department becomes less hospitable to certain students when it embraces, or seems publicy [sic] to embrace, a cause that polarizes and alienates whole student groups. If the Poli-Sci department sponsored an event titled, “Preserving Jewish Rights in Ancient Samaria,” or “Ways to Protect Heterosexual Marriage in a Secular Age,” we’d have the same problem: certain students (Palestinians and Gays/Transgender, respectively) would feel like the department was not hospitable to them.

As far as I can see, that’s the only issue against the sponsorship. But don’t misunderstand: it is absolutely wrong, and possibly unconstitutional, to prevent BDS from speaking at the college. It is equally wrong to oppose a department sponsoring a particular speaker, no matter what he or she advocates. The worry is about departments taking up very polarizing causes. And it’s a real worry.

Politics being what it is, most issues of interest to political science departments and their students are likely to be polarizing, especially on a campus as diverse as Brooklyn College. How about talks on the Bangladeshi genocide? That would offend our Pakistani students. Or perhaps someone would like to talk about the Warsaw uprising and its role in post-war communism. But that might offend our Russian students? Where does one draw the line? As I indicated in my first post, college campuses are where students should be going to have their older beliefs challenged, to feel uncomfortable when presented with unconventional viewpoints and arguments. If college is supposed to be yet another installation of the familiar, then why not stay at home and regurgitate the received wisdoms of one’s community, ethnicity, religion and race? Describing some topic as ‘very polarizing’ is neither here or there; someone might be extremely offended by a talk thought by most to be offering the most banal of bromides. Should the department then call a halt because one person has been so affected? Is there a magic number of students that need to express such fears of being offended before the department should reconsider its sponsorship? Should there be a screening committee that vets topics for their polarizing potential (PP) before recommending that a department sponsor it?

Kevin Murtagh admonishes me for an ‘ad-hominem’ attack on Dershowitz (he also echoes Jared’s ‘concern’ above):

Your ad hominem attacks on Dershowitz are, to say the very least, not befitting someone with a Ph.D. in philosophy. I offer you a comment that I have found myself writing in the margins of my 100-level students’ papers: Don’t distract from the evaluation of the author’s argument by attacking the author’s character.

Also, how, exactly, do you conclude that Dershowitz is engaging in “advocacy of censorship” when he explicitly states “My sole objection is to the official sponsorship and endorsement of DBS by an official department of a public (or for that matter private) college.” In fact, most of his essay focuses not on the issue of whether the event should take place, but rather whether the event should receive the official sponsorship of Brooklyn College’s Political Science Department. What does that have to do with freedom of speech?

First off, I merely described Dershowitz. I did not dismiss his arguments on the basis of his character; I offered independent refutations of his incoherent fulminations. So the charge of ad-hominem dismissal fails.

Second, I am impressed by the level of naiveté in Murtagh’s inquiry, in his wholesale acceptance, at face value, of Dershowitz’s claims. In case anyone had missed the details: a Harvard Law professor is writing Op-eds in prominent media outlets and enlisting the support of elected officials to pressure an academic department to rescind its academic decision to sponsor an academic discussion on campus. Murtagh asked me: ‘What does this have to do with freedom of speech?’ Let me in turn: Are you so naive as to believe Dershowitz’s tactics do not amount to intimidation or coercion? Furthermore, why should Dershowitz get to decide what the content and format of academic discussions at Brooklyn College should be? How did he get to be the arbiter of what constitutes an exchange of ideas? When you attempt to regulate the content and format of speech, you are inserting yourself into a freedom of speech debate. When you attempt to enlist political and media aids to attenuate the exchange and flow and visibility of ideas, you are engaging in censorship. If you believe Dershowitz is merely interested in getting the Political Science department to back off from its sponsorship then I have a bridge to sell you.

Alan Dershowitz, Pro-Torture Plagiarist, Deigns to Lecture Us On Intellectual Honesty

Alan Dershowitz, a pro-torture plagiarist who has inexplicably managed to find employment at Harvard Law School, has written an embarrassingly incompetent Op-Ed at the Huffington Post. In it, he accuses the Department of Political Science at Brooklyn College of having an ‘Israel problem’ because it has sponsored, and thereby, according to Dershowitz, endorsed the contents of, a panel discussion featuring Judith Butler and Omar Barghouti on the Boycott, Divest and Sanction movement. Throughout this screed, Dershowitz reveals the anti-intellectual dishonesty so characteristic of Brooklyn College’s worst alumnus.

Consider:

The president of Brooklyn College claims that this co-sponsorship does not constitute an endorsement by the college and that this is an issue of freedom of speech and academic freedom. But when a department of a university officially co-sponsors and endorses an event advocating DBS against Israel, and refuses to co-sponsor and endorse an event opposing such DBS, that does constitute an official endorsement. Freedom of speech, and academic freedom require equal access to both sides of a controversy, not official sponsorship and endorsement of one side over the other. The heavy thumb of an academic department should not be placed on the scale, if the marketplace of ideas is to remain equally accessible to all sides of a controversy.

For a Harvard Law professor, Dershowitz has a poor understanding of freedom of speech and academic freedom; he also cannot construct a coherent argument.

If a department sponsors an event featuring a speaker committed to thesis X, it is merely committed to hosting the speaker and providing the speaker a forum in which to air her views. Those views might be contested by those attending the talk, thus engendering a discussion space where they might even be refuted.  This provision of a forum to the speaker is all that is required to show support for academic freedom; it does not require the department to then seek out a speaker committed to the thesis Not-X. Were another student organization to organize an event featuring a speaker committed to Not-X, the department could evaluate that request for sponsorship separately.

There are many more quotes that illustrate Dershowitz’s poor grasp of the concepts central to his claim. (He is, of course, deliberately oblivious to how his advocacy of censorship is inimical to freedom of speech and academic freedom.)For now, I want to address another claim that he makes, one which he desperately hopes will serve to obfuscate the issue: does the sponsorship of such an event create a hostile atmosphere for  ’pro-Israel’ students and for faculty? Only if those students and faculty imagine the discussion of political claims and counterclaims creates a hostile atmosphere. If they do feel so then their problem is not with the particular thesis being presented but with the very idea of the open discussion of uncomfortable topics. That’s a problem the department of Political Science cannot be held responsible for. If every academic department were to stop sponsoring events for fear that someone, somewhere, is likely to be offended, that their students would somehow think that the department was officially endorsing the views expressed therein, then there would be no discussion on campus at all.

But that is what Dershowitz wants: an end to all discussion, to be replaced by the rote recitation and memorization of a party line written up by him.

Note: I have posted on the BDS event at Brooklyn College before; please do read that post and write in with your expressions of support. The Dershowitz-sponsored bullying is now in full effect.

John Donne’s Paradoxes and Problems

A short while ago, I provided, here, excerpts from Aristotle’s Problems; in particular, I quoted two questions that Aristotle raises about alcohol and sex. Then,  I wanted to showcase the colorful framing of the question and the answer; the latter was made especially interesting because of the serious spirit of inquiry visible in it, one which, even if it seems to have gone off-mark, still impresses because of its earnestness.

Today, in the same spirit, I want to quote from John Donne‘s ‘Paradoxes and Problemes‘. The titles of these should indicate the mood in which they were written.

First, the Paradoxes:

I. A Defence of Women’s Inconstancy.

II. That Women ought to Paint.

III. That by Discord things increase.

IV. That Good is more common than Euill.

V. That all things kill themselues.

VI. That it is possible to find some vertue in some Women.

VII. That Old men are more fantastike than Young.

VIII. That Nature is our worst guide.

IX. That only Cowards dare die.

X. That a Wise man is known by much laughing.

XI. That the gifts of the Body are better than those of the Minde.

Then, the Problemes:

I. Why haue Bastards best Fortunes?

II. Why Puritans make long Sermons?

III. Why did the Diuell reserue Iesuites till the latter Dayes?

IV. Why is there more Variety of Greene, than of any other Colour?

V. Why doe Young Lay-men so much study Diuinity?

VI. Why hath the Common Opinion afforded Women Soules?

VII. Why are the Fairest falsest?

VIII. Why Venus Starre only doth cast a shadow?

IX. Why is Venus Starre Multinominous, called both Hesperus and Vesper?

X. Why are new officers least oppressing?

The online edition lists only the first ten of these; my copy of John Donne: Poetry and Prose (Modern Library Edition, Random House, 1967) includes an additional two, numbered XI (Why doth the Poxe soe much affect to undermine the Nose?) and XVI (Why are Courtiers sooner Atheists than Men of other Conditions?).

As a sample of Donne’s answers to the Problemes, here is his response to Probleme I, one that I’m sure has perplexed many over the years:

Is Nature (which is lawes patterne) hauing denied women Constancy to one, hath prouided them with cunning to allure many, and so Bastards de iure should haue better wits and experience. But besides that by experience wee see many fooles amongst them; we should take from them one of their chiefest helpes to preferment, and we should deny them to be fooles; and (that which is onely left) that Women chuse worthier men than their husbands is false de facto, either then it must be that the Church hauing remoued them from all place in the publike seruice of God, they haue better meanes than others to bee wicked, and so fortunate: Or else because the two greatest powers in this world, the Diuell and Princes concurre to their greatnesse; the one giuing bastardye, the other legitimation: As nature frames and conserues great bodies of Contraries. Or the cause is, because they abound most at Court, which is the forge where fortunes are made; or at least the shop where they be sold.

American Horror Story, The Walking Dead, and the ‘American Gothic’ Style

The opening credits/titles for season 1 of American Horror Story are very creepy; in their visual ‘style’ they resemble those of season 3 of The Walking Dead. Let’s call this style ‘American Gothic’; what makes it work?

The central motif in ‘American Gothic’–at least in the two sequences cited above–is the decay of the familiar: inevitable, persistent,  insidious, ever-present and perhaps most frighteningly, contagious. In the case of American Horror Story the haunted house is so because of the ghosts that live in it, carrying around their violent pasts, impinging on and infecting the present. In the case of The Walking Dead, the decay motif is especially straightforward: this is what is left of the world we once knew, this is what awaits us. In both cases, the title sequences  remind us that true horror lies in that which is most immediately at hand, that the most proximal bears the capacity to contain the utterly unfamiliar; that is what makes it frightening. Novelty, because of its distance from us, can be comforting; the familiar is not so easily dismissed. Its decline is more frightening because it cuts a little closer.

The imagery of the ‘American Gothic’ style forces us to confront a world that lives among us even though it has passed away. It makes us reckon too, with the dissolution that lies within us: we are headed for death, our decline is inevitable. American Horror Story relies on old photo albums, household objects, nooks and crannies, and lab jars for preserving biological artifacts. (This last item taps into a straightforward source of childhood nightmares; no one is left unaffected by their visit to the samples room of a biology or pathology lab.) In The Walking Dead the decay of the world is infected by the melancholia of days gone by, of a kind of life no longer lived. It evokes terrifying dreams of deserted landscapes we found ourselves in, lost and alone; the cry of the disconsolate child is almost at hand. What makes this nightmare complete is the once known world is now strange; we see see traces of the past even as we realize it is gone forever. In American Horror Story the world is as it should be, peopled and populated by the living, but forced to reckon with those whose time is not yet up. Their remains intrude into day to day life, their actions live on beyond their first commission. The photos of children add a layer of menace to the intrusion of the pathological and horrifying into the mundane, in asking us to consider the possibility that children are monsters in the making.

But perhaps most fundamentally, the specific imagery of the style taps into a truth that can only be postponed but that must be faced up to eventually: that everything we know and love will no longer be. That relentless fact, always visible out of the corner of our eyes, standing in the wings of our mental stages, ready to wrap us in its clammy embrace is what makes ‘American Gothic’ effective.

Note: I’ve just found out that the American Horror Story and The Walking Dead title sequences are directed by the same person: Kyle Cooper.