Author: Bill Vallicella

Marcel Duchamp and the Superiority of the Useless

Marcelduchamp Marcel Duchamp abandoned art for chess because of the latter's superior uselessness. Art objects, after all, have exchange value as commodities, and may make the artist some money. But with few exceptions chess lies entirely beyond the sphere of the utile. In this sense, the art of the 64 squares is the highest art. There is little danger that Caissa's acolytes will fill their bellies from her service. There is just no market for the artistry of chess games, not even those of the very highest quality. Here you can review some of Duchamp's games.

Can Religious Notions be Naturalized?

I continue to mull over Jim Ryan's naturalization project with respect to salvation. It seems to me that salvation is but one of several religious 'objects' that resist naturalist reduction. God and sin are two others. But if God, sin, and salvation cannot be reduced to anything natural, they can be eliminated. Thus I recommend to Ryan that he take an eliminativist line. Actually, I would like to see him abandon his naturalism. That is not likely to happen. But I do hope to be able to convince him that it is folly to try to capture the content of religious notions in naturalist terms. The better approach, and more honest to boot, is for the naturalist to deny that these notions correspond to anything real.

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Compensations of Advancing Age

You now have money enough and you now have time. The time left is shrinking, but it is your own. There is little left to prove. What needed proving has been proven by now or will forever remain unproved. And now it doesn't much matter one way or the other. You are free to be yourself and live beyond comparisons with others. You can enjoy the social without being oppressed by it. You understand the child's fathership of the man, and in some measure are able to undo it. You have survived those who would define you, and now you define yourself. And all of this without rancor or resentment. Defiant self-assertion gives way to benign indifference, Angst to Gelassenheit. Your poem might be:

Brief light's made briefer
'Neath the leaden vault of care
Better to accept the sinecure
Of untroubled Being-there.

Ciardi on Kerouac: The Ultimate Literary Put-Down?

A few years back the indefatigable Douglas Brinkley  edited and introduced the 1947-1954 journals of Jack Kerouac and put them before us  as Windblown World (Viking, 2004).

Reading Windblown World reminded me of John Ciardi's "Epitaph for the Dead Beats" (Saturday Review, February 6, 1960), an excellent if unsympathetic piece of culture critique which I dug out and re-read. Here is the put-down directed at Kerouac's 'spontaneous prose':

Whether or not Jack Kerouac has traces of a talent, he remains basically a high school athlete who went from Lowell, Massachusetts to Skid Row, losing his eraser en route.

In a similar vein there is the quip of Truman Capote: "That's not writing, it's typewriting!"

But Jack's sweet gone shade has had the last laugh.  Whatever one thinks of Kerouac's influence, he has altered the culture.  But Ciardi?  I'll bet you've never heard of him __ until now.

Good Advice from John Ciardi

Poet John Ciardi (pronounced Chyar-dee, emphasis on first syllable, not See-ar-dee) was born in 1916 and died in 1986. A brilliant line of his sticks with me, though I cannot recall where he said it, and Mr. Google didn't help: "Never send a poem on a prose errand." Tattoo that onto your forearms, you would-be poets. (I myself am no poet, I know it, so I can't possibly blow it.  I hereby allude to a certain troubadour who, though I would not call him a poet, others would.)

Here is the epitaph Ciardi composed for himself:

Here, time concurring (and it does);
Lies Ciardi. If no kingdom come,
A kingdom was. Such as it was
This one beside it is a slum.

UPDATE (14 December):  The ever-helpful David Gordon, and that indefatigable argonaut of cyberspace, Dave Lull, inform me that Ciardi's exact words were, "But I have learned not to send a poem on a prose errand."  The quotation can be found on p. 60 of Ciardi Himself: Fifteen Essays in the Reading, Writing, and Teaching of Poetry.

Jim Ryan on Salvation

Yesterday, I posted some thoughts about salvation, and in order to test and refine them, I will confront them with some rather different thoughts of Jim Ryan on the topic. See his Salvation I and Salvation II.

Since Ryan is a naturalist, it is quite natural that what he should offer us is salvation naturalized, in his phrase. My counter is that salvation naturalized is rather thin beer, so thin in fact that I don't think it deserves the name 'salvation.' Salvation naturalized is salvation denatured. But I don't want to denigrate in the least what is positive in Ryan's suggestions. My point is rather that he does not go far enough. Ryan does not deliver salvation; what he delivers is a substitute for salvation.

According to Ryan,

. . . salvation is an achievement of deep and genuine patience accomplished through a calming of the mind and a contemplation of the fact that the frustration, resentment, and anger with which it frequently reacts to the course of mundane events are: (a) inappropriate, given the fact that on the whole life and the world are very good and (b) unnecessary, given the fact that the mind can replace resentment and the others with patience.

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If You Send E-Mail to a Blogger . . .

. . . bear in mind that it is liable to be posted for all the world to see.  Most bloggers are permanently on the prowl for interesting 'blog fodder.'  This blogger is no different.  What I find interesting, what I find suits my philosophical or pedagogical or polemical purposes, is liable to be posted in whole or in part.  Of course, I am typically discreet and reasonable by my lights.  But what counts as discretion and reasonableness by my lights may not count as such by yours.  So if you send me something and want to be sure it doesn't enter the 'sphere, append some such annotation as:  Not for public consumption.  I will respect your wishes if you are a decent and honorable person. 

I used to supply the names and sometimes the e-mail addresses of correspondents who submitted material, but in many cases I no longer do this, both to protect the young and not-yet-established who are trying to make their way in a world increasingly polarized and dirempted by political antagonisms, a world in which almost anyone can find out almost anything about almost anyone with a few keystrokes, but also to save myself work later on when said individuals, out of a fear that is often excessive, ask me to remove their names and other identifying information.

Own your words.  Accept responsibility for what you say and do.  Don't hide behind handles.  These are sound conservative maxims.  I will enforce them on some, but I cannot in good conscience enforce them on all in the present social and political climate.  The years to come will be interesting indeed, as things 'heat up' ever more.  And I am not talking about global warming.

From the Mail Bag: Dogmatism in Academe

This just over the transom:

I wish I could express to you just how much of a blessing your blog has been (and continues to be) to me.

I am a grad student in a Ph.D. program here in the states.   I read your site for enjoyment, but also because I find that you tend to very acutely and eloquently crystallize objections and points that I find appearing in my own mind in a very rudimentary and unrefined way.  It is a great reassurance when I find you making a point so clearly that has occurred to me, but that I haven't known quite what to do with.

And, of course, this is to say nothing of your topics and insights that are well beyond me and never would have occurred to me.

I have a love/hate relationship with this field.  I love it, but I suffocate within it because of predominating paradigms.   I was recently instructed by a professor in one of my courses that "no reasonable person needs to argue for naturalism" when I pointed out that a certain author never once argued for the naturalism he was presupposing.

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Three Concepts of Salvation: Physical, Mystical, Religious

Salvation is a religious concept, and every religion includes a doctrine of salvation, a soteriology. Or can you think of a religion that does not? It is not essential to a religion that it be theistic, as witness the austere forms of Buddhism, but it is essential to every religion as I define the term that it have a soteriology. A religion must show a way out of our unsatisfactory predicament, and one is not religious unless one perceives our life in this world as indeed a predicament, and one that is unsatisfactory. Sarvam dukkham!  But the definition of 'religion' is not what I want to discuss.  Surely some religions include a soteriology (think of Hinduism, Buddhism, and the three Abrahamic religions) and so it is worth inquiring into just what salvation is or could be.

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Causes of Death of Philosophers

Here. For example, Rescher died of incoherence while Spinoza died of substance abuse. Miguel de Unamuno expired from a tragic loss of sense. Plantinga perished of necessity, and Augustine by a Hippo. As you can see, some are nasty and one needn't be dead to have a cause of death assigned. Last I checked, Professor Rescher was still happily scribbling away. And that reminds me of a joke.

A student goes to visit Professor Rescher. Secretary informs her that the good doctor is not available because he is writing a book. Student replies, "I'll wait."

Bilingual Education and the Left’s Diversity Fetish

My mother was born near Rome and didn't come to the United States until she was ten years old. She quickly learned English, she became completely fluent, and she spoke without an accent. But I wonder what would have happened if there had been a bilingual education program in place in the New York schools and she had been forced to participate in it. I think the answer is obvious: she would have had more difficulty learning English and she would not have learned it as well as she did.

And that fact would have impeded her assimilation. So why is there any support for bilingual education? It is a foolish idea on the face of it, and it harms those it is supposed to help.

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