Maverick Philosopher – Page 512 – Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

I Submit to Analysis

Another post from the old blog, dated 3 November 2006. A redacted version, less crude than the original.

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The worst bores in the world are those who subject their listeners to blow-by-blow accounts of their medical procedures. Fear not. I just want to report that I underwent a screening colonoscopy this morning, and that if you are fifty years of age or older, and hitherto 'unscoped,' you should schedule one too.

But don't procrastinate as I did. It is not too much of a hassle. Yesterday I subsisted on clear fluids alone, my last meal being Wednesday's dinner. At four PM I swallowed four Dulocolax tablets and at six began quaffing four liters of a solution ($35 out of pocket, insurance wouldn't cover any part of it due to its one-time consumption) designed for lavage. That term, from Fr. laver and L. lavare, signifies the therapeutic washing out of an organ or orifice. And wash out my lower GI tract it did.

The thought of deep analysis (deeper than sigmoidoscopy) may unnerve some of you, but if your experience is like mine you won't be aware of a thing due to the narcotic cocktail they mainline into your arm. They gave me a bigger shot than I requested, as I wanted to watch the proceedings on the monitor. My last words right after the good Dr. Stein introduced himself and the nurse opened the IV valve were, "Time to be analyzed!"

I refrained from such other prepared witticisms as "Doc, I'm Mabel, if you're able" and philosophical nuggets about wide and narrow 'scope.') I didn't want to cause offense to the sweet nurses who may have been proper Mormons. In no time at all I was floating face-down in the sweet waters of Lethe. Next thing I knew I was putting on my clothes and stumbling out the door with a clean bill of gastroenterological health.

I was too stupefied to remember my prepared parting joke: What did the gastroenterologist say when asked about the meaning of life? "It depends on the liver."

Should I be blogging about a subject like this? Maybe not. But it was no physician who convinced me to get scoped out, but a regular guy in the pool who told me about his experience and how polyps were found.

Maybe it takes a blogger to get you off your analysandum.

Have I gone on too long, hard by the boundary of boredom? Perhaps. So let me go on a bit more. A physician my own age once recommended a screening colonoscopy. I said, "Have you had one, Doc?" "No, I'm a runner," "Well, I'm a runner too." The doctor's enthymematic argument was bad, but it helped me procrastinate. And my wife once saw him coming out of a fast-food joint. But he was a good practioner and diagnostician. He had a scientific mind, something too many medicos lack.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Slim Gaillard and Wine Spodiodi

This post is for my old college buddy Tom Coleman, fellow Kerouac aficionado, who played Dean to my Sal back in the day. It's Saturday night, the day's scribbling is done, and I just made myself a wine spodiodi. It is a sort of alcoholic sandwich with mean bourbon the meat and sweet wine the bread. I just made one with sangria, but it is usually made with port. Pour some wine into a glass, add some bourbon, then throw in some more wine. On the rocks or not as is your wont. Repeat as necessary.

From On the Road:

… one night we suddenly went mad together again; we went to see Slim Gaillard in a little Frisco nightclub. Slim Gaillard is a tall, thin Negro with big sad eyes who's always saying 'Right-orooni' and 'How 'bout a little bourbon-arooni.' In Frisco great eager crowds of young semi-intellectuals sat at his feet and listened to him on the piano, guitar and bongo drums. When he gets warmed up he takes off his undershirt and really goes. He does and says anything that comes into his head. He'll sing 'Cement Mixer, Put-ti Put-ti' and suddenly slow down the beat and brood over his bongos with fingertips barely tapping the skin as everybody leans forward breathlessly to hear; you think he'll do this for a minute or so, but he goes right on, for as long as an hour, making an imperceptible little noise with the tips of his fingernails, smaller and smaller all the time till you can't hear it any more and sounds of traffic come in the open door. Then he slowly gets up and takes the mike and says, very slowly, 'Great-orooni … fine-ovauti … hello-orooni … bourbon-orooni … all-orooni … how are the boys in the front row making out with their girls-orooni … orooni … vauti … oroonirooni …" He keeps this up for fifteen minutes, his voice getting softer and softer till you can't hear. His great sad eyes scan the audience. Dean stands in the back, saying, 'God! Yes!' — and clasping his hands in prayer and sweating. 'Sal, Slim knows time, he knows time.'

Light up a cigarodi, mix yourself a wine spodiodi and then dig Slim Gaillard's Cement Mixer mentioned above. While you're at it, check out the cat on bass in this clip. Go, man, go! (Never did get around to reading John Clellon Holmes' Go.)

Stick McGhee, Drinkin' Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee, 1947

Now you know where The Electric Flag, featuring Mike Bloomfield on guitar, got their song Wine.

Jerry Lee Lewis has a version.

While we are digging the roots of rock, Rocket 88, 1951, may well be the first R & R number.

Ike Turner puts me in mind of Tina and It's Gonna Work Out Fine, 1961.

Leiter Lambasted: A Case of the Left Eating Their Own?

Brian Leiter is known for his academic gossip site, Leiter Reports. He is also known for his careerism, thuggishness, and political correctness. Some call him Ladder Man because of his obsession with rankings and status. (One of the meanings of the German Leiter is ladder; another is leader as in Gauleiter.) Others call him Brianus Climacus because he is a climber and careerist. For others he is just the Academic Thug. Recently, however, some on the Left have been turning on him. This from a reader:

I don’t know if you’ve been watching all this develop, but some people are more and more willing to come out publically against Leiter (though I don’t mean to suggest that I approve of the position they are siding with in order to do so). See the second paragraph in particular for background (with links):

http://www.newappsblog.com/2014/03/please-do-not-revise-your-tone.html#more

At the moment it does indeed seem that Leiter is being devoured by the world he created, the hyper-professionalized world of academic philosophy. The conception of philosophy as a “profession” (and all the b.s. that entails) combined with the PC tendencies of academia at present have given birth to an ugly sort of monster, and Leiter has inadvertently stumbled into its labyrinth. But he does conceive himself as a sort of Theseus in this context, and he has promised a long reply to his critics. In this one specific instance I think he is in the right against many of those attacking him—their attacks coming from an even more radical version of PC than his own. But still he’s in the wrong overall (and your description of him is spot on), and this is what he gets.

I had asked: Is pushback against Leiter a case of the Left eating their own? When do these feminists and their fellow travellers actually do philosophy? Methinks too much of their time is occupied with issues of professional status and standing, 'diversity,' careerism, and the like. That is what I can't stand in Leiter as well, that corpulent apparatchik of political correctness.

Fly Bottle Blues

Ludwig Wittgenstein, PI 309:

Was ist dein Ziel in der Philosophie? Der Fliege den Ausweg aus dem Fliegenglas zeigen.

What is your goal in philosophy? To show the fly the way out of the fly glass.

Why does the bug need to be shown the way out? Pop the cork and he's gone.

Why did Wittgenstein feel the need to philosophize his way out of philosophy? He should have known that metaphilosophy and anti-philosophy are just more philosophy with all that that entails: inconclusiveness, endlessness . . . . He should have just walked away from philosophy.

If the room is too smoky, there is no necessity that you remain in it. You are free to go, the door is unlocked. This figure's from Epictetus and he had the quitting of life in view. But the same holds for the quitting of philosophy. Just do it, if that's what you want. It can be done. I'm not saying it should be done. On the contrary.

What cannot be done, however, is to justify one's exit. (That would be like copulating your way to chastity.) For any justification proffered, perforce and willy-nilly, will be just more philosophy, and you will remain stuck within the bottle You cannot have it both ways. You either walk away or stay.

Just walk away, Rene.*

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*Typo Man sez: 'Rene' is not a typographical error!

Into the Wild Update: Hunter Who Found McCandless’ Body Shot by Cops

Story here.

Some of my McCandless posts accessible from this page.

Kitty Genovese, 50 Years Later

Kitty Genovese was murdered on yesterday's date 50 years ago. Many of us who are old enough to remember it, do. But why do we remember it? And what was, or was made out to be, the meaning of that event?

I now hand off to Nicholas Lemann, A Call for Help. Among the fascinating details I didn't know:

Aside from the guilty reflections it inspired, the Genovese case had some tangible consequences. It helped in the push to establish 911 as an easy-to-remember national police emergency number; in 1964, the most reliable way to call the police in New York was to use the specific telephone number of each precinct, and caller response wasn’t always a high priority. Two psychologists, Bibb Latané and John Darley, created a new realm of research into what came to be called the bystander effect, the main finding of which is that your likelihood of intervening in a Genovese-like incident increases if you believe that there are very few other bystanders. The effect has stood up through repeated experiments. In 1977, Winston Moseley, engaged in a periodic attempt to be granted parole, had the chutzpah to argue in a Times Op-Ed piece that his misdeed had wound up making the world a better place: “The crime was tragic, but it did serve society, urging it as it did to come to the aid of its members in distress or danger.”

Body as Temple

The secular too think of the body as a temple, a temple of the ego.

The Philosopher and the Thief

John Kaag in Harper's tells a fascinating story of William Ernest Hocking and his library, and he tells it well. (HT: Seldom Seen Slim) No bibliophile could fail to enjoy it.

And this raises one of life's greatest mysteries. Why do some of us value good books above bread while others of us are indifferent to them? A harsh answer tempts me: the latter are human only in a biological sense. But I warn myself not to succumb to misanthropy.

Here is John Kaag's PhilPapers page.

I have wrtten at least two Hocking entries.

Hocking on the Anarchist and the Criminal

Hocking on the Value of the Individual

Hugh McCann on the Implications of Divine Sovereignty

I have in my hands the Winter 2014 issue of American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly. It contains (pp. 149-161) my review essay on McCann's 2012 Creation and the Sovereignty of God. Many thanks to Peter Lupu and Hugh McCann for comments and discussion, and to the editors for allowing me to expand my review into a review article.

I see that the same issue contains a reply by Peter Dillard to Ed Feser anent James F. Ross' case for the immateriality of abstract thinking. I'll have to study that for sure.

My Most Read Post . . .

. . . is 'One Man's Terrorist is Another Man's Freedom Fighter.' And that is probably because Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic cited it. So I tell myself that I am having some influence, and doing some good. But even if I had no influence on anyone, the life of the mind would remain for me an end in itself and its own reward.

The Obligatory, the Supererogatory, and Two Moral Senses of ‘Ought’

This is an old post from the Powerblogs site, written a few years ago. The points made still seem correct.

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Peter Lupu's version of the logical argument from evil (LAFE) is committed to a principle that I formulate as follows:

P. Necessarily, agent A ought to X iff A is morally obligated to X.

This principle initially appealed to me, but then I came to the conclusion (with the help of the enigmatic Phil Philologos or was it Seldom Seen Slim?) that the biconditional (P) is correct only in the right-to-left direction. That is, I came to the view that there are moral uses of 'ought' that do not impute moral obligations. But so far I have not convinced Peter. So now I will try a new argument, one that explores the connection between the obligatory-supererogatory distinction and the thesis that there are two moral senses of 'ought.' Here is the gist of the argument:

1. There are supererogatory actions
2. Whatever is good to do ought to be done
—
3. There are two moral senses of 'ought,' one prescriptive the other commendatory.

Ad (1). I am using 'supererogatory' in a wide sense. Accordingly, an action can be supererogatory (roughly: above and beyond the call of duty) even if it is not heroic or particularly costly (financially or otherwise) to the agent. It can be something as trifling as leaving a 50% tip in a restaurant. (Not that hard to do given dives I frequent.) If an action is obligatory, then it is good to do, and bad to leave undone. If an action is supererogatory, then it is good to do, but NOT bad to leave undone. Suppose I have lunch in a restaurant in which the food is good and the service adequate. Then

a. I am legally and morally obligated to pay the bill.
b. I am morally but not legally obligated to leave a 15% tip. (Or so I would argue.)
c. I am neither legally nor morally obligated to leave a 50% tip.

Nevertheless it is a good thing to leave a large tip (other things being equal), but not bad if I fail to leave a large tip. So the action is supererogatory in the wide sense here in play.

Ad (2). The principle that whatever is good to do ought to be done is theoretically attractive. It is attractive because it forges a partial link between the axiological and the deontic which are two aspects of the normative. Axiological terms include 'good,' 'evil',' 'value,' 'disvalue,' 'ideal.' Deontic terms include 'obligation,' 'prohibition,' 'permission,' 'right,' 'duty.'

Note the difference between (2) and

4. Whatever is good ought to be done.

(2) is about the good-to-do; (4) is about the good-to-be, which is a wider category. (4) says that everything which would be good were it to exist ought to be brought about by someone. It suffices to refute (4) to adduce a state of affairs that would be good if realized, but is not in the power of any finite agent to realize. Well, it would be good if none of us had to to die; but the immortality of human beings is not a state of affairs that can be brought about by any finite agent or agents.

Much more needs to be said about the principle (2) but let's assume that one accepts it.

Now under what conditions can it be true both that (1) there are supererogatory actions, and (2) whatever is good to do ought to be done? On the face of it, these seem contradictory. The supererogatory is that which it is good to do but not obligatory. But if what is good to do ought to be done, then it seems to follow that what is good to do is obligatory — which contradicts (1).

The contradiction is avoided if we distinguish between two moral senses of 'ought.' In the prescriptive sense, what one ought to do is what one is obligated to do. In the commendatory sense, what one ought to do is good to do but not obligatory.

But are there any sentences that feature moral uses of 'ought' that do not impute obligations? Suppose my wife says to me, 'We ought to give more of our income to charity.' Suppose further that there is an obligatory percentage and that we are already giving that percentage. In saying what she says, my wife is not imputing an obligation to us; she is recommending that we do more than we are obligated to do. Since the context is moral, this seems to be a moral use of 'ought' that does not impute an obligation. This seems to be a clear counterexample to (P) above.

Suppose instead she had said to me, 'We ought to check out the Roy Orbison exhibit at the Tempe Center for the Arts before it is too late.' Visiting such an exhibit is a morally indifferent action: neither prohibited, nor obligatory, nor supererogatory. The use of 'ought' in this example is nonmoral. It like the 'ought' in 'If you want to get to Tempe from Gold Canyon by freeway, then you ought to head east on the Superstition Freeway.'

Robert Merrihew Adams (Finite and Infinite Goods, Oxford 1999, p. 235) offers this example: "The religious leaders of the world ought to launch an appeal to protect the physical environment in which humanity must live." Someone who says this is not saying that the leaders are under an obligation; he is saying that it would be a good idea were they to act as recommended.

To sum up. There are nonmoral and moral uses of 'ought,' but not every moral use is an obligation-imputing use. So the biconditional (P) is false. What is true is the conditional,

P*. If agent A is morally obligated to X, then A ought to X.

Deconstructing God: Gutting Interviews Caputo

Another in the NYT Opiniator series. This one is particularly bad and illustrates what is wrong with later Continental philosophy. Earlier Continental philosophy is good: Brentano, Meinong, Husserl, early Heidegger, early Sartre, and a whole host of lesser lights including Stumpf, Twardowski, Ingarden, Scheler, von Hildebrand, Edith Stein, et al. The later movement, however, peters out into bullshit with people like Derrida who, in the pungent words of John Searle, "gives 'bullshit' a bad name."

This is the third in a series of interviews about religion that I am conducting for The Stone. The interviewee for this installment is John D. Caputo, a professor of religion and humanities at Syracuse University and the author of “The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion.”

Gary Gutting: You approach religion through Jacques Derrida’s notion of deconstruction, which involves questioning and undermining the sorts of sharp distinctions traditionally so important for philosophy. What, then, do you think of the distinction between theism, atheism and agnosticism?

John Caputo: I would begin with a plea not to force deconstruction into one of these boxes. I consider these competing views as beliefs, creedal positions, that are inside our head by virtue of an accident of birth. There are the people who “believe” things from the religious traditions they’ve inherited; there are the people who deny them (the atheism you get is pegged to the god under denial); and there are the people who say, “Who could possibly know anything about all of that?” To that I oppose an underlying form of life, not the beliefs inside our head but the desires inside our heart, an underlying faith, a desire beyond desire, a hope against hope, something which these inherited beliefs contain without being able to contain.

One could be forgiven for stopping right here, though I read the whole thing. First of all, it is simply false to maintain that one is a theist or an atheist or an agnostic "by virtue of an accident of birth." Some are brought up theists and become atheists or agnostics. Some are brought atheists and become theists or agnostics. And so one. It is also wrong for Caputo to imply that those brought up theist or atheist can have no reasons for their theism or atheism. Then there is the silly opposing of beliefs and desires, head and heart. And the talk of a form of life as if it does not involve beliefs. Then the empty rhetoric of desire beyond desire. Finally, the gushing ends with the contradictory "contain without being able to contain."

The interview doesn't get any better after this. But there is an insight that one can pick out of the crap pile of mush and gush: there is more to religion than doctrinal formulations: the reality to which they point cannot be captured in theological propositions.

Retractio 3/11. Joshua H. writes,

As one of your loyal "continental"-trained readers, I must say I agree that Caputo's performance in the NYT elicits a rather terrible odor of self-congratulatory BS. But surely "later" continental philosophy as a whole doesn't suffer from this unfortunate illness?! Gadamer, Frankfurt School, Ricoeur, among others? Surely Gadamer-Habermas and Habermas-Ratzinger are some of the most interesting debates the discipline has produced in the last 50+ years?

As someone who, back in the day, spent his philosophical time mainly on Gadamer and Habermas and Adorno and Horkheimer and Levinas and Ricoeur, et al., I must agree that Joshua issues a well-taken corrective to what I hastily wrote above at the end of a long day of scribbling. The later movement cannot be dismissed the way I did above. I would, however, maintain that the quality declined as the movement wore on and wears on.

I will also hazard the observation, sure to anger many, that just as one becomes more conservative and less liberal with age, and rightly so, one becomes more analytic and less Continental, and rightly so. It is the same with enthusiasm for Ayn Rand and Nietzsche. Adolescents are thrilled, but as maturity sets in the thrill subsides, or ought to.

I present some reasons for my aversion to much of the later Continental stuff — an apt word — in The Trouble with Continental Philosophy: Badiou.

Heidegger’s Black Notebooks to Appear

This old Heidegger man can't help but wait with bated breath for this material to see the light of day.

In his will, Heidegger, who died in 1976, stated the order in which his unpublished writings were to be released. That drawn-out process is why the 1,200 pages of the 1930s and 1941 notebooks are being published only now.

The new material "is something very surprising, something we’ve never seen before," says Mr. Trawny, director of the Martin Heidegger Institute at the University of Wuppertal. The scholar was chosen by the Heidegger family to edit the three volumes of the leather-covered black notebooks.

"In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Heidegger was very angry," says Mr. Trawny. By then, he says, the philosopher realized that both Nazi ideology and his own philosophical mission, which was predicated on a national revolution and Germany’s dominance in Europe, were going to fail. "In this anger, he makes reference to Jews, including some passages that are extremely hostile. We knew that he had expressed anti-Semitism as private insights, but this shows anti-Semitism tied in to his philosophy," says Mr. Trawny.

Though unreleased, the Black Notebooks material is already causing a furor. Cf. Robert Zaretsky, Martin Heidegger's Black Notebooks Reignite Charges of Antisemitism.

Heidegger: Nazi Philosopher or Nazi Philosophy?

Abstain the Night Before, Feel Better the Morning After

Do you regret in the morning the spare supper of the night before or the foregoing of the useless dessert? Do you feel bad that you now feel good and are not hung over? You missed the party and with it the ambiguity and unseriousness and dissipation of idle talk. Are you now troubled by your spiritual continence?

As for idle talk, here is something good from Franz Kafka: The Diaries 1910-1923, ed. Max Brod, Schocken 1948, p. 199:

In the next room my mother is entertaining the L. couple. They are talking about vermin and corns. (Mrs. L. has six corns on each toe.) It is easy to see that there is no real progress made in conversations of this sort. It is information that will be forgotten again by both and that even now proceeds along in self-forgetfulness without any sense of responsibility.

I have read this passage many times, and what delights me each time is the droll understatement of it: "there is no real progress made in conversations of this sort." No indeed. There is no progress because the conversations are not seriously about anything worth talking about. There is no Verantwortlichkeit (responsibility): the talk does not answer (antworten) to anything important in the world or anything real in the interlocutors. It is jaw-flapping for its own sake, mere linguistic behavior which, if it conveys anything, conveys: ‘I like you, you like me, and everything’s fine.’ An expression of boredom, it does little to alleviate it.

The interlocutors float along in the inauthenticity (Uneigentlichkeit) of what Heidegger calls das Man, the ‘they self.’ Compare Heidegger’s analysis of idle talk (Gerede) in Sein und Zeit (1927), sec. 35.

Am I suggesting that one should absolutely avoid idle talk? That would be to take things to an unnecessary and perhaps imprudent extreme. It is prudent to get yourself perceived as a regular guy — especially if you are an 'irregular guy.'

Automotive Frugality and Manual Air Conditioning

This is an old post rescued from the old blog, dated 20 May 2007. Some things have changed. But all the details were true then.

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There are some people with whom I would not want to enter a frugality contest. Keith Burgess-Jackson is one of them. I seem to recall him saying that he doesn't own a clothes dryer: he hangs his duds out on a line in the Texas sunshine. Not me. This BoBo (bourgeois bohemian, though not quite in David Brooks' sense) uses both washer and dryer. But I have never owned an electric can opener (what an absurdity!), nor in the three houses I have owned have I used the energy-wasting, house-heating, noise-making, contraptions known as dishwashers. The houses came with them, but I didn't use 'em. In the time spent loading and unloading them, one can have most of one's dishes washed by hand. And tall guys don't like bending down. Besides, a proper kitchen clean-up job requires a righteous quantity of hot sudsy water.

So I'm a frugal bastard too. And on the automotive front, I've got Keith beat. His car is old as sin, but mine is older, as old as Original Sin. It's a 1988 Jeep Cherokee base model: five-speed manual tranny, 4.0 liter, six-cylinder engine, four-wheel drive, off-road shocks, oversized tires, and manual air conditioning despite the fact that I live in the infernal Valle del Sol — from which I don't escape in the summer like some snowbird wimps I could mention. Manual air conditioning: if you want air, you use your God-given hands to roll down the windows. In this part of the country manual A/C is also know to the politically incorrect as 'Mexican air conditioning.' 'Roll down the windows, Manuel!'

One blazing hot August I drove straight through from Bishop, California to Chandler, Arizona, 600 miles, alone. Stopping for gas in Blythe, on the California side of the Colorado river, I noted that the afternoon temperature was 115 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade. Bouncing along Interstate-10 I saw that the only people with their windows down were me and the Mexicans.

It's no big deal, really, driving through 115 degree heat in the middle of the day in the middle of the desert with the windows down. You take a bandanna and soak it in the ice water in your cooler and wrap it around your neck. When the dry blast of desert wind hits the wet bandanna some serious evaporation takes place cooling your neck and with it the rest of your body. Feeling a little drowsy after four hundred miles of nonstop driving? Stoke up a cheap cigar, say that Swisher Sweet that's been aging under the seat alongside those oily shop rags, and throw another audio tape into the deck. May I recommend Dave Brubeck? Or how about Kerouac reading to the piano accompaniment of Steve Allen? Or perhaps that latter-day beat, Tom Waits.

With four on the road, one in the hand, a cigar in the mouth, some boiling hot McDonald's drive-through java in the other hand, Brubeck on the box, proudly enthroned at the helm of a solid chunk of Dee-troit iron, rolling down a wide-open American road, with a woman waiting at the end of the line, you're feeling fine.

I bought the Jeep around Thanksgiving, 1987 and come this Thanksgiving it will have been twenty years. Expect another post in celebration. An old car is a cheap car: cheap to operate, cheap to insure, cheap to register. My last registration renewal cost me all of $31.39 for two years. My wife's late model Jeep Liberty, however, set us back $377.93 for two years. With a five-speed manual tranny, a six cylinder engine, and no A/C I can easily get 25 mpg. With a tailwind, 30 mpg.

So I don't want to hear any liberal bullshit about all SUVs being gas guzzlers. Your mileage may vary.

Americans are very foolish when it comes to money. If you want to stay poor, buy a new car every four or five years. That's what most Americans do. And if you finance the 'investment,' you compound your mistake. Buy a good car, pay cash, and keep it 10+ years. Better yet, live without a car. From September 1973 to May 1979 I lived and lived well without a car. But I was in Boston and Europe, compact places.