Faults of taste, and upcoming projects

Hello all, just a quick update for anyone who finds this blog. Enough people have found these rather desultory speculations useful enough to convince me to keep the posts all up, ashamed as I sometimes am of them or of certain of the thoughts expressed in them. Looking back on his criticism of Wordsworth, Francis Jeffrey once wrote that with respect to the treatment of the faults he found, he sometimes forgot "that, even on my own view of them, they were but faults of taste," and "sometimes visited them, I fear, with an asperity which should be reserved for objects of Moral reprobation." Something similar happens with faults in ideas that we find, especially when young, and you feel that you sacrifices nothing in throwing all one's energy into the proper thinking-through of a problem--if only because, in the beginning stages of committing oneself to the life of the mind, it seems as if sacrificing everything is almost what is required to think it through.

This is not a false assumption either, both because you are committing yourself to something, and you have to muster up the energy for it, and because, with the sorry state in which the pursuit of ideas is indeed held in this society, at this time, there seems so little recompense in going about it ...I hesitate to say purely, because I mean only impractically, with no foreseeable practical outcome or effectivity, yet even this is made out to be some sort of sham-recompense, which we find in dreams (I use the word with the tone of those who speak of "dream-houses," "dream-cars," "dream-retirement," and especially "dream-job," somehow the hyphen slinking itself in there, as if to insinuate that the substantiality of the thing to which it attaches itself was in some sense never really undreamlike, real, to begin with) of the cozy academic life, which allows you to settle down comfortably and think a lot and write and work whenever you want in pajamas and meet people for coffee and have influence over students but get to talk of popular cultural topics... a dream in which you have everything, and whatever sacrifice you make is not really a sacrifice, just another happy example of initiative, leadership, innovation, or any one of the horrible words we use now to degrade and devalue hard and often unrewarding work. That is (to come back to my point), you treat other people's ideas often too harshly, because you are involved in a process of self-definition, as well as a process of finding the proper degree of honesty and candor with which--not just to present, but to think through your own.

That's about as honest as I can be about the process, though I think it has the potential to sound a bit too harsh on the self there defining itself. I don't mean that what you do is find out how honest you should present yourself as--that'd be a flat out contradiction. What I mean is that you are in a process of finding out how seriously to treat your own ideas--and this is often what makes you attack others unjustly. For people of my generation, who grew up in the hugely dishonest environment of the culture-wars and are caught now in the middle of an age where all expressions of intelligence are treated as competing with the rest of those within the rest of the "discourse" considered, and very often the uber-discourse of "the media," as if an idea were only true if it could manage to fight it out against enough "bad" ideas, and as if everyone who wrote within "the media" (which, as you can gather from the TV news several times an hour, means, you horrible people who say what you mean on the internet, you actual people saying things, without any corporate backing or group-political angle) were a nut--for people who had to confront this way of regarding things, this way of talking about things, this way of conversing with each other, it is so hard to regard others as genuinely speaking as if they mean what they say, so that you come to doubt even if you mean or indeed could ever really mean what you say. And if you don't want to fall back into the position of self-parody, treating nothing that you think or say as serious, or as only temporarily serious (that is, merely useful, merely as a means to some end), then this puts you in a real bind. Moreover, it makes you incredibly sensitive to moments where you have seemed to extend your trust and it seems let down--that is, when you suddenly find out someone else treating an idea less seriously than you thought they might be treating it. And indeed, too often moments of genuine bewilderment in an author can be confused, in such an environment, with a lack of seriousness. But on the rare occasion in which it happens that someone you think is doing their best, and you find out in reality is just spouting bullshit, with a sort of ironic self-referential catchall which is supposed to get them out of the fact that they don't say what they mean--when this happens it can be really a hard thing to bear. If it doesn't poison your expectation of others, it can poison your expectations of yourself and how you treat what you think. This is complicated all the more by the fact that they genuinely are confused; they just also want to say that in a way we all are about the issue in question, and so that gives them to speak authoritatively as if they knew what they were talking about better than you. We are supposed to take the beginning of opening up the limit of a problem, as if it were the actual frontier of that problem. We are supposed to take the fact that all knowledge is gained gradually and the fact that at any particular moment one never knows enough about what they are pursuing, as a reason not to speak of it, not to pursue it further. Or some hope is held out that because we are more conscious of this process, we can fold it back into our own thinking, incorporate it systematically in our answer itself, in our knowledge itself--when this is best developed as an ethic apart from one's thinking, which hangs on a precarious, but only because fundamentally human and sympathetic, society of intellectual characters, neither hostile nor like-minded... and certainly not hostile merely because not like-minded.

But as you develop some surer sense of your own honesty, this situation goes away. And it seems better, on the whole, to treat others ideas that you disagree with, not unlike the faults of taste Jeffrey speaks about. Not that they are the less important for that. It is just that they are not at first, moral problems. You can still look back a little embarrassed at the whole ordeal you went through, though, in order to get to such a place. I've tried to sum up a little how I feel about them all, and what I think went into the parts I now find (as I disagree even with myself) distasteful, but I do also want to give some indication of what the struggle is in those moments which bursts out beneath the surface. We live in an age of such intellectual rage and hate, partly because everything is a matter of the intellect and nothing a matter of ideas--and therefore of feeling, real feeling, too. Belief in oneself and what one says, is not an easy thing to come by, or come to, especially if we understand what we are saying to be merely an indicator of what we do not, cannot quite know yet in full--that is, when one also has doubts. So while I do want to apologize for the harsh tones of some of the entries here--to come round to what I meant to say in this little note--I also can come to bear something of their harshness, looking back on it, as part of the struggle which others still find some use in.

Looking back on it too has also made me convinced it is good to write such occasional thoughts, and if not yet professionally (I hope one day to do some reviewing, alongside my academic work), then somewhere like this. I'm setting up a little blog where I will comment on some keywords I think are pretty interesting and come across while reading, which I'll put a link to here, when I have a couple entries written. I'm also setting up a venue for my fellow graduate students to write reviews of new books at our colloquium website, which should prove interesting for anyone in the field. So keep posted for those things, if you like.

It's time...

It's time to wrap up this blog, everyone. I'll be maybe sticking a couple nice quotes up here over the next few months, but there won't be much more new content. Mostly, this is because there are more important things to do, but also because I think I've learned what I can from this experience--that is, just jotting down things in a more public form, with an eye trained towards an audience of thoughtful readers.

I know blogs can be a lot more than this, of course, so it's not like the medium is failing me in any major way. It's just that I went in with the aim to write a bit better and think a bit more clearly, and, well, I think I've seen it through. Insofar as the blog remains something you can keep continuing even without such a goal, indeed, there it might have failed me: its informality, or unformedness, too easily moving in the space between a diary and an essay or project (the horrible vagueness of "log" hits at this), like everything electronic now can quickly become a crutch, a way of keeping you from beginning something definite and finishing it definitively.

I know that this is also part of the new (or is it old? 17th century cavalier poets did something similar too) practice of creating a public image, or a virtual identity, which you can manipulate and alter as you see fit--probably some way of giving ourselves some sort of narrative for ourselves in such a fragmented society. I think too often this ends in us merely giving ourselves excuses or justifications rather than narratives or passing off the former for the latter: I believe this or this, I take this position and so that was the reason I acted that way, I was consistent, never a hypocrite (one of the topics I gave my students for their essays this semester was the following: "Characters in fictions can be ambiguous where someone, realistically, might be called a hypocrite. Show how a narrative we have read tells a hypocrite’s story as a tale of two desires (without necessarily justifying them), rather than of self-contradicting (or even conflicting) beliefs or biases."). However, the project, insofar as it tends towards making sense of things, is a good one. It's just that I've never really been interested in that, or if I have been, I'm not quite interested any more. And in the end, all of this doesn't quite matter much anyway. Media are not responsible for what is said through them, and first and foremost blame for whatever is at fault here lies certainly with my various incapacities: inexperience; lack of skill; an over-systemic way of thinking; a tendency, drastically lessening as soon as I got into grad school, to read for critique rather than with sympathy and with the aim of understanding; a lack of inventiveness, drollery, incoherence--to name a few things that my readers have had to slog through on occasion.

The human factor broached, I feel on this level there is also an even more basic reason for bringing things to a close: I feel the blog is a good place for people who don't have anything more concrete to do on the intellectual level to just do something, put things to work. That's pretty basic, but I think it's true, and, far from being a testament to the laziness, etc. of such people--I don't mean to say this at all--it testifies to the the absolutely incredible inability of our current society to make something of people's intelligence, skill, time, and desire to be useful: we have to ask ourselves what is going on when our society has to create a massive virtual repository for less professionally oriented intellectual work, give it none of the material benefits of the actual world of letters or make it subject to the same restraints or regulations, and then even have the gall to call it "self-publishing." Of course it's not all bad: people should be able to just have an area to talk to others casually in a weird world where it is hard to do this sometimes, and people do things with blogs that are of course much more than a waste. Again, I don't mean to indict the medium or anything: I just mean to recognize the fact that I don't know if I'd find myself fulfilled writing these things if they weren't notes merely to other work (most of which, in fact the majority of which, has nothing to do with what I write here: I write on 18th century literature), and that has to be weighed into the whole scheme of things when you are at the point of deciding whether you should quit the thing or not. I also just want to recognize, on more of a human level, how lucky I feel that I'm one of the really, really fortunate ones out there now who has more concrete things to do intellectually.

To do this another way, I might again turn the lens not on the notes here but on myself, and just say that as you get older, the desire to engage in such open-ended things as this just fades. You've been around enough to see what results from actions; you have a good measure of your force in the world, and what type of force it is. The blog at its best extends all this and deepens it, and at its worst makes you think you can extend it much farther and go much deeper than you can: in that respect, it seems more appropriate for the young, or the young at heart, who are also more willing to get into fiery all-night-long debates about and critiques of things. I'm past that moment, I think, perhaps earlier than some of my friends (though later than a few I can think of, certainly). That doesn't at all imply I'm more mature, too cool for school--far from it. It's just that, at a certain point, you crave doing something much more actual--by which I mean, more appropriate to your measure. Some people precisely have made blogging their thing: that's great. But for me, it's in scholarly work and teaching, and the fun I have with this just can't compare to the fun and fulfillment I have with that.

Obviously, there's a nice middle way in here somewhere, and I probably will try and gesture towards it in quoting some nice bit every now and then. Of course I won't delete the blog, a few of you good souls out there have pleaded with me not to do that. But as for new things, new thoughts, you won't really be getting many from me. My point here is just to say that maybe this is for the best for you too, reader, in some small way: it encourages you not to read these little notes looking for thoughts, but to go out and think and jot down some yourself.

Saying things clearly

I thought I'd just stop a moment and recommend the great "Philosophy Bites" podcast of David Edmonds and Nigel Warburton, in case any of you haven't heard it. They do a wonderful job, and have some of the best guests: there's a great, great piece with Princeton's amazing Philip Pettit they did recently, which I finally got around to hearing, which I particularly recommend (anything by Pettit is just fascinating).

And they are also extremely, extremely clear, though not much depth is actually sacrificed in the service of this. This is on the one hand not suprising, given the immense experience and knowledge of their guests, but also extremely suprising, given the nature of the medium and indeed the problems involved. But if there is anything I miss about philosophy sometimes, it is what they keep at work in the interviews: the imperative to clearly state something, to clearly formulate it, and clearly argue about it. It's that certain plain style aspect of philosophizing which I miss, that commitment to clear reasoning which makes Warburton quip that prose of Stanley Cavell, who is an extremely lucid writer in the scheme of things, is a bit "purple." Of course, it's more than a style (though a style too is usually more than just a style): it's an ethic, which makes me particularly fond of people like G.E. Moore--and Moore perhaps a little too fond of Wittgenstein.

I know people feel hemmed in by the sort of "common language" philosophy of the followers of the latter, and people outside philosophy often cite it disapprovingly as an example of the sort of weirdness of the imperative. But the truth is (and this is why those who diss the clarity-requirement I'm thinking of nevertheless usually love Wittgenstein) Wittgenstein doesn't really submit himself to the requirement of thinking clearly so much as identify clarification with a procedure for philosophizing. And while these two things overlap often, they aren't the same.

In short, Searle's "if you can't say it clearly, you don't understand it yourself" (which Warburton has at the top of his website) doesn't mean you need to work like Wittgenstein, even if you sometimes fall back on it and use it as a sort of guide to your thinking--i.e. using it even as a procedure isn't the same thing as identifying it with a procedure. Indeed, it means something quite broad: clear speaking and clear thinking usually go hand in hand, so if you're not speaking clearly about something, there's a good chance you don't understand it, and you need to think through it more. Hemingway spoke once somewhere of a bullshit detector, and it's basically that: a way of not confusing philosophy with poetry, even if you think the former is something of an art. But it is also a spur to thinking--that's the part people usually leave out--which encourages understanding: not unlike how Hegel thinks something is only known when you've seen both sides of it (which is all that much-maligned "synthesis" is, in the end: not grasping things one-sidedly).

And indeed, if it doesn't lead to bullshit, feeling this way about thinking through problems often leads you down certain more unsavory paths. One is the use of jargon as an excuse for technical language. Now, I am all for the use of technical language, and indeed the argument for saying things clearly could actually support this. Paul Ennis puts it best, probably, in these terms: sometimes you just need a word for something, and so the word chosen is one is weird. And that doesn't mean you don't speak clearly with it: all it means is that the word requires a special use. At the same time, and while it has been used against the cultivation of a clearer technical language (maybe I should speak intead of lingo, then), it's probably best to acknowledge a difference betwen jargon and technical language, because there is a use of specific terms that don't improve clarity (or even clearly demarcate the specifics of its use). An example of this would be theoretical discourse, of course, which is often just a way to allow thought to proceed precisely on the opposite principle of the one I'm talking about: the more you are led by unclarity, and into unclarity, the more you have thought something through. This trades on an insidious sophism--one which Searle precisely objected to, though perhaps a bit too harshly--which claims that what is thought is always going to be beyond my ability to refer to it, which isn't inherently wrong so much as wrong-headed: it smuggles in a notion that clear speaking involves direct reference to the object of thought, which as you can see from Searle's little formula is never mentioned, though it might be implied. One can't generalize from this that all clear thinking is referential, and therefore the only way to get beyond what we refer to is to use a weird term: indeed, it is often the case that when we use jargon, we precisely know what we're referring to, and just want to sound like an asshole.

The other way you go down if you don't make clarity a big part of your thought and speech, is something philosophers do all the time, actually, and isn't as insidious, though I find it unfortunate: it is gathering up what could be expressed clearly into a special "Problem," or "Argument" instead of giving it the form of exposition or even a technical term. The "mind-body problem" is one of these, though since that's more of a commonplace, I'm actually thinking more of something like what you encounter in ethics and aesthetics a lot, which usually describes a situation or a sort of crux which either amounts to an objection or something that needs to be thought around, or a position of some sort (in philosophy of mind, technical terms often do the same work: behaviorism means a position or proposition). It's a weird sort of work that is based on the same sorts of assumptions as formal logic, and while this isn't wrong, doing it in other areas than formal logic often leads to a lot of systematizing rather than sticking close to the subject matter. Sometimes, since the subject matter can be dizzying, and systematizing is precisely what you need (I don't mean to knock systems), but sometimes you'll be thinking through a problem and won't pursue a certain angle because you are too afraid it will ultimately end back in x position, in y problem, or, what's perhaps worse, that making an advancement in thinking amounts to merely getting past, resolving the contradictions in x position or y problem. And sticking close to the notion that saying things clearly often means thinking them through clearly can actually be quite liberating when this is the case. Most good philosophy I've read--especially in aesthetics, which is absolutely bogged down with -isms and formal problems of this sort--just returns to basics and tries to speak about what's going on clearly, just as most good academic work in general is, I find, remarkable for its ability to address something clearly but in a new way rather than obscurely.