Philosophy Talk: The Blog

Thoughts on the Reader

posted by Ken Taylor 

Thanks to everybody who made our  First Annual Dionysus Awards Show  such a success.  It was a lot of fun.  We got lots of  great input from our listeners.   If you haven't heard the show, be sure to check it out.  We're trying to get it picked up as pre-Oscar special by stations throughout the public radio system.  Wish us luck with that.   

Anyway,  I thought I'd follow up a bit on the discussion of one movie in particular -- The Reader.   David Thomson -- who was originally scheduled to be our guest but had to cancel at the last minute  -  had suggested to us in our preparation for the show that we  think about spending the entire hour talking about just this one film  --- I guess because he thinks that no other film from 2008 comes close the Reader in its depth and complexity.   I'm not sure I agree with that and we didn't accept the suggestion, in any case.   But I did find the movie profoundly interesting and profoundly challenging.   So I thought I'd ruminate about it a bit more in this blog entry as a follow up to our episode.  

I know that some people seem to find this film  morally reprehensible.    Manhola Dargis, writing about the Reader for the New York Times,  concludes his review with  the following:

Although the commercial imperatives that drive a movie like this one are understandable — the novel was a best seller and an Oprah’s Book Club selection, for starters — you have to wonder who, exactly, wants or perhaps needs to see another movie about the Holocaust that embalms its horrors with artfully spilled tears and asks us to pity a death-camp guard. You could argue that the film isn’t really about the Holocaust, but about the generation that grew up in its shadow, which is what the book insists. But the film is neither about the Holocaust nor about those Germans who grappled with its legacy: it’s about making the audience feel good about a historical catastrophe that grows fainter with each new tasteful interpolation.

My reactions to this movie are completely at odds with this.   In my view,   the movie raises a number of profound moral questions and though it doesn't decisively answer those questions  -- what movie could -- it does explore -- in a way movies seldom do (though novels more often do) --  the space of possible answers to the questions it raises.  Let me explain what I mean.   Obviously  Hanna, aka,  Kate Winslett,  is the moral center of this movie. By the way, about Hanna,  Dargis says the following:

In the novel and the film — which monumentalizes every trembling lip and fluttering eyelash, turning human gestures into Kodak moments — Michael’s pain turns him not just into Hanna’s victim, but also a kind of survivor. Outrageously, Hanna is a victim too, because she took the guard job only to hide her illiteracy, as if illiteracy were an excuse for barbarism.

Dargis is surely right that both Michael and Hanna are represented as victims   -- he of her;  and she of something more diffuse and less pointed.   I suppose she is partly represented as a "victim"  of the German attempt to understand and come to grips with the past.   She is also, I suppose,  partly represented as the "victim"  of the Nazi system in which she was a participant.   But I don't think it's at all right  to say that the film  "excuses" Hanna's participation in the barbarism of the Holocaust because of her illiteracy.  The movie does nothing of the sort.  It is true that the movie doesn't take the morally "easy" way out of simply condemning Hanna's act. Certainly,   that would be the more superficially morally  satisfying thing to do -- to offer  (again) the simple, unambiguous, untroubled judgment that the Nazi's, and all who aided them,  were purely and simply evil barbarians.

Why would that be the  "easy"  way out, you ask?   Well,  my answer  goes back to a claim made a few years ago, on a show we did about evil,  by our guest, Peter Van Inwagen.  He argued, as I recall,  that the psychology of evil is incomprehensible to us, that true evil is  alien and "other."   I think something like that thought lies behind Dargis's reaction to this movie.  I say that because if you think that the Nazi's were purely and simply evil barbarians, there is nothing much  to be said or done about them except to note and condemn their barbarism. Certainly,  no "explaining" or "excusing"  is necessary.   If we are in a position to unambiguously condemn, then there's not much self-reflection called for in thinking about the Nazi's.   They were evil.  We are not.  They performed acts of unspeakable barbarism. We did not.   That was them.  This is us.   We are different. 

But I think the movie rejects this simple-minded picture and is  trying to make the point on behalf of Germans who came of age after the war  that such a proffered neat moral separation between those who lived through the war, and took part in the Nazi's atrocities and those who came of age only after the war, and therefore had no  part in those atrocities, is an illusion.   The movie makes that point in several ways.   First and foremost,  there is the somewhat opaque, but in many ways ordinary inner psyche of Hanna.  The remarkable thing about Hanna is that she is in almost every way unremarkable.  In particular,  she isn't Van Inwagen's alien other,  peculiarly capable of unspeakable acts that those her came after are incapable of.      No doubt,   Hanna is  a troubled and  wounded person, with things to hide.  But she's more than that too.   She is capable of joy and passion and a kind of love. 

You could,  I suppose,  look upon her as a sexual predator.     If Michael were a Michelle and Hanna a Hermann, we'd no doubt  see Hermann as a child molester.  Curiously,   I find that I am not quite prepared to say that Hanna  molests the young Michael -- who is, after all,   only 14, if I've got my math right -- when they begin their affair.  But it's very clear that the affair with her leaves a scar on his psyche. 

The fact that Hanna is in many ways an unremarkable person --  neither heroic, nor particularly virtuous,  but also not possessed with  an utterly alien and incomprehensible psyche of the sort that Van Inwagen suggested is the hallmark of true evil   -- is by my lights what gives the movie true moral force.  Hanna was put to a certain moral test.   She failed because she lacked whatever inner psychic resources it would have required to pass the moral test.  But I think that one of the deepest points made by the movie is that  many of who were fortunate enough not to be put the test differed from Hanna in no morally significant respect.  She and many in her generation were put to a moral test to which those in the succeeding generation were not subject.  

That doesn't mean that Hanna gets a free pass.  She is not excused. Her atrocities are not explained away -- despite what Dargis says.   I think the movie makes that point forcefully and clearly.     But at the same time, in recognizing that Hanna is just an ordinary person with an unremarkable psyche,  the movie  also raises a very deep puzzle about what exactly we are condemning when we condemn her.    Of course, we condemn her acts.  But we'd like to condemn more than her acts.   We'd like also to condemn the inner psyche that produced the acts.   That's why the judge tries to discern whether Hanna  "willingly"  joined the SS.   But if it turns out that Hanna's psyche is not so unlike our own, is not so alien and other,  what then?  How are we really to distinguish ourselves from Hanna?   

This  has to do with the problem of what  philosophers call moral luck.  Hanna was unlucky in her circumstances  -- or in the combination of her circumstances and her character.   Suppose that she had been born in Britain rather than in Germany.  In such circumstances,  the very traits that made her a willing SS guard, might have led her to willingly enlist in the British Red Cross.   And then we might have praised rather than blamed not just her acts but the inner character that led to those acts.    But the point is that it's the very same inner character in the two cases.  So on what basis do we condemn its expression through acts here, while praising its expressions through acts there?

I said earlier that the movie explores the space of possible answers to the moral questions that it raises.  I'm thinking of a couple of different things.   First, recall the scene near the end when Michael goes to New York to meet the jewish woman who wrote the book about the death march from Auschwitz.   She is stern and steadfast in her refusal to grant any absolution to Hanna.   And I do not think that the movie represents her as being somehow wrong in doing so.   Rather,  the movie takes note of and accepts that attitude as one entirely legitimate attitude among others that we might adopt.  Michael,  recall, makes no attempt to change her attitude toward Hanna.  Indeed, he seems rather  silenced in the face of such moral certainty.  Just as the court offers no answer to Hanna's biting question  "What would you have done,"  Michael has no response to the survivors refusal to offer any kind of absolution to Hanna.  

Though the movie takes note of the fact of felt moral certainty and does nothing to challenge it,  it also doesn't rest with moral certainty as the final and sole legitimate response.  Exhibit A for the movie's refusal to rest with moral certainty is the complexity of  Michael's own attitudes towards Hanna.  His welter of attitudes are as complex as could be.   I'm not sure that I can even fully describe the totality of his attitudes.    On the one hand, there is his  deeply passionate affair with her, that both opened up a certain realm of human experience to him and left him  scarred. The Hanna of his youth haunts his memory.    On the other hand, there is his subsequent encounter with her and his startling realization that she took part, willingly, it seems, in the atrocities of the past.  To the very end,  he wishes to be assured that she has "learned something from the past."  This bespeaks a kind of enduring condemnation.     But there is also more.  There is, of course,  Hanna's  refusal, driven by I am not quite sure what --  a kind of shame, I suppose --  to reveal that she is illiterate even when it might have saved her from years in prison and his silence in the face of that refusal.  He cannot even bring himself to see her to speak to her about what he knows and she knows.  And then there is the mercy he offers her years later,  through his subsequent act of recording books for her again.    Or is this a way of seeking absolution for himself?   You could see his failure to come to her aid as a kind of moral cowardice, driven by revulsion and shame, perhaps.  But if it is a kind of cowardice, it is the kind that disguises itself as "respect."    

So how, ultimately,  should we understand  the moral relationship between  Michael - who I suppose is some sort of stand in for the generation whose moral task it was to narrate the history of Nazi Germany as somehow both a chapter in its  own history  and a chapter from which it is determined to make  a decisive break  --  and Hanna -- who I suppose is a stand in,  not for the main movers and shakers of the Nazi era, but for the millions of ordinary Germans, inwardly indistinguishable from the average run of humanity, without whose cooperation the Nazi's could not have carried off their barbarism?   How are we to understand that moral relationship?  

The movie doesn't really tell us, I think,   because it doesn't really know.   It leaves us with no simple answers.  But I do think it leaves us with a profound question.   Again,  as a protective impulse, we may tell ourselves that  evil is other,  alien and distant.  But the reality is that it lives just around the corner in the souls of people little different from ourselves.   Only if we come to grips with that fact,  I think the movie is trying to say,  can we really come to grips with the past. 

The First Annual Dionysus Awards

Philosophy Talk is initiating a new movie award.   

I know;  I know.  Do we really need yet another movie award?  We've got the Oscars; the Golden Globe; the National Society of Film Critics, the People's Choice Awards ....  So what's the point of another, you ask?

Well,  it's fun to talk about movies -- at least the good ones.  But more importantly,  nobody really explicitly applauds movies for their philosophical merits -- though filmmaking can sometimes be a highly philosophical art form.   So why not an award that does just that?  Finally,  what could be cooler than winning a Dionysus Award?  Sounds much cooler than an Oscar or a Golden Globe -- at least to me. 

So on February 8th, we're going to inaugurate our Annual  Dionysus Awards for the most philosophically interesting movies of the year.    Our main guest will be noted film critic David Thomson.   But we'll also be joined briefly by some of our favorite philosopher-cinemaphile who will give their takes on the philosophically most interesting movies of the year.   

We'd love to have you join in the fun.  Submit your own  nomination for a Dionysus Award to comments@philosophhytalk.org.   Tell us which movies of 2008 you found most philosophically gripping and why.  If we find your nomination compelling,  we just may include you as a special guest  on our on-air broadcast on the 8th.

Why Music Matters: Open Thread!

posted by Ken Taylor

I'm in the airport at Tucson. I'm listening online to our episode on "Why Music Matters" which we recorded in front of live audience at a locale in San Francisco. David Harrington, of the world famous Kronos Quartet is our guest. Since my flight is about to board, I won't have time to listen at length. And I've been too wrapped up in the conference to blog about the topic. But I thought it might be fun just to open up an entry to comments from listeners about the show and the topic. I'll add my own two cents worth in a separate entry when I get some time --hopefully later this week.

For now, comments on the episode from listeners are welcome. Post away!

Poetry, Philosophy, Truth

Howdy folks; Troy Jollimore here. Ken and John were kind enough to invite me to be their guest for the “Love, Poetry, Philosophy” show they taped at Powell’s City of Books in June. And now that the show is being broadcast, they were kind enough to invite me to blog for the show as well. I’m happy to take them up on it—keeping in mind that blogging is a very informal medium, and that what I have to offer may turn out to be no more than a few fairly random thoughts.

 

One of the relations between poetry and philosophy that we didn’t really get to discuss on the show, as I recall it at least, has to do with their respective conceptions of truth. I’m really generalizing here, but I’m going to make the claim that analytic philosophy, at least as traditionally practiced, is dominated by a conception of truth that has (at least) two significant features. First, it is propositional: it takes the proposition to be the primary entity that truth attaches to. And second, it is unitary: it tends to take it that there is one truth about any given subject matter. Thus philosophers are always looking for THE truth about something—THE proper analysis, THE correct understanding.

 

Poets tend not to think like that, partly because their understanding of truth tends to have more to do with metaphor, and poets tend naturally to be pluralists. If I have a philosophical analysis of x, and you come along with a philosophical analysis of x that isn’t the same as mine, then it seems like, as philosophers, we’re obliged to try to figure out which one is right; but again, they can’t both be right. But if I have a metaphor for y, and you come along and offer another metaphor for y, I can accept that your metaphor is a good one without feeling obliged either to (i) reject the validity of the metaphor I had already offered, or (ii) showing that at a deep level, the metaphors are really the same. So philosophers tend to view truths the way most people view spouses: you only get one at a time, so accepting them is a matter of replacement. Whereas poets tend to view truths, a lot of the time at least, more as friends: you can accumulate them, and you don’t need to get rid of the earlier ones.

 

In a related way, poets put more emphasis on the role of pictures than on the role of propositions. After all, a set of true propositions about z need not constitute an adequate picture of z. The propositions may all be trivial and uninteresting and leave out what is truly interesting or distinctive about z. So poets, on the whole (again, I am generalizing terribly) are more interested in truth as it attaches to pictures, than truth as it attaches to propositions. Thinking about truth in terms of propositions makes us more inclined to believe in the ONE truth since, after all, any proposition must either be true or false, and so there can only be one complete set of true propositions about the world. But thinking in terms of pictures reminds us that any human grasp of this one complete truth is partial, and that in human terms, the idea of multiple distinct but not necessarily incompatible truths may in fact be one that makes a certain sense.

 

Admittedly there is, among many poets, the idea of a ‘more complete’ understanding; as we add more metaphors to our mental stock, we form a deeper, richer, more adequate picture of the world, and so understand it better. We learn to see things from different angles, to appreciate them in a different light; to come to understand how something that doesn’t attract you can nonetheless appear attractive to someone else; and so forth. On the other hand, I think many poets think that there is no such thing as a complete or total understanding—there is always the possibility of coming to understand something better, of adding another metaphor.

 

Some philosophers have held views something like this. Nietzsche, for instance, may seem to have had something very much like this in mind with his “perspectivism.” And like Nietzsche (at least in some of his moods), some poets may want to take this sort of thing too far, and give up talking about truth at all. This, I think, is an overreaction to the valid recognition that it is always perilous, and very often misleading, to talk about the ONE truth about anything. But on the whole, it seems to me that poets—even those who tend to feel nervous when the word ‘truth’ is bandied about—do believe in truth; it’s precisely what they are striving for when they search for good  metaphors.

What's on you Summer Reading list?

posted by Ken Taylor

On today's show, we'll be talking about books. The sun is out, the surf is up, and it's time to take to the beach, with a few good philosophical books in hand. We did a similar episode last year and it was fun. So we thought as the summer of 2007 approaches, we'd try it again.

OUr guest will be Danielle Marshall from Powell's City of Books in Portland Oregon. You may or may not have noticed that Powell's is now an official sponsor of Philosophy Talk. We're really pleased about this and are looking forward to along and fruitful partnership with Powells.

By the way, if you are in the Portland area, come and check us out week after next. We're going to be doing two events of there. On Wednesday evening, June 20th at 7:30, we'll being doing a live taping of the show at Powell's downtown store. Our guest will be the poet and philosopher Troy Jollimore, whose first book of poetry, Tom Thompson in Purgatory just won the National Book Critics Circle award in poetry. More details about that event are here.

The following evening, we'll be doing our show LIVE from the studios of Oregon Public Broadcasting, Thursday evening at 8pm. This will give our Oregon area listeners a chance to interact with us live, rather than getting their usual re-broadcast version of the show. Our two guests for that epsiode will be Tom Cohart and Daniel Klein, authors of Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy through Humor. Be sure to tune in and call-up, Oregon!

I have to admit to have slightly subversive intentions with regard to OPB. I very much want them to move us to Sunday's at 10am, so we can be live all over Oregon. They aren't likely to do it, but maybe by coming up and doing the show live just once, that can create a bottom-up groundswell of demand for more live episodes of Philosophy Talk.

In any case, do come and check us out at Powell's on Wednesday the 20th and tune in and call up to our live OPB broadcast on Thursday the 21st.

But back to our summer reading list.

Now I have to admit that most of my own summer reading, will not be reading for pure philosophcal pleasure. That's because I really MUST finish a book I've been working on for several years now that is WAY past due and get started on the next one, about which I have been thinking, speaking and teaching but not writing for the past several years. So most of my reading wil be directly related to those two tasks.

Still, I have thoughts both about what I would like to read myself this summer, if I were to be able to for pure philosophical pleasure and about what I might recommend to others to read who were looking for interesting philosophical reads.

Here are few things that I find intriguing. In some cases, I've actually begun the books. In other cases, I merely hope to some day relatively soon.

Two important philosophers, well worth reading, both of whom sometimes wrote for a wider audience, died recently. Richard Rorty and Robert Solomon. Rorty died just Friday morning. Solomon died a few months ago.

Solomon was a guest on Philosophy Talk awhile back talking about happines. We tried to get him on again, to talk about love or the emotions or existentialism. But schedules never clicked. Bob was a lucid and passionate writer. You should read something by him. He wrote many fine books, but one I like a lot is his book, About Love: Reinventing Romance for our Time.

Many regard Rorty as one the most important philosophers of the twentieth century. Though not many analtyic philosophers regard him that way, many non-philosophers do. I think the truth probably lies somewhere in between. Rorty was probably over-appreciated by non-philosophers and underappreciated by many philosophers. If you haven't read Rorty or haven't read him recently, you should pick up one of has many books or collections of essays. I just picked up two of them the other day. A collection he published back in 1999 called Philosophy and Social Hope which is, I think, his first collection of essays aimed at a "popular" audience and a more recent collection called Philosophy as Cultural Politics. This last one was published just this year, and is represented as the 4th volume of his philosophical papers. Perhaps the final thing that Rorty wrote, or really co-wrote , is What's the use of Truth? This very short book, which I haven't looked at yet, seems to be an exchange between the French analytic philosopher Pascal Engel and Rorty.

If you want to read a reasonably accessible book by an outstandingly good philosopher attacking Rorty's views on truth, see Paul Boghossian's book Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism

I've just looked up at the clock. Unfortunately, I really need to run. I've got to get to the studio. I've got lots more suggestions. I'll just type a few quickly without providing a lot of links. I'm about three chapters into The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It's an intriquing idea, and there's lots of insight there. But the style of the book is a little frustrating. Seems like a book that will be much talked about for awhile.

I'm a good way into Barack Obama's Tale's of my Father -- a really fascinating read about the constituting of a self, espeically a racial self. Obama is a very fine writer and a much more thoughtful than your average politician lets himself appear to be. You could read this book and then read Anthony Appiah's The Ethics of Identity and/or Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon and you would have had a great exploration of the dynamics of identity constitution from many different angles in many different voices.

Another a-typical politician that has something deeply philosophical to say is Al Gore. I've just picked up his book The Assault on Reason. I'm not that far into it yet. I've just skimmed a couple of chapters. But it seems to be written with passion and courage and clarity at first glance. I read a column of David Brooks criticizing Al Gore as some weird alien creature. But seems to me, we need more people like him in American poltics.

I also started Doug Hofstadter's I am a Strange Loop. This looks like a typical Hofstadter book -- well written and witty, full of insight, but also not likely to satisfy the professional philosopher in me. Of course, that's not quite what he's trying to do with this book about the nature of the self. (Although he does say that he views this book as a "return" to philosophy on his part and he wants it to be convincing to professional philosophers of mind like me. We'll see. I'm only a few chapters into it and I'm reserving judgment.

If you want to read a more philosophically demanding book about the self, read The Situated Self by Jenann Ismael. Brilliant stuff -- it will be harder going than Hofstadter, admittedly, but it will be well worth the effort.

Anyway, I gotta go. Talk to you soon. Between you, Danielle, John and me, I'm sure we can come up with a dynamite summer reading list for the philosophically inclined.

Music, Meaning, and Emotion

posted by Ken Taylor

Today's episode is about the philosophy of music. Our guest will be Peter Kivy, a leading philosopher of music and a former colleague of mine from Rutgers University.

I fancy myself a pretty accomplished philosopher. I've been at this philosophy thing for about 25 years now. I also consider myself a decent musician. In my youth I played a lot of music -- trombone, violin, piano. Plus I sang in various choirs. I don't perform much anymore, but I still consume music of all sorts.

But I have to admit that although I'm not bad at philosophy and pretty good at music, I've never given music a great deal of philosophical attention. That's one reason I'm so looking forward to our conversation with Peter later today. He has given a very great deal of philosophical thought to music. I think he's written something on the order of five or six books specifically about the philosophy of music. So I expect to learn a lot from him.

Just to get the juices flowing, I thought I'd ruminate in my elementary, not yet completely well work-out sort of way on some things that I personally find philosophically puzzling about music. Here goes.

First worry. What distinguishes music from non-music? The world is replete with sound -- both man made sounds and the sounds of nature. Many of these sounds are quite beautiful -- the cries of various animals, the sound of the ocean, the whistling wind, the human voice, the majestic boom of the space shuttle as it rockets into space. But only a few of the sounds with which the world is replete count as music. Is there anything deep to say about what distinguishes music from non-music?

I'm not sure. One initially tempting thought is that music can be demarcated from non-music by its structure and organization. Music comes with a key signature, with meter, with melody, harmony and all that. Certainly a lot of music is organized and structured in this way. Almost all music that I enjoy listening to, for example, has some or all of these features. But there are probably instances of music that have none or few of these features -- late twentieth century and early 21st century "classical" music comes quickly to mind. That suggests that there may not be any necessary and sufficient conditions for what counts as music rather than non-music. It probably doesn't matter that there aren't such conditions. Most of us certainly know music when we hear it, even if we couldn't define it.

Second Worry. Music is often quite emotionally gripping. By turns, it can make us feel sad or elated, It can convey a sense of unfulfilled longing, of awe and wonder. It can make us laugh or cry. Music may even convey anger or regret.

It's not, I think, hard to come up with a first pass explanation of how music with lyrics or that accompanies other contentful representations might convey such emotion. When we set words to music, the words retain at least the expressive and representational powers that they have all on their own. But even here there are some complexities, I think. Music may certainly enhance the expressive power of the words, images, or scenes it accompanies. Imagine a scene in a scary movie. First imagine it without any music. Then imagine it with a subtle but creepy melody rising slowly. Which is more effective? It will depend, of course, on the details. But we've all seen movies in which the music greatly enhances the sense of doom lurking around the corner. (When I was a kid I used to imagine that when I finally fell in love, and declared my love to my beloved, an invisible orchestra would begin playing some swelling romantic tune as my beloved and I exchanged our first tender kiss.) But if music can enhance the expressive power of a scene or a speech, then it's not the words or the scene alone that does the expressing, even when we have words accompanied by music.

It's also possible I suppose for there to be a mismatch between the music and the words (or other representations). Imagine angry words sung to a happy uplifting melody. I suppose, also, that it's possible to exploit such mismatches intentionally and creatively. The result I guess would be a kind of irony or perhaps even satire.

"Pure" music -- for lack of a better term -- probably does raise the issue more accutely, though. By pure music I mean music entirely devoid of representational content -- music accompanied by no scenes or words or images or narration. Just pure sound (ordered and structured to be sure) but still just pure non-representational sound. How does such music achieve such astounding emotive power in the absence of all representational content?

I don't really know the answer, to be frank. I'm not sure I have even a proto-theory. I do wonder, though, whether the emotion is, as it were, "in the music" or merely in our reaction to the music. Let me explain what I mean. You could, I suppose, think that when we called music sad or mournful or happy or said that it expresses unfulfilled longing, we mean nothing more than that it evokes such sentiments "in us." And there might be no deep explanation of why just these sound sequences should evoke just these sentiments or feelings in us. Maybe psychology might eventually reveal something deep. But there might be nothing more than brute fact or something about evolution or something about cultural constructions.

On the other hand, you might think that when we call a piece of music sad we are getting at some sort of response-independent facts about the music itself, about, as it were, the internal qualities of the music.

I tend to think it's a "both and" sort of thing -- though it wouldn't take much to talk me out of this half-formed view.

My thought is that when we call a piece of music sad, we are saying both something about its, as it were, intrinsic musical character -- albeit indirectly -- and also something about our response to it. In particular, by calling the music sad, we "license" certain emotional reponses as "appropriate" in light of the intrinsic musical character of the piece. If you aren't moved to sadness by sad music, you've in a way misperceived the music. Or that, at any rate, is what I believe at the moment. Let's see if it holds up after a conversation with a world-class expert.

The reductive metaphysician in me would like it to be the case that we could eventually say, in non-emotive terms, just what it is about the intrinsic musical character of a piece of music that makes it correct to say that the music is sad. But the music lover in me, wonders if we would really understand music better if we really could do such a thing.

There's a lot more that could be said about all this. Unfortunately, I've got to take off for the studio now. And one certainly shouldn't drive and blog at the same time. (DWB is surely at least as dangerous as DWI.

Storytelling Creatures

posted by Joshua Landy

Why did human beings develop traditions of storytelling? Of course, any answer to this question is going to be speculative. But it might be reasonable to assume that the capacity for imagination is adaptive (I need to be able to predict what is going to happen as a result of different courses of action), and that engagement with fictions helps to hone the relevant skills. This is, I believe, more or less Gregory Currie's view, and I think it's an entirely plausible one.

Still, this is completely unsatisfying as an answer to why I get so passionate about, say, In Search of Lost Time. The evolutionary account is far too general. It doesn't even really explain why I like novels, let alone (say) first-person novels, let alone (say) In Search of Lost Time. So what do specific fictions do for us?

Most of us are brought up, I think, to answer that question by looking at content. We think that literature is valuable if we learn something from it: we learn what went on in, say, turn of the century Paris (propositional knowledge). We learn what it feels like to be someone like Proust's main character (knowledge by acquaintance). We learn to be more like this character (emulation).

There may be something to these ideas, but they raise all kinds of problems (in part for reasons mentioned by Neil in an earlier post) and above all are monstrously limited. If I wanted knowledge of turn of the century Paris, I could find out more reliably some other way. Do we really go to literary artworks for that? (I'll return to knowledge by acquaintance in a moment.)

Rather than resorting automatically to content, I suggest that we consider two other dimensions: (1) literary form; (2) the process of engagement with fictions. First, literature can provide us with formal models of how best to live, not in what a given work puts on display but in how it presents it. According to the life-as-literature theorists (Alexander Nehamas, and--very differently--Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre), we can look to well-crafted stories for inspiration for the crafting of our own lives.

Notice that the content of the fictional lives is, for these purposes, no longer important. I can substitute my own content without loss. Notice too that the very pleasure we derive (what Neil called the “this-is-awesome” feeling) is the same satisfaction we stand to gain from crafting our own lives in an aesthetically pleasing way. So here the expansion of formal imagination is at least related to, if not necessarily responsible for, our aesthetic enjoyment.

Now via the process of engagement with fictions, I argue, we stand to hone our skills. This is entirely different from learning facts, and also from gaining a new set of values. Some of the pleasure we gain from an intricately-crafted fiction has to do with the successful deployment of some of our cognitive capacities. Here again pleasure is bound up with longer-term gain (though I'm not making an evolutionary argument).

Some--like Martha Nussbaum--might say that these capacities are, in an ideal case, my moral capacities. I fine-tune my moral skills, the argument goes, by engagement with fictional works. (Richard Rorty, and a caller on the show, would add that by empathizing with characters who are not like myself, I learn to fold all of humankind under the rubric “us,” rather than designating some types of people as “them.”)

Is this true? Well, even if it were, it would be unfortunate to consider this the function (or value) of literature, as Nussbaum often appears to. Further, it's not at all clear that empathy with fictional characters leads to empathy with real people. (Conversely, it's not at all clear that empathy with vicious fictional characters leads to vice. When I watch a mafia movie, I briefly take on the values of the mafiosi in imagination; but I do not go home planning a career in organized crime. And surely I don't end up feeling the pain of pedophiles after reading Lolita. If so, maybe it should be banned!)

Nor is it clear that empathy, in the sense of getting inside someone's head and learning what causes them pain, is guaranteed to yield altruism: this skill is of course extremely useful for sadists and torturers (a point made by Richard Posner in response to Nussbaum).

It seems to me that we should think of fictions as a catalyst for a process which may lead to an increase in altruism, but which may just as well lead to an increase in other-sacrificing perfectionism, or again to morally neutral change, or indeed no change at all. (Alexander Nehamas writes about this unpredictability in his recent work on Beauty.) When we engage with a great work of literature--where the stakes are high, where everything conspires to yield powerful effects--the pieces that compose us are shaken up; we may come to see these pieces more clearly; we may come to imagine new ways of organizing them; we may seek to change some, by bringing them into line with others (second-order and first-order desires, for instance); and we may hone skills necessary to these various ends. What a fiction does for us depends not just on what kind of work it is but also on what we choose or manage to do with it. If you don't lift the weights, the weights are not to blame for your lack of muscle growth.

Fiction and Imaginative Resistance

posted by Ken Taylor

This post has been hanging in Limbo land for awhile, waiting for me to find time to get it finished.   I haven't had much time to blog lately but hope to squeeze more blogging in.  Also, I hope we can make a renewed push to get some of our on-air guests to contribute as well.

Thanks to Steven Meyer for being our guest on recent  show on the willing suspension of disbelief.     Steve was the  first English professor we've actually had on the program.   Given that there can still be some hostility and talking at cross-purposes between philosophers and literary types these days, it was a nice to have a fruitful exchange in which we were  all more or less on the same page.

I've been thinking a bit more about the phenomenon of  imaginative resistance and that's the main  subject of this post.

I recall saying during our on-air conversation that we are inclined to go along and imagine whatever the author of a well-constructed fiction invites us to imagine.    Without the slightest resistance, we accept invitations to  imagine scenarios that contradict the known laws of nature or that rewrite  some large or small fragment of the history of the world.  We have no resistance to imagining  scenarios that, on one way of measuring,  might be seen as  altogether  metaphysically impossible.  Our  imaginations resist  violating the most obvious laws of logic, but imagination can clearly accept the suspension of the  least obvious laws of logic.   If you think that quantum theory involves violation of the laws of classical logic and requires a new "quantum logic"  then perhaps you should say that the imagination refuses to heed and can even help us reconfigure logic itself. 

On the surface then, the imagination is subject to very few constraints.   The "on the surface" has to do with the fact that it's sometimes a little tricky  to specify the exact contents of an episode of imagination.    Suppose  I ask you to imagine a scenario in which Ken Taylor, the actual son of Sam and Seretha Taylor, was  born not to Sam and Seretha but to some imaginary royal couple in some long ago and faraway land.   Can you really imagine that this very person, the one and only Ken Taylor,  was born to different parents?   Or are you really imagining a person a lot like me,  but with different parents,  born and reared  in a different age?   Believe it or not, one could spend a long time arguing about this sort of issue.  But I won't do that here.

What I'm intrigued by at the moment is the extent of  our imaginative resistance to scenarios  which violate the dictates of what we take to be morality.    I gave the example of the show of being invited to imagine that its a morally good thing to kill a perfectly innocent child in cold blood.   I think we experience a great deal of imaginative resistance to any such scenario.   During the show I was taking the line that that's because our in tact moral sense is part of the "frame" relative to which we  (morally) evaluate imagined scenarios.   If we are asked to alter the very content of what we take to be  morality,  we don't really have any place to stand when it comes to morally evaluating the proffered scenario.  Part of the point of imagined worlds, on this way of thinking about things, is to provide imagined experiments in living on which to exercise the moral sense. 

But on further reflection while I think there is something to this line,  I now think that  there is less to it than I first thought.    First of all,  I'm a pretty thoroughgoing relativist about morality.   And I think there is a certain plasticity to our moral sense.   The moral sense is relentlessly pushed and pull, figured and reconfigured by all sorts of things.   I suspect that the imagination plays an important role in reconfiguring our moral sense.  We  tell ourselves stories that enable us to gain imaginative acquaintance, for the first time, with  the common humanity of those with whom we have been at odds.  We tell ourselves stories that show us how much our own moral fortunes depend on  moral luck.   It's not to hard to imagine, for example,  a story about an ordinary German, whose character differs little from our own,  becoming,  during the Nazi period,  one of Hitler's willing executioners by a series of small steps that we ourselves might have taken in the same circumstances.   

If fiction has the power to challenge and reconfigure  our moral sense through invitations to  re-imagine the  moral order,  does it follow that the we don't, after all,  imaginatively resist what goes against our own current standards of morality?   I think we can still say that the answer to this last question is no.  But I also think one shouldn't conclude from that fact that, therefore,  anything goes with respect to imagining alternative moral frameworks.  We don't allow another to simply   "stipulate away"  the contents of our current moral sense in the same way that we do allow another to stipulate away  the contents of our current best science or our current understanding of the history of the universe.   

It's not exactly puzzling why this should be.  Our moral sense is deeply intertwined with our concrete conceptions of what a life should be, how a society should be ordered.   To re-imagine the moral order is to re-imagine not just  morally indifferent matters of fact, but the very foundations of our lives.   We cannot simply stipulate those foundations away without also stipulating away  the lived and felt basis of our moral sense.  To imagine away the wrongness of killing a child, is either to  imagine away  that which leads us to view  children as  innocent or to imagine away the moral significance of innocence.  How do  we do either of those things without entirely reconfiguring the very idea of childhood?  Someone who invites me to stipulate away either the innocence of children or the moral significance of that innocence has asked me to do  something I don't quite know how to do.   I don't immediately know what kind of world I am being invited into when I am invited to imagine such a world.   True,  I don't know how warp drive is supposed to work either.  But I know that a world in which there is warp drive is a world in which spaceships can get from place to place faster than light can.

To be sure,  there are many works of fiction that are not "aimed"  at us or at people with moral senses exactly like our own.   Think of fiction aimed at the members of cultures radically unlike our own in times radically unlike our own. What are we to do when we encounter such works?  Might not such a work offer me a way into an alien moral order?    Perhaps there are times and cultures  in which children are considered the mere property of their parents rather  than  vessels of moral innocence to whom nurture and protection are morally due. Perhaps richly constructed scenarios of such world can provide me the wherewithal to do what I cannot do by the power of mere stipulation.

Suppose that so.   How should we,  here and now,  regard invitations to imagine issued from such cultural milieus?   Two different sorts of responses seem available.     We might simply read works which issue such invitations  by using  our own current normative lights as our guide.  That's, I suspect, is mostly what we, in fact, do when faced with such fiction.   But we can also try to imaginatively project ourselves into that  different moral order.  The former is easy.  The latter is difficult, but still perhaps psychologically possible.   

Whether the latter is morally permissible is another question.  Even if it is psychologically possible, should  I  permit myself to put on the moral sense of a  racist, sexist, imperialist  milieu in order that I am able to achieve  -- what exactly?  Fuller appreciation of a morally repugnent work that glorifies  empire, or the subjection of women or the  enslavement of peoples of color? 

My gut instinct is to say no.  On the other hand,    it seems right that I should  permit myself to be "morally stretched"  by a work that challenges me, say, to expand my compassion beyond my own class and kind   What's the big difference? Why should I resist the one but  go along with the other?

One might answer that the one promises moral improvement, moral improvement by my own lights, while the other does not.  But might I not be improved in a different way by projecting myself into the moral universe of the jerk?    For example, if  I want to speak with and perhaps persuade the sexist, imperialist, racist jerk to abandon his jerky ways, might it not be useful for me to gain  full imaginative acquaintance with the world as that jerk sees it, might it not even be morally mandatory to equip myself as best as possible to deal with the jerk?   It would be one thing, I suppose, if the invitation to imagine had the power to permanently reconfigure my moral sense, but if I think I am immune to such reconfiguration, then what?

We’re All Crazy (Prelude to Tuesday’s show “Art and the Suspension of Disbelief”/follow-up to John’s most recent blog)

posted by Neil Van Leeuwen

Have you ever watched a foreign film without subtitles in a language you don’t speak ? You probably didn’t watch the whole thing, because—no matter how worked up the actors got—you didn’t follow it and they’re just actors anyway. Contrast that feeling of lack of interest with the intense feeling of engagement you get watching your favorite film. For me that would be American Beauty or The Godfather, Part I. Let’s call the first kind of feeling the this-is-lame feeling and the second the this-is-awesome feeling.

Here’s the puzzle I want to raise, which I think is the same as the one John was getting at in his most recent blog. It seems like—rational creatures that we are—we should be having the this-is-lame experience for any fictional work or drama that we take in. After all, we know that the events depicted aren’t real; all that’s real is a bunch of people making noise and playing with props on stage or in front of a camera. We know this. Worse yet, there might only be words or flickering images on the screen, with the authors or actors long dead. How and why is it that a bunch of fakers manage to give us the this-is-awesome experience? People are normally committed not to take fakers seriously.

Consider the magnitude of this puzzle! Society spends billions of dollars and who-knows-how-many hours on movies, novels, video games, plays, and TV shows. Why so much expenditure for so much Unreality? You may explain the expenditure by saying fictional drama gives pleasure. But that just pushes the question back. Why do we enjoy certain, but not other, forms of Unreality so much?

If you like evolutionary psychology—as I do in some moods—you could put the puzzle like this. How on earth did the disposition to take pleasure in stories we know aren’t true evolve? Isn’t spending time on such stories just wasting valuable time that could be spent surviving and reproducing? We can make sense of people’s enjoyment of true stories from an evolutionary perspective, because a propensity to enjoy true stories might get us to listen in ways that produce knowledge (which could ultimately be used to help us survive and reproduce). But how do we make sense of our enjoyment of stories we know aren’t actual? Why wasn’t this propensity weeded out by natural selection?

I’m not going to solve this mystery here. My purpose is rather to quicken our sense of the mystery; fiction is so common that we take enjoyment of it for granted, but we shouldn’t. In keeping with this purpose, I want to take a few paragraphs to shoot down two rather tempting approaches to solving the mystery and thereby show that it’s still a pretty big mystery after all.

First, a lot of people think taking in fiction brings learning and knowledge. (I actually heard my Dad say this recently. Sorry, Dad.) Fiction doesn’t teach us facts about the actual world, so the story goes, but experiencing fictional works exercises our ability to think about possible situations that might arise. We rehearse in our minds what might happen in certain situations and learn how to respond. Thus, to complete the story, fiction equips us for life.

This solution is bunk. Socrates pretty much already demolished it in Plato’s Ion. Ion, a Homeric rhapsode, argues in that dialogue that studying Homer helps people become better generals, warriors, deliberators, horsemen, and the like. Socrates makes the point in response that if you actually consider the relevant passages from Homer on warfare and such, you see that they’re totally unhelpful for actual situations. Any real general that fought like a Homeric general would get wiped. The fictional events are stylized and unrealistic enough so as to be useless for purposes of generating applicable knowledge. But Homer is one of the greatest dramatists in history at generating the this-is-awesome feeling. So whatever it is in fiction that generates the this-is-awesome feeling, it can’t be generation of useful knowledge about how to act in “possible situations.” The mystery remains.

Here’s the second attempted solution. We have a lot of emotional centers in the brain—amygdala, hypothalamus, etc.—that respond to stimuli in a way that’s largely independent of higher cortical processing. If someone throws a rubber snake at you, you could well feel fear even if you know the snake isn’t real. If you add that going through emotional experiences often leaves us feeling good whenever we come out well in the end, then maybe we could explain why fiction gives us the this-is-awesome feeling as follows: the actions and events depicted in fictional drama stimulate the emotions without the participation of higher cortical processing or higher belief systems, leaving us with an emotional this-is-awesome experience despite our not believing in the events. The idea is that lack of belief in the reality of the story doesn’t matter as long as the images or events depicted are such as to get the emotions going—spark the emotional systems. Reason doesn’t matter for fictional enjoyment. (Book X of Plato’s Republic actually gives a picture of fictional enjoyment that looks something like this.)

But this “solution” doesn’t work either. Remember the experience of the foreign film without subtitles—the this-is-lame feeling. There were probably many emotionally charged scenes depicted in the film—kung fu fights or angry arguments to excite the emotional centers in the brain—but the overall experience was still lame. The reason it was lame was that a higher-level understanding of the events was missing. (Or, if you did have the this-is-awesome feeling at the kung fu film, it was probably because you could follow the plot despite not knowing the language.) So some sort of higher reasoning is needed to get the this-is-awesome feeling after all. Thrills of the rubber snake variety won’t keep us in our seats for two hours. Mere images to excite the emotional centers aren’t sufficient to explain the this-is-awesome feeling of good fictional drama. So the second attempted solution doesn’t work. The mystery remains.

Will the show on Tuesday solve the mystery? I think John, Ken, and Steven (our guest) will make a good crack at it. But it’s tough. We might never figure out the real solution (I actually think the real solution, whatever it is, would involve revising and somehow combining the two solutions mentioned here). But it’s something to think about next time you’re driving to Blockbuster to drop another four bucks to see moving pictures of guys in tight pants. Who knows? Maybe your sense of the mystery will heighten the enjoyment even more.

Beauty: Skin-Deep, in the Eye of the Beholder and Valuable?

by  Alexander Nehamas

Let me make some dogmatic remarks about beauty and subjectivity.  We can discuss them in more detail on the air tomorrow.

There is such a thing as beauty that is only skin-deep.  It is the beauty of appearance, what we call "looking good."  It has little to do with personality, character, wit or morality, and that is because anything that applies to how things look is not a reliable guide to many of their other qualities. 

The beauty of appearance -- what we can judge, say, by looking at a photograph of a face -- is something that psychologists have been investigating a lot recently.  In general, they show people photographs of faces and ask them to rank them in terms of their beauty.  Since these are digital photographs, it is possible to combine them into composite photographs.  What seems to be the case is (1) the larger the composite photograph (the more features of individual faces it combines) the more people are likely to consider it beautiful and (2) there is remarkable agreement, both within and between different cultures, about which faces are more beautiful than which.

Several hypotheses have been offered to account for these phenomena, and it seems agreed that they have something to do with the likelihood of reproductive success.  The more features a face combines, the more average it is.  Now it is very counterintuitive to say that the average is what strikes us as beautiful (since the people or works of art we find beautiful usually stand out against their background), but it turns out that average members of groups are less likely to be subject to external evolutionary pressures and more likely to be healthy and survive in the long run.  (That may suggest that even beauty that is skin-deep shows something about the nature of the person it characterizes.)

But the fact that there is significant agreement about such judgements (as well as the fact that it is explained in terms of evolutionary success) suggests, in turn, that BEAUTY THAT IS ONLY SKIN-DEEP IS NOT SIMPLY IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER.

Now, not only are these psychological results counterintuitive -- they also contradict another aspect of everyday experience.  Most people in the known universe have, at some time or other, loved someone and most people in the known universe have, at some time or other, been loved by someone, though that is not always, unfortunately, the same person.  But the point is (here I am being very dogmatic) that it is impossible to love someone or something that you do not find beautiful.  And so, since most people in the world are not, by the evolutionary standards above (or even by the standards applicable to supermodels, male and female) beautiful, either most people in the world are deceived all the time or there is more to beauty, so to speak, than meets the eye.

We must be careful here, for the easy way out is to say that there is such a thing as "inner" or "psychological" beauty, to be contrasted with the beauty of appearance.  But that is only easy, and nothing else -- in particular, it is not true.  For even if you love someone on account of their character or wit or whatever, these features will manifest themselves in the appearance of the person in question: you will literally perceive them in their face, their posture, their voice and their behavior.  That is, a person you love will not appear to you as they do to others who don't love them or as they appear to you when you are indifferent to them.

Such beauty is, unlike good looks of the sort psychologists investigate, very controversial, which is why we keep asking ourselves what our friends see in the people they love, but whom we can't stand. The sense in which there is more to beauty than meets the eye is not that it is "inner," but that it is not likely to meet many eyes.  That is, beauty, generally considered, is a product of love and not, in general, its antecent cause.  That's what locates it in the eye of the beholder.   BUT BEAUTY THAT IS IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER IS NO LONGER ONLY SKIN-DEEP.

It is this beauty that I find philosophically interesting and important.  It applies equally to people and things, particularly works of art.  It certainly is valuable, although I am not sure its value is intrinsic, as Ken suggests (it may be -- I really am not sure).  But its value, along with the value of all the "aesthetic" features that are associated with it, is very different from the moral values that seem to have acquired a monopoly over human life in philosophy and public discourse.   Moral values, broadly speaking, depend on the similarities and connections that require us to treat each other impartially, fairly and equally.  The values associated with beauty, by contrast, depend on the differences between various human beings and give preference to individuality, autonomy and personal style.

More tomorrow.