humour and horror, comedy and tragedy

Thanks for your thoughts about the humour and horror stuff. First off, you ask if I actually like and watch horror much. I think part of my growing fascination with horror is that it's something I never really indulged in much, but not because I didn't have a taste for it, but rather because I didn't have the stomach for it. As a kid and teenager I knew I couldn't handle spicy food, and it was only in my mid-twenties that I slowly discovered that I could now handle spicy food and really enjoy it. Similarly, what little horror I saw as a kid deeply traumatized me and gave me nightmares, and even now I get really spooked by effective horror (my girlfriend takes much amusement at my getting the willies). But, like with spicy food, my palate's gotten duller, so I can handle the stuff without too much trauma, so I've started to explore more. And part of what fascinates me about this question is precisely the fact that I seem to be so deeply affected by horror. What is it about this stuff that troubles me so much?

I think another thing that fascinates me about the topic is simply that I'm fascinated by and enjoy humour and also find it dangerously precarious. It's a very thin line between humour and creepy. It's one of the things I admire about black humour as well as authors as diverse as Chekhov and Roald Dahl: they leave you unsure whether you ought to laugh, and that in itself is quite effective.

I actually do remember that scene you mention from Mulholland Drive and remember finding it tremendously effective. I think part of what makes it work is that the guy himself is so bizarre (such a Lynch character) and yet he's clearly very nervous and the way he tells the story builds up incredible tension. And this being a Lynch film, you haven't the least idea what's going to happen when we look around the corner. But what we see is just a tacky-looking beast and that instantly deflates the tension. A friend of mine who's a real horror connoisseur told me about a complaint that Stephen King had about the difficulty of building suspense in horror: the suspense is easy, but actually showing the monster is almost inevitably a let-down. You show the audience a thirty-foot tall man-eating slug and the audience says, "oh, I was kind of expecting a three-hundred-foot tall man-eating slug." The scene in Mulholland Drive seems deliberately to play on this, to say, "okay, whatever you were expecting back there, it's better than what I could show you, so let's just play up the humour instead."

It also raises a further question: Lynch films aren't generally classified as "horror," but I'd say there's certainly an element of horror in them, or at least the uncanny, which is to horror what suspense is to mysteries.

I think you're right that most horror almost inevitably teeters on the edge of humour. Both deal with the grotesque, and especially for an audience that knows it's dealing with fiction, and a postmodern audience most especially, it's hard to do the grotesque without devolving into giggles. But it is possible. And usually humour and horror are easy to distinguish, especially when it's not in fiction but in real life.

Anyway, a few thoughts about comedy and tragedy in the Symposium. I wonder if I can tie this back into some of the stuff I said about Eric Havelock. The theatre was traditionally one of the main repositories of Greek wisdom: both Plato and Aristotle quote the tragic poets almost as much as they quote Aristotle when they want to illustrate a point. In that sense, Platonic philosophy is in competition with theatre as much as it is with the rhetoric of the sophists for the claim to being the dominant mode of thought and discourse in Ancient Greece. And just as a dialogue like the Phaedrus tries to demonstrate philosophy's superiority over rhetoric by showing how Socrates is a better rhetoritician than the sophists, the Symposium seems to want to demonstrate that philosophy offers better drama than the dramatists. Fitting, then, that Alcibiades should enter at the end and declare Socrates to be the champion. And at a party celebrating Agathon, too--cheeky!

As for why the dialogue is predominantly comic rather than tragic, I wonder if that's because Platonic philosophy is itself more comic than tragic, or at least it's rational and optimistic where tragedy emphasizes irrationality and pessimism. With the blessings of philosophy, nothing that befell the House of Atreus should have happened. Nor Oedipus, nor Medea, etc. Nietzsche's main complaint about Socrates in The Birth of Tragedy is that he brings a sunny rationality onto the Greek stage, thereby killing the--for Nietzsche--much more profound tragic yet cheerful spirit of pre-Socratic Greece.

I worry all these thoughts are already obvious to you. Though I suppose there are worse things to do than state the obvious. Like state the misleading or patently false.

a genealogical myth of philosophy

I read something by my supervisor that struck me as problematic, but I can't quite put my finger on what I find wrong with it, so it might not be a bad idea to air some of the grievances.

He begins the paper with a Heidegger-inspired "genealogical myth of philosophy." Heidegger-inspired in the sense that it draws on Heidegger's distinction between ontic sciences, regional ontologies, and fundamental ontology. The idea is that there are various ontic sciences that go about interrogating particular kinds of beings: living beings in the case of biology, rocks in the case of geology, and so on. We're driven to interrogate entities because we want to understand their nature better: we want to know what kinds of entities there are. These ontic sciences all operate within a particular framework, a set of assumptions about what questions there are, how we should go about asking them, what basis of knowledge we all agree on, and so on. In Kuhnian terms, normal science operates within a paradigm. Call this paradigm a regional ontology. Occasionally, problems will arise that will make people start questioning the regional ontology. That's largely what philosophers do: philosophers of science aren't doing science but are doing regional ontology, where they question the framework within which the ontic science takes place. The Heideggerian step is then to ask what we're presupposing in doing our regional ontologies. This question then leads us back to fundamental ontology and Heidegger's beloved Question of Being.

Now, there are a few things that trouble me about this. Perhaps the central concern is that he calls this a "genealogical myth" because obviously it's not meant to be a rigorous description of how knowledge or science or philosophy or inquiry actually work, but rather a framework for thinking about it. A regional ontology for philosophy, if you will. But I can't help but think it's a bit sloppy and lazy to introduce something while granting it's far from rigorous, but then move on to other things without returning to question its assumptions. And my suspicion isn't just that it's drawing neat lines where things are far messier, but that it actually is a bad myth, it distorts matters in a number of important ways. Though I'm not sure I'm quite succeeding in putting my finger on how.

One simple objection is just that lines are far fuzzier than this myth suggests, though I suspect the use of "myth" was meant to grant that point. It can only have bite if I can show that these fuzzy lines are too fuzzy to make the distinctions worth drawing. But, for instance, it's not like scientists never question their paradigms. "What is life?" is as much a biological question as a philosophical one. And indeed, many of the people working in the "regional ontologies" of philosophy of biology or philosophy of physics are scientists first and foremost rather than philosophers. My uncle, a chemistry professor, once remarked to me that philosophers tend to come up with very simplistic notions of what it means to do science because they've never really done it themselves, and it takes many years of working in the sciences to really have a clear notion of what goes on in the sciences.

Not just do I think the hierarchical distinctions are problematic, I also think that a three-tiered hierarchy groups together things that don't really belong together. Mulhall talks about different regional ontologies, giving the philosophy of religion and the philosophy of science as two examples. But are they really the same sorts of things, and more important, are science and religion really two commensurable "ontic sciences"? The myth I gave above--recapitulating his own--gives a scientific example, where it's easier to operate within the simple assumption that scientists are in the business of accumulating knowledge and that this accumulation can then be interrupted by questioning the overall framework. I'm not sure the same accumulation of knowledge occurs in any non-scientific field. What's the "ontic science" of religion in the business of doing? Science isn't one way of answering our curiosity about the world; it's the way of doing so. My interest in art or religion isn't provoked by a question of "what sorts of entities are there in the world?" but by entirely different kinds of question altogether.

This problem become more acute when we consider various ontic sciences deal with different kinds of entities, so that regional ontologies are asking the question of what it means for something to be an entity of that nature. He writes that philosophy of science asks what it is for something to be material, philosophy of mind asks what it is for something to be mental, philosophy of religion for something to be divine, and so on. That strikes me as bizarre on a number of levels. Firstly, I haven't done much philosophy of science, but I've done enough to know that "what is it for something to be material?" isn't a question they ask. That's a question for the metaphysicians. And also, it further reinforces this suggestion that the material, the mental, and the divine are just three different kinds of entities, which sounds all right if you're Descartes, but sounds very odd to a more contemporary ear. It takes some unnecessary reification and grouping together of apples and oranges to insist that there are divine or aesthetic entities just like there are material entities.

I also think this genealogical myth would be inimical to Wittgenstein, who's one of Mulhall's other great heroes. Wittgenstein explicitly rejects the notion of a "second-order philosophy," which is what fundamental ontology sounds like on this picture. And he was also very clear that he wasn't doing anything connected to science. Nor did he take himself to be interrogating entities. This might be Heidegger's genealogical myth of philosophy, but I don't know how much we can extend it beyond Heidegger.

Anyway, I don't know if any of this sounds like sound criticism to you. I don't feel I've quite put my finger on what troubles me about this genealogical myth, but I do find it problematic.

Phaedrus

Of the two short texts I'm supposed to be looking at (or long since finished looking at actually) that Blanchot wrote about Sade, one of them is called 'the madness of Sade', and on the last page of the essay he writes "[Sade's] demon was not the demon of lubricity. It is more dangerous than that. It is Socrates' demon, which Socrates always resisted and Plato would have preferred not to give into: it is the madness of writing, a movement that is infinite, interminable, incessant." There's another half a page, and then a quote from Sade explaining that, however much it leads men to shiver, the philosopher must be prepared to say everything... I'm not doing a very good job of translating, but you get the point of that last statement. As far as the demon of writing and comparisons between Socrates and Sade, before I can deal with that, I suppose I should say one or two things about Phaedrus.
Since last I wrote, I've read through the Phaedrus... I'm not sure whether I had read it before and forgotten most of it, or simply read enough about it second-hand that large sections of the argument were familiar. The most valuable thing in there might be the origin of crickets... those who were so overwhelmed when music appeared that they could no longer interest themselves in food or sleep or anything else but playing music - they would have starved to death if the gods hadn't taken pity on them and turned them into crickets, able to make music with their legs and live without sustenance. Anyway, the dialogue certainly does accord well with what you said about the platonic Socrates' relation to writing, and makes my previous position hard to defend (which doesn't mean I won't try...). Yes, as you said, Plato's Socrates distrusts writing because a written text can't defend itself. He says near the end of the dialogue that writing is a frivolous pursuit, and the only writers who can be called wise are those who are able to defend his statements when challenged and demonstrate the inferiority of his writings out of his own mouth - they must be writing as a pastime and not imagine that writing is a serious pursuit. He has nothing but contempt for those who place great value in their literary works on whose phrases they spend hours "twisting them this way and that, pasting them together and pulling them apart". There is, however, something very weird about the Egyptian myth he gives as the origin of writing... namely that it is a god who comes down and delivers writing, while it is a man who criticizes the gift this god has given him, bringing up all the objections that Socrates will seem to subscribe to afterward, saying "if men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls, they will cease to exercise memory because they will rely on that which is written, etc." Don't get me wrong, I don't claim to know what this detail means or whether it means anything, but Socrates is generally pious, and objects to stories in which gods behave in an immoral or unfitting manner. It should also be pointed out that earlier in the dialogue, Socrates delivers a long lecture demonstrating that love is a bad thing, totally convincing Phaedrus, before he turns around, admits that he didn't mean a word of it and sets about proving the opposite. Why should we have faith in what Socrates is saying now? Particularly considering we are taking in the speech in written form, knowing that this is not simply a recording of a real dialogue that was written down after the fact, but that we are reading something which was carefully composed in writing. I realize that these are the sorts of things that us literature people quibble about, but I do think they are serious objections, precisely because Plato cannot have been unaware of this contradiction as he wrote. It should also be noted that in this dialogue it is stated with particular clarity that the art or knack of persuading people is a necessary prerequisite to teaching or philosophizing - sophistry is here neither useless or harmful, except that it must be subordinated to a higher end... sophistry is jumbled together with the composition of poetry, whether written or oral, and with every imaginable written form, including even the writing of laws. What Socrates seems to me to be speaking against is much less writing than a certain purely passive relation to writing or to the words or teaching of others. There is here a doctrine of self-reliance, a warning against epigones, and a warning against learning the conclusions that other people have come to through their though and their lives rather than looking carefully at the process by which those conclusions were reached. Just as texts shall not be used in place of memory, they shall not be used in place of thought. I also think it is noteworthy that the Symposium, being the most closely related text, centered around the same topic and keeping Phaedrus as a central character, begins with a follower of Plato acting in a spirit directly contrary to Plato - while the slavish devotion of Apollodorus (and at the end Aristodemus, who, like a dog is sleeping in the corner, but perks up when his master is about to leave and follows him out) while this devotion might be a sign merely of Socrates ability to elicit love, of being the truly erotic individual, it must be noted that Socrates always approaches the people he would speak with in what might appear as a deferent manner, respectfully telling him he is sure they would know better and he would like them to explain things to him. In the Symposium in particular, though he'll come out with some belated cutting remarks about Agathon's speech, Socrates is pure charma dn seduction, drawing men toward the truth. Apollodorus walks around abusing everyone he meets - even when they want to ask him about his favorite topic (Socrates), he still treats them abrasively. A follower necessarily betrays the thought of his teacher. It is also noteworthy how often in Plato's dialogues it is the follower of a school that Socrates argues with rather than the founder. Gorgias does very little talking in Gorgias - even in Phaedrus, Phaedrus is representing Lysias, whose speech he so admired. Though Socrates does undermine Protagorus, he treats him relatively leniently, finding a point of agreement that preserves a part of what Protagorus initially claimed. Part of what Socrates seems to attack is often the credulousness of a follower... though of course presumption and the belief that one knows more than one really does is clearly the more important target. Socrates' true followers went off and started schools of their own. Anyway, I'm drifting off subject.
The madness of writing, the willingness to say anything. Sade and Socrates were both silent because they couldn't be quiet, weren't willing to be quiet, couldn't imagine life without continuing there eternal process of negation. But that isn't the main link between them. Sade complained that if you killed a man, his suffering was soon over, the pleasure was fleeting. Every crime was flawed and imperfect, fleeting and unsatisfying. Unlike Socrates, Sade did feel that increasing these small pleasures in quantity and diversity was a worthwhile pastime, but his main interest in all of his writings is very clearly the pursuit of the ideal form of Crime (and he calls the pursuit of this ideal form philosophy). Sade's virtuous characters are punished, but so are his evil characters... the only difference is that the evil characters don't mind their punishment, as long as they are being imprisoned, tortured or killed in pursuit of Disorder and Crime. In order to commit crimes on the level of the Absolute, it is necessary for Sade's most important crimes to be virtual - unlike a theft, a rape, a murder or any ordinary act of perversity, a book that corrupts its reader (Sade, like Socrates had a great deal of faith in a speaker, teacher or statesman's ability to have a real moral effect on his audience), a book that corrupts is a crime that continues taking effect long after the death of its author. While a person can only be killed once, the number of people a book can corrupt is limitless - here we are moving away from any attempt to link Sade to Socrates, the search for ideal forms really is the one small point of intersection - well, that and the sense of compulsion, the unity of life and thought, philosophy experienced as holy quest and the figure of the philosopher as the highest form humanity could aspire to. Blanchot most often links Sade to Hegel, the links to Nietzsche are so numerous and obvious people often seem to embarrassed to bring them up except in passing - Sade could be used as a starting point to teach stoicism or Epicurianism as well. Learning philosophy with the Marquis de Sade would be a fun class to teach...