I think you once asked me whether people were working on Camus... lately there have been a series of talks on Camus at NYU by fairly important people, so I guess things are being done. I guess I just wasn't paying attention - plus there are my own prejudices, which lead me to assume that there isn't that much to say about him. I'm thinking of this right now because I'm supposed to be preparing to teach Candide, and I've always associated Voltaire, and particularly Candide with Camus, and particularly the Stranger. They're both short accessible books that you have to read in high school English classes, they're both among the very first things that are given to French students to read in the original because of the lucid, straightforward prose. They're both entertaining, and in a sense, because they're fun, quick reads, because they're lucid with nothing apparently mysterious about them, I tend to think of them as the sort of thing you read for fun and not the sorts of things you work on. I say this, and at the same time, I would probably scoff hearing it said by someone else, because I do think that any good literature should be enjoyable, and I guess almost anything worth reading is worth discussing... normally I'm more likely to hold forth on pop music or TV shows than a book that I breeze through in an afternoon. But then, I generally spend too much time talking about theoretical texts and not enough on straight literature.
For me, there's enough proof that Candide should be taken seriously in the fact that it pops to mind from time to time in relation to other things and almost always has. In the path to clear, I even slipped the last line of Candide into casual dialogue - "we must cultivate our garden" is one of the best last lines of any book I've ever read (and I admire good endings more than I do good openings... endings aren't done well nearly as often. Of course, it is a great last line in part because it is inseparable from everything that came before. It succinctly comments the rest of the book, and it isn't possible to separate the literal from the figurative meaning. It seems more straightforward than it is, and I'm always surprised to find other people can understand it differently than I do. It's intimately linked to the question posed shortly before, namely is it worse to be raped, tortured, kidnapped, press ganged and sold into slavery, or to be bored at ease in the estate we've acquired? Last week I was teaching St. Augustine's confessions - which I should do an entry on - and that question of which is worse makes me think of a small part of St. Augustine's discussion of memory (which takes a lot from the Meno), where St. AUgustine briefly considers why it can be pleasurable to remember unpleasant, or even horrible experiences, and why it can be sad to remember the happy ones. Experiences of atrocities are, nevertheless, experiences, movement, life. To suffer is to live - not in the sense that life is only suffering, but in the sense that suffering, like joy, gives content to life, shapes us, and the experience of suffering becomes part of who we are. To want to undo past suffering is to want to become someone different. While present and future suffering is to be avoided, past suffering becomes precious because it belongs uniquely to us. I don't know if Voltaire would necessarily sign his name to what I'm saying, but there is a strong ambivalence about all the atrocities viewed in retrospect. When saying we must cultivate our garden, Voltaire seems to me to be suggesting not so much that quietism should be embraced and we should mind our own business (the garden is the prime image of private space, and in the book there is mention of political strife and executions going on in Constantinople which Candide and his friends are willfully ignoring), but rather that whether we recognize it or not, fulfillment comes from remaining occupied, from doing something, and that a lack of action or experience will always be intolerable. We are always least happy when instead of going about life we are idle enough to ask ourselves whether we are happy or not. I realize this is a comment which, I am aware is problematic both in real life and in relation to Candide, a book in which the protagonist is obsessively asking both himself and others whether they are happy and whether the world is well ordered - a book in which slavery, war and oppression, though comically exaggerated are shown in the worst possible light. Nevertheless, what makes the book charming is precisely the ambivalence with which irrational, dangerous and contemptible actions may parody specific ideas, institutions and activities, but also exist without any contrasting or alternative behavior. Atrocities and inhumanities are very real and horrible, but there's a weird way in which they are almost... and not many people would agree with me I think... they're almost lovable as well. Not that rape and murder and mutilation are endearing, but the inevitability of people behaving badly - the fact that even Candide is implicated (stabbing a priest, a jew and the brother of his lover, selling his future brother-in-law back into slavery to get him out of the way so he can marry a woman he is no longer in love with for no personal profit). Voltaire seems ambivalent about free will. He's parodying Leibniz, but he doesn't really seem capable of whole-heartedly disagreeing with Leibniz. Though even Pangloss is said to no longer really believe what he maintains (that this is the best of worlds), and though Candide seems somewhat convinced in the end that his own optimism has been refuted by experience, the simple fact that the absence of atrocities is almost more unbearable than the atrocities themselves at the end, and that the greatest joy always comes from talking about horrible experiences, all seems to suggest that maybe he was always right.
I once read about half of the Theodicee, and a part of Monadology, and I always kind of assumed that Voltaire must have only had a second hand account of what Leibniz had written... though now I wonder. I just read - which I hadn't realized before - that Voltaire had himself earlier been a philosophical optimist, and the short article I read was by someone who seemed to recognize the ambivalence in Candide, and to want to show that both during and after the writing of Candide, Voltaire didn't fully move into the opposite camp (and that he was a surprisingly happy old man - not that this fact is particularly relevant). When Leibniz speaks of the best possible universe, he gives a clear definition of 'best'... and this is why he will be embraced by Deleuze, and why I connected him to Glissant as an opposite pole to a Segalen steeped in Schopenhauer (all this would take a lot more explanation) - 'best' for Leibniz does not mean leading to the most joy or least suffering, but containing the greatest possible diversity. This in no way means that all is as it should be here and now, that nothing can or should be changed or that everything is ordered for us to enjoy our lives, but rather that the universe is ordered so as to lead to the maximum number of events that might or will come about.
But I'm bumping up against another subject that I've written about in the past and don't feel like getting into here. Suffice to say, there is a moment in Candide where a character is asked whether he believes people always acted as badly as they currently do. The answer he gives is that hawks have always and everywhere preyed on pigeons if they could. Their nature doesn't change. Candide kind of lamely protests that it is different with people because of free will. Voltaire seems to be mocking Rousseau's romantic notion of a state of nature - and of course the savage tribes that are presented in Candide are far from idyllic innocents, they come very close to eating Candide and his friend and only let him off when they discover he's killed a priest. There's a belief that we should fight for change, but that things will always inevitably be chaotic, messy and unpleasant.
When I set out to write my own novel, I thought often of Candide, and realized I was more or less writing the same character.
Sunday, April 11, 2010
Monday, March 22, 2010
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.
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.
Saturday, March 20, 2010
Short
I feel like I should have read your last post slowly and carefully, but in case I don't manage to do that any time soon, I'll just jot down the first couple of things that came to mind while reading it. First a question - do you actually like horror? do you ever watch the films or read the books? One of the wonderful horror/ humor moments that comes to mind when thinking of the connection between the two (and I think horror movies that aren't on some level supposed to be comedies are rather an exception - Brain dead, dead snow, evil dead, Sean of the dead - they're all comedies), but the first creepy comic thing that comes to mind that works incredibly well is the scene from Mulholland Drive in which some guy comes into a fast food restaurant with a silly name - binkie's or something, and asks to see the manager... he wants to look out back because he saw something horrible in a dream, some sort of man/ creature that he would never want to see again. It's haunting him and he wants to reassure himself it isn't there. The manager is okay with this, and opens up the back and brings him out - it's broad day light in a safe suburban setting. The creature is there and appears to devour the guy. Both the comedy and the horror (which are largely dependent on timing and decor and probably don't come through in my description) are largely dependent on the absolute normality of the setting. The people, the surroundings, the outfits, everything is familiar and ought to instill confidence and a sense of security. The world is governed by laws which work off a basic exchange - a certain amount of security for a certain amount of freedom. When those laws are violated, the comic can result from the new found freedom, while horror results from the loss of security. Clearly this doesn't work for all humor... at least not the freedom idea, I don't think. But it is one interesting link. Funny the role murder plays in both... lack of restraint, exaggeration. Think of the scene at the end of Kill Bill part one when for what seems like forever the main character hacks through dozens of people with blood spattering in all directions - I laughed uncontrollably the first time I saw it. The violence was cartoonish because it was without consequence, because the people dying were not real people whose irrevocable loss I was aware of. A person not initially realizing they've lost a limb, or holding on to their own severed hand, once again potentially comic or horrifying, according to whether there are consequences, according to whether loss is internalized and permanent.
I don't think I've added much to what you said - it's an interesting topic. There's the connection between shrieks of laughter and screams of horror - waiting expectantly for something horrible or something comic to happen - audience members bracing themselves and making themselves consequently more susceptible to the desired effects (expecting something unexpected), though that's touching on cheap comedy and bad horror - I've never been much for the giddy variety of either.
In real life, genuinely horrible situations, humor often becomes a necessary defense... in my case at least, when I laugh at something upsetting, it is usually linked precisely to the liberation I mentioned before, a shift of perspective and a denial of importance or consequence to things that before something bad happened I might have seen as serious or even momentous. I have had moments where I suddenly had a profound sense that nothing could happen that was worse than death, and death, which is inevitable, isn't really that horrible... at moments like that, there is only freedom and real insecurity is impossible - the comic dominates absolutely.
I don't think I've added much to what you said - it's an interesting topic. There's the connection between shrieks of laughter and screams of horror - waiting expectantly for something horrible or something comic to happen - audience members bracing themselves and making themselves consequently more susceptible to the desired effects (expecting something unexpected), though that's touching on cheap comedy and bad horror - I've never been much for the giddy variety of either.
In real life, genuinely horrible situations, humor often becomes a necessary defense... in my case at least, when I laugh at something upsetting, it is usually linked precisely to the liberation I mentioned before, a shift of perspective and a denial of importance or consequence to things that before something bad happened I might have seen as serious or even momentous. I have had moments where I suddenly had a profound sense that nothing could happen that was worse than death, and death, which is inevitable, isn't really that horrible... at moments like that, there is only freedom and real insecurity is impossible - the comic dominates absolutely.
humour and horror
Well, I've recently handed in a draft of a chapter on Wittgenstein and Heidegger that's been keeping me from focusing on much else besides for the past few weeks. I don't particularly feel like writing about it at the moment, but I'll need to revise it in the next month or so, so you may not end up being completely deprived of that pleasure. I'm also not going to comment on your last (now long ago) post because you sent me the paper it turned into, and I hope I'll find a chance to read it in the next couple of weeks.
Instead I'm going to talk a bit about humour and horror, which is the topic of a paper I'm working at revising right now. I was hoping I could make some changes and then send it off for publication, but as I find almost always happens when I'm revising something--either in academia or creative writing--I tend to just stare blankly for days, grow to hate myself, and then make a few minor fixes and tell myself that I'll make some real improvements on the next sweep through. I'm right at the beginning of that painful process right now, and I thought it might do myself a double favour to type some of the thoughts up here. First, it might help me organise my own thinking on the topic, and second, it might provoke a response in you that helps my own thinking. No pressure, though. I've hardly been doing that kind of service for you.
Anyway, here's the plot, in rough outline. There are various philosophical questions that come up with regard to humour, foremost being the question of what humour is. A search for a satisfactory theory of humour should presumably do two things for us: give us necessary and sufficient conditions that fix what sorts of things are humorous, and also give some sort of explanation of why these things are humorous, tell us what it is about them that provokes this particular response in us.
One of the more promising lines of attack on this front are so-called "incongruity theories" of humour, which define humour as connected in some way to the perception of incongruity. This claim needs refinement in a number of ways: obviously not everything that's incongruous is humorous, and not all humorous things seem to be necessarily incongruous (laughing at someone behaving in a way that's ridiculously typical of them finds humour not in the incongruity of the behaviour but precisely in how closely it fits that person's typical patterns of behaviour). The counter-example that motivates my paper is horror, which also seems to rely on perceptions of incongruity. But I don't want to take this discovery as evidence of just how ludicrously off-the-mark incongruity theories are, but rather take it as evidence of just how close humour and horror are.
Another point that humour and horror have in common is that they can be regarded in many ways as aesthetic phenomena, and be subjected to aesthetic judgment, but unlike most aesthetic phenomena, their success depends on immediate response. I can mull over a painting and declare on reflection that I think it has a marvellously subtle beauty to it, but if I mull over a joke and on reflection declare that it's funny, that's tantamount to saying the joke's failed. Same with horror: if it fails to scare us, it hasn't done its job.
That said, I think horror isn't really about fear anyway (the only other paper I've found on the comparison between humour and horror argues that horror is incongruity plus fear and that humour is incongruity minus the fear). Horror comes from a deeper sense of something being amiss in the universe, or more precisely, something being amiss in our normally stable sense of self. What's scary about zombies chasing us isn't simply the fear that we're going to die, but the fact that the dead have come to life and that people we knew are no longer people and are trying to kill us. The incongruity that's central to horror is an incongruity in our conception of the human: our sanity depends on there being a sharp line between the human and the inhuman, and horror blurs that line.
Another point worth remarking on with both humour and horror is that the incongruities they rely on require a certain aptness. Not just any incongruity is funny because some incongruities are simply weird. If I see three bananas lying on the sidewalk, that's neither humorous nor horrific, but it is incongruous. Humour relies on incongruous twists that strike us as slyly appropriate: jokes about lascivious priests work because, on one hand, priests are supposed to be celibate--hence the incongruity--but on the other hand, we recognise that, in fact, priests are often nothing of the sort. The incongruities in horror tend to rely on a deeply rooted sense of cosmic justice. The Birds, for instance, starts out with the two protagonists flirting in a dangerously cavalier way, with a love bird at the centre of their flirtation. Soon enough, they learn that birds aren't something to be trifled with, the implication being that neither is love. With both humour and horror, the aptness and the incongruity seem to derive from the discovery or recognition that the world is bound to upset our best-laid plans, that our rationality is limited, that we are finite beings. This characterisation might seem a bit grandiose for describing casual jokes and cheap horror flicks, but I think I can answer that by simply saying that they're superficial instances of deep phenomena.
One line of attempting to define humour would be to say that there's some characteristic of humour itself--to say that humour is an entity out there in the world--by which we can identify it and distinguish it from everything else. My counter-example to show that this can't work is black humour, because black humour--it seems to me--can be either humorous or horrific depending on how we look at it. You could say it's a humorous way of reflecting on horror, but there are also circumstances where the humour simply won't be taken up, and what one person might see as grimly comic another might see as simply horrific. (There's a nice story of Kafka reading the first chapter of The Trial to Max Brod, but being unable to finish because he was laughing so hard.)
More broadly speaking, it seems we can find pretty much anything humorous and pretty much anything horrific in the right frames of mind. (This is one sense in which humour and horror seem as much emotional phenomena as aesthetic phenomena). The point is, first of all, that pretty much anything can strike us as incongruous given the right frame of mind--language itself contains the incongruity of random marks corresponding to meanings--so whatever humour and horror are, they aren't things "out there" to be detected independent of our responses to them.
In prying them apart, I want to say it has something to do with the nature of play. Humour is a species of play, whereas horror isn't, or at least isn't straightforwardly so. What play is and how it works is tremendously complicated and intriguing and I don't have enough to say about it right now. But for the moment, take these as characteristics of play: (1) it involves a kind of distancing, or "as if" behaviour, where we don't take what we're playing at as fully seriously; (2) it's bounded in space and time: there's a kind of "play-ground" in which play is acceptable, but there are subtle rules or principles that govern how and where we can play; (3) play involves creatively developing on a theme, whether it's passing a ball toward scoring a goal or building on jokes. I'm sure I could think of other important characteristics. But the important thing for the moment is that humour involves the distancing aspect of play, which horror lacks. Under the aspect of humour, everything seems remote, and as a result, we feel safe. When the world is laughable, we can't be hurt, because under the aspect of play, important things can't be hurt. In the world of cartoons, Coyote can blow himself up as much as he likes but he won't actually be harmed.
In horror, by contrast, I'd suggest that the notion of precariousness of human identity that I wrote about earlier comes from the fact that nothing feels safe anymore. It's not just that there's a monster that's going to get us, but that the universe is fundamentally out of joint. Horror gives us a world in which play isn't possible.
Both of these responses are important, I claim, and both are related to the fact that the actual occupies a vanishingly small space within the realm of the possible. We tend to think of the way things are as fixed and necessary, but what both humour and horror reveal is that things could be radically otherwise. Depending on how we encounter this discovery, we can either have a sense of distance on the actual that makes it seem laughably trivial, or we can respond with a horrific sense of agoraphobia, realising that how things are is by no means safely established.
Shit, I really have to run, so I'm not going to be able to check over this or say anything about the Symposium--not sure I have much of any interest to say anyway--and also I haven't had a chance to think through the fact that some things are clearly funny that aren't horrific. Horror can sometimes be amusing, but aside from the case of black humour, humour is rarely horrific. I'm not quite sure why. Maybe it's because horror only plays on the precariousness of human identity, so there are vast swathes of humour that aren't susceptible to being viewed as horror.
Sorry this was so hasty and such a mess. Not promising for the paper I want to write.
Instead I'm going to talk a bit about humour and horror, which is the topic of a paper I'm working at revising right now. I was hoping I could make some changes and then send it off for publication, but as I find almost always happens when I'm revising something--either in academia or creative writing--I tend to just stare blankly for days, grow to hate myself, and then make a few minor fixes and tell myself that I'll make some real improvements on the next sweep through. I'm right at the beginning of that painful process right now, and I thought it might do myself a double favour to type some of the thoughts up here. First, it might help me organise my own thinking on the topic, and second, it might provoke a response in you that helps my own thinking. No pressure, though. I've hardly been doing that kind of service for you.
Anyway, here's the plot, in rough outline. There are various philosophical questions that come up with regard to humour, foremost being the question of what humour is. A search for a satisfactory theory of humour should presumably do two things for us: give us necessary and sufficient conditions that fix what sorts of things are humorous, and also give some sort of explanation of why these things are humorous, tell us what it is about them that provokes this particular response in us.
One of the more promising lines of attack on this front are so-called "incongruity theories" of humour, which define humour as connected in some way to the perception of incongruity. This claim needs refinement in a number of ways: obviously not everything that's incongruous is humorous, and not all humorous things seem to be necessarily incongruous (laughing at someone behaving in a way that's ridiculously typical of them finds humour not in the incongruity of the behaviour but precisely in how closely it fits that person's typical patterns of behaviour). The counter-example that motivates my paper is horror, which also seems to rely on perceptions of incongruity. But I don't want to take this discovery as evidence of just how ludicrously off-the-mark incongruity theories are, but rather take it as evidence of just how close humour and horror are.
Another point that humour and horror have in common is that they can be regarded in many ways as aesthetic phenomena, and be subjected to aesthetic judgment, but unlike most aesthetic phenomena, their success depends on immediate response. I can mull over a painting and declare on reflection that I think it has a marvellously subtle beauty to it, but if I mull over a joke and on reflection declare that it's funny, that's tantamount to saying the joke's failed. Same with horror: if it fails to scare us, it hasn't done its job.
That said, I think horror isn't really about fear anyway (the only other paper I've found on the comparison between humour and horror argues that horror is incongruity plus fear and that humour is incongruity minus the fear). Horror comes from a deeper sense of something being amiss in the universe, or more precisely, something being amiss in our normally stable sense of self. What's scary about zombies chasing us isn't simply the fear that we're going to die, but the fact that the dead have come to life and that people we knew are no longer people and are trying to kill us. The incongruity that's central to horror is an incongruity in our conception of the human: our sanity depends on there being a sharp line between the human and the inhuman, and horror blurs that line.
Another point worth remarking on with both humour and horror is that the incongruities they rely on require a certain aptness. Not just any incongruity is funny because some incongruities are simply weird. If I see three bananas lying on the sidewalk, that's neither humorous nor horrific, but it is incongruous. Humour relies on incongruous twists that strike us as slyly appropriate: jokes about lascivious priests work because, on one hand, priests are supposed to be celibate--hence the incongruity--but on the other hand, we recognise that, in fact, priests are often nothing of the sort. The incongruities in horror tend to rely on a deeply rooted sense of cosmic justice. The Birds, for instance, starts out with the two protagonists flirting in a dangerously cavalier way, with a love bird at the centre of their flirtation. Soon enough, they learn that birds aren't something to be trifled with, the implication being that neither is love. With both humour and horror, the aptness and the incongruity seem to derive from the discovery or recognition that the world is bound to upset our best-laid plans, that our rationality is limited, that we are finite beings. This characterisation might seem a bit grandiose for describing casual jokes and cheap horror flicks, but I think I can answer that by simply saying that they're superficial instances of deep phenomena.
One line of attempting to define humour would be to say that there's some characteristic of humour itself--to say that humour is an entity out there in the world--by which we can identify it and distinguish it from everything else. My counter-example to show that this can't work is black humour, because black humour--it seems to me--can be either humorous or horrific depending on how we look at it. You could say it's a humorous way of reflecting on horror, but there are also circumstances where the humour simply won't be taken up, and what one person might see as grimly comic another might see as simply horrific. (There's a nice story of Kafka reading the first chapter of The Trial to Max Brod, but being unable to finish because he was laughing so hard.)
More broadly speaking, it seems we can find pretty much anything humorous and pretty much anything horrific in the right frames of mind. (This is one sense in which humour and horror seem as much emotional phenomena as aesthetic phenomena). The point is, first of all, that pretty much anything can strike us as incongruous given the right frame of mind--language itself contains the incongruity of random marks corresponding to meanings--so whatever humour and horror are, they aren't things "out there" to be detected independent of our responses to them.
In prying them apart, I want to say it has something to do with the nature of play. Humour is a species of play, whereas horror isn't, or at least isn't straightforwardly so. What play is and how it works is tremendously complicated and intriguing and I don't have enough to say about it right now. But for the moment, take these as characteristics of play: (1) it involves a kind of distancing, or "as if" behaviour, where we don't take what we're playing at as fully seriously; (2) it's bounded in space and time: there's a kind of "play-ground" in which play is acceptable, but there are subtle rules or principles that govern how and where we can play; (3) play involves creatively developing on a theme, whether it's passing a ball toward scoring a goal or building on jokes. I'm sure I could think of other important characteristics. But the important thing for the moment is that humour involves the distancing aspect of play, which horror lacks. Under the aspect of humour, everything seems remote, and as a result, we feel safe. When the world is laughable, we can't be hurt, because under the aspect of play, important things can't be hurt. In the world of cartoons, Coyote can blow himself up as much as he likes but he won't actually be harmed.
In horror, by contrast, I'd suggest that the notion of precariousness of human identity that I wrote about earlier comes from the fact that nothing feels safe anymore. It's not just that there's a monster that's going to get us, but that the universe is fundamentally out of joint. Horror gives us a world in which play isn't possible.
Both of these responses are important, I claim, and both are related to the fact that the actual occupies a vanishingly small space within the realm of the possible. We tend to think of the way things are as fixed and necessary, but what both humour and horror reveal is that things could be radically otherwise. Depending on how we encounter this discovery, we can either have a sense of distance on the actual that makes it seem laughably trivial, or we can respond with a horrific sense of agoraphobia, realising that how things are is by no means safely established.
Shit, I really have to run, so I'm not going to be able to check over this or say anything about the Symposium--not sure I have much of any interest to say anyway--and also I haven't had a chance to think through the fact that some things are clearly funny that aren't horrific. Horror can sometimes be amusing, but aside from the case of black humour, humour is rarely horrific. I'm not quite sure why. Maybe it's because horror only plays on the precariousness of human identity, so there are vast swathes of humour that aren't susceptible to being viewed as horror.
Sorry this was so hasty and such a mess. Not promising for the paper I want to write.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Convalescent
Well, I'm writing under the, possibly very false, assumption that writing something is better than writing nothing. I had expected to have a free week with no classes, not very much that I had to rush to do, when I could spend days at a time reading whatever I chose... then I got hit with the worst illness I've had in years, and for days I was incapable of doing anything at all. As I started to recover I could watch movies on my computer - sometimes mostly listening to them with my eyes closed. I lost five days completely. Nw that the break is almost over, when I pick up a book I've been meaning to get around to, I read ten pages or so knowing that I can't really get into it, that there isn't time to read the whole thing or even half, and I don't concentrate all that well. I have a big presentation to prepare for next Thursday (on the Symposium), a pile of tests and papers to correct, and articles I'm supposed to be looking over.
The articles are translations into English for a Dictionary of philosophical untranslatable terms originally published in French. Some entries are words, word pairs or word groups that really only exist in one language, such as the difference between Vorhanden and Zuhanden, which is clearly mostly a Heidegger article, or Sein/ Sosein/ Aussersein, which is largely focused aroung Meinong. Some, like the entry on 'Object' are talking more about a term's absence in a ancient Greek and the way it is read back into classical texts, sometimes slightly distorting them. Some, like 'translation', are largely the history of a concept - once again, in ancient Greek there was a word 'to Hellenize' or 'to make Greek', but no word acknowledging two-way translation... various words are used in Latin for adopting Greek texts, and the various words that are used for translation as well as the use of the word 'translatio' are all bound up with various ideas of transmission, fidelity, betrayal, etc., and the whole fifty page article is actually pretty interesting. I have a badly-paid, occasionally unpaid side gig reading through translations and checking them against the original. It's mostly interesting, but it has been a massive time and energy drain this semester.
When I was reading through another article on the Phaedrus, I thought to look up a myth mentioned at the beginning of the dialogue in Robert Graves' 'Greek Myths'. At the end of the little entry on Boreas, Graves has a note which begins "Socrates, who had no understanding of myths, misses the point of Oreithyia's rape". I laughed when I read that - especially thinking back on Derrida's constant praise of Plato's myth-making in the same dialogue.
I'll be largely wrapped up in Plato for at least another week, despite my desire to start reading more modern stuff again as well. Not only that, but a large part of my Plato reading is going to have to continue centering around 'the Symposium'. One of the articles I read today was one I was kind of looking forward to reading because of its topic, though I was disappointed by how it was treated. The subject was the theatricality of the dialogue... what I was specifically looking for was an explanation of the fact that at the very end of the dialogue Socrates is talking to Agathon the tragedian and Aristophanes the comedian about the idea that the same person who can write a good tragedy should be able to write a good comedy. The whole symposium is in honor of Agathon's triumph as a playwright, and a crown is going to be awarded to the best encomium by Dionysus himself, and of course Alcibiades comes in at the end drunk as the living embodiment of Dionysus, wearing a crown of ivy and violet, and he gives the crown to Socrates (sort of), What is the importance of all the theatrical references? How should they reflect on everything else in the dialogue? What's with the whole comedy/ tragedy thing? It's often said that the comic elements in the symposium are evident (Aristodemus' awkward arrival without Socrates, Aristophanes' hiccups, etc.), and questioned whether there is a tragic element, and if so, what? This article was suggesting that the date of the events in the dialogue was the surest clue - 416, just a year before peace would once again be broken Alcibiades and Phaedrus would be accused of defacing Herms, Athens would lose a major battle and things would go to hell. Within a couple years of the Symposium, only Aristophanes and Socrates would still be left in the city. This particular article suggested that the very beginning of the dialogue would have taken place in 399, and this part sort of does interest me. No evidence is given here for the specific dating at 399, but it is supposed that the reason fact gathering is going on at the beginning about events belonging to the distant past is that Socrates has already been accused though not yet tried, and in this period before Socrates' death an attempt is being made to assemble Socratic Logoi as accurately as possible for posterity, particularly while facts can still be verified by Socrates himself. This would help to explain why Apolodorus is in such a foul mood at the beginning, and it also helps to explain why everything is at such a remove... it's always said that Socrates' couldn't decently repeat the praise that Alcibiades made of him, but this doesn't explain the stress on temporal distance, the fact checking and the fact that it isn't even a second-hand account.
Anyway, I realize that this is pedantry and not the voicing of ideas for us to discuss... which is also too bad, because I know I had ideas to discuss recently. Oh well. I hope things are well in England and you've been keeping yourself pleasantly occupied. Tell me if you have any ideas about the discussion of comedy and tragedy at the end of the Symposium and how it might fit into the dialogue as a whole. I would really like to have a convincing sense of why it needs to be there.
The articles are translations into English for a Dictionary of philosophical untranslatable terms originally published in French. Some entries are words, word pairs or word groups that really only exist in one language, such as the difference between Vorhanden and Zuhanden, which is clearly mostly a Heidegger article, or Sein/ Sosein/ Aussersein, which is largely focused aroung Meinong. Some, like the entry on 'Object' are talking more about a term's absence in a ancient Greek and the way it is read back into classical texts, sometimes slightly distorting them. Some, like 'translation', are largely the history of a concept - once again, in ancient Greek there was a word 'to Hellenize' or 'to make Greek', but no word acknowledging two-way translation... various words are used in Latin for adopting Greek texts, and the various words that are used for translation as well as the use of the word 'translatio' are all bound up with various ideas of transmission, fidelity, betrayal, etc., and the whole fifty page article is actually pretty interesting. I have a badly-paid, occasionally unpaid side gig reading through translations and checking them against the original. It's mostly interesting, but it has been a massive time and energy drain this semester.
When I was reading through another article on the Phaedrus, I thought to look up a myth mentioned at the beginning of the dialogue in Robert Graves' 'Greek Myths'. At the end of the little entry on Boreas, Graves has a note which begins "Socrates, who had no understanding of myths, misses the point of Oreithyia's rape". I laughed when I read that - especially thinking back on Derrida's constant praise of Plato's myth-making in the same dialogue.
I'll be largely wrapped up in Plato for at least another week, despite my desire to start reading more modern stuff again as well. Not only that, but a large part of my Plato reading is going to have to continue centering around 'the Symposium'. One of the articles I read today was one I was kind of looking forward to reading because of its topic, though I was disappointed by how it was treated. The subject was the theatricality of the dialogue... what I was specifically looking for was an explanation of the fact that at the very end of the dialogue Socrates is talking to Agathon the tragedian and Aristophanes the comedian about the idea that the same person who can write a good tragedy should be able to write a good comedy. The whole symposium is in honor of Agathon's triumph as a playwright, and a crown is going to be awarded to the best encomium by Dionysus himself, and of course Alcibiades comes in at the end drunk as the living embodiment of Dionysus, wearing a crown of ivy and violet, and he gives the crown to Socrates (sort of), What is the importance of all the theatrical references? How should they reflect on everything else in the dialogue? What's with the whole comedy/ tragedy thing? It's often said that the comic elements in the symposium are evident (Aristodemus' awkward arrival without Socrates, Aristophanes' hiccups, etc.), and questioned whether there is a tragic element, and if so, what? This article was suggesting that the date of the events in the dialogue was the surest clue - 416, just a year before peace would once again be broken Alcibiades and Phaedrus would be accused of defacing Herms, Athens would lose a major battle and things would go to hell. Within a couple years of the Symposium, only Aristophanes and Socrates would still be left in the city. This particular article suggested that the very beginning of the dialogue would have taken place in 399, and this part sort of does interest me. No evidence is given here for the specific dating at 399, but it is supposed that the reason fact gathering is going on at the beginning about events belonging to the distant past is that Socrates has already been accused though not yet tried, and in this period before Socrates' death an attempt is being made to assemble Socratic Logoi as accurately as possible for posterity, particularly while facts can still be verified by Socrates himself. This would help to explain why Apolodorus is in such a foul mood at the beginning, and it also helps to explain why everything is at such a remove... it's always said that Socrates' couldn't decently repeat the praise that Alcibiades made of him, but this doesn't explain the stress on temporal distance, the fact checking and the fact that it isn't even a second-hand account.
Anyway, I realize that this is pedantry and not the voicing of ideas for us to discuss... which is also too bad, because I know I had ideas to discuss recently. Oh well. I hope things are well in England and you've been keeping yourself pleasantly occupied. Tell me if you have any ideas about the discussion of comedy and tragedy at the end of the Symposium and how it might fit into the dialogue as a whole. I would really like to have a convincing sense of why it needs to be there.
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
the Concept of Irony
&& (I have to figure out how to make the paragraph sign on this computer. Anyway, I imagine that thinking of information as a commodity is itself a fairly modern phenomenon... though to further support what you were saying - the belief that I universities one can or should diminish the traditional master/ student relationship as one between a person who knows and explains to one who is ignorant and listens probably does go together with a sense of knowledge as being something cheap and easy to come by. Having sessions where students who have not yet learned to read carefully and have little frame of reference with which to analyze texts talk at length about what they felt and thought while reading the text does for me in some way fit with blogging, surfing the net, commenting on whatever and picking up factoids and opinions from various sources... when I was a student myself I remember feeling like my time was wasted when the floor was given too often to classmates, many of whom had nothing valuable to contribute. Everything has gone democratic. Why pay or work for expertise when everyone is an expert?
As for what you wrote in your last post about your professor's 'myth', I'm not so sure I understood the myth itself, which makes it difficult to say anything about your criticism of it. I'm not sure exactly where he's drawing his lines, so I can't say if they should be fuzzier, and the one thing I can say is that the way you described his position, it certainly did seem simple and of dubious value. While it doesn't feel in the least bit presumptuous to me for a philosopher to speculate about the nature of Being and perception and so forth, once philosophers get to talking about other sciences and disciplines, I get suspicious... just as you seem to do. But even then, something like Foucault talking about epistemological shifts seems okay to me - he might not be right, there's some sloppiness in the initial formulation, but it can be argued with and modified, and there was a lot of work done in archives underlying his initial claims - he did, after all, have his Ph.d. in one of the social sciences, and it was the social sciences that he began by critiquing. But just as when you began talking about how knowledge is valued in our society, I feel like I'm drifting into a region where I'm outside of what humble competence I might have.)
Anyway, on to my actual subject. I haven't been writing lately in part because the paper I'm writing is finally taking shape, and why write casually and badly about what I'm already trying to write rigorously and well elsewhere? Why do violence to my twenty-page thought (which actually ought to be longer), by cutting it down to one? I've often mentioned my own feeling of unease when I sense I'm misrepresenting the thoughts of people or books I'm chatting about, but it's kind of worse to feel I'm misrepresenting and diminishing my own thoughts. Nevertheless, I'll say a few things about what I'm writing, because that's pretty much all I'm reading and thinking about at the moment (though the weekend was spent listening to more than twenty speakers at a very long conference I helped organize, and teaching is taking a lot out of me at the moment). It shouldn't be a surprise to you that I ended up making my Sade paper revolve around a comparison between Blanchot's reading of Sade and Kierkegaard's interpretation of Socrates. Just as makes Sade synonymous with pure negation, Kierkegaard defines Socrates, or socratic irony, as pure negation. In both cases negation is defined in opposition to Hegel (though young Kierkegaard is much more Hegelian than Blanchot). Kierkegaard tries to maintain a strict distinction between Socrates and Plato (he's dismissive of Xenophon and admires Aristophanes, but, of course mostly uses Platonic dialogues, particularly the Apology, the Symposium and the Phaedo). In order to attain ideality, it is necessary first to negate the actual. In Plato, this negation is a starting point from which the Idea can be attained. For Socrates, the idea exists merely as a boundary. The destruction of the actuality is the goal of all Socratic thought. It is an infinite movement, but void of content. Negativity itself becomes absolute. It would initially seem that in Blanchot, no similar opposition can be set up (the short little description I just gave will give a sense of how much of Hegel is left in Kierkegaard - though I Socrates' own thought the negative is not just a moment in the accomplishment of work, of the negative giving birth to the positive, in world-historical terms, Socrates is seen as the negative moment that gave birth to Plato (and the cynics, etc.) as a new positivity. Still, Blanchot describes literature as a sort of constant self-erasure. Literary writing is, for him, always trying to return to the negative space of pure possibility... what the writer creates is a translation which is necessarily faithful because that which he is translating from, the dark space preceding creation, has no proper existence before being translated... it has no characteristics of its own, no set identity. It would be lost if not translated. Each writer brings to light a specific dark of night, which is, properly speaking, nothing. Nevertheless, that specific nothing, that silence, that space of possibility is what interests the writer more than what he has written (which has become something and gained characteristics, positive content). I could go on, but you probably get enough of the point. The main thing here is that, self-devouring as literature may be in Blanchot's description, and as shaky as the writers positive content may be in comparison with Plato's ideas which at times seem so clear and so close in certain dialogues, it is still aiming at a sort of ideality. Though Sade is mentioned by Blanchot as the writer par excellence at one point, Sade is unique in that the destruction of actuality, for him as for Socrates, appears as an end in itself rather than a point of departure. As with Socrates, Sade deals with the infinite/ absolute, and as with Socrates it is an infinite movement which stops short of ideality and doesn't appear to strive for positive content of any sort.
In a sense, I suppose that's my central argument. Everything else is used to add nuance, make the argument more convincing, give examples, etc. A couple of times you've brought up Derrida's 'Plato's pharmacy', which I might actually incorporate into the paper briefly to deal with the Blanchot quote about the demon of writing possessing Sade and Socrates... as it's the only place in the books I'm dealing with where the two men are brought together, I kind of have to bring it up and do something with it... I also have to talk about freedom in relation to negation since that's a constant theme in Blanchot, and just slightly less in the Kierkegaard. I have to admit I hadn't read the Derrida article when we started the blog, and I'm still not finished... I think its an amazing piece, and I hope I'll find a chance to discuss it here.
I'll be very interested to hear what your thoughts are on this post, but please don't be too brutal. Though these ideas are in a rough form here, unlike every other entry I've made, this actually has reached the phase of things I'm developing that sort of matter.
As for what you wrote in your last post about your professor's 'myth', I'm not so sure I understood the myth itself, which makes it difficult to say anything about your criticism of it. I'm not sure exactly where he's drawing his lines, so I can't say if they should be fuzzier, and the one thing I can say is that the way you described his position, it certainly did seem simple and of dubious value. While it doesn't feel in the least bit presumptuous to me for a philosopher to speculate about the nature of Being and perception and so forth, once philosophers get to talking about other sciences and disciplines, I get suspicious... just as you seem to do. But even then, something like Foucault talking about epistemological shifts seems okay to me - he might not be right, there's some sloppiness in the initial formulation, but it can be argued with and modified, and there was a lot of work done in archives underlying his initial claims - he did, after all, have his Ph.d. in one of the social sciences, and it was the social sciences that he began by critiquing. But just as when you began talking about how knowledge is valued in our society, I feel like I'm drifting into a region where I'm outside of what humble competence I might have.)
Anyway, on to my actual subject. I haven't been writing lately in part because the paper I'm writing is finally taking shape, and why write casually and badly about what I'm already trying to write rigorously and well elsewhere? Why do violence to my twenty-page thought (which actually ought to be longer), by cutting it down to one? I've often mentioned my own feeling of unease when I sense I'm misrepresenting the thoughts of people or books I'm chatting about, but it's kind of worse to feel I'm misrepresenting and diminishing my own thoughts. Nevertheless, I'll say a few things about what I'm writing, because that's pretty much all I'm reading and thinking about at the moment (though the weekend was spent listening to more than twenty speakers at a very long conference I helped organize, and teaching is taking a lot out of me at the moment). It shouldn't be a surprise to you that I ended up making my Sade paper revolve around a comparison between Blanchot's reading of Sade and Kierkegaard's interpretation of Socrates. Just as makes Sade synonymous with pure negation, Kierkegaard defines Socrates, or socratic irony, as pure negation. In both cases negation is defined in opposition to Hegel (though young Kierkegaard is much more Hegelian than Blanchot). Kierkegaard tries to maintain a strict distinction between Socrates and Plato (he's dismissive of Xenophon and admires Aristophanes, but, of course mostly uses Platonic dialogues, particularly the Apology, the Symposium and the Phaedo). In order to attain ideality, it is necessary first to negate the actual. In Plato, this negation is a starting point from which the Idea can be attained. For Socrates, the idea exists merely as a boundary. The destruction of the actuality is the goal of all Socratic thought. It is an infinite movement, but void of content. Negativity itself becomes absolute. It would initially seem that in Blanchot, no similar opposition can be set up (the short little description I just gave will give a sense of how much of Hegel is left in Kierkegaard - though I Socrates' own thought the negative is not just a moment in the accomplishment of work, of the negative giving birth to the positive, in world-historical terms, Socrates is seen as the negative moment that gave birth to Plato (and the cynics, etc.) as a new positivity. Still, Blanchot describes literature as a sort of constant self-erasure. Literary writing is, for him, always trying to return to the negative space of pure possibility... what the writer creates is a translation which is necessarily faithful because that which he is translating from, the dark space preceding creation, has no proper existence before being translated... it has no characteristics of its own, no set identity. It would be lost if not translated. Each writer brings to light a specific dark of night, which is, properly speaking, nothing. Nevertheless, that specific nothing, that silence, that space of possibility is what interests the writer more than what he has written (which has become something and gained characteristics, positive content). I could go on, but you probably get enough of the point. The main thing here is that, self-devouring as literature may be in Blanchot's description, and as shaky as the writers positive content may be in comparison with Plato's ideas which at times seem so clear and so close in certain dialogues, it is still aiming at a sort of ideality. Though Sade is mentioned by Blanchot as the writer par excellence at one point, Sade is unique in that the destruction of actuality, for him as for Socrates, appears as an end in itself rather than a point of departure. As with Socrates, Sade deals with the infinite/ absolute, and as with Socrates it is an infinite movement which stops short of ideality and doesn't appear to strive for positive content of any sort.
In a sense, I suppose that's my central argument. Everything else is used to add nuance, make the argument more convincing, give examples, etc. A couple of times you've brought up Derrida's 'Plato's pharmacy', which I might actually incorporate into the paper briefly to deal with the Blanchot quote about the demon of writing possessing Sade and Socrates... as it's the only place in the books I'm dealing with where the two men are brought together, I kind of have to bring it up and do something with it... I also have to talk about freedom in relation to negation since that's a constant theme in Blanchot, and just slightly less in the Kierkegaard. I have to admit I hadn't read the Derrida article when we started the blog, and I'm still not finished... I think its an amazing piece, and I hope I'll find a chance to discuss it here.
I'll be very interested to hear what your thoughts are on this post, but please don't be too brutal. Though these ideas are in a rough form here, unlike every other entry I've made, this actually has reached the phase of things I'm developing that sort of matter.
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.
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.
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