tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-354774142024-03-07T18:04:50.134-08:00the net self.laura.ghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13638164730513113228noreply@blogger.comBlogger126125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35477414.post-52890204792324295932014-03-09T23:46:00.001-07:002014-03-09T23:46:13.623-07:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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oh. hi. it's been awhile. i was thinking, hey, maybe i'll try this again, but new. so i'm officially leaving this old blog as a record of some years, never again to be posted on or reformatted. just the brown bear on gray on until the day this old thing dies whatever death webpages ever do. it's nice and also sad how you don't leave blogs empty, like houses. you lock the door behind you, leaving everything just how it was. anyway, i'm starting again here:<br />
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https://medium.com/the-net-self<br />
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right now it's just a couple of things i've reposted from this blog, to get the hang of the new formatting, and remember myself a little. but i hope it'll be more.<br />
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bye old weblog. bye.laura.ghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13638164730513113228noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35477414.post-30491892801530541782012-07-01T19:17:00.001-07:002012-07-02T08:45:26.341-07:00food rules.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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stricture isn't in my nature. hard lines aren't my way. but ethics is my business and (mostly) my pleasure, and on most views, ethics is a matter of rules and principles (if also love). i'm also a 30-year old graduate student in the humanities who's spent twelve years living in various east and west coast major metropolitan areas, which is to say my friends are a tapestry of vegans, freegans, vegetarians, pescatarians, paleos, gluten-free-ers, and organic only / free-range only / local only meat-eaters. and i've been nearly every one of these myself at some point or other. which is all to say that i've spent a fair number of hours thinking on the ethics of eating. and while i see so many (ethical) reasons to be strict in these matters, i've always thought: i can't be strict about food, because sharing food is a way that people show love, and a way that people show who they are, and i want to be open to anything someone wants to share with me about who they are. i won't not eat what someone makes for me. i won't not eat what other people are eating. but the reasons for stricture (and you know them all already) persist.*<br />
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i've also spent a fair amount of time (especially since moving to LA) engaged in critical conversation (with myself and with others) about the stated reasons (mine included) for these dietary restrictions, and, in particular, the tendency to offer ethical or holistic-health type reasons for what are so often, at bottom, just diets, adopted primarily for the purpose of weight-loss and to assuage various body-related anxieties. it's not so much a matter of feeling that anyone's being insincere, as that i'm not sure how one could even know one's own real reasons when it comes to food, in a world so brimming with food- and body-related pressures, often in the guise of spiritual- and health-related quasi-ethical advice. is it enough that i do it, and that there IS a good reason? but i want to know what MY reasons are. and there are some reasons i don't want to even risk having acted on-- and that i especially don't want to have acted on while smugly claiming that my reasons were something nicer-sounding.<br />
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anyway, today in the sunday times i read <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/01/fashion/rsvp-ps-no-gluten-fat-or-soy-please.html">this really nice piece</a> which touches on these issues (mostly the former, and just a little the latter). it's what i'd call mildly provocative, which is about the most i ask of the weekend paper (besides that there be a crossword puzzle in it). worth a read.<br />
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*an interesting point that's come up in the facebook comments: despite my qualms about asking others to accommodate any dietary restrictions of MINE, i actually experience the act of making food that accommodates the restrictions of others to be more (and not less) satisfying. it really feels like taking care of someone to make them something pleasing that's within the special limits of what their bodies can accommodate, and it can feel especially like honoring someone to make them something pleasing that accommodates their principles and commitments. it's a funny little asymmetry that i'd never really thought about before.</div>
</div>laura.ghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13638164730513113228noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35477414.post-56978723073073959322011-09-14T13:38:00.000-07:002011-09-14T14:22:17.228-07:00how to worry about privacy.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEhdMAvCEoo9Dy9kf3t-1OZvC4-wRobL0KwGHvg1o_7mCgoS9cre0OUEz7JfV9g74TxRnDeLdUBvgoYBq5JXt95fbLOSXXBw_LS3Wq5s0cyv7iO_TCDgQ1FxiBOprhUQ03a3xhqA/s1600/photo-40.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEhdMAvCEoo9Dy9kf3t-1OZvC4-wRobL0KwGHvg1o_7mCgoS9cre0OUEz7JfV9g74TxRnDeLdUBvgoYBq5JXt95fbLOSXXBw_LS3Wq5s0cyv7iO_TCDgQ1FxiBOprhUQ03a3xhqA/s320/photo-40.JPG" width="320" /></a></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #666666; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>this is a post that i started last year and never finished. i'm posting it as-is just to lay the groundwork for a new post i have in mind on privacy and technology-- laying out the problems and approaches that interest me and inform my interest in these questions going forward. it's twice as long as it should be and stops abruptly. apologies. i'll edit it someday.</i></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #666666; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">before the technological advances of the last quarter century, there was a natural limit to the information about us by which we would likely be judged by our friends, family, potential employers, our government, creditors, and the community at large. these were the limits of human memory, the limited life of paper. our indiscretions may have been on record, but they were preserved by means that naturally degrade over the course of a lifetime, and in which information, even where preserved, can nonetheless be buried. or this, at least, is the premise of this week's new york times magazine feature-- <a href="http://www.blogger.com/goog_834270523">jeffrey rosen's "</a><i><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/magazine/25privacy-t2.html">the end of forgetting"</a>--</i> a meditation on the theme of viktor mayer-schonberger's new book <i>delete: the virtue of forgetting in a digital age. </i></span><br />
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</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #666666; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">the notion is that there is something essential in forgetting. the most interesting suggestion, i think, is that there is a necessary relationship between forgetting and forgiving-- that our ability to forgive is imperiled by these advances. but the more general concern is that our newfound (and soon-to-be-found) abilities to collect, record, aggregate, and search through vast amounts of information will result in potential dates, employers, and everyone else, making crucial judgments about our character and potential based on information that we haven't chosen to share-- information taken dramatically out of context, or about past behaviors that no subsequent penitence can erase. rosen presents a picture of a world in which </span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #666666; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #666666; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">"people will be able to snap a cellphone picture of a stranger [or a job candidate], plug the image into google and pull up all tagged and untagged photos of that person that exist on the web...[and] internet searches for images are likely to be combined with social-network aggregator search engines...which combine data from online searches-- including political contributions, blog posts, youtube videos, web comments, real estate listings, and photo albums...in the web 3.0, [founder of ReputationDefendender michael] fertik predicts, people will be rated, assessed and scored based not on their creditworthiness, but on their trustworthiness as good parents, good dates, good employees, good baby sitters or good insurance risks."</span></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #666666; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></i></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #666666; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">to correct these disturbing trends, it is suggested that we put time limits or expiration dates on the photos, blog comments, and other bits of our digital trail that would mimic the limitations of human memory. another suggestion (of jonathan zittrain's) is that we be allowed to file for some sort of reputation bankruptcy, which would wipe the digital slate clean ever so many years.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #666666; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #666666; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">this feature was fun to read, but i confess that i got a lot more out of<i> </i><a href="http://bostonreview.net/BR35.3/morozov.php">"speak, memory"</a>, <a href="http://bostonreview.net/BR35.3/morozov.php">evgeny morozov's review of </a><i><a href="http://bostonreview.net/BR35.3/morozov.php">delete</a></i> in last month's <i>boston review. </i>in it he does a pretty good job ob of defending the view that, though mayer-schonberger's argument is "interesting", it </span></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #666666; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></i></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #666666; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 18px;"><i>"suffers from three large and arguably fatal flaws: a very loose account of what memory is, an insufficient appreciation of the value of remembering, and—most important for public policy—an unconvincing effort to distinguish the animating concerns about memory from more conventional (and serious) concerns about privacy.<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 1px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 1px;">"</span></span></i></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 1px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 1px; color: #666666; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 18px;"><i><br />
</i></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 1px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 1px; line-height: 18px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; color: #666666; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: normal;">it's a relatively dry and wonkish set of objections to mayer-schonberger's "romanticist rebellion against technology", but even as someone more prone to and qualitified to offer romanticist cultural criticism than technical assessment of the likely implications of specific new technologies (more of a mayer-schonbeger, that is, than a evgeny morozov), i like that morozov does mayer-schonberger the honor of taking his view seriously enough to offer such useful and academic assessment of what might prevent serious tech thinkers and policy makers from taking mayer-schonberger's critiques and suggestions seriously.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #666666; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #666666; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">but what i loved most about morozov's review is that it pointed me toward hellen nissbaum's really wonderful book <i>privacy in context</i>, which has dominated my reading list all summer. her argument, in short, is that our privacy interests aren't just a matter of how much of our information is shared (as some brute percentage of what there is to know overall), or whether a particular kind of personal information (income, say, or medical records) is shared at all with anyone ever-- they are, rather, a matter of whether or not our personal information is being shared <i>in accordance</i> with what she calls "context-relative informational norms" or in violation of those norms. we live, she argues, within</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #666666; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>"a finely calibrated system of [these] social norms, or rules, [that] govern the flow of personal information in distinct social contexts (e.g. education, health care, and politics). these...context relative informational norms define and sustain essential activities and key relationships and interests, protect people and groups against harm, and balance the distribution of power. responsive to historical, cultural, and even geographic contingencies, informational norms evolve over time in distinct patterns from society to society"</i></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #666666; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">in our society, for example, there are norms according to which it is generally proper to share facts about your income with the IRS, and improper to share facts about your income at dinner parties with your coworkers. and there are norms according to which it is generally proper that to share facts about your sexual history with your family doctor, and generally improper to share facts about your sexual history with, say, your kids' teacher. these norms arise for all kinds of reasons, often having to do with the nature of particular kinds of relationships. (you have only to describe what kind of a thing a doctor <i>is</i> to start to see why sharing your sexual history with your doctor is appropriate, though you may refrain from sharing this information from even people you are very close to.)</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #666666; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">on nissbaum's view, we ought to assess the alleged intrusiveness of particular instances of information gather or dissemination according to whether or not they violate the existing social norms of a particular society. and we ought to structure our laws around information gathering and dissemination in such a way as to protect and buttress those norms, even as new technologies make it ever easier to violate those norms on ever grander scales.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #666666; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">there's a crapload that's problematic about nissbaum's view-- most centrally its inherent conservatism. her program is essentially one of conserving whatever the existing norms are, however contingent, and without any particular attention being paid to what sorts of contingencies we're talking about. the contingent fact that a particular society exists in an extraordinarily warm climate looks to be different from the contingent fact that a particular society has lived for sixty years under cruel dictatorship, but it's hard to see how the existing norms established under this latter contingency are any less norm-y than the existing norms in the former. as with all societal norms, informational norms will sometimes seem, upon inspection, sound and other times silly, or oppressive, or otherwise objectionable. it's at the very least not obvious that laws that both varieties of norm ought equally be protected by law.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">but there's something i fundamentally love about this view: it begins with an understanding of the dynamics underwriting all privacy concerns: the near-illiminable diversity of relations in which a human being can stand to other human beings, each essentially constituted by what the various parties know about one another and how they know it. to be someone's friend, or husband, or doctor is to stand in a particular kind of relation to that person-- a relationship subject to both generalizable norms and a a thousand little peculiarities. we might think, for example, that friendship is a particular sort of a relation, and that liking or trusting someone is partially constitutive of it, such that you could not truly say of someone that you neither like nor trust 'she is my friend.' and then beyond the general features constitutive of any particular type of relationship, there will be more localized norms (what i share with my best friend, my childhood friends, my friends at work), and ultimately the entirely unique pattern of sharing and expectation that we have with each individual friend, sensitive to specific contours of who someone is, or who they are to you. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">(the problem with facebook-- its ground-up misunderstanding of how relationships works-- the need to distinguish beyond "friend," to share in a much more targeted and discerning way.)</span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #666666; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">one of the philosophies around privacy issues is that it's ultimately the protection of a precious resource: intimacy. that in controlling what people know about us, we control who they are to us and who we are to them. we decide who gets in and to what degree, according to (best case scenario) our judgments about who they are. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #666666; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">the particular problem of aggregation.</span></div>laura.ghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13638164730513113228noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35477414.post-70353807898714073912010-10-28T08:16:00.000-07:002011-09-20T12:15:04.000-07:00what you can't know.<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgamNkj2gj092dWwtP24aAa2OtohVdc56u8cgZcWYPfNz21Vx7dgPrY8TpIRVxrUFuFpRrOZmXHj0mWKqAtFjHExQZsd9GD_ZTeKTDqQQID5CLPbUpO3s2EnEjfBkHIHi6iYU9mng/s1600/photo-33.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5533136488077736098" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgamNkj2gj092dWwtP24aAa2OtohVdc56u8cgZcWYPfNz21Vx7dgPrY8TpIRVxrUFuFpRrOZmXHj0mWKqAtFjHExQZsd9GD_ZTeKTDqQQID5CLPbUpO3s2EnEjfBkHIHi6iYU9mng/s320/photo-33.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 310px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 320px;" /></a>we all have beliefs that are unresponsive to facts and arguments. we all have beliefs that make life as we know it possible (or so we think on some level so deep that it's probably not quite right to call it thinking) and the job of a belief like that is to be unmoving. and notoriously there will be other beliefs whose job it is to buttress those pillars, those supporting beams in the architecture of our belief systems-- to innoculate against doubt. they'll often be things like 'the kinds of people or facts that would challenge this belief are not to be trusted' or 'the more others criticize this view the more steadfast you'll proved yourself by continuing to believe in the face of others' doubt'. and while it's true that what i've said so far about these kinds of beliefs is famously argued by those public intellectuals attempting to explain the religious mind, i've sat in the offices of those public intellectuals who have famously attempted to explain the religious mind and i've talked with them on other subjects, and i promise you: they have their own support beam beliefs, stubborn in the face of facts and arguments, which make life as they know it possible, and which are insulated from doubt in a very similar kind of way. i'm not talking about some of us, i'm talking about us all.<br />
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</div><div>reading about ginni thomas and her damn fool behavior this week, i've been full of feelings. first, obviously and passionately, is the feeling that a lot of people seriously owe anita hill an apology. this was true even before last week, but there's something about the spectre of an apology being demanded from the very person who is actually so deeply owed an apology and has never asked for one that really raises that middle-school feeling of intolerable injustice in the human heart. </div><div><br />
</div><div>but my feelings for anita hill aren't exactly feelings against ginni thomas. her behavior is, i think, deeply human and has been instructive to me. the impulse to philosophical inquiry is deeply human, and so, too, is this stubborn antithetical fear of knowing-- the refusal to know what we fear can't be born. in some meaningful sense i think it's true that ginni thomas can't (or at least couldn't) know the truth about her husband. she's cited in an interview as saying that they got through "that dark time" during the confirmation hearings by pulling the kitchen curtains closed and listening to religious music. </div><div><br />
</div><div>i'm reminded again for the millionth time that the fear i have of knowing myself or others or the facts or where the argument leads-- any fear i have at all-- will undermine my philosophical aims in ways that it would be hubristic of me to think that i'll recognize at the time. the struggle to know more is often enough the struggle to fear less. i hope i never get through anything by pulling the the curtains closed. it's understandable, but i don't imagine it's worth it.<br />
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<i>update: a couple of relevant links!</i><br />
<i><a href="http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/intersection/2011/09/14/facts-dont-persuade-climate-skeptics-so-what-does/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:%20DiscoverIntersection%20(The%20Intersection)">discover magazine - facts don't persuade climate skeptics, so what does?</a></i><br />
<i><a href="http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/09/stubbornness-social-pressure/">wired science - stubbornness increases the more people tell you you're wrong</a></i><br />
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</div>laura.ghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13638164730513113228noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35477414.post-74272353705718273582010-10-13T16:27:00.000-07:002011-05-10T00:49:42.844-07:00on knowing what i am doing. (part I)<div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5527802309420314994" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqv_2NSmf1N82IOM7MWMjwyHAUK-26vKLmTZAxr2ZXn9tzruIzJ6I8oNOQg5wtJ3kjn9ZJi4QqxC7DYGAHc3WTx0uEce-F-7lQ-aQBgZknUxlElqB6pwV48urHNtfuoRwmgmAx-g/s320/picture.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 310px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center; width: 320px;" /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"></span></i></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqv_2NSmf1N82IOM7MWMjwyHAUK-26vKLmTZAxr2ZXn9tzruIzJ6I8oNOQg5wtJ3kjn9ZJi4QqxC7DYGAHc3WTx0uEce-F-7lQ-aQBgZknUxlElqB6pwV48urHNtfuoRwmgmAx-g/s1600/picture.jpg"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"></span></i></span></i></span></i></span></i></span></i></span></i></span></i></span></i></span></i></span></i></span></i></span></a><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqv_2NSmf1N82IOM7MWMjwyHAUK-26vKLmTZAxr2ZXn9tzruIzJ6I8oNOQg5wtJ3kjn9ZJi4QqxC7DYGAHc3WTx0uEce-F-7lQ-aQBgZknUxlElqB6pwV48urHNtfuoRwmgmAx-g/s1600/picture.jpg"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none;"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">i'm</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;"> taking a seminar this semester on the philosophy of action. it's an area of philosophy in which we worry over what differentiates our intentional actions from the broader category of human behavior. what is the distinction between the things we mean to do and those things we do unintentionally? if i know that </span><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">i'm</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;"> doing something, does that necessarily make it intentional? (what about cases of </span><span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;">collateral</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;"> damage, where i know that i will hurt someone, but hurting them is not my aim? is that a harm i inflict intentionally?) if i do not (consciously) know that </span><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">i'm</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;"> doing something, does that necessarily make it unintentional? (what about cases in which i am directed by motives that are only clear to me in retrospect, if at all? can't i have meant to do something without realizing it until later?) and if we can come up with some way of distinguishing intentional actions from mere behavior, what should its moral significance be? are we more or only responsible for intentional behavior? does intentional behavior have unique moral significance? is an agent who does intentional harm somehow morally worse than an agent whose behavior </span><span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;">persistently</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;"> results in unintentional harm? why is it? anyway, it's a subject near the center of my academic interests in will, responsibility, self- and </span><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">personhood</span></span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;">.</span></i></span></a></span></i></span></i></span></i></span></i></span></i></span></i></span></i></span></i></span></i></span></i></span></i></span></i><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"></span></span></i></span></i><br />
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<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;"><br />
</span></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;">one of the central features attended to in this literature is that everything you do, the smallest movement of your hand-- a keystroke-- can be described in infinitely many ways. you're moving the air. you're pressing a button. you're making a certain sound. you're arresting </span><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">someone's</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;"> attention, or failing to. you're typing a letter (the letter 'a'). you're typing a letter (to your sister). you're reconfiguring the </span><span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;">innards</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;"> of your laptop in ways that you may or may not understand or think about. all of these things (and so many others) are things you do when you strike the key. your action answers to many descriptions, some almost certainly of things you intend to do, and others that you just as certainly didn't. some things you do that you didn't directly intend, you could probably have anticipated if you'd thought about it. other things you never in a million years could have imagined. some will be written in familiar language, while others will be written in terms of the most abstruse physics.</span></span></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;"><br />
</span></span></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12"><a href="http://www.lowrypei.com/bio"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">pei</span></span></a></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;"> says the things you regret are the things you didn't do, and i believe him. it's a sentiment with plenty of currency, </span><span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;">corroborated by</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;"> sages and the common sense. it captures something true in the experience of a particular kind of person who i particularly admire. but </span><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">i've</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;"> never been able to understand how it works in a moment where it might make a difference. it's rare that i feel like </span><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">i'm</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;"> choosing between doing something and not doing it. i'm choosing between doing something and doing something else. and even that's misleading. because for everything i do, there are infinite things i don't do. with every actual step i take, i </span><span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_18"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;">annihilate</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;"> infinite possible futures. the vast majority of them will never cross my mind. the vast majority of those that cross my mind i won't be troubled by the loss of. to make sense of this sentiment, then, one would need some kind of anchor. one would need to know what makes some possible paths The Things You Didn't Do and others nothing at all to you. what property does the former have that distinguishes it from the latter? it has to be something more than just facts about individual temperament-- individual propensities to regret in general or not to regret in general. i suppose that The Things You Didn't Do must be something like the times you might have defied the inertia of fear and habit and followed your heart-- the times you might have taken a personal risk where the benefits might have been great-- the times you missed yr chance to have done something different than you'd done before-- something deeper.</span></span></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;"><br />
</span></span></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;">ok, so here's where i bring it all together. (thank you for your patience.) the infinitely describable nature of action (and of possibility) makes it so desperately impossible to sort The Things You Didn't Do from the things you did. i began by saying something about all the different things you do by the smallest movement of your hand. and each action we <i>might have </i>undertaken, like each action we do undertake, is likewise infinitely describable. and whether or not it constutes a Thing You Didn't Do (as i understand it) depends on which description you adopt: </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;">whether or not a course of action constitutes a break from the past or more of the same, following your heart or acting out of fear, is in large part a matter not only of how you describe the potential options-- the different courses you might take-- but how you describe what's come before. we don't just change more or less, overall--</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;"> we only ever change in some particular respect</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;">. <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">it's relative, i mean. but</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;">there's no one thing that answers to the name "what came before"-- as i've said, there are infinite possible descriptions of a life that draw out different shades and patterns. what constitutes a break from the past depend on what aspects of the past one takes to be important. and given how much and complexly we love and fear it will often enough times be the case that almost any course of action open to a person could be accurately described in terms of either-- as constutiting either a change or more of the same. and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">i'm</span> still only talking about the descriptions that are warranted-- forget all of the ways we describe things to ourselves which amount to misleading rationalizations or self-protecting spin. even if we could be so lucky and so good as to only consider the truest truths about who we are and what we've done, we're still, as we stand there considering our options, weighing and comparing, in a shifting matrix. try to focus your eyes anywhere and it goes fractal, folds into some infinity.</span><br />
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<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><div style="display: inline !important;"><div style="display: inline !important;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><div style="display: inline !important;"><div style="display: inline !important;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><div style="display: inline !important;"><div style="display: inline !important;"><div style="display: inline !important;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;">and then there's that funny fact of life-- how we always end up back where we started, anyway-- how we end up with exactly what we took ourselves to be running from.</span></div></div></div></span></i></div></div></span></i></div></div></span></i><br />
<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><div style="display: inline !important;"><div style="display: inline !important;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><div style="display: inline !important;"><div style="display: inline !important;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"></span></i><br />
<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><div style="display: inline !important;"><div style="display: inline !important;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><div style="display: inline !important;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><div style="display: inline !important;"><div style="display: inline !important;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><div style="display: inline !important;"><div style="display: inline !important;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><div style="display: inline !important;"><div style="display: inline !important;"><div style="display: inline !important;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;">two paths diverged in a yellow wood-- <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">ok</span>. but i don't believe it was so obvious which was which as it seems in memory to have been. or that, in fact, there were only two. it's such quaint idea, two paths. anyway, </span></div></div></div></span></i></div></div></span></i></div></div></span></i></div></span></i></div></div></span></i></div></div></span></i></div></div></span></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><div style="display: inline !important;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><div style="display: inline !important;"><div style="display: inline !important;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><div style="display: inline !important;"><div style="display: inline !important;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><div style="display: inline !important;"><div style="display: inline !important;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"></span></i><br />
<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><div style="display: inline !important;"><div style="display: inline !important;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;">agree times a million that we regret the things we didn't do rather than the things we did, but i wonder how often it ever seems clear in the crucial moment, in the pinch, which future matches which description.</span></div></div></span></i></div></div></span></i></div></div></span></i></div></div></span></i></div></span></i></div></div></span></i></div>laura.ghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13638164730513113228noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35477414.post-15758015133993633022010-06-08T11:55:00.000-07:002010-06-08T12:49:28.444-07:00<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjO4Ax-wqyhvgmeKJrSBidYd2B-GzpOpxtQELCWl24skcFMvpGT63EochympaisaAapZNRUggXLEy38w9QxPmLG1nDfGQ6rKCyvRdhmcG4gGs8NdsXE6xxW2AaZJnRm1zGhIP3v7A/s1600/photo-28.jpg" style="text-decoration: none;"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjO4Ax-wqyhvgmeKJrSBidYd2B-GzpOpxtQELCWl24skcFMvpGT63EochympaisaAapZNRUggXLEy38w9QxPmLG1nDfGQ6rKCyvRdhmcG4gGs8NdsXE6xxW2AaZJnRm1zGhIP3v7A/s320/photo-28.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5480490328520625586" /></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" white-space: pre-wrap; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 5px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 5px; "><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">"i've carried this character around like an old suitcase, down a long, dusty path. i'm not carrying it because i like it. the contents are too heavy, and it looks crummy, fraying in spots. i've carried it with me because there was nothing else i was supposed to carry. still, i guess i have grown attached to it. as you might expect."</span></span></i></span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" white-space: pre-wrap; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 5px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 5px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><br /></span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" white-space: pre-wrap; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 5px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 5px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">haruki murakami</span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" white-space: pre-wrap; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 5px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 5px;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">what i talk about when i talk about running</span></span></i></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" white-space: pre-wrap; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 5px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 5px;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><br /></span></span></i></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" white-space: pre-wrap; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 5px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 5px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">i put up a post awhile back that began with a discussion of the fact that we are attached to our particular lives-- generally unwilling, even in theory, to trade them in for better ones-- even when we don't like them much. murakami puts this phenomenon really nicely. and he draws out the deep implicit connection between this attachment we have to our characteristic features, the good and the bad, and the view that our most characteristic behaviors, the good and the bad, are better described as just that-- as expression of our character, rather than than as acts of our will. the above passage is immediately prefaced by a discussion of murakami's "own individual, stubborn, uncooperative, often self-centered nature that still doubts itself":</span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" white-space: pre-wrap; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 5px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 5px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><br /></span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" white-space: pre-wrap; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 5px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 5px;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">i didn't start running because somebody asked me to become a runner. just like i didn't becomes a novelist because someone asked me to. one day, out of the blue, i wanted to write a novel. and one day, out of the blue, i started to run-- simply because i wanted to. i've always done whatever i felt like doing in life. people may try to stop me, and convince me i'm wrong, but i won't change.</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"> </span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" white-space: pre-wrap; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 5px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 5px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><br /></span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" white-space: pre-wrap; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 5px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 5px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">he neither seems to approve nor disapprove of this fact.</span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" white-space: pre-wrap; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 5px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 5px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><br /></span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" white-space: pre-wrap; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 5px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 5px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">in the comments section of that other post drew claimed that perhaps we ought to bite the bullet and concede that we </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">should</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"> be willing to trade in our lives for better ones, regardless of our inclinations-- that it's irrational not to. given my own views on personal identity, to say that we ought to be willing to trade in lives for better ones is to say that we ought to be willing to give up our lives for the greater good-- for the sake of things being better, overall. because there is no us beneath all of those projects and characteristics to survive the loss of the old ones and bear the new. and maybe morality is that kind of thing-- it can demand of us that we give up our lives for the greater good. but to be attached to and to grieve for the loss of the perfect little storm of beliefs and aims and memories that we are, independent of how they stack up against some other, doesn't strike me as being irrational at all, even if the attachment and the loss don't ultimately undermine morality's claim. </span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" white-space: pre-wrap; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 5px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 5px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><br /></span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" white-space: pre-wrap; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 5px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 5px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">i think that the right kinds of views about personal identity can themselves suggest that the best descriptions of our choices and acts will be in terms of expression of character rather than acts of will. i'm not at the point of being able to say it yet the way i'd like to, but i think reductionist views about personal identity and deflationist views about the will and revisionist views about blame and responsibility, while they all get a bad wrap for seeming not to capture the depth of our sense of ourselves and each other, are in fact the only terms in which we'll ultimately be able to do that sense any real justice.</span></span></span></div>laura.ghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13638164730513113228noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35477414.post-57124453590471448022010-06-03T10:35:00.000-07:002014-03-23T11:14:06.528-07:00part III: 'the data-driven life' (pragmatism, lantern consciousness, and flow)<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifIEkiL5Neb389SVf7B2ifGV0jK38uiLG8GdVrrWwA4LZ_T8vypx0hRgHiIUDmWex3_gcj6qnXLzx2q_8aPSq5pjRD0HiczjLH1xyHlynCPzQ50VtPagnK76npcILMEg9-2f7yeA/s1600/photo.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" style="text-decoration: none;"><img alt="" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifIEkiL5Neb389SVf7B2ifGV0jK38uiLG8GdVrrWwA4LZ_T8vypx0hRgHiIUDmWex3_gcj6qnXLzx2q_8aPSq5pjRD0HiczjLH1xyHlynCPzQ50VtPagnK76npcILMEg9-2f7yeA/s320/photo.jpg" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5478616795656021282" style="cursor: hand; 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<i>[this will probably be a little confusing if you haven't at least read <a href="http://pencilsandoatmeal.blogspot.com/2010/05/at-least-little-better-than-ive-been-so.html">part I</a> of the series (one of my favorite things i've ever written), and maybe <a href="http://pencilsandoatmeal.blogspot.com/2010/05/part-ii-on-data-driven-life.html">part II</a>]</i><br />
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perhaps it's true that the data-driven approaches to self-knowledge are inextricably entwined with dubious self-improvement projects (<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">'</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #4c4c4c; font-style: italic; line-height: 20px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">We use numbers to optimize an assembly line. Why not use numbers on ourselves?') </span></span></span>, the nature of which somehow skews the inquiries' results. but there are plenty of people who would argue that it makes no sense to try to conceive of any truth except in the context of practical inquiry-- as the answer to some question that we raise as a means of accomplishing some goal. on this view, there is no purer truth for truth's sake. there is no purer method that generates self-knowledge for its own sake. truth is a function of practical inquiry and it's utterly misguided to seek a truth external to it. so perhaps, in this, data-driven approaches to knowledge are no different from any other-- the answer will be largely a matter of how you ask the question. but even if we're thoroughgoing pragamatists, we can hold that there are better and worse kinds of practical inquiry. it still might be the case that the <i>particular</i> practical context of this data-driven stuff (which, historically at least, has been to maximize efficiency and thereby profit for capitalists) is the problem, but then there is a burden to show what other kind of practical inquiry would be superior and how it would be. <br />
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another way of explaining the pragmatist point is to say that we are planners, and that our beliefs are always on some deep level inextricable from our plans. what it is to be an agent, the idea goes, is to understand everything we see, at a very basic level, as a set of opportunities. we think only in the context of <i>do</i>ing. but then, we may not have always been (or always be) planners in this way. it's debatable. i'm currently reading alison's gopnik's new book on baby thinking, in which she argues that to be a baby is to be a little buddha, experiencing 'lantern consciousness' ('that vivid panoramic illumination of the every day'), which she contrasts with 'flow' ('the experience we have when our attention is completely focused on a single object or activity'). neither of these is our daily experience. rather, each is a different way in which we lose ourselves. the latter is accessible only to adults-- the experience of being absorbed in work. the former, though, seems to be a state in which we genuinely perceive in a way that is utterly divorced from planning-- no inner directedness at all-- and it's a state we achieve through certain kinds of meditation practice, and that we experience as babies. young children, according to gopnik, don't have a sense of self, or the 'inner executive', that projects forward and backward, and what this means isn't that they have no inner consciousness (indeed, gopnik argues that they are in some sense <i>more conscious</i>), but that their inner consciousness is undirect-- ' a journey of exploration rather than conquest'. so it seems as though a pure state of awareness (should we call it knowing?) is possible, independant of any particularly inquiry or plan.</div>
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this is where i should move into the discussion of buddhism and the quantified self that i'd like to end with, but my discussion partner and fact checker in these matters is in nepal for a month. so i'll end it with this for now: the suggestion is that maybe there is a way of knowing that stands outside of our projects and desire for conquest (most notably the desire to conquer ourselves, which so many self-quantifiers seem driven by), and whether or not that's true <i>means</i> something for what the burden of proof should be for the quantifiers. the data nerds' holy grail (perfect productivity/functioning) may require that they appeal to this notion of 'lantern consciousness'-- productivity being best acheived when we are able to move as directly as we can from lantern consciousness to flow and back again-- to move from the utter openness of undirected play to the consummate work of flow, and back. i suspect that that's what gets the most brilliant ideas off the ground, as this excerpt from <a href="http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/to_be_a_baby/">an interview with gopnik</a> suggests:<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia, serif; line-height: 22px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia, serif; line-height: 22px;"><i>there is a tradeoff between the ability to learn and imagine — which is our great </i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia, serif; line-height: 22px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"><i> <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></i></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia, serif; line-height: 22px;"><i>evolutionary advantage as a species — and our ability to apply what we’ve learned and <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span>put </i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia, serif; line-height: 22px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"><i> </i></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia, serif; line-height: 22px;"><i>it to use...children are like the R&D department of the human species. they’re the <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span>ones </i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia, serif; line-height: 22px;"><i>who are always learning about the world. but if </i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia, serif; line-height: 22px;"><i>you’re always learning, <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>imagining, <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>and </i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia, serif; line-height: 22px;"><i>finding out, you need a kind of freedom that you </i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia, serif; line-height: 22px;"><i>don’t have if you’re actually making<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia, serif; line-height: 22px;"><i>things happen in the world.</i></span></div>
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but to argue that such a hyper-open and -productive way of living is even possible puts the data collectors in the position of having to defend against the charge that their approach, born as it was of this desire for a kind of self-conquest, is itself antithetical to achieving the the desired state. something in the daily acts involved in quantifying our ourselves seems to preclude both the imaginative openness of lantern consciousness and the consummate focus of flow, but particularly the former. the question, then, is whether something in the nature of the quantifiedself-ers methods, given their ultimate goals, makes their whole project sort of self-defeating.<br />
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laura.ghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13638164730513113228noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35477414.post-52494798464481526392010-06-01T13:54:00.000-07:002011-02-05T21:12:15.767-08:00part II: on "the data-driven life" (a modest defense)<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgri517YhIStHx0kT0mFW64RsGaF1TxzAYieGAxbf-wWEwnqAFpiBDdCQm8cNiNLsrHr5Gcb3615IF0DKOlsKSLjXNVMzliGQ3ELs-5UPEaXcFiI7CcCZqp9_pIjmKXSFvirrpOAg/s1600/kurtli.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" style="text-decoration: none;"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5478390890909371634" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgri517YhIStHx0kT0mFW64RsGaF1TxzAYieGAxbf-wWEwnqAFpiBDdCQm8cNiNLsrHr5Gcb3615IF0DKOlsKSLjXNVMzliGQ3ELs-5UPEaXcFiI7CcCZqp9_pIjmKXSFvirrpOAg/s320/kurtli.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 213px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 320px;" /></a><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">the funny thing about 'priorities', and 'job descriptions', and all these kind of capital letter nouns is that they always make a lot of sense in abstraction, but it can be really complicated to square them up against reality. i'll give you an example. if i just grabbed you on the street and i said, 'what's the most important thing in your life?' you would say something probably like, you know, your family, or your church group, or, you know, maybe your career, or, you know, your kid, or your pet, or whatever. and the thing is, in some part of your heart, that's absolutely true. but do you have a sense of the extent to which your time and attention tracks to actually doing good stuff for that thing that you claimed is really important? because if a lot of people actually looked at where their time and attention went, the parts that they do have control over, it would like the most important thing in their life was facebook.</span></span></span></i><br />
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</span></span></span></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">merlin mann</span></span></span></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></span></i></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://pencilsandoatmeal.blogspot.com/2010/05/at-least-little-better-than-ive-been-so.html">in part I of this little series</a> i went over the basics of <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/magazine/02self-measurement-t.html">gary wolf's feature, 'the data-driven life'</a> and what i take to be some of the best reasons to be skeptical of the notion that wolf's methods provide some viable alternative to the talk therapy (or meditation, or the kinds of conceptual analysis adopted in western philosophy ) as a way of coming to know oneself. but my allegiances in this discussion between the "quantified self"-ers and their critics isn't so clear, even to me. </span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #666666;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">over the past several years, largely by way of my excellent friend <a href="http://stevetm.com/">steve</a>, i've become a regular peruser of the world of certain what you might call 'productivity gurus'-- in particular the various blog posts and podcasts of merlin mann. there seems to be a sort of clan of them writing and thinking about </span></span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">how and when and why we get our work done--</span></span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> for the purpose, of course, of being able to offer people advice and the proper tools for getting their work done. that's what they're paid to do, it seems-- help tech people and other 'knowledge workers' bogged down by meetings and a million emails a day manage it all and increase productivity by way, ostensibly, of a kind of self-awareness about certain measurable features of their circumstances, allowing for greater focus and self-mastery. (in the same lecture that i quote from above, mann recommends that his listeners use a particular program that tells you exactly how much time you've spent doing what on your computer all day.) i'm casting a pretty wide net here, but these would seem to be some version of our quantifiers-- advocating particular (digital) tools and systems aimed at increasing (in some measurable way) productivity, while gesturing toward grander things-- values, life projects-- invoking buddhism, even. </span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">it's troubling, of course, if the grand gesturing toward self-understanding through self-measurement begins to obscure the original ends of these measurement projects ('efficiency', 'productivity', etc.) and they are presented as just a new approach to self-understanding as an end in itself. but wolf's grandiosity aside, there's something obviously compelling in mann's very particular observation, and something obviously useful in the 'quantified self'-ish tools he suggests for helping us to see the problem more clearly. the point seems to be that, even putting to one side the question of whether or not we are living the lives we should be living, it is often the case that we aren't even living the lives we think we </span></span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">are</span></span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> living. the minutes slip by, and no natural faculty of ours (for most of us anyway) seems up to the task of keeping us in the honest know about how we're spending them.</span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #666666;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">these data nerds aren't even close to the first people to point this out-- that we are awfully limited in our capacity to see ourselves clearly-- or to suggest a method for correcting the problem, and though there are reasons to approach and inspect their methods with care before adopting them, my initial feeling is this: inasmuch as we are (1) already oriented by certain values, and (2) able to really look at the data we gather about ourselves without turning away, that data can, in certain limited ways, help us to see how and when we are failing and succeeding at living according to them. in favor of this proposed method of self-knowledge i will say that where it fails i think it's important to remember that other much older and grander methods have also failed (neither psychologists nor philosophers nor buddhist monks have yet ushered in an age of perfect self-knowledge, and god knows most psychologists and philosophers, at least, aren't even particularly adept at coming to know <i>themselves</i>). as a word of profound caution i'll add that where it succeeds it only does so by appeal to and reliance upon the partial successes of those same methods: if we aren't agile conceptualizers with an independent commitment to self-knowledge, the data is less than nothing. though numbers can certainly tell us a stark and surprising truth, if we can't approach them with openness and equanimity then we can ignore or misinterpret the truths they have to tell us just as we can ignore and misinterpret truths we can't bear to hear when delivered in any other form.</span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">when the "quantified self" rhetoric isn't ratcheted up to the almost religious (and certainly the best of it isn't) i don't have so much of a problem with it. the questions of how and when and why we do what we think we ought to are at least as much a part of ethics as questions of what it is we ought to do, and some of these guys seemed to be doing some interesting thinking on that topic. so i've been eavesdropping a little, and i'm frankly pretty fascinated. the trick, i think, is to keep firmly in mind (1) that we manipulate and interpret the data according to rules that must have some other source (more on this later) and (2) that when it comes to these data-collecting methods in particular, as a contingent fact of human psychology, we're extremely vulnerable to being distracted from our goals by the very methods we're using in our attempts to reach them.</span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">but then no one seems more aware of this pitfall</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> then mann, a dude working within that very tradition</span></span></span></span>. one of the things I've found so compelling is how deeply aware some of these thinkers seem to be of the risk that these methods and systems designed to help us get our work done (work in the broadest sense) will themselves becomes the focus of our thinking-- the real danger that adopters of these methods will come to use them as yet another way of avoiding what they fear-- to avoid finding or embracing the purpose to which those methods are meant to be put. the best are at least as aware of certain of the risks associated with their methods as the critics of those methods are, and they ought to be given credit for it.</span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #4c4c4c;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #4c4c4c;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black;"><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 17.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">anyway, dudes like wolf want to throw their hat in the ring and put forward these methods as a means of potentially coming to know ourselves, i think they should have their day in court, and that it would be worth our time, as critics, to look beyond wolf and try to respond to the best and subtlest pictures that can be sketched of what the approach would be. but i do hope that the advocates of this kind of method understand what they're in for in being taken seriously. when the data guru begins to make claims about the nature of the self, or the power of her method to reveal it, she will find herself in territory in which she may be distinctly uncomfortable: </span></span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">beyond</span></span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> the realm of the clearly testable or quantifiable-- her bets, in adopting this method, are not just empirical but in some profound sense normative. </span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 17.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">while the power of massive data sets is that they allow us to carefully test and potentially falsify certain beliefs we hold about ourselves or the ways in which things affect us, the larger (often implicit) claim motivating these projects-- the meta-claim of the data-guru that legitimate self-knowledge can be had by this method-- </span></span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">is not itself a purely empirical or testable claim, </span></span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">and so can't be legitimized by the data-guru's preferred method. </span></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 17.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">here's what I mean: the buddha says that truth is the nirvana we discover when we follow the breath and sink below the surface chatter of our conscious minds, and plato tells us the truth is a heaven of ideal forms that we gain access to by a process of correctly abstracting from the apparent world of sullied particulars. suppose the alleged truths we discover by either of these methods conflict or fail to jibe, in principle or practice, with the alleged truths of the data-guru. suppose one tradition says "this is what you are, as revealed by our method", and another tradition (say, the tradition of the data-guru) says "no, this is what you are, as </span></span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">our</span></span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> method reveals." these aren't, though they may seem to be, typical empirically testable claims. what set of data can the data guru gather that could falsify or vindicate their picture over the others? if we're comparing different and possibly antithetical methods of getting at the truth about ourselves, and likely differing claim about what those truths are, we can't usefully appeal to one of those self-same methods in deciding on one over another, and there's no independently existing blue print against which to compare the picture of selfhood each tradition generates.</span></span></span></div></span></span></div>laura.ghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13638164730513113228noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35477414.post-2138852450183807762010-05-21T12:16:00.000-07:002010-05-23T14:48:18.714-07:00on silverman.<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHN08WRt36a0EjTUI9-4PmKxogqWcPniNF6wc8ORVLXKdpXQ7hZfaM4AD2xDWU-RbUJe3OyjqIJbgUWT4pBQ7NaW2ycuSIDdt38KnmBFFXgODSNOU5DDafm07hKPdV5vk2VPxMoQ/s1600/453_sarahsilvzm8.jpg" style="text-decoration: none;"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 257px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHN08WRt36a0EjTUI9-4PmKxogqWcPniNF6wc8ORVLXKdpXQ7hZfaM4AD2xDWU-RbUJe3OyjqIJbgUWT4pBQ7NaW2ycuSIDdt38KnmBFFXgODSNOU5DDafm07hKPdV5vk2VPxMoQ/s320/453_sarahsilvzm8.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5473811052400710738" /></a><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">i love </span></span><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">sarah</span></span></span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span></span><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">silverman</span></span></span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">. i do. i think she's funny, </span></span><span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">independent</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> of any view that i might have of myself on any particular </span></span><span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">occasion</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> for thinking that. so i was listening today to </span></span><a href="http://www.onpointradio.org/2010/05/comedian-sarah-silverman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">her interview with tom </span></span></a><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4"><a href="http://www.onpointradio.org/2010/05/comedian-sarah-silverman"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">ashbrook</span></span></span></span></span></a></span><a href="http://www.onpointradio.org/2010/05/comedian-sarah-silverman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> on </span></span></a><i><a href="http://www.onpointradio.org/2010/05/comedian-sarah-silverman"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">on point</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">, </span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">and of course the topic is roughly: "is anything sacred?" "is everything fodder for your jokes?" and more subtly the topic turned to the question of (1) whether it makes a difference (a </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">moral </span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">difference, is the implication) whether or not the listeners are in on the joke, and (2) if it's better to say what we're all already thinking. if </span></span><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">sarah</span></span></span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span></span><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">silverman</span></span></span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> makes a joke about kids with mental retardation, and the "real" joke is that she (or, rather, her on-stage persona) is morally obtuse, well, what does it mean that some people are laughing at the joke of her obtuseness and some people are laughing at retarded kids? and are we all really laughing at the kids, while a few </span></span><span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">sophisticates</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> are simply able to tell themselves that they're laughing at the former rather than the latter? and is it better, as she claimed, to give a voice to the -isms that would otherwise be there, tamped carefully down upon. is there something potentially redeeming about being forces to confront that in ourselves?</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">i think that there's some merit to these defenses, but listening to </span></span><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">silverman</span></span></span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> kind of vaguely and </span></span><span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">uncomfortably</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> offer them (she is humbly uncomfortable in the role of theoretical </span></span><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">explicator</span></span></span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> or moral philosopher), i thought, as i often do, of this passage from </span></span><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">arendt's</span></span></span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">on totalitarianism</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">, in which she addresses the actual impact of the work of another group of artists (</span></span><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">silverman</span></span></span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">is</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> clear in expressing her belief that comedy is art, and that this means the comic, like other artists, has no business telling the audience what they ought to make of their work) looking to expose some middle-class </span></span><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">hypocricy</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">:</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Since the bourgeoisie claimed to be the </span></span><span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">guardian</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> of Western traditions and confounded all moral issues by parading publicly virtues which it not only did not possess in </span></span><span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">private</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> and </span></span><span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">business</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> life, but actually held in contempt, it seemed revolutionary to admit cruelty, disregard human values, and general amorality, because this at least destroyed the duplicity upon which the existing society seemed to rest. What a temptation to </span></span><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">flaunt</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> extreme </span></span><span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_16"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">attitudes</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> in the hypocritical twilight of double moral standards, to wear publicly the mask of cruelty if everybody was patently inconsiderate and pretended to be gentle...</span></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">At the time, nobody anticipated that the true </span></span><span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_17"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">victims</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> of </span></span><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_18"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">their</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> irony would be the elite rather than the bourgeoisie. The </span></span><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_16"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_19"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">avant</span></span></span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">-</span></span><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_17"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_20"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">garde</span></span></span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> did not know they were running their heads not against the walls but against open doors, that a unanimous success would belie their claim to being a revolutionary minority, and would prove that they were about to express a new mass spirit or the spirit of the time. Particularly significant in this respect was the reception given Brecht’s </span></span><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_18"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_21"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Dreigroschenoper</span></span></span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> in </span></span><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_19"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_22"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">pre</span></span></span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">-Hitler Germany. The play presented gangsters as respectable businessmen and respectable businessmen as </span></span><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_20"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_23"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_16"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">gangsters</span></span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">. The irony was somewhat lost when the respectable businessmen in the audience considered this a deep insight into the ways of the world and when the mob welcomed it as an artistic sanction of gangsterism. The theme song in the play, ‘Erst </span></span><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_21"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_24"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_17"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">kommt</span></span></span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span></span><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_22"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_25"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_18"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">das</span></span></span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span></span><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_23"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_26"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_19"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_16"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Fressen</span></span></span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">, </span></span><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_24"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_27"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_20"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_17"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">dann</span></span></span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span></span><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_25"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_28"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_21"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_18"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">dommt</span></span></span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> die Moral,’ </span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">[LG translation: first comes a full stomach, then comes ethics] </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">was greeted with frantic applause by exactly everybody, though for different reasons. The mob applauded because it took the statement literally; the bourgeoisie applauded because it had been fooled by its own hypocrisy for so long that it had grown tired of the tension and found deep wisdom in the expression of the banality by which it lived; the elites applauded because the unveiling of hypocrisy was such superior and wonderful fun. The effect of the work was exactly the opposite of what Brecht has sought by it. The bourgeoisie could no longer be shocked; it welcomed the exposure of its hidden philosophy, whose popularity proved they had been right all along, so the only political result of Brecht’s “revolution’ was to encourage everyone to discard the uncomfortable mask of hypocrisy and to accept openly the standards of the mob.</span></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">obviously, this isn't </span></span><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_19"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">pre</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">-war </span></span><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_20"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">germany</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">. despite some insane shit going on at the moment, i don't think that we're on the verge of a collapse into totalitarian dictatorship from the right or left. and i don't think, where our -isms are concerned, we're anything like eager to drop the pretense to embrace our worse selves. i don't think that we're weary in the right ways to start thinking that our worst selves are our true selves. but the point is, there are worse things than hypocrisy. there are worse things than tamping down on our base impulses. there can be a sophomoric </span></span><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_21"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">holden</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span></span><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_22"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">caulfieldish</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span></span><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_23"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">naivete</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> in the urge to point out and rile them.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">of course no one decried </span></span><span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_26"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">hypocrisy</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> more directly than </span></span><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_27"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_29"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_22"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_24"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">hannah</span></span></span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span></span><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_28"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_30"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_23"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_25"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">arendt, who famously referred to it as 'the vice of vices' ('integrity,' she said, '</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.')</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">. so the lesson isn't 'tolerate </span></span><span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_29"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">hypocrisy</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> for fear of something worse', but i does suggest that there are real moral and political risks in even an act so seemingly righteous. our moral responsibility doesn't stop with being honest or demanding honesty. taking a hard look at the worst of ourselves is not, itself, morally worthy-- though it can lead to acts of great moral (and artistic) worth.</span></span></span></span></span></span></p> <!--EndFragment-->laura.ghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13638164730513113228noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35477414.post-66987858149065069282010-05-18T12:10:00.000-07:002011-09-13T16:15:28.518-07:00part I: on "the data driven life"<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMDt0CZ9Pgp9483kb0zyssnG5lPdOFnkNznjd4ewCBPOS5aZT8kBlUABOUoRKqs-CyP8bNHidXY0R7MxqNl_5wzefLLy65dATj-5MKPcAYAcF_FplEYID74klv-YBiwkKDXFpnPg/s1600/beans.jpg" style="text-decoration: none;"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5472692782293520178" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMDt0CZ9Pgp9483kb0zyssnG5lPdOFnkNznjd4ewCBPOS5aZT8kBlUABOUoRKqs-CyP8bNHidXY0R7MxqNl_5wzefLLy65dATj-5MKPcAYAcF_FplEYID74klv-YBiwkKDXFpnPg/s320/beans.jpg" style="cursor: hand; 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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 13.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><i><i><span style="color: #4c4c4c;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I</span></span></span></i><i><span style="color: #4c4c4c;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> believe there is only one story in the world, and only one…. Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity, too—in a net of good and evil…There is no other story.’</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">John Steinbeck, East of Eden</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></i></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 13.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><i><span style="color: #4c4c4c;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">The New York Times Magazine</span></span></span></span><span style="color: #4c4c4c;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> recently featured </span></span></span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/magazine/02self-measurement-t.html"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">a piece</span></span></span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> on the growing number of people attempting to amass serious data sets cataloging the state and changes of their own bodies, thoughts, behaviors, etc., as a method for gaining self-knowledge, generally with an eye toward some kind of self-improvement or -mastery.</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">The projects cited range from a relatively modest record of drinks consumed or the effects of a particular drug on the body, to moment-by-moment accounts of time spent over the course of a work day or speed over the course of a run, to serious longitudinal records, stretched over the course of many years, of mood changes or new ideas. </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 13.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><i><span style="color: #4c4c4c;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">What I’d like to do is to try to take this claim seriously: That full self-understanding is aided by, if not dependent upon, our facility at quantifying ourselves. I’m naturally sympathetic to those who conceive of the drive to understand ourselves in terms of numbers and data sets as dangerous and misguided, particularly as intertwined as these projects have historically been with corporate efficiency goals and some of the more obviously facile “self-improvement” goals. But I can’t ignore the sense in which this movement shares a motive with a discipline as old as thought, and one with which I’m also naturally sympathetic: <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Western and Eastern philosophy alike are also founded on the claim that we can get free—of the cave, of our futile struggles—if we’re willing to surrender to a </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">method</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">, putting by the daily cud-chewing of ordinary thought with all of its erratic and sad circularities to follow the breath or the mantra or the syllogism—eyes closed, one hand in front of the other—toward truth, which is also freedom.</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 13.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><i><span style="color: #4c4c4c;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">In this, part I of a series I hope to write over the course of the summer, I'd like to focus on offering what I take to be the best case against the "data-driven life" approach to self-knowledge: that engaging in the methods it prescribes for making progress in fact systematically distracts us from what matters-- from real self-knowledge-- from meaningful life projects-- derailing any hope of actual progress. I agree with the critics that the “data-driven” approach to self-knowledge is often a way for its practitioners to avoid rather than confront certain deep human fears-- fear of the body, of mortality, of intimacy-- the confrontation of which are ultimately essential to self-understanding. To gather and gather and look to these numbers for the source of our problems is sometimes merely to be blindly subject (subjected blindingly) to the very forces that self-understanding demands we detect. But it doesn’t seem entirely implausible to me that for those with a certain kind of independent commitment to self-knowledge, this approach might furnish certain tools useful in that pursuit.</span></span></span></span><span style="color: #4c4c4c;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 13.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><i><span style="color: #4c4c4c;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Anyway, a little more about the “quantified self” phenomenon”: These quantification projects generally differ in scope from run of the mill calorie counting and checkbook balancing, though not necessarily in kind. What sets them apart is, first, the use of new developments in portable technologies. Most, though not all, involve the use of tracking devices that can account for steps, breaths, drops in blood sugar, and websites clicked through, with a mechanical precision and regularity formerly unattainable for your average human being. And some, though comparatively few, are distinct in a more fundamental way:</span></span></span></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 13.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><i><i><span style="color: #4c4c4c;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">For many self-trackers, the goal is unknown. Although they may take up tracking with a specific question in mind, they continue because they believe their numbers hold secrets that they can’t afford to ignore, including answers to questions they have not yet thought to ask.</span></span></span></i></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 13.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #4c4c4c;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Unlike balancing a checkbook or counting calories, the folks engaged in these projects don’t always know in advance what it is they’re looking to find out—not only in the sense that we don’t know before we analyze these data sets what the answers to our questions might be, but in that we may not even know in advance what the question </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">are.</span></span></span></span></span></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 13.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><i><span style="color: #4c4c4c;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">The central idea driving these projects is, I think, one that we can all (advocates and critics alike) agree on</span></span></span></span><span style="color: #4c4c4c;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">: we often get ourselves badly wrong when we rely on intuition and eye-balling it—“Our memories are poor," says Wolf-- "we are subject to a range of biases; we can focus our attention on only one or two things at a time.” These cognitive limitations, bias foremost among them, limit our capacity to understand ourselves, leading us to systematically under- and overestimate stuff like the amount of money or time we spend on what, and leaving us only crudely aware of the crucial but sophisticated workings of our own hearts, lungs, digestive and endocrine systems. The idea specific to the data-trackers is that better mechanical tracking devices are an essential tool for self-understanding, and not just understanding of the body, but of behavior-- of the </span><span class="Apple-style-span">self</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> in some more fundamental sense</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">.</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">When we look at the numbers, we see ourselves more truly—we achieve a better self-awareness. We look at the numbers, and we come to understand ourselves as we are—and, the idea goes, gain a traction that may allow us to become better—to see how and where we can.</span></span></span></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 13.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><i><span style="color: #4c4c4c;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">In 2005 Mark Greif wrote an essay (“Against Exercise”) in which he presciently excoriates the very phenomenon that Wolf descibes in the NYT piece: “Almost imperceptibly,” Wolf writes “numbers are infiltrating the last redoubts of the personal. Sleep, exercise, sex, food, mood, location, alertness, productivity, even spiritual well-being are being tracked and measured, shared and displayed.” Wolf's statement of the phenomenon he takes to be the solution to our problems could be taken, almost word for word, from Greif's perspective, as an indictment of that same phenomenon. (Side note: One of the most fascinating things about this discussion is that the advocates of this approach often understand their movement in exactly the same terms as its most disdainful critics. More on this later) Greif, in his earlier essay, addresses the case of exercise specifically, but delivers what I think is still the best formulation of the general distaste that a certain class of cultural critics (to whom I am hugely sympathetic) has for this approach to self-knowledge (I’m going to quote from this essay extensively, because it doesn’t seem to be otherwise available online, but feel free to skip over it—or, better yet, go read the whole thing </span></span></span><a href="http://nplusonemag.com/print-issue-1"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">here</span></span></span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> or </span></span></span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Best-American-Essays-2005/dp/0618357130"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">here</span></span></span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">):</span></span></span></span><span style="color: #4c4c4c;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 13.0pt; margin-left: 48.0pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><i><i><span style="color: #4c4c4c;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">The only truly essential pieces of equipment in modern exercise are numbers. Whether at the gym or on the running path, rudimentary calculation is the fundamental technology…a simple negative test of whether an activity is modern exercise is to ask whether it could be done meaningfully without counting or measuring it…</span></span></span></i><span style="color: #4c4c4c;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 13.0pt; margin-left: 48.0pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><i><i><span style="color: #4c4c4c;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">in exercise one gets a sense of one’s body as a collection of numbers representing capabilities. The other location where an individual’s numbers attain such talismanic status is the doctor’s office. There is a certain seamlessness between all the places where exercise is done and the sites where people are tested for illnesses, undergo repairs, and die. In the doctor’s office, the blood lab, and the hospital, you are at the mercy of counting experts….The clipboard with your numbers is passed. At last the doctor takes his seat, a mechanic who wears the white robe of an angel and is as arrogant as a boss. In specialist language, exacerbating your dread and expectation, you may learn your numbers for cholesterol (two types), your white cells, your iron, immunities, urinalysis, and so forth. He hardly needs to remind you that these numbers correlate with your chances of survival.</span></span></span></i><span style="color: #4c4c4c;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 13.0pt; margin-left: 48.0pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><i><i><span style="color: #4c4c4c;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">How do we acquire the courage to exist as a set of numbers? Turning to the gym or track, you gain the anxious freedom to count yourself. What a relief it can be. Here are numbers you can change. You make the exercises into trials you perform upon matter within reach, the exterior armor of your fat and muscle. You are assured these numbers, too, and not only the black marks in the doctor’s files, will correspond to how long you have to live. With willpower and sufficient discipline, that is, the straitening of yourself to a rule, you will be changed…</span></span></span></i><span style="color: #4c4c4c;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 13.0pt; margin-left: 48.0pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><i><i><span style="color: #4c4c4c;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">The curious compilation of numbers that you are becomes an aspect of your freedom, sometimes the most important, even more preoccupying than your thoughts or dreams. You discover what high numbers you can become, and how immortal. For you, high roller, will live forever. You are eternally maintained.</span></span></span></i><span style="color: #4c4c4c;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 13.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><i><span style="color: #4c4c4c;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">It seems like the idea is something like this: </span><span class="Apple-style-span">The data-collection method of achieving self-knowledge seems patently absurd if the method itself serves as a daily means of distracting us from our own fear of mortality and intimacy—</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span">particularly if it does so in part by giving us a false sense that we are in fact gaining some traction on these very “problems”.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> Perhaps my drive to keep careful records of my heart rate on each daily run and how I’ve spent the minutes of my day is itself the function of a fear of death and the inevitable passage of time—a fear that record-keeping can momentarily hold at bay but can neither detect nor ultimately assuage. The thought seems to be that the promise of self-knowledge that mere data collection and analysis promises is not only false, but ultimately serves to mask and distract us from that very thing.</span></span></span></span><span style="color: #4c4c4c;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 13.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #4c4c4c;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Also prominent in Greif's essay is the notion that we’re distracted from the project of living a meaningful life by the pointless but self-sustaining project of preserving and maintaining an otherwise meaningless life of endless preservation and maintenance. This is a criticism that the modern exerciser may be particularly vulnerable to, but anyone devoting the kind of time required to implement and maintain data-gathering systems on any aspect of their lives seem equally vulnerable. We may, in this way, “</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">dispose of the better portion of our lives in life preservation.”</span></span></span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=35477414&postID=6698785814906506928#_ftn1"><span style="color: #fffc74; text-decoration: none;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">[1]</span></span></span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> But the complaint isn’t just that act of recording oneself as data becomes (like some self-referential nightmare) the daily content it was meant to record</span></span></span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=35477414&postID=6698785814906506928#_ftn2"><span style="color: #fffc74; text-decoration: none;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">[2]</span></span></span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> (this content might otherwise have just been some other relatively meaningless daily bullshit anyway), but that, but their very nature, these number games distracts us from the particular projects that are likely to make a life meaningful. </span><span class="Apple-style-span">Even if our systems of data-collection, once implemented, take up little of our actual time, their impact may be huge and unpredictable: </span><span class="Apple-style-span">We are by nature self-regarding animals. Change the way we look at ourselves, and you change</span> <span class="Apple-style-span">the selves we're looking at.</span></span></span></span></span></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 13.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><i><span style="color: #4c4c4c;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">I hope that even proponents of this movement won't consider any of this merely the vicious slander of a bunch of liberal arts majors. The data-collectors, at least as they’re represented in the </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Times</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> piece, do seem to understand their own movement in some of the same (sometimes troubling) terms as their critics: </span></span></span></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 13.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><i><span style="color: #4c4c4c;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">(1) as an outgrowth of the (emotionally and spiritually hollow-sounding) movement toward ever-greater efficiency (i.e. greater productivity in the context of capitalist economies in which the end is, I guess, money):</span></span></span></span><span style="color: #4c4c4c;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 13.0pt; margin-left: 48.0pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><i><i><span style="color: #4c4c4c;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I suspected that the self-tracking explosion was simply the logical outcome of this obsession with efficiency. We use numbers when we want to tune up a car, analyze a chemical reaction, predict the outcome of an election. We use numbers to optimize an assembly line. Why not use numbers on ourselves?</span></span></span></i><span style="color: #4c4c4c;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 13.0pt; margin-left: 48.0pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><i><span style="color: #4c4c4c;"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></o:p></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 13.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><i><span style="color: #4c4c4c;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">i'm not inclined, as some are, to hear this kind of talk-- of "optimizing" ourselves like cars on an assembly line-- in ungenerous or even dystopic terms, but i think it rightly gives many of us pause. let's consider with some care how we are or aren't like assembly line projects. </span></span></span></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 13.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><i><span style="color: #4c4c4c;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">(2) as an (perhaps superior) alternative to therapeutic means of self-knowledge—to verbal analysis of our “thoughts and dreams". The following is from Wolf:</span></span></span></span><span style="color: #4c4c4c;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 13.0pt; margin-left: 48.0pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><i><i><span style="color: #4c4c4c;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Ubiquitous self-tracking is a dream of engineers. For all their expertise at figuring out how things work, technical people are often painfully aware how much of human behavior is a mystery. People do things for unfathomable reasons. They are opaque even to themselves. A hundred years ago, a bold researcher fascinated by the riddle of human personality might have grabbed onto new psychoanalytic concepts like repression and the unconscious. These ideas were invented by people who loved language. Even as therapeutic concepts of the self spread widely in simplified, easily accessible form, they retained something of the prolix, literary humanism of their inventors. From the languor of the analyst’s couch to the chatty inquisitiveness of a self-help questionnaire, the dominant forms of self-exploration assume that the road to knowledge lies through words. Trackers are exploring an alternate route. Instead of interrogating their inner worlds through talking and writing, they are using numbers. They are constructing a quantified self.</span></span></span></i><span style="color: #4c4c4c;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 13.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><i><span style="color: #4c4c4c;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">I've already said a little bit about why therapeutic methods might be better suited than data collection methods when it comes to self-knowledge, so I’m not going to keep hammering on this, but I hope it’s obvious why thoughtful people might suspect that this data-collecting stuff is, at best, a pointless distraction from what really matter and, at worst, the importation of utterly creepy, soulless and ultimately destructive capitalist business models into to the very heart of our personal lives. Whether one ultimately agrees with all of this or not, it strikes me as irresponsible not to at least take these sorts of concerns very seriously. The stakes are not small. In Greif’s words</span></span></span></span><span style="color: #4c4c4c;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 13.0pt; margin-left: 48.0pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><i><i><span style="color: #4c4c4c;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">The consequences are not only the flooding of consciousness with a numbered and regulated body or the distraction from living that comes with endless life-maintenance, but the liquidation of the last untouched spheres of privacy, such that biological life itself becomes a spectacle.</span></span></span></i><span style="color: #4c4c4c;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 13.0pt; margin-left: 48.0pt; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><i><i><span style="color: #4c4c4c;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">…The thinness we strive for becomes spiritual. This is not the future we wanted.</span></span></span></i><span style="color: #4c4c4c;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 13.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #4c4c4c;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">A final word against all of these numbers: I began this post by drawing a parallel (which I will draw out further in subsequent posts) between this method of overcoming cognitive limitation to see ourselves my clearly on the one hand, and Eastern and Western philosophy on the other-- and particularly the claims made by the founders of these two tradition. Both Socrates and Buddha offered us methods for getting at freedom by way of seeing ourselves truly. And, you know, it's hard for me to see, off the top of my head, how self-tracking could have helped the Buddha or Socrates to understand themselves better than their own methods allowed them to. Which is to say that data gathering is not obviously </span><span class="Apple-style-span">necessary</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> (though it may be useful) for self-knowledge. And I don't think that even the most avid data-gather would claim that data gathering is </span><span class="Apple-style-span">sufficient</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">. It can't tell us what questions to ask or make us capable of properly analyzing the data-- or even being able to bear to look at the results. <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia, serif;">Despite the dreams of the engineer, the data can’t tell us what questions to ask, and the data can’t open our eyes to see what we can’t or won’t see. <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-style: italic;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">It seems to me that having conceded that these methods are neither strictly necessary nor ever sufficient for self-knowledge, maybe there could be some space for discussing, in a way that is palatable to the critic, what valid use these methods </span><span class="Apple-style-span">could</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> be put to.</span></span></span></span></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #4c4c4c;"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></o:p></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 273.0pt; margin-top: 0in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><i><span style="color: #4c4c4c;"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></o:p></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 13.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><i><span style="color: #4c4c4c;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=35477414&postID=6698785814906506928#_ftnref"><span style="color: #fffc74;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">[1]</span></span></span></a></span><span style="color: #4c4c4c;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> Greif here is referring to preserving our bodies through exercise, but I don’t think I’m making too much of a jump by understanding the phrase in this broader sense—by understanding the keeping of detailed numerical records of the states and changes of our minds and bodies as itself a form of “self-preservation”.</span></span></span><span style="color: #4c4c4c;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="color: #4c4c4c;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=35477414&postID=6698785814906506928#_ftnref"><span style="color: #fffc74;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">[2]</span></span></span></a></span><span style="color: #4c4c4c;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> Collecting numerical data would, after all, be no more subject to this criticism than, say, writing incessantly in a journal.</span></span></span></i></div><br />
<div style="mso-element: footnote-list;"><div id="ftn" style="mso-element: footnote;"></div></div>laura.ghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13638164730513113228noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35477414.post-24950652426001755622010-05-02T15:53:00.000-07:002010-05-04T09:25:32.825-07:00talking about the future.<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0QCn0XC8lzJf1IS8hcIvg7OlzxJBGROejXpbrBYUsNHsRYBmLdg0ZZMYo06pOp_AGzFNEKDCe-bNGpWnda0kbqiXRnMHGJp3xvLxkD_QWvwevAxrf_AAtlTiNnasKJqShNDwiOQ/s1600/mirror.jpg" style="text-decoration: none;"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 249px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0QCn0XC8lzJf1IS8hcIvg7OlzxJBGROejXpbrBYUsNHsRYBmLdg0ZZMYo06pOp_AGzFNEKDCe-bNGpWnda0kbqiXRnMHGJp3xvLxkD_QWvwevAxrf_AAtlTiNnasKJqShNDwiOQ/s320/mirror.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5466856792709786210" /></a>suppose someone proposed to you the following arrangement: you trade in your life for a new one. this new life will be measurably better. your life will be arranged in such a way as to score markedly higher by all quality of life indexes. you will, they can guarantee, accurately report higher levels of satisfaction-- less anxiety, more opportunity to engage directly in the projects you find most meaningful, better fit with those you are closest to, etc. you just live a new life, in a new place, with a new social network, and new projects. suppose you knew that your central values, preferences, and strengths could remain the same-- these places and projects and social networks would be better by your own lights-- you wouldn't be a happy executioner or anything like that. suppose also that you wouldn't even have to worry about missing your old life because you wouldn't have to remember it. you could wake up one day living this new life as though you'd been living it forever. you wouldn't miss a beat, or friend.<div><br /></div><div>would you be inclined to take this person up on their offer?<div><br /></div><div>people's answer to questions like this is almost invariably (and surprisingly/unsurprisingly) no. this holds true even when people are quite dissatisfied with their actual lives. we seem to be attached to the lives we live for reasons that aren't reducible to happiness or satisfaction, or even values and projects.</div><div><br /></div><div>there are a mess of thought experiments in the literature on personal identity that have a remarkably similar ring to them. (personal identity is a branch of metaphysics devoted to questions of what a person is such that it persists through time as a single entity, though it may change drastically in its composition-- part of a larger literature on identity in general, concerned with the question of how <i>anything</i> persists in this way.) only the question here is a theoretical question: not 'would you choose to live this new life?' but 'would this new person still be you in any meaningful sense? in any sense at all? in what sense?' is it memory that unifies us? character? commitment to particular projects and values? the continuity of the body? of the brain? at what point do changes in any of these constitute the end of a person? are you the same person if your memory is wiped clean? if you find jesus? if your brain were transplanted into a new body? half of your brain? are you the same person if you step into a teletransporter and are perfectly reconstituted on a distant planet out of different atoms? what if there's a glitch at point A, and you are reconstituted at point B without ever having been unconstituted? what if there's a lag and you see, in the monitor, yourself at point B and you see, through the window, the teleportation operators working frantically to fix their mistake? you know they will succeed in just a moment and these atoms will be blown apart. do you feel you are about to die, or that you'll lived on? are you bored as though merely stuck in traffic? who is that person in the monitor to you? the questions are so strange, but our answers, if we look at them, can help us to understand who it is we think we are.</div><div><br /></div><div>people keep asking me about the future. i don't know what to say. am i so excited? no, i can't say that i'm excited. what i mostly feel is a determined resignation-- sadly certain and a little scared. but not because i believe i'll be unhappy or that i've made the wrong choice-- quite the contrary. i think i'll be happy in california. more than happy. if there's something i know about myself it's that i'm good at beginnings, and i'm going to begin work i know i'm good at. but this 'i' i'm looking at in the monitor, with all of my values and strengths, most of my memories, who shares some of my projects and commitments and feelings and is alienated from or uninterested in others, she is primarily this to me: who i'll die for. and that's cool and that's right, because her life will fit to her the way this life here has been fit to me but would cease to be if i couldn't bring myself to do what i have to do, which is die so i can live. it sounds dramatic, i know. but my feelings aren't dramatic. they're barely even feelings. whatever they are, though, i'm determined to do them justice. i don't mind dying-- letting my own accomplished, failed, and deferred projects give way to someone else's-- but i'm not inclined to pretend that i feel something i don't, or that i'm someone i'm not yet. and i don't need anyone to explain to me that things will be awesome, as though my hesitation is a sign that i don't know-- as though i'm not the one willing to die for it. knowing one as fully as i can know it does nothing to undermine the other.</div><div><br /></div><div>i'm so lucky in my life and place and projects and network, and it's not a question of waking up one day having lost all that, it's true. but there's a real sense in which a chapter has come to a close, and i can't say i didn't cling more than a little before i let go, or that i won't have to fight the urge to cling a little yet. because it's been so fucking good and so fucking bad and all mine. the future, for better and worse, is someone else's. and that's cool, and wonderful, and inevitable, and also sad.</div></div>laura.ghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13638164730513113228noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35477414.post-37289871610794301022010-04-17T11:59:00.000-07:002010-04-17T13:23:16.357-07:00a work in progress progresses.<div><i>yesterday's blogtime was devoted to helping my sister put together packets of things for the voters of maricopa county, AZ. today, in light of this, and the difficulty of the subject matter i'm giving myself an hour.</i></div><div><br /></div>several months ago i left hanging <a href="http://pencilsandoatmeal.blogspot.com/2009/11/work-in-progress.html">a post about causation</a>, that claimed to be part one of a two part series. the gist of the thing (part one) was this: even if you know the whole story of how something came to pass, you don't yet have a way of establishing what caused it. run the tape backwards-- watch the bridge resurrect, uncollapse, in excruciating detail-- watch the cars and boats slide backward underneath and over it, and days become nights become days, the rain stopping, and the rain starting again-- watch the thing unravel back to the first moment a sleepy engineer arrived to survey the undeveloped land. catalogue it all and all you've got's a story in which every feature, no matter how seemingly insignificant, will like play an ineliminable role in the story of the fall. and, anyway, you could just keep rolling that film back forever. where does the story even start?<div><br /></div><div>how, then, do we pick out the salient facts? the one's rightly named 'cause'? there are lots of philosophers who talk about causation in lots of different ways (<a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-probabilistic/">probabilistic causation</a>, <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-backwards/">backward causation</a>, <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-process/">causal processes</a>, <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-metaphysics/">the metaphysics of causation</a>-- and that's not even touching on aristotle, who divides the universe of causes into four distinct sorts: material, formal, efficient, and ultimate), but what i'll be discussing here are counterfactual theories of causation, which ground what is known in legal and philosophical contexts alike as 'but-for' causation. In it's broadest form this is just to say that 'A caused B' is to be understood as the claim 'if A had not occurred, then B would not have occurred.' </div><div><br /></div><div>but this doesn't get us too much further along than our perfect catalogue of events. a significant subset of the list of features will likely amount to causes by this definition. what we need to find are those subset of causes (in the broadest sense of that that term) which are not just necessary, but sufficient ('determinants', lewis calls them). so long as this feature (or set of features) is present, this enough to ensure that the bridge will fall. the relevant formula is now more demanding-- for A to be a cause in this stricter sense it must be true that so long as A <i>has </i>occurred, then B will occur. </div><div><br /></div><div>oh, crum. leah is here early. and i haven't even gotten to overdetermination yet! i haven't even turned my little philosophy lesson into anything meaningful! i guess it's the nature of these exercises. i will continue to work on this, but i'm going to post it now anyway, in the spirit of the task i set myself.</div>laura.ghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13638164730513113228noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35477414.post-43305099562628699872010-04-15T15:12:00.000-07:002010-04-15T16:00:23.168-07:00the space of logical possibility.<i><div>day 2:</div></i><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>i'm changing course, deviating from my list of things to write about, to think about a question drew posed in a comment on my last post-- both because it interests me and because i only have twenty minutes today, and i just spent ten of them looking for images i couldn't find. this is a question i've asked about many times myself: what are we suppose to be imagining when we imagine the space of logical possibility?</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div>upon reflection it seems to me that i always imagine the space of logical possibility as a hybrid between:</div><div><br /></div><div>(a) the fine grained color wheel that appears when i'm feeling picky and choose the 'more colors' option in microsoft word, so that i can pick the perfect shade in which to offer feedback on student papers. ('what color,' i ask myself, ' will communicate firmness and authority without being harsh or anxiety inducing?' and then i choose regular old blue again.)</div><div><br /></div><div>and </div><div><br /></div><div>(b) that old map (which i can't find anywhere) that they used in science textbooks circa 1995, representing our best guess at the time of what the universe might look like: a sort of ghostly dimpled undulating sphere-- the deep center of which looked utterly impenetrable, even in that sad little textbook sketch.</div><div><br /></div><div>-- a hybrid interactive in the style of the technology used by the department of precrime in steven spielberg's <i>minority report-- </i>with all of the data swirling and reorganizing itself with an incredible responsiveness the smallest changes in the nature of the particular inquiry, utterly sensitive to the smallest expert flick of the inquirer's wrist (the mind's wrist!).</div><div><br /></div><div>what do you say, drew k?</div><div>also, question: isn't there something square/circle-y about trying to imagine the space of logical possibility? how does the fact that we may or may not be able to imagine the space of logical possibility, or generate models of it (could we?), reflect on its ontological status? </div>laura.ghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13638164730513113228noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35477414.post-24255122048947239922010-04-14T13:19:00.000-07:002010-04-14T15:50:44.400-07:00all of the possible people who, for all i know, i am.<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiWDPIYSyvKQhdou9HGAhNUwPoqhSCck0sQKtlFtiQIiF0L0ywUZb2bh02KKX76hQnGjlFLwpMeTZVlHEtX7f23eUpD64f4hGsQ8gE_PiA5hawh6w_tl6fhON_L-g997K-ejAQRA/s1600/hallway.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiWDPIYSyvKQhdou9HGAhNUwPoqhSCck0sQKtlFtiQIiF0L0ywUZb2bh02KKX76hQnGjlFLwpMeTZVlHEtX7f23eUpD64f4hGsQ8gE_PiA5hawh6w_tl6fhON_L-g997K-ejAQRA/s320/hallway.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5460125452233695922" /></a><br /><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>to break up a week of studying in the desert for my metaphysics comp, i'm going to try to do a quick entry each of the next four days going roughly through some little idea or other that i've been meaning to get down and never managed to. these will be timed, and therefore badly edited, and likely confusing at times-- but i hope not utterly incomprehensible.</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>day 1:</i></div><div><br /></div>this is a little idea i've been meaning to write down forever-- as good a place as any to begin. you've all heard me talk (too much, too much) about possible worlds, and i hope you can forgive me if i start there again, as a kind of warm up. it will start out seeming very dry and technical, but i hope that by the end you'll see that it's really about the something so hard and true and human and familiar.<div><br /></div><div>kripke famously objects to david lewis' analysis of the modal claims we make about ourselves and others-- claims about what we could have done-- on the grounds that this analysis, in some profound way, fails to capture what we mean when we say that we could have done something. lewis's analysis goes something like this: when terry malloy says, with the deepest conviction and longing, 'i could have been a contender', we should analyze this as being a claim about what terry malloy counterparts actually did in nearby possible worlds. to say that malloy <i>could </i>have been a contender is to say that in very many of possible worlds very like our own world, people in those worlds very closely resembling malloy (except, perhaps for very slight variations in his composition or circumstance) <i>were </i>contenders. </div><div><br /></div><div>according to kripke, though, this analysis is fundamentally in error, no matter what other advantages it may have: when malloy says '<i>i</i> could have been a contender', he means <i>himself. </i>it is irrelevant to him what some other person in some other possible world did, but very important to him indeed that <i>he himself </i>could have done. there's a good technical response to this objection, which i'm not going to talk about here, because even though i think it does technically answer kripke's objection, i think there's another response that gets more to the beating heart of the problem kripke raises, which i think is not quite shaken off by the technical fix. (and because i'm strictly timing this little writing exercise, and i'm already running short.)</div><div><div><br /></div><div>to understand the response i want to give, you have to understand something about how david lewis conceives of learning. imagine that, as david lewis thinks, the world we live in is "located" in a vast logical space, containing every possible world-- every single way things might have been-- with worlds most like our own being the closest and those farthest away being the most different. (of course worlds must be like or unlike one another in some particular respect, so where our world is located in logical space is not static, but determined by some particularly modal inquiry.) learning, then, is a matter of <i>locating ourselves in logical space</i>. if you know nothing about the world you inhabit (if that's even possible), then, for all you know, any possible world you can conceive of might very well be the world you're in. but every single thing you learn about the world you're in narrows down the list of worlds which, for all you know, are your own. so long as we're ignorant of anything, there will be many possible worlds which, for all we know might be our own. we're forever adding and eliminating possible worlds from the list-- that's what learning is. the region of logical space containing all of the possible worlds which, for all you know, might be the world you live in, is the space of epistemic possibility.</div><div><br /></div><div>so here's the thing: there's so much we don't know about ourselves. there are infinite possible people, who, for all i know, might be me. we imagine possible futures, and we hope for and fear them terribly sometimes. there are many possible people who, for all you know, might be you, and some you come to hope or fear you are-- and some you even come, out of hope or fear, to believe that you are, though the evidence is, in fact, still inconclusive. it stands to reason, then, that because we are (a) epistemically limited in ways that keep us from knowing just exactly who we are or what's coming next, and (b) prone, as a contingent fact of human psychology, to care about who we are and what happens to us, and to prefer certain outcomes to others, that we will come to have feelings for possible people that it turns out we aren't, which are as profound as any feelings we might have for the person who it turns out we are. it's a funny thing about us that we sometimes care more for those possible people it turns out we're not. we sometimes spend our whole lives mentally tracking a person that it turns out we aren't along a path we believed we might follow. there is a possible person, a contender, who terry malloy believed so fiercely was himself, and that, i think, is more than enough to explain all of the conviction and longing implicit in his famous proclamation.</div><div><br /></div><div>it's this sort of obvious aspect of human psychology, and not that he overlooked a certain technical detail of lewis' analysis, that makes kripke's "me myself" objection seem so obtuse to me.</div><div><br /></div><div>time's up.</div></div>laura.ghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13638164730513113228noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35477414.post-64069898078550533762010-03-25T19:42:00.000-07:002011-10-30T12:00:41.077-07:00investing in possible futures.<div><i><br />
</i></div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhffkSZig_rGuSytdwuiVzsrbXcCXr5xlgGgNH4yUacpD2dm0G98mxulUaf7KwzCGIeoGjmTb8A9XY-E0_g7t3RllQEd1m1QdjCsiCNQxPcYs9_x2Y54fpDYQQqGmTdlzGrEB2k0g/s1600/babies.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5452768110555868818" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhffkSZig_rGuSytdwuiVzsrbXcCXr5xlgGgNH4yUacpD2dm0G98mxulUaf7KwzCGIeoGjmTb8A9XY-E0_g7t3RllQEd1m1QdjCsiCNQxPcYs9_x2Y54fpDYQQqGmTdlzGrEB2k0g/s320/babies.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 320px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 320px;" /></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">it's spring, and all of the ladies and gentlemen of the greater boston area are blooming baby bjorns, and so many of my friends who don't already have one or two are in various states of negotiations on the subject, and everyone's in the mood to talk about it, and damned if i'm not also reading </span></span><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6343761-the-philosophical-baby"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">a book on the subject</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> (also, jason kottke reposted </span></span><a href="http://kottke.org/10/03/babies-trailer"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">the trailer for the film, 'babies',</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"> which reignited my passion for watching it). if you're reading this blog, chances are i've discussed this subject with you yourself-- but, listen, i have a self-imposed blogging quota to meet. i'll try to add something a little fresh in order to hold yr attention.</span></span><br />
<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">i'm pretty much in love with the babies my friends have grown, and are growing, and are planning to grow, but i've always thought that any kids i raise will be kids i adopt, and something about this stance has recently become more clear to me: if i do adopt kids, it won't be because i'd rather adopt kids than grow them myself, but because i'd rather raise kids i've adopted than do anything else at all. there are approximately infinite answers to the question of how one should spend one's time and money, how one should love, and i don't see why the choice between raising a kid you adopt versus raising one you grow is more ethically salient than the choice between adopting one and doing something entirely different-- spending your life writing blog posts, for example-- or between growing a baby yourself and devoting your life to the sea. there's just a lot of ways to spend what you have, and they all have their advantages and drawbacks, and we each have our values and moral imperatives, and things we take special pleasure in.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">richard russo says the following: 'you won't be a fully vested citizen until you have someone you love more than life to hand this imperfect world over to', and i think he's probably roughly right. there are awful parents and saintly childless crusaders, it's true. it's also true that the protective impulses that parenthood brings will probably tend, just like self-protecting impulses, to skew our judgment in ways that are sometimes destructive-- particularly toward others, toward the larger world. nonetheless, it's easy to see what RR's saying. and i don't suppose that there's a better way to learn more about science and magic and justice and injustice and pleasure and pain and goodness and badness than by attentive child-rearing. i suspect that raising kids would be for me, as it is for many people, exceptionally challenging and gratifying, and these are good reasons to do it.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">but russo also writes: 'd</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">on't worry too much about the world they'll be born into, which will suck, because that's what the world mostly does', and i believe that, too, but maybe a little differently. it might sound odd or extreme, but i do think that the potential horrors that life throws at people, in addition to the horrors that people (who were all once the children of parents-- probably even some good and loving and optimistic parents) grow up to inflict on one another, makes the prospect of bringing children into the world an ethically risky proposition. i don't mean to suggest that these risks are necessarily prohibitive, but they are, i think, profoundly concerning...and <i>possibly</i> prohibitive. they concern the shit out of me, anyway. i do believe that taking a kid in the world and investing yourself fully in her, despite the risks inherent investing in anything as uncertain as someone else, strikes me as being one of the most unqualifiedly sound and satisfying choices that life allows for (assuming that building families and helping kids grow is one of the things you like to do best of all). but bringing new kids in the world in order to invest in them in this way is, i think, a distinct and distinctly dicier proposition, ethically speaking. you bring a kid into the world, and you can't make any promises to either about how the other is going to turn out. the risk you take, i can't help but notice, is so much more than yours. </span></span></div>laura.ghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13638164730513113228noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35477414.post-71628055015546694372010-03-20T08:09:00.000-07:002011-09-20T12:28:04.487-07:00it takes a special bravery to see love through.<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxjvy-4m8K6hoFwtEw6aXtgr3e9UVhM41yJK5t1ot2KhiVfm0HJk7vzdDAR1gCz2XNGiqKO3tW-F8YZ15rKQc73pBhWo3KCoF1gNld47k6sqLlvXxC7CDRZHnCJzE_vd15ApM2Hw/s1600-h/d&M.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5450687034369124194" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxjvy-4m8K6hoFwtEw6aXtgr3e9UVhM41yJK5t1ot2KhiVfm0HJk7vzdDAR1gCz2XNGiqKO3tW-F8YZ15rKQc73pBhWo3KCoF1gNld47k6sqLlvXxC7CDRZHnCJzE_vd15ApM2Hw/s320/d&M.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 320px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 246px;" /></a><br />
<div><i><br />
</i></div><div><i>i've been trying to write this paper for over a year. i had a strong intuition about what the problem to be addressed was, but i was floundering around with no real notion of how to address it. and then i understood, and the answer seemed obvious. so i finally wrote it. i never really understand, of course, whatever it might feel like in the moment. i just take a swing at it. what follows are some tweaked selections from my swing. i've tried to strain out the most boring technical parts, but a good bit of it's here, and though it's a paper about a platonic dialogue it is not, as you'll see, addressed to a boring or technical question. plato, you should know, is endlessly sexy and relevant, and i'm not just saying that.</i></div><div><br />
</div><div><div><i><br />
</i></div><div><i> </i><br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><i><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Love as Reverence & Revelation: Mad love in Plato’s Phaedrus</span></b></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">"[The lover's] effort is to know the other's character through and through. This leads, further, to increased self-understanding." </span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness</span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span></b></i></div><i><b></b></i><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;"><i><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></b></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><i><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">It’s an endless source of consternation, reassurance and wonderment how little the most basic questions about how to live ever change, even over the course of millennia.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Ought one choose a partner she loves terribly—one, perhaps, who harbors a love like that for her—or ought one partner on more prudential grounds?</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Is passionate love imprudent by its nature?</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">These are the questions that Socrates and Phaedrus discuss at length, along the banks of the Ilisus, in a dialogue composed roughly twenty-four hundred years ago. </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Passionate romantic love is a form of madness, both sides agree—the point of contention is whether this madness consists in a desire that overpowers reason-- obscuring our sense of the good, the right, the true-- or whether it is a kind of “divine” madness, in fact a special insight into those very things.</span></span></span></span></b></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><i><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">In the following paper I will present the arguments for and against choosing the companionship of a suitor in love (as those arguments are presented in the text), and then I will raise what I take to be a significant problem with the argument as it is explicitly put: namely, that, first of all, it’s hard to know how we could adjudicate between these views in principle, and that, second of all, even if we were to find some grounds on which to agree with Socrates about the wisdom of partnering for love, it would be difficult make good pragmatic use of his advice.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> What is "divine madness", and w</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">hat, in principle, could count as a good secular reason to affirming or denying its exists?</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">And what, in practice, could count as a reason for thinking that some particular instance of madness is of the divine as opposed to profane variety?</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">The solution I will suggest is that we understand Socrates’ claim that love is a "god-given" madness, and his conclusion that we ought therefore to choose the companionship of a lover, as part of the larger and utterly central Socratic injunction to ‘know thyself’, </span><span class="Apple-style-span">making the relevant question not whether love obscures or enhances the lover’s understanding of the world, but whether love is a force that obscures the lover’s own character, or if love in fact reveals her.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">I hope I can demonstrate that this reading of the </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Phaedrus</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> is both warranted and instructive.</span></span></span></span></b></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><i><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Phaedrus presents the view of the speechwriter Lysias, who argues that being in love is a kind of madness, and that choosing the companionship of someone who is in love with you is therefore to exercise extremely poor judgment.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">On this view love is a kind of desire—a desire for what is beautiful.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">“Each of us,” on Lysias’ view,</span></span></span></span></b></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i><b><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span></o:p></b></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;"><i><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">is ruled by two principles which we follow wherever they lead: one is our inborn desire for pleasures, the other is our acquired judgment that pursues what is best…The unreasoning desire that overpowers a person’s considered impulse to do right and is driven to take pleasure in beauty…, this desire, all-conquering in its forceful drive, takes its name from the word for force and is called love. (237d 6-8, 238b7- 238c1-3).</span></span></span></span></b></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i><b><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span></o:p></b></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">On this view, a person in love is, by definition, in a state of impaired judgment, moved by slave-like necessity.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">The “miserable condition” of the lover is to be driven by a helpless kind of agony to make imprudent choices regarding his own affairs—choices he will likely come to regret and retract, and for which he may even come to resent the love object—and to demand that the object of his affection make similarly imprudent choices, to neglect his other business and relationships, and, worst of all, to neglect the cultivation of his own soul.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">The lover loses his sense of proportion and perspective—“when a lover suffers a reverse that would cause no pain to anyone else, love makes him think he’s accursed!</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">And when he has a stroke of luck that’s not worth a moment’s pleasure, love compels him to sing its praises” (233b 1-4).</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">The lover cannot help, in his impaired condition, but exploit, limit, and otherwise harm the one he desires with such myopic urgency, and when the madness has passed, a lover, whose promises were compelled by this madness, has little reason to honor the commitments he made while not “in his right mind” (241a8). </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span></b></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><i><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">On this basis, Lysias advises Phaedrus to choose the stable, enriching, and mutually beneficial companionship of a friend he can trust and admire over the companionship of a lover—one who, according to Lysias, will have been rendered unreliable, pitiable even, by that very love.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">In the cool light of reason or the warm glow of tame affection, free of mad desire, the suitor not afflicted by passionate love will choose a more appropriate object.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">In a better position to assess a potential companion’s proper worth, he is free to choose on the basis of certain facts of character and habit which better determine a longer-term suitability, facts which desire would obscure (233b1-4, 232e2-5).</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">This is a companion who can dedicate a stable and improving attention to his partner. To be measured, masterful, and far-thinking, then, is the special province of the “non-lover”.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">And Lysias cites additional advantages:</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">If a person is not limited to those who are in love with her, she can choose the most deserving from among a significantly larger candidate pool, and the relationship, in its decorum, is more likely to meet the approval of the community (231d6-10, 232a6-233b4).</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span></b></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><i><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Socrates dismisses Lysias’ speech as a sort of heretical hack job—not an earnest attempt to define and examine love, but a “wily” attempt to win the favors of a boy (Phaedrus) that he is actually “no less [in love with] than the others” (237b3). </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">But despite Socrates’ (and some of my classmates’) protests to the contrary, it’s easy to see why Phaedrus is so enamored of Lysias’ speech.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">He describes with a formidable and stirring accuracy certain kinds of pain and poor judgment often associated with being in love, riling some deep and not unreasonable anxieties we have about loving and being loved—how it can limit and reduce us.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Examples abound of love’s reputed tendency to blind, torment, and turn us sour.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">We have good prudential reasons for fearing the impact of powerful irrational forces on our ability to make sound judgments and manage to live by them.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">We have strong experiential evidence in favor of the proposition that love is, as Lysias claims, just such a powerful and irrational force.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">It is not at all obvious, at least to me, why a person—particularly a person aspiring to lead a philosophical life—shouldn’t agree with Lysias’ advice.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Eros is unreasonable.</span></span></span></span></b></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><i><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Socrates’ agrees that love is a kind of madness, and he, too, has a compelling and resonant description to offer of the human experience of love—a description not so terribly different from the first:</span></span></span></span></b></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i><b><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span></o:p></b></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;"><i><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">“in its madness the lover’s soul cannot sleep at night or stay put by day; it rushes, yearning, wherever it expects to see the person who has that beauty…no one is more important to it than the beautiful boy.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">It forgets mother and brothers and friend entirely and doesn’t care at all if it loses its wealth through neglect.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">And as for proper and decorous behavior, in which it used to take pride, the soul despises the whole business.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Why, it is even willing to sleep like a slave, anywhere, as near to the object of its longing as it is allowed to get!</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">That is because in addition to its reverence for one who has such beauty, the soul has discovered that the boy is the only doctor for all that terrible pain.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">This is the experience we humans call love.” (251e-252a)</span></span></span></span></b></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i><b><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span></o:p></b></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">But on the view presented by Socrates love itself consists not in the desire for the beauty we see in another person, but just in the striking recognition of that beauty.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">On this view, all human beings are to some degree, depending on their sensitivity to beauty, prone to being so struck.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Love is a mad insight—a way of coming to know an aspect of the true nature of things by visceral impression as opposed to inductive or deductive methods.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">The experience of this insight is by its nature powerful and will tend to be accompanied by powerful desires, but the specific character of the experience, and the particular response one has to it, will be determined by the character of the experiencer:</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">One will respond by “gazing…reverently” at the object of beauty, while another “surrenders to pleasure,” seeking immediate gratification (250e).</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Both may appear to be, or be in fact, </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">mad</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">—but a person of the right character, the right sensitivity to beauty, the right kind of soul, is </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">divinely </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">mad—he is “moved abruptly from here to a vision of Beauty itself when he sees what we call beauty here” (250e). Love in fact consists in this experience of insight, and not just the powerful desires for sexual and emotional gratification that notoriously accompany it, and although some may lack the strength of character to maintain the right kind of composure in the face of this terrible beauty, the explanation for their bad behavior is their own character, and not the character of love, which lies in seeing, and to which the proper response is reverence.</span></span></span></span></b></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><i><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">In the course of the dialogue Socrates offers a larger story about the human soul and the nature of reality as a context for this view of love. </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">The soul is described as analogous to a charioteer, whose chariot is guided by two winged horses.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">One is “beautiful and good,” “a lover of honor with modesty and self-control,,,he needs no whip” (246b2, 253d5-6).</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">The other is bad—“companion to wild boasts and indecency…deaf as a post—and just barely responds to the horsewhip and goad combined” (253e2-4).</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Before a human soul is incarnate it must have driven its winged horses around that Platonic heaven of ideas—a place “without shape and without solidity, a being that really is what it is, the subject of all true knowledge, visible only to intelligence” where “it has a view of Justice as it is; it has a view of Self-Control; it has a view of Knowledge” ().</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Each fights for a view of this Reality.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">It’s our nature, Socrates tell us, to be nourished by it.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">But not all souls have the same view.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Different souls follow different gods, who, in turn, each have a different a place in the procession—and they differ, too, in the competence of their charioteers.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Even the luckiest of souls, “distracted by the horses…does have a view of Reality, but just barely” (248a3-4).</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">While we won’t explicitly remember the soul’s journey, we will be more or less sensitive to earthly instances of these perfect Ideas according to our exposure. </span></span></span></span></b></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><i><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Both the practical question of who one ought to choose as one’s most intimate companion and the question, underlying the first, of what the nature of love might be, are as compelling now as they were twenty-four hundred years ago, and the descriptions and analysis offered by Lysias and Socrates are both still awfully compelling.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">But it seems less clear what secular grounds there could be for deciding the practical question.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Though we may recognize that Socrates analysis is better organized, that it makes some important clarifying distinctions—that it is, in short, an actual analysis, in contrast to Lysias’ mere and partial description—it is still grounded in something almost mystical.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">We may be extremely sympathetic to the view that certain ethical insights can only be reached by human beings by way of irrational forces—love in particular.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">But it seems that the practicality of trusting such a force to generate insight as opposed to distorting it depends upon there being some truth to the claim that madness can be a force of insight and some way of determining when it is.</span></span></span></span></b></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><i><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">My intention is not to distort or simplify the view for the purposes of making it palatable or provable by contemporary standards.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Certainly an important part of what Socrates claims is that mad love is good because it constitutes a kind of vision into the nature of external Reality (the world of the Forms), and that it does this by picking out what it is good and beautiful in the changeable world we daily inhabit—“the soul,” Socrates says, “is a sort of seer” (242c5-6).</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">There is, as Martha Nussbaum puts it, something “cognitive” about the emotions and desires that constitute the experience of this madness—“they give the [lover] </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">information</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> as to where the goodness and beauty are, searching out and selecting, themselves, the beautiful objects” (215).</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Though it may be difficult to understand how we could go about proving this to be so, without either going around in a circle, or appealing to something sort of mystical, these claims stand, and they resonate, and they’re an essential part of the view Socrates presents. </span></span></span></span></b></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><i><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">But there is another aspect of the argument which doesn’t immediately raise the same kinds of difficult metaphysical and epistemological questions, and which, I am proposing, might present us with easier grounds on which to decide the practical question: to choose the lover or the non-lover?</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">The grounds, I’ve proposed, are whether love reveals or obscures the lover’s character.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Socrates, I argue, claims the former, while Lysias claims the latter.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span></b></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><i><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">One of the strengths of [the reading I've proposed] is that it gets to what I take to be the very heart of the Socratic project, particularly as it is framed in the </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Phaedrus</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Early in the dialogue, before any arguments have been offered, Socrates tells Phaedrus that he himself has no interest in debating the truth or falsity of certain mythological explanations of things on the grounds that he has “no time” for it:</span></span></span></span></b></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i><b><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span></o:p></b></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;"><i><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">and the reason, my friend, is this.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">I am still unable, as the Delphic inscription orders, to know myself; and really it seems to me ridiculous to look into other things before I have understood that.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">This is why I do not concern myself with them.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">I accept what is generally believed, and, as I was just saying, I look not into them but into my own self: am I a beast more complicated and savage than Typhon, or am I a tamer, simpler animal with a share in a divine and gentle nature?</span></span></span></span></b></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i><b><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span></o:p></b></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">It seems that understanding our own nature is the beginning and the end of Socratic discourse.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Whatever divine entities are posited, they’re role is to make sense of things that seem true on other grounds—some combination of felt experience and careful analysis of that experience. </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span></b></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><i><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">A good example of this use of divine explanation of observable phenomena is Socrates’ claim that each man’s soul is attendant to a particular god, whose character he strives to emulate.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">The mythology stands as the explanation for a mundane and observable reality: different people have different characters.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Apart from being just more or less ‘good’ or ‘bad’, different persons are more or less querulous, more or less domestic, more or less prone to admire the warrior, the philosopher, or the able politician.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">“Everyone spends his life,” Socrates says, “honoring the god in whose chorus he danced” (252c8-252d1).</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">We needn’t be deists to feel the force of this insight.</span></span></span></span></b></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><i><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">When Socrates recounts the view of Lysias, he emphasizes that Lysias’ view implicitly relies on the notion that love obscures the lover’s nature—than the honorable man will be rendered dishonorable, the gentle man violently jealous, the otherwise trustworthy man untrustworthy.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">The lover is not “the same man” as he was before he loved—he is “a different man” when passion has passed.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">The lover in love is ruled by “a mindless regime” which will be subsequently replaced by another, sounder one, and the man in question will not be able, in good conscience, to honor the promises he made—promises of another man, imprudent and otherwise inclined.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">On this picture, there is reason, and there is desire.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Love is desire.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Desire distorts reason.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Love is unreasonable.</span></span></span></span></b></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><i><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Socrates rejects this view.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Love, he argues, is not mere desire, identically distorting.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">It is a common experience of beauty, to which different individuals will be differently sensitive; it is an experience that commonly incites strong desires, to which different individuals will respond differently.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">When and how we experience love, and how it shapes our behavior, is largely a matter of individual character.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">In his strongest explicit formulation of this claim, Socrates says that however the man in love behaves, “that is how he behaves with everyone at every turn, not just those he loves” (252d3-4).</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">It seems correct, at least, to conclude that those who tend to be careful in love, or abusive, or effusive, will tend to be careful, or abusive, or effusive more generally.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Socrates, in fact, begins his rebuttal by appealing to the obvious fact that the listener must know some “noble and gentle man…who [is or has been] in love with a boy of similar character”—someone whose behavior and experience Lysias’ description of love fails to capture.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">The right account of love will explain the obvious diversity of experience and behavior among people in love.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">On Socrates’ account, this diversity is best explained, commonsensically enough, by the diversity of human character.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span></b></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><i><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">It seems to me that Socrates’ definition of love, and his description of the peculiarities of the human experience of it, warrant a claim which is in some sense stronger than the one Socrates explicitly makes, and in another sense weaker: namely, that our experience of and behavior in love doesn’t merely express our character, but specially reveals it.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">This claim further underscores the role of love in bringing out what is uniquely true of the individual experiencer, but it is weaker in the sense that it may require us to back off somewhat from the explicit claim that the lover treats the beloved just as he treats everyone.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Socrates’ own description of love provides us with adequate grounds to conclude that, in fact, love amplifies our typical responses, uniquely arousing and laying bare certain deep and relevant aspects of the lover’s character which, for better and worse, are not otherwise on prominent display—which are generally invisible even, to others and, perhaps, to the man himself.</span></span></span></span></b></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><i><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">We’ve said that mad love is to get a look at the beauty in another human being, a beauty that arrests the attention and inspires reverence.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">This reverence, I think, amounts to a kind of profoundly active stillness—the effort to hold one’s ground, to maintain the proper posture of awe, to keep one’s eyes fixed, against the powerful desires to grasp at or to flee the object of one’s awe.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Socrates says that “when the charioteer looks love in the eye, the entire soul is suffused with a sense of warmth and starts to fill with…the goadings of desire”—the white horse is prevented only by his sense of shame from “jumping on the boy” who is his object, while the dark horse “leaps violently forward”, “no longer responsive to the whip and the goad” (253e5-245a5).</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">An epic struggle ensues between the charioteer and the dark horse, in which the charioteer occasionally tires, giving in and moving toward the boy, only be blown back again each time he “sees that face”: “At the sight he is frightened, falls over backwards, awestruck…pull[s] the reigns back so fiercely” (254b4-254c1).</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">And as the stunned dark horse regains its strength, the whole thing begins again, over and over, until the dark horse is finally humbled by the repeated violent reigning and the whole soul is then able to “follow its boy in reverence and awe” (254e8).</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Love, inasmuch as it is a thing apart from a desire for sexual or emotional gratification, is a process of “reject[ing] certain ways of acting when they…do not accord with felt reverence” (Nussbaum 217).</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">The reverence one feels—the love—is not only a thing apart from these desires, it is the only help for them, the measure against which neither grasping nor fleeing can really meet with our own approval, though the desire to do either may be powerful—though we may even succumb to them.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span></b></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><i><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">The beauty that inspires love also riles powerfully destructive aspects of the lover’s own nature, bringing them mercilessly to his attention.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Fears and desires—the stuff that underwrite the jealously, pettiness, and abandonment Lysias’ speaks of—are revealed and at the same time thrown into a specially instructive kind of relief by the revered love object.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">He comes to feel the power of these fears and desires in light of love—a light in which they are seen to be profane. In light of love, the lover is revealed to himself.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">He can’t afford a smug or self-congratulatory naïveté about his own nature, but must engage fully with the hardest parts of that nature in order to hold his ground and his gaze—in order to do justice, that is, to the object of his awe.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Guided by his awe to control those powerful and potentially destructive aspects of his nature, he learns, through struggle, a kind of self-control that Socrates argues is near to being divine. “The companionship of a non-lover,” Socrates says, “is diluted by human self-control”, and “all it pays are cheap human dividends” (256e4-6). </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">A self-control hard-won by the light of reverence, not “human self-control”, is, on Socrates view, the only truly stable basis for lifelong companionship and self-knowledge.</span></span></span></span></b></i></div><i><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">We don’t have to be deists or mystics, or even Platonic idealists, to feel the power of this claim: that love reveals us—that its dual power is to rile and aggravate and generally expose what we’d most prefer to avoid and deny, while simultaneously providing us with a special motive and energy for understanding and learning to control the same.</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">If we accept this view of love, we have good reason to agree with Socrates that a boy ought to choose the companionship of a lover:</span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">The self-control of the non-lover is not hard-won—neither inspired by a sense of the boy’s true worth, which is not merely prudential, nor accompanied by the same hard-won insights into his own nature which are both essential to partnership itself to the overarching process of living well.</span></span></span></span></b></i></div></div>laura.ghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13638164730513113228noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35477414.post-28645329775273684762010-03-14T08:26:00.000-07:002010-03-14T09:00:09.007-07:00a writing break, from writing.<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj71-17ygiWSfFvwRPaUzpmYV43ao4DpCzoMJ3X_PTlGbVNcp3aeIDS8rnttVdADScak5mTHo3ARGfNeSstYC4BJVEojT368mYoWn6k70Gizo1KDf9OzXhnJIVnVeps_j6-5-0s5g/s1600-h/desk.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj71-17ygiWSfFvwRPaUzpmYV43ao4DpCzoMJ3X_PTlGbVNcp3aeIDS8rnttVdADScak5mTHo3ARGfNeSstYC4BJVEojT368mYoWn6k70Gizo1KDf9OzXhnJIVnVeps_j6-5-0s5g/s320/desk.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5448518239052441122" /></a><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px; font-family:Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:11px;"><p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><b><i><br /></i></b></span></span></p><p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold; "><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Locking Yourself Out, Then Trying to Get Back In</span></span></span></i></span></p><p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold; "><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">by Raymond Carver</span></span></span></i></span></p><p><span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">You simply go out and shut the door<br />without thinking. And when you look back<br />at what you've done<br />it's too late. If this sounds<br />like the story of a life, okay.<br /><br />It was raining. The neighbors who had<br />a key were away. I tried and tried<br />the lower windows. Stared<br />inside at the sofa, plants, the table<br />and chairs, the stereo setup.<br /></span></span></span></i></span></p><p><span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">My coffee cup and ashtray waited for me<br />on the glass-topped table, and my heart<br />went out to them. I said, </span></span></span></i><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Hello, friends,<br /></span></span></span></i><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">or something like that. After all,<br />this wasn't so bad.<br /><br />Worse things had happened. This<br />was even a little funny. I found the ladder.<br />Took that and leaned it against the house.<br />Then climbed in the rain to the deck,<br />swung myself over the railing<br />and tried the door. Which was locked,<br />of course. But I looked in just the same<br />at my desk, some papers, and my chair.<br /><br />This was the window on the other side<br />of the desk where I'd raise my eyes<br />and stare out when I sat at that desk.<br /></span></span></span></i><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">This is not like downstairs</span></span></span></i><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">, I thought.<br />This is something else.<br />And it was something to look in like that, unseen,<br />from the deck. To be there, inside, and not be there.<br /><br />I don't even think I can talk about it.<br />I brought my face close to the glass<br />and imagined myself inside,<br />sitting at the desk. Looking up<br />from my work now and again.<br />Thinking about some other place<br />and some other time.<br />The people I had loved then.<br /><br />I stood there for a minute in the rain.<br />Considering myself to be the luckiest of men.<br />Even though a wave of grief passed through me.<br />Even though I felt violently ashamed<br />of the injury I'd done back then.<br />I bashed that beautiful window.<br />And stepped back in. </span></span></span></i></span></p><p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span></span></p><p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">this is probably just about my favorite poem ever. i thought of it just now, sitting writing at my desk, which is also by a window, which also looks out over a porch-- the kind i would try to climb up on to get in if i locked myself out (which is just the sort of thing i'd do)-- which is also being steadily rained on at the moment.</span></span></span></p><p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">i was going to say some things about this poem, but i've spent all of the time i allotted myself for this writing break from writing just reading it and reading it again. it's as perfect as i remember it. probably better not to bother saying much about it. i'm sure you'll understand.</span></span></span></p></span>laura.ghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13638164730513113228noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35477414.post-26788904029187526902010-03-07T03:59:00.000-08:002010-03-16T09:22:17.974-07:00post/mail<div style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#0000EE;"><br /></span></div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZSSKYqbCDkA9iB9FzLzfe5r2X7WscSuJcXoTVXHzAWMktq145zdiT-Y4DP7R6T86-k83dkuvPDV3djrL4JwvjXoXC7jL31XYTQW68PQyAFGpckqr-H9tkTY9jNEc6UOVIQ1331A/s1600-h/envelope.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 292px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZSSKYqbCDkA9iB9FzLzfe5r2X7WscSuJcXoTVXHzAWMktq145zdiT-Y4DP7R6T86-k83dkuvPDV3djrL4JwvjXoXC7jL31XYTQW68PQyAFGpckqr-H9tkTY9jNEc6UOVIQ1331A/s320/envelope.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5445860581733458642" /></a>this week <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/02/AR2010030200912.html?hpid=topnews">the postmaster general told congress</a> that any reasonable plan to keep the united states postal service solvent in the coming years would likely involve raising the price of postage at a rate greater than that of inflation and dropping saturday delivery. <div><br /></div><div>drop saturday delivery! i don't generally consider myself particularly attached to custom and habit, though i'm learning to appreciate its comforts, but there's something about the almosteverydayness of the united states postal service that's somehow tangled up in my own wiring. changes in the way the mail is delivered feel like some kind of threat to my own homeostasis. i won't wax on here (i've almost hit my self-imposed blog writing time limit) on the topic of my feelings about and associations with the mail and it's delivery, but i will say i was very nearly moved to read a congressman object to the changes, citing, in part, the loss of "the social component of going down to the post office."</div><div><br /></div><div>the thing is, though, we send less mail now than we did. and we will send less later than we do now. and there's no point in lamenting it, i guess-- its a way of doing things that's been replaced by other ways of doing things, which also have their value. in a changing world, we all have to change to stay solvent. even 'homeostasis' is just a fancy word for the process of changing to remain the same. but! i'm going to do my own small part to reverse the trend: one letter a week.</div><div><br /></div><div>***</div><div><br /></div><div>UPDATE!</div><div>letter, week one.</div><div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjo2YJ6iI75q_tQ7HFw8Chk7GaweKGHxXA27TDMmbgx574ehBD-Nl9E9wmKCO3_c6ACdMYxIydOjxxgA3BLAbYFwa0IlFlG4AkPMO2CN8nzzsFRfTPLG3pyfco6Z7kF-GLokmp78w/s1600-h/post!.jpg"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjo2YJ6iI75q_tQ7HFw8Chk7GaweKGHxXA27TDMmbgx574ehBD-Nl9E9wmKCO3_c6ACdMYxIydOjxxgA3BLAbYFwa0IlFlG4AkPMO2CN8nzzsFRfTPLG3pyfco6Z7kF-GLokmp78w/s320/post!.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5447446130629807714" style="cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 320px; " /></a></div><div><br /></div><div>update!</div><div>letter: week 2</div><div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgBNv932GNAJbki54ufGaANlDNNaYIFFERcsZL5SzY4ejYhPHQSHtJn4qpyWzF_MfjahLL6C6uI4SPUJRL0lfJ5D79TRYksybU7hybCglFSIfmhzGaJIzTzEM-SkgWu7JOsv0vNQ/s1600-h/mail2.jpg"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgBNv932GNAJbki54ufGaANlDNNaYIFFERcsZL5SzY4ejYhPHQSHtJn4qpyWzF_MfjahLL6C6uI4SPUJRL0lfJ5D79TRYksybU7hybCglFSIfmhzGaJIzTzEM-SkgWu7JOsv0vNQ/s320/mail2.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5449267686518217250" style="cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 320px; " /></a></div>laura.ghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13638164730513113228noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35477414.post-7351242677958360372010-02-25T14:01:00.000-08:002010-03-03T07:09:14.527-08:00(w)resting my attention.<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjouJROuH9Kvbw6cS3C_R2FboVRhGJ52UaCcG5cnWlDy7eKsk1gCTz7twIP98evIDUfk7cEwtIGzVXrpkmCiETV5EtIiLqgODaNgdVTPk14rovP_kd_rvJZSFmadle4okcmRFM9Q/s1600-h/buddha.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjouJROuH9Kvbw6cS3C_R2FboVRhGJ52UaCcG5cnWlDy7eKsk1gCTz7twIP98evIDUfk7cEwtIGzVXrpkmCiETV5EtIiLqgODaNgdVTPk14rovP_kd_rvJZSFmadle4okcmRFM9Q/s320/buddha.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5443086529716536194" /></a><br />last week, on a days notice, i decided to catch a ride out to central mass and spend five silent days at a buddhist meditation center, instructed in meditation practice by some really nice and knowledgeable dudes, and, of course, practicing it. practicing it from 5am to 9pm each day-- forty-five minutes of sitting meditation, alternated with forty-five minutes of walking meditation, with breaks for meals (breakfast, lunch, tea) and an hour of chores. i needed a little adventure, a little quiet, a little bit of that feeling of new skill acquisition, and a little break from my devices.<div><br /></div><div>there were yogi's at the camp who were on year-long silent retreat, others three month, and many of those there, like me, for only a couple of weeks or several days had been practicing silent meditation at this center for ten, twenty, nigh on thirty years some of them. </div><div><br /></div><div>i myself have never meditated before. i went to try this thing-- to see about this way of knowing supposedly more clear-eyed reliable, more searingly direct than all of my philosophical figuring. i didn't expect to get more than the rudiments in these few days, and that was right. i expected it to be a grueling exercise in not thinking-- like they'd equip me with some kind of punishing shock collar that zapped at the first suggestion of theorizing-- and there i turned out to be interestingly wrong. their task, they explained to me in (not) so many words, was to gently strip me of the punishing shock collar of my own making. the key was to notice, without judgment (!), when my thoughts had wondered and to bring my attention gently gently back to rest gently on my breathing. the impediment would be my own exasperation with myself.</div><div><br /></div><div>to see clear is to see without aversion. that seemed to be a central notion. and looking inward we find many things to which we are averse. and the first and forever aversion to be overcome is the aversion our own distractability-- how easily we are subject to recursive and looping and endlessly repeating fantasies and replays of played out pasts. and that's before you ever even have to address your aversion to those fantasies and replays themselves! so first, and forever, i just had to train my attention on my breathing. <i>rest</i> my attention. just rest my attention on my breathing for a breath or two or three (that was really all i could manage at first) until i was carried away by one thing or another and then, eventually, to notice that i'd been carried away and to gently bring that same attention back again and again and again to the breath. gently.<br /><div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div></div></div>laura.ghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13638164730513113228noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35477414.post-46756884941974982852010-02-18T03:53:00.000-08:002010-02-18T05:07:56.657-08:00raising them right. i mean happy!<span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 18px; "><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">We are born utterly dependent; from the moment we pop out, a social relationship becomes essential to living, namely the relationship with our mother (as well as other family members). <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Through that dependency—for physical survival and mental, social, physical, and sensory stimulation—we form connections with other people who become significant in shaping our view of ourselves and of the world around us. That socialization process also structures the </span></span></span></i><a href="http://www.psychologytoday.com/basics/neuroscience" title="Psychology Today looks at Neuroscience" class="pt-basics-link" style="color: rgb(35, 111, 181); text-decoration: none; "><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">brain</span></span></i></a><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"> in important and enduring ways. Through the complex processes of socialization, families can create in their members, and especially in their children, either susceptibility or resistance to depression that can last a lifetime.</span></span></i></span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:Arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:130%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 18px;font-size:14px;"><p><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">Long-term epidemiologic studies show that depression intensifies from one generation to the next. Today's parents represent the largest group of depression sufferers raising the fastest-growing group of depression sufferers. We are on average four times more depressed than our parents and ten times more than our grandparents.</span></span></i></p><p><i><a href="http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200908/secondhand-blues?page=2"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">michael yapko & hara estroff marano, secondhand blues, psychology today</span></span></a></i></p><p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">so, there's actually a lot i don't like about this article. (to begin with, "pop out"? seriously? where is the editorial support?) but i've been thinking about in terms of another question that's been on my mind-- when do you know that you're ready to have kids? i know that this question usually refers to things like, when do you have enough money? when do you have enough time? when have you accomplished enough of your own goals? and the answer that people generally give-- and rightly, i think-- is that you're never really ready in any of these senses, so you just have to do it, and you figure it out, and you learn as you go. </span></span></p><p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">but how do you know when you've worked through your own bullshit sufficiently to actually avoid the egregious repetition of the past? how do you know when you've found the calm center from which you can...i don't know, not just parent responsibly, but bring up happy kids? i know that it's easy to group these kinds of questions with the others, but i'm not inclined to. the best of lives can be lived on not enough money and short of time-- you could imagine, even, wishing these kinds of material limitations for your children, that they might learn to thrive in more interesting and satisfying ways. but it's hard to see how we might analogously wish for them the constraints congenital loneliness or persistent anxiety. and yet, with the best and clearest intentions, and with the sincerest love, we seem to be handing these things on at a rate that's approaching the exponential. we have one life, and we give one life to our kids, their entire experience of which will be filtered through the lens that they construct from observing our own daily approaches to life. </span></span></p><p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">it seems to me that the question deserves a different kind of reflection than the others. a friendly pat-on-the-back-and-you'll-figure-it-out approach makes sense if you're urging someone to put aside pragmatic questions for the sake of jumping into the wonderful business of family, and it makes sense as a way of saying 'look, these are the problems that have been faced time immemorial'. but here i think the question isn't pragmatic-- it's a matter of ultimate concern. and this seems to be a uniquely modern epidemic-- which is not to say that this, too, is not an age old question of parenting, but the risks seem uniquely high: "The World Health Organization recently declared depression the fourth leading cause of human disability and suffering and predicted that by the year 2020 it will be the second leading cause." high risks, ultimate ends. the stakes are high.</span></span></p><p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">this has probably begun to sound awfully pessimistic, but i am, in fact (foolishly, i'm sure), brimming with optimism. but it seems so crucial to know: how will you know that you have in yourself the critical mass of peace, that warm solid center, that frees you up to do it right? or is the fresh start we seem to need more fruitfully thought of in terms of external conditions? what will a good place to start look like?</span></span></p><p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia, helvetica, sans-serif;"><i><br /></i></span></p></span></span></div>laura.ghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13638164730513113228noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35477414.post-16782256553664845722010-02-17T13:25:00.000-08:002010-02-18T03:30:32.626-08:00arguments.<span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 18px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 1px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 1px; font-family:georgia, serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(56, 33, 16); "><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">when it's over, i want to say: all my life</span></span></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">i was a bride married to amazement.</span></span></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">i was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.</span></span></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">when it's over, i don't want to wonder</span></span></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">if i have made of my life something particular, and real.</span></span></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">i don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,</span></span></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">or full of argument.</span></span></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;"><br /></span></span></i></div><div><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#666666;">mary oliver</span></span></i></div></span></div><div><br /></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">more on the subject: i just found this paper by a philosopher and a social scientist, called "why do humans reason? arguments for an argumentative theory". </span></span></span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 18px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 1px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 1px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><br /></span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 18px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 1px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 1px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">abstract: "</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: normal; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">Reasoning is generally seen as a mean to improve knowledge and make better decisions. Much evidence, however, shows that reasoning often leads to epistemic distortions and poor decisions. This suggests rethinking the function of reasoning. Our hypothesis is that the function of reasoning is argumentative. It is to devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade. Reasoning so conceived is adaptive given human exceptional dependence on communication and vulnerability to misinformation. ...Poor performance in standard reasoning tasks is explained by the lack of argumentative context. When the same problems are placed in a proper argumentative setting, people turn out to be skilled arguers. Skilled arguers, however, are not after the truth but after arguments supporting their views. This explains the notorious confirmation bias. This bias is apparent not only when people are actually arguing but also when they are reasoning proactively with the perspective of having to defend their opinions. Reasoning so motivated can distort evaluations and attitudes and allow the persistence of erroneous beliefs. Proactively used reasoning also favors decisions that are easy to justify but not necessarily better. In all of these instances traditionally described as failures or flaws, reasoning does exactly what can be expected of an argumentative device: look for arguments that support a given conclusion, and favor conclusions in support of which arguments can be found. " </span></span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 1px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 1px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><br /></span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 18px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 1px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 1px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: normal; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">http://www.dan.sperber.fr/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/MercierSperberWhydohumansreason.pdf </span></span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 1px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 1px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><br /></span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 1px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 1px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">there are these rare thinkers, though-- really, having read a significant amount of philosophy, i find them to be so utterly rare-- who seem to go where the argument leads them-- who don't begin with a commitment to an outcome, but discover, with wonder, along with the rest of us, where the train of thought leads. they're willing to be proved wrong. can't we argue from a place of wonder? isn't that what wondering is? or is wondering also problematic? does it only lead to arguments, or can it also lead to understanding?</span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 1px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 1px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><br /></span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 1px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 1px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;">so understanding stands apart. it's clearly a way of knowing, but not a way arrived at by arguments, whose function is to convince, and to assess for convincingness. so what is it, if anything, that moves when we come to understand? what is it we do, cognitively? is it a movement? (we must be moved.) is it utterly still?</span></span></span></div>laura.ghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13638164730513113228noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35477414.post-37244374105309182262010-02-15T13:15:00.000-08:002010-11-03T22:17:32.916-07:00you (i), my little lettuce.<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(56, 33, 16); line-height: 18px; font-family: georgia;font-family:georgia,serif;font-size:100%;" ><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); line-height: normal;"><p><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(102, 102, 102);">[i'm trying to change my writing process from the very bottom up. i've got to learn to spit it out. in the name of this, i'm going to do these little writing exercises-- timed and unrevised, twice a week, i hope.</span></span></span></span></p></span></div><i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(102, 102, 102);">'when you plant lettuce, if it does not grow well, you don't blame the lettuce. you look into the reasons it is not doing well. it may need fertilizer, or more water, or less sun. you never blame the lettuce. yet if we have problems with our friends or our family, we blame the other person. but if we know how to take care of them, they will grow well, like lettuce. blaming has no positive effect at all, nor does trying to persuade using reason and arguments. that is my experience. no blame, no reasoning, nor arguments, just understanding. if you understand, and you show that you understand, you can love, and the situation will change.' </span></span></i></span><div style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;font-size:100%;" ><i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(102, 102, 102);"><br /></span></span></i></span></div><div style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;font-size:100%;" ><i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(102, 102, 102);">thich nhat hanh</span></span></i></span></div><div style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;font-size:100%;" ><i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(102, 102, 102);">peace is every step</span></span></i></span></div><div style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(56, 33, 16);font-size:100%;" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><br /></span></span></span></div><div style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(56, 33, 16);font-size:100%;" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><br /></span></span></span></div><div style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;font-size:100%;" ><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">i read this book about a thousand years ago, and then the other day a friend of mine gave me the most wonderful gift-- she handed me this book, my own book, from my own shelf. it can look and read like something a little embarrassing-- an easy self-help manual, or treacly pop buddhism. i can't answer this except to say, somewhat vaguely, that this is that rarest thing-- a simple book that rewards multiple readings. while a first reading may provide a facile sense of revelation, i suppose that the only real transformative power comes with simple repetition (which is only to be expected, given the central role of simple repetition in buddhist pratice, as i understand it). </span></span></span></div><div style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;font-size:100%;" ><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);"><br /></span></span></span></div><div style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;font-size:100%;" ><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">but i want to talk about the lettuce a little. i am here to write about the lettuce. i often use metaphors like these to try to bring home to people my practical and theoretical objections to our blaming practices. practically speaking, i think it's more useful and loving (and hard!) to think of each other in these sorts of terms (this is a highly contention claim-- the final word on the subject so far was spoken by the wonderful pf strawson who says that a mature and mutual and satisfying love depends on our</span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);"> not</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);"> treating each other as we would the lettuce (see more on this subject </span></span><a href="http://pencilsandoatmeal.blogspot.com/2009/10/this-morning-i-listened-to-interview.html"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">here</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);"> and </span></span><a href="http://pencilsandoatmeal.blogspot.com/2009/10/ive-got-new-attitude.html"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">here</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">)). and i'm skeptical of there being any coherent justification for blame, as we generally conceive of it, whether or not it's of any practical use. blah blah yeah yeah you've heard it all before. </span></span></span></div><div style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;font-size:100%;" ><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);"><br /></span></span></span></div><div style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;font-size:100%;" ><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">but look here! thich nhat hanh has used his lovely little lettuce metaphor not only to suggest the uselessness of blame, but to suggest the uselessness of arguments and reasoning. i'm brought up short. all at once i'm being schooled! challenged at the very core. because i think that people are like lettuce, and i think the value of my life is all and only my skill as a lettuce tender, but i also think that people are a very special kind of lettuce, responsive not only to sunshine and rain, but also to reason. i think that, officially. but the real challenge isn't to what i think, officially, but to who i am and what i do, independant of what i think. i'm an arguer and a reasoner, with a relentless habit of describing and redescribing things as a way of understanding them (and maybe something else). especially hard things. and most especially lettuce. it's the best and the worst of me. i think of this process of arguing and redescribing as the very process by which i come to understand. but thich nhat hanh tells me that you (i), my little lettuce, will respond no better to arguments and reason than you (i) will respond to blame. he suggests that understanding, on the one hand, and reason and arguments on the other, are of a distinctly different character. it feels hard as a paradox, trying to understand this very claim except as an argument or for reasons. alternately and also, i can understand it with the perfect ease that lettuce understands the sunshine. </span></span></span></div><div style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;font-size:100%;" ><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);"><br /></span></span></span></div><div style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;font-size:100%;" ><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">this is what i've been thinking about.</span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(56, 33, 16);"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;font-size:medium;" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia,serif;"><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=";font-family:Calibri,serif;font-size:100%;" ><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: normal;font-size:11px;" ><br /></span></span></div></span></span></span></div>laura.ghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13638164730513113228noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35477414.post-55132225248575345542009-12-01T16:34:00.000-08:002012-08-17T06:50:56.773-07:00in answer to your question.a home i'd want would be full of people and their lives. it's not like everyone i know would get a key to the place. but sort of. i've managed to be where the people i love are talking about the things that interest me by travelling everywhere at every hour to be where those people are talking about those things. if i had a home, the kind of home i'd want, they'd come to me, from everywhere at any hour. a home i'd have with you would be a place they'd be inclined to be, inclined to feel at home in themselves and inclined to talk about things in. and all of the people who came, no matter whose friends they began as, we'd have to come to really know each other, because a home is who lives there, and i love small talk, too, but so much of this feeling that people would feel of wanting to come and to talk about what they really wanted to say would be the result of their comfort with us, and our comfort with each other. a place we come to know each other and other people. that's a home i would invest in more spoons for.<br />
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the apartment i grew up in was a prison. no one was allowed in, and the only possibility was escape. to be fair, it was a prison handcrafted with all of the strangebeauty that is the bright side of the schizophrenic's imagination. but we were all trapped inside in the dark with our secrets, just surviving. i think that lots of homes, normal homes, not particularly fraught, lock us up in pairs, ostensibly for our own good, with scheduled visitations for scripted conversation with friends who know us less and less, and then we know each other less and less, and ourselves, too. i don't think it has to be this way. i don't think it typically is in the homes i'm blessed to know now. but this better way isn't a thing i've always been sure i knew how to do. it seemed to me that a certain kind of distance was the way to save myself from people and save people from myself. it's one way to go. but there were things i didn't know. i didn't know all the things that walls could do, but i knew some bad things they could-- keeping people in, for example, and out.<br />
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but there's a trick some people know for making homes into safe warm flower pots, good for growing in. lots of things follow from this central way i'd want a home to be. it means that a home i share can't be in the country or in the suburbs, or even too far from a train station. ideally it would be in a place that the people who talk about the things i'm interested in talking about would walk past just in the course of their day. when a friend comes into town on a couple of days notice with a backpack and a duffle bag, i don't want them to have to walk too far from the train before they can put down their duffle and have some tea and tell me what brought them on such short notice. it means that they'd need to know i'd be around to be found. ideally close to the work we do.</div>
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it would be like a place we built to make ourselves and other people comfortable. you know, full of warm and cold things. blankets. beer. a guest sweater and a guest a bike. i'd have to feel comfortable in a kitchen. i'm not at all certain that i have an aptitude for cooking, but i assume that, for my purposes, being a nuanced and subtle epicure probably isn't essential. i expect it's more about reliably having these warm and cold things around that aren't just logs of high fructose corn syrup. i think that small places are particularly nice for this. small places arranged for comfort.</div>
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ideally there could be space and time in a home for projects. the ukulele began for me as a project like the kind i'm thinking of-- a morningtime bedroom hobby. i think things like the ukulele and terrariums, say, or bug collecting, are often left in childhood. but i like the space to try and then fail or forget and then try again at little projects like these. order is nice-- order is important-- but i'm just saying, if you ever wanted to turn the bathroom into a darkroom or a distillery to pursue your morningtime hobby, or the backporch into a green house, i love these kinds of things, and i'm into prioritizing them, even if they don't always work out. </div>
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there'd be a library. more than a bookshelf. that's a thing i have to offer. when we're talking, and some essay comes up that moved us so much, the book they printed it in could be there so we could look at it together. i spend an unreasonable amount of money on books that i can't even read right away, and i don't intend to stop. whatever decorative or atmospheric function a library would serve would be ancillary. these are reference materials for a life in which we're forever referencing materials. and, of course, as building blocks for the other furniture. i don't own any furniture, and while, if i had home, i'd probably want some (see: the last paragraph), i'd want to collect it slowly as opportunities came up to acquire things i like, that have meaning to me. going to ikea makes me feel upset.</div>
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then, privacy. lack of privacy is an integral part of any prison, and it was an integral part of the imprisonment i knew. work space is the best privacy, i think, and really inviting work space is probably the only possible way of avoiding work email in bed. in my experience you don't need a more expensive place or a place farther away from the train station to have this, though people are forever saying that you do. the best work spaces i've ever had have been made in tiny closets or unexpected corners. i like making these spaces. a thing i can't even take the time to address here is how much time we all need for work, and how hard that is and always will be to figure out. but privacy, relatedly, is as much about scheduling shared time as it is about arranging shared space. this is one reason that not sharing an exact work schedule with the person you share a home with can be nice. it not only makes for alone time, but the pleasure of anticipating and experiencing one another's arrival. </div>
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i don't like having a lot of shit around. i don't like decorative plants. i don't like ornate picture frames, or cheap plastic picture frames, either. i like even the hooks i use to hang things to be made out of some old office supply that's around. i don't like buying new things when i can use old things. i don't like buying new things to match the old things when the old things break. a lot of people say they don't like having a lot of shit around, but they don't care enough to actually do the extremely hard work of not acquiring a lot of shit. one of the great advantages of not having a home has been that i can ruthlessly purge without having to consult or compromise, which makes a hard thing less hard.</div>
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i do like the meaningful clutter of beloved pens and the oddly sized art my friends make, and the clutter from projects. i have drawers full of those polaroids (although i expect that someday i'll get a lot of satisfaction out of throwing most of them away). other things i do like are red and brown and blue and green and yellow. i like maps. i like map pins. i like spinach. you know what i like. i like doing laundry (bone-dry and warm-- i'll pay whatever it takes). i like rugs. i hate organizing clutter, which is just to say that i'm bad at it-- but i'm good at throwing it away. i like the radio to be on. i don't like the tv to be on, making noise or filling a void. more and more i like listening to podcasts while i clean. this has made organizing clutter, even, less terrible. i like writing early in the morning and reading and practicing the ukulele late at night.</div>
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practically speaking, a place we shared would likely be covered in newspapers and drafts of things i'm writing and loose change and half full glasses of water and cups of coffee-- bobby pins when my hair is long, running shoes when it's not winter, and bikes hanging somewhere when it is. there'd probably be lots of mail that neither of us cared to deal with. our combined subscriptions to periodicals alone would fill shelves. my clothes and shoes would look funny next to yours in the closet, and we'd probably make lots of jokes about it. you know how it is.</div>
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hannah arendt talks about the difference between loneliness and solitude-- how a certain approach to virtue is about being lonely even in a crowd, and another version emphasizes solitude-- a time alone for necessary reflection in which one isn't lonely at all. i guess the best idea of a home i know is a place that assuages loneliness and provides for solitude. the place i grew up was all loneliness, no solitude, and i escaped the lonesome crowd by having nothing like a home that could fit more than one, and keeping my family outside of it. it worked. i have been often solitary and rarely lonesome. but those ways i learned of doing things are mere means to the ends i really care about, and i can be inventive about developing new means when the old one's stop working. and i think the validity of that strategy would not be undermined if it turned out for me to be a stop on the way to something else-- it was just time spent learning to think inventively about achieving what matters-- good skills for home building, i hope. loneliness will come of course. and solitude is hard won in the crush of things. but home, a home i'd have would be a place i'd want to work at making full of the good life noise of projects and people that as much as possible relieves loneliness and as absent as possible the bad life noise that impedes solitude. there would be space for saying the things it's hard to say. there would be patience and aid.</div>
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i've always gone out for the things i needed. it's an expensive way to live. the price has always been worth it to me. i have no regrets. but i suspect that this isn't sustainable. i think it's a riskier proposition, trying to make the things i need at home with other people, but inasmuch as we achieved it, i expect that like most riskier things, the potential gratification is something awfully profound. and you know i'm so indebted to people for couches and meals and places to talk about the things that interest me. i'd like to be able to do more than just show up and accept what other people can offer me. i'd like to be able to offer it back. i like the idea of one space to bring together all of the disparate people who i go to see in disparate places, and the people you have. i think you'd like them. i think i would like them. i think they'd all like each other. the blood family i bring is small, but my friend family is wide and wonderful and rich in resources. a home could be a place from which to share these resources, not just split the bills.</div>
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i've been working on this a little everyday as a way to think about it. i expect i'll keep at it for awhile.</div>
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laura.ghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13638164730513113228noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35477414.post-31023928182823125322009-11-10T06:24:00.000-08:002009-11-10T14:34:16.110-08:00a work in progress.i've been thinking back a lot about a lecture i listened to a professor of mine deliver-- the first session of a course on causation. he's a philosophy professor now, but he was an engineer for a long time, and one of the things that he used to do professionally was provide expert testimony, in the aftermath of disaster, about what went wrong. why the plane crashed. why the bridge fell.<div><br /></div><div>why did the bridge fall? it's a harder questions than it seems to be, and it already seems like a really hard question. let's say we put to one side the ponderous constraints on what even an engineer can know about the precise empirical facts of something even just as complicated as a bridge. say we know with perfect certainty the properties of all the materials the bridge is made of, and of all the pressures those materials will come under, and all of the effects that each part of the bridge will have on the other parts, and precisely what effects the environment will have on the whole structure. say we know the story of every raindrop that ever winds its way into any fissure in the concrete, or along any rivulet formed in the bend of the steel. say that there is no detail in the story of the epoxy and its corroding effects on the particular material of which the screws are made when the temperature falls below zero that escapes our notice. say the whole story of the bridge and the bridge's coming to fall is, in all of its immense complexity, fixed and knowable and known. </div><div><br /></div><div>why did the bridge fall? you might think that under these conditions we have an answer to the question, but it turns out that we only have a story-- a long story of materials and dynamics in which each and every material and dynamic plays an ineliminable role. to pick out a part of the story, a particular material or dynamic, and say 'here is the cause' requires something else-- something more even than the most perfect knowledge. even more, that is, than what we can ever hope to have.</div><div><br /></div><div>coming soon: proximate cause, making the difference, and everything that's left unclear, even then.</div>laura.ghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13638164730513113228noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35477414.post-53521755380327099932009-10-27T05:49:00.000-07:002009-10-27T17:41:36.141-07:00i've got a new attitude!oh my gosh, i have to do this so fast, i should not be blogging right now, but i want to write this down. it requires you to (1) read my last post, which was a short little transcript of an interview with the novelist hilary mantel, and (2) understand the basics of the philosopher peter strawson's essay 'freedom and resentment'. you go do (1), and i'll work on making (2) happen:<div><br /></div><div>(skip this if you've read the strawson) in 'freedom and resentment' (probably one of the most riveting little philosophical essays i've ever read), strawson asserts that there are two general places from which we can consider one another. the first he calls 'the reactive attitutes' [RAs], and we 'inhabit' these (i think that this is the word strawson uses) pretty much all the time with other adults. from the RAs we implicitly consider one another agents, who are, with some exceptions, the cause of their own actions, and we can feel passionately about them as agents, hating them, or loving them as equals; we can feel mildly amused or annoyed at them as strangers. i did a bad job of explaining that, but it'll make more sense after i tell you about the second place-- the objective attitutes [OAs]. we tend to take up the OAs when we think about children, or people living with severe mental illnesses, or when we're acting as doctors, or social workers or whatever. when we think in this way, we are thinking about people in terms of (a) the forces that caused them and (b) how to use that information to sort of manage them in the future. blame, according to strawson, is an RA, and we can only avoid blaming others by taking up the OAs. but strawson doesn't think that we are capable of considering the other adults in our lives from the OAs for very long-- we can do it for a little, but we could never manage to maintain the OAs consistantly in our daily interactions. And, he thinks, we oughtn't do that even if we could, because while you can feel compassion, or affection, perhaps, or the love of a parent for a child, passionate adult engagement is impossible, almost definitionally. there is something clinical about the OAs, and that troubles strawson. (this paragraph sucks, but i'll fix it up later-- you get the general idea for now, and hopefully most of you have read the strawson and are skipping this part anyway.)</div><div><br /></div><div>the point: i think that the attitude that HM takes up in thinking about these characters (thomas cromwell and robespierre) <i>constitutes a third kind of approach or attitude</i>. it is diognostic in a sense- she wants to know the causes, the full explanation of what happened- 'the facts'- but it is not clinical- first, because she's not trying to manage that person (their fate is set in history- the facts are in), just understand them, and second, because she is utterly concerned with the vividness of the character's inner life. she's not trying to <i>do</i> anything to them, she's just trying to understand them-- and not just <i>functionally</i>, but <i>phenomenlogically</i>. she wants most of all to <i>do them justice</i>. </div><div><br /></div><div>i don't think that this is a version of either the RAs or the OAs. i don't think that this is a highbred. i think that this is a distinct approach, and it's a better approach. because i don't think that our respecting one another as agents or loving/hating one another passionately depends on our failing to know who a person is, including the forces that caused them (aka the forces that drive them), and if meditating on the causes of a person tend to mellow our most recriminative impulses, i don't think that they'll necessarily dull our ardour. indeed, i don't see why it couldn't give our ardour more depth and focus. oh man, i really have to go grade papers, but i want your opinion: what should these kinds of attitudes be called?</div>laura.ghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13638164730513113228noreply@blogger.com10