New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Lost in translation

 Peter Gordon’s excellent book (Continental Divide) on the 1929 Davos encounter between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger is an insightful and historically informed account of the complex interplay of issues that were brought to the table. The central hinge or fold of Gordon’s book is the full translation of and commentary to the encounter itself, the Arbeitsgemeinschaft, which was transcribed by students of both Cassirer and Heidegger (Otto Bollnow for Heidegger, and Joachim Ritter for Cassirer). A central fold of the encounter itself occurs, I would argue, when the Dutch linguist Hendrik J. Pos intervenes into the discussion and suggests that what separates Cassirer from Heidegger is that, as Pos puts it, “Both men speak a completely different language,” and moreover there are several terms in each of these distinct languages that he doubts can be translated into the other’s language. For Heidegger, he nominates the terms “Dasein, Being, the ontic,” and for Cassirer “the functional in spirit and the transformation of primordial space into one another.” (CD 189)

Heidegger’s response to Pos’s claims brings to light a number of interesting points about the nature of philosophical problems and the role of philosophical discussions and disputations in addressing such problems. I’ll just highlight some of the implications of these points as they relate to the analytic-continental divide (working off some of the nice points made in Jon's post).

What is Philosophy?

Over the next several months or  more I will be writing a book on Deleuze and Guattari's What is Philosophy? The answer they give to the question, "what is philosophy?" is simple enough: "philosophy is the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts." (2). Unpacking this definition, of course, is not nearly as simple, although a few pages later Deleuze and Guattari begin the process by differentiating philosophy from art and science:

In fact, sciences, arts, and philosophies are all equally creative, although only philosophy creates concepts in the strict sense...Nietzsche laid down the task of philosophy when he wrote, "[Philosophers] must no longer accept concepts as a gift, nor merely purify and polish them, but first make and create them, present them and make them convincing." (5, citing Will to Power §409)

In future posts I'll discuss this further, but for now I'm interested in other answers to the question, "what is philosophy?" Below the fold I have added one from Russell and another from Heidegger. Feel free to add to the list.

Working Façades and Degrees of Difference

John’s nice post has reminded me of the importance of repetitive series for Deleuze (an issue I also discuss here). Picking up on John’s discussion of the perception of colors, series play an important role in attempting to account for our use of predicates: in short, Deleuze will often place predicates within the context of a series of predicates – e.g., shades of blue. This pattern is most obvious in Deleuze’s Logic of Sense, where each chapter is titled “First Series of…” “Second Series of…” etc.… But why series?

Two short answers, which I’ll expand on below the fold: 1) a series of differences is precisely what provides, in good Spinozist fashion, the principle of sufficient reason for determinate phenomena; and 2) series in turn provide the metaphysics science needs.

Go Figure...a thought on Deleuzo-Cartesianism...and painting

In an earlier post, I made reference to Jacob Klein’s essay about Husserl’s history of the origin of geometry. Klein’s own work is very impressive as well (Burt Hopkins has a recent book on both Klein and Husserl [a NDPR review is here), and reading through Klein's book has helped me to see one reason why Deleuze so freely and regularly draws from both mathematics and art, though not just any mathematics or any art. Deleuze was interested in a problematic as opposed to axiomatic mathematics; and he was interested in a figural as opposed to figurative art. What the two have in common is a certain form of abstraction.

Why Husserl? Ask Gödel

In a rather unflattering review of Marvin Farber’s 1941 edited collection Philosophical Essays in Memory of Edmund Husserl (Husserl died in 1938), Ernest Nagel takes a few swipes at Husserl, or perhaps more precisely at Husserl’s commentators. Farber himself, as discussed in an earlier post, had studied with Husserl in Germany while a graduate student at Harvard. In 1940 he was the founding editor of the journal Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (which he edited until 1980). With the exception of Dorion Cairns, Farber was probably the person best suited to compile a volume in honor of Husserl.

Despite Farber’s credentials, Nagel finds little that is compelling in the collection and his criticisms often mirror what will often be heard in later decades regarding continental thought. For example, Nagel expresses doubt about whether any of the papers “will be either intelligible or persuasive to any one not previously instructed in Husserl’s ideas or convinced of their importance” (301); and, more damningly, he argues that with few exceptions Husserl’s views are not “expressed in recognizable English,” with “such barbarisms as ‘presuppositionless,’ ‘insightful,’ ‘pre-givenness’ or ‘the itself-giving’” (ibid.) being thrown around in a way that leaves novitiates at a loss to understand their meaning.

Adding to the recent discussions of Eric (here), Catarina (here), and Mohan (here) regarding the use and significance (or lack thereof) of intuition in analytic philosophy, one obvious place to turn to where intuition does appear to loom large is the work of Husserl. Husserl’s work, however, was also an important source of inspiration for Gödel’s understanding of the relationship between philosophy and mathematics, and thus it bleeds significantly into a number of problems within the analytic tradition.

The Problem with Identity

Coming to a pause in his arguments in Appearance and Reality, Bradley wonders if the reader may question “whether anything of what is understood by a thing is left to us,” given that at this point Bradley believes that what is generally thought of as a thing has been “undermined and ruined.” In particular, Bradley argues that “for a thing to exist it must possess identity; and identity seems a possession with a character at best doubtful.” (AR, p. 72).

Identity is a problem for Bradley with important, although perhaps unsettling consequences. Moreover, the problem of identity has, as Della Rocca (himself a careful reader of Bradley) shows in a recent article (here), important implications for the 3d’ist/4d’ist debate. I would also add that this was already a problem for Hume (as I’ve discussed here and here) and it is a problem that is critical to understanding Gilles Deleuze’s project.

Repetition

"Say something once, why say it again?" - Talking Heads

At this international Deleuze conference in Kaifeng, China, organized by Paul Patton, I explored the important influence of Hume in Deleuze's own efforts to develop an understanding of repetition. I'll now rework it in preparation for this big event in New Orleans.

Hume's influence is apparent from the very first sentence of the second chapter of Difference and Repetition, “Repetition for Itself,” where Deleuze begins with the Humean problematic, and with what Deleuze calls the “famous thesis” that was the result of Hume’s efforts to address this problem. As Deleuze states the thesis, “Repetition changes nothing in the object repeated, but does change something in the mind which contemplates it…”

As Deleuze sets forth the problem Hume is addressing, we are confronted with a repetitive series, AB, AB, AB, AB, and when we are next presented with A the problem is one of accounting for why we come to expect B when there is nothing in the nature of A itself that would lead us to this expectation. As Hume famously presents the problem in the Treatise (1.3.14), we come after a series of repetitions of AB to have the “idea of a cause and effect, of a necessary connexion of power, of force, of energy, and of efficacy” (T 162). 

The question is why? And this is where Hume's famous thesis enters the picture.

Bergson says Spinoza, Russell says Leibniz

 In his nice post on the origins of analytic philosophy, a theme that has been addressed many times at this blog, Eric points out that Bergson was among Russell's principle targets. It is perhaps understandable that this part of the story has been forgotten. The Frege-Russell narrative concerning the origins and legitimacy of analytic philosophy has largely maintained its hegemonic status. Within this narrative, Bergson emerges not only as a  marginal “continental” figure safely ignored by analytic philosophers but moreover he is a philosopher whose influence on the continent was itself surpassed by the phenomenologists (who, such as Merleau-Ponty, rejected Bergson’s vitalism). However, following up on a comment I made on the thread to John Protevi’s post about Adrian Moore’s book, I would push back the genealogy of an important aspect of the continental/analytic divide to the choice between Spinoza or Leibniz. Understood in this way, Bergson, à la the song "Let's call the whole thing off," says Spinoza and Russell says Leibniz. In targeting Bergson, therefore, Russell is ultimately one in a line of many who are seeking to exorcise the specter of Spinoza.

Foucault or Deleuze

I’ve recently been revisiting Foucault's Birth of Biopolitics lectures, a misnomer if ever there was one since much of the discussion is on neo-liberalism and Foucault never actually gets to biopolitics. Regardless, while going through this book again an important connection and/or difference between the projects of Foucault and Deleuze became clear to me, a difference with clear connections to Hume and Adam Smith. A couple of passages should give a sense of these connections.

Mr. Smith goes to China

Teaching Hume’s political essays this semester is giving me an opportunity to reread a number of essays that have long been among my favorites, and it has reminded me yet again about the important contribution these essays make to political theory. A favorite quote of mine that encapsulates much of this contribution comes when Hume is discussing the “tumultuous governments of Athens and Rome” near the end of his essay, “That Politics may be reduced to a Science,” and he points out that despite the fact these governments ended in ruin, the proper conclusion to draw is that 

…so little dependence has this affair on the humours and education of particular men, that one part of the same republic may be wisely conducted, and another weakly, by the very same men, merely on account of the difference of the forms and institutions, by which these parts are regulated. 

Hume is thus quite adamant in what this entails with respect to governmental institutions and the regulatory apparatus they have in place—in short, it is much more important to have good laws and institutions with regulatory powers than it is to have good or bad people in government. As Hume puts it, “wise regulations in any commonwealth are the most valuable legacy that can be left to future ages.” 

Humean Phenomenology

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post discussing Dorion Cairns’ critique of Sidney Hook’s “impression” of German philosophy, circa 1929. Cairns took particular aim at Hook’s “identification of phenomenology with psychology, a confusion indicated by Mr. Hook’s epithet, ‘logicized psychology.’” Hook, in other words, remained captive to the naïveté of the natural attitude, when it is the task of phenomenology to detail the constitutive acts of consciousness, regardless of the reality or unreality of the objects being constituted. The very notion of a Humean phenomenology may thus appear to be a blatant oxymoron. How could Humean empiricism, with its embrace of the natural attitude, be reconciled with the phenomenological bracketing of the natural attitude?

When one looks at the historical narrative Husserl offered to account for the rationale behind the development of phenomenology, we see that an important part of phenomenology’s impetus was its effort to grapple with a problem that Husserl claimed was discovered by Hume, and a problem that was central to Hume’s own project.

Husserl among the realists

A few weeks ago Eric and I put up a series of posts discussing the history of analytic philosophy, especially the role Moritz Schlick, Ernest Nagel, Sidney Hook, and others play in this history (see here, here, here, and here). Among the essays discussed was Sidney Hook’s 1930 JPhil essay, “A Personal Impression of Contemporary German Philosophy.” A few months after Hook’s essay was published, Dorion Cairns published a short reply in JPhil, “Mr Hook’s Impression of Phenomenology.” Before looking at Cairns’ impression of Hook’s impression, I think it’s important first to place Cairns into his intellectual context.

Problems and Solutions

One way to look at the history of philosophy is as a series of creative acts, or as the history of the simultaneous creation of problems and solutions. Randall Collins, in his hefty The Sociology of Philosophies, offers such an account. As Collins puts it:

The crucial feature of creativity is to identify an unsolved problem, and to convince one’s peers of the importance of solving it. It is typical for intellectuals to create problems at the very moment they solve them. In India the issue of how to escape from the bonds of Karma did not exist until the Buddhists proposed a means of escape. Epicurus made fear of the gods an issue at the same time he propounded a solution to these fears. Kant discovered that science was threatened when he announced a Copernican revolution to end the threat. (p. 80).

I wonder to what extent philosophers in general would accept Collins’ claim, and if so what other examples one could give. Regardless, it would appear, on the surface at least, that Deleuze would second Collins’ approach, for he too spoke of “a history of philosophy that would list only the new concepts created by a great philosopher,” (Empiricism and Subjectivity, ix) these concepts themselves being “connected to problems without which they would have no meaning and which can themselves only be isolated or understood as the solution emerges.” (What is Philosophy? p. 16). Despite this similarity, there is a crucial difference in how they understand the relationship between problems and solutions.

Schools and Traditions; or Husserl and Realism, pt. I

In Hook’s survey of German philosophy circa 1930, which I discuss here, we saw that for Hook Husserl’s phenomenological movement (or school) is "the strongest analytical group in Germany and closest to the English and American school of neo-realism." In his follow-up post (here), Eric challenged my claim that Hook had Russell in mind but rather was thinking of “an American movement of scientific philosophers” – namely, Montague, Barton, and others who set forth their platform of neo-realism in a 1910 issue of JOP (and which Eric cites [the essay is here]). I wholeheartedly accept Eric’s claim that this is indeed who Hook had in mind when he refers to the American school of neo-realism, but I’ll stick to my guns that Russell is who is being thought of when he refers to the English school. Eric would probably accept this point, for what he is arguing is that it was only a consequence of Nagel’s successful “philosophic prophecy” which has led us to think only of Russell (and subsequently Frege) and not of the American school Hook also had in mind. Eric’s use of the concept philosophic prophecy to understand the contingencies of the history of philosophy is an important and challenging contribution to those of us who struggle to think through the historical relationships that come to constitute various philosophical “traditions” and “schools.” My only hesitation with this concept is that it seems to rely too strongly on an individualist, or great man, understanding of intellectual history. So when Eric attributes to Nagel the power to determine “The way we think about the origins of analytic philosophy,” or that Nagel was “so successful in recoining the concept “analytical philosophy”…[that most people, myself included] can’t see what he has wrought,” the Foucauldian in me becomes skeptical of attributing such authorial control over consequences. Nagel’s 1936 essay does stand as an interesting testament to the processes of inclusion/exclusion. I will grant that. But an adequate accounting of the eventual success of the narrative that legitimizes these exclusions/inclusions needs to do more than address the prophet but also look as best one can into the dialogue behind the scenes as well as the institutional and structural factors that make some inclusions/exclusions viable and others not. I have already suggested that Nagel was in dialogue with Hook but I would add another, and perhaps even more important example: Morris Cohen, who was Nagel’s former teacher and the author of the influential Reason and Nature: An Essay on the Meaning of Scientific Method (1931) and, with Nagel, An Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method (1934).

Cohen is important not only for the personal working relationship he had with Nagel but also for the fact that in the JOP issue where the neo-realist program was published the essay that immediately follows it is by Cohen, “The Conception of Philosophy in Recent Discussion” (here). One could also say that in this essay Cohen prophesies both the failure of the neo-realist program as well as, by extension, the Vienna Circle program and manifesto the neo-realists anticipate, and Cohen's piece prefigures some of the moves that will come to be made within “continental” philosophy.

CC#12: Hook's "Impression" of German Philosophy circa 1930

Continuing with some thoughts and research related to posts that Eric, Catarina, and I have written regarding the history of the continental-analytic distinction (see here, here, and here) and the importance of turning the discussion to methodological differences in order to better understand this history, I stumbled across Sidney Hook's 1930 essay in the Journal of Philosophy, "A Personal Impression of Contemporary German Philosophy". After reading this essay I've concluded it's likely that Nagel's 1936 "Impressions and Appraisals" essay that Eric discusses in his post (linked above) was influenced by Hook's essay.

There are also 5 points I gleaned from this essay that are relevant to recent discussions regarding the methodologies of analytic and continental philosophy.

CC#10: Husserl and the history of analytic and continental thought

In Eric’s post of a few days ago (here), he continues with his argument that Moritz Schlick ought to be considered the “rightful father of analytic philosophy,” contrary to the more frequent claim that this honor belongs to Frege. This post led me to think yet again about the historical roots of the analytic-continental divide.

The usual story as I would tell it, simplified as it is, was that one could mark the bifurcation with Frege’s critique of Husserl’s habilitation dissertation, On the Concept of Number. In his critique, Frege rejected Husserl’s strong psychologistic tendencies. On this telling, we begin with shared concerns and problems in the foundations of mathematics but then divergence arises as Frege and Husserl set out addressing these problems and concerns, with Husserl taking up the issue  along Brentano’s psychologistic lines, and Frege (and subsequently Russell) rejecting this approach and moving in a decidedly realist direction.

This story of the diverging approaches of Husserl and Frege supports the claims of those who read continental thought as being more anti-realist than analytic thought, though there are notable exceptions of course (Deleuze, among others, is more appropriately placed among the realists while the later writings of Putnam have a strong anti-realist flavor).

Thanks to Eric’s post, and to his recommendation of an excellent essay by Abraham Stone, “Heidegger and Carnap on the Overcoming of Metaphysics,” (this and other essays can be found here), I am beginning to rethink the history of the analytic-continental divide.

CC#10: The Relevance of Seneca?

It is no secret that Deleuze's project is in many ways at odds with Kant's. Whereas Kant's transcendental project sought to set forth the conditions of possible experience, Deleuze's transcendental empiricism (and yes, it is a transcendental project) sought to understand the conditions of real experience. In his efforts to develop this project, Deleuze turned heavily to the early modern philosophers, most notably Spinoza, Leibniz, and Hume. There has been an upsurge of excellent work in early modern philosophy, as is well represented on this blog by Eric Schliesser, Dennis Des Chene, and Charles Wolfe. I would argue that one reason for the increased interest in early modern thought converges with Deleuze's project: namely, it's part of an effort to develop realist alternatives to various forms of Kantian transcendental idealism and anti-realism.

As part of this general trend in philosophy it might be time to reconsider the stoics, and in particular Seneca.

CC#9: tracking the action-image

The following clip from Chaplin's 1921 short film, "The Idle Class," one of his Mutual Series films, is for me both a clear example of the action-image as Deleuze discusses this in his Cinema books and it points to an important claim Mark Wilson makes in his book Wandering Significance.

 

Continental Connections Thursday #8: philosophy as generative system

Last week Jon (with a hat tip to Gregory Schufreider) posted a link [here] to a video of Brian Eno and Will Wright discussing many things, but among the things they discussed were generative systems.

As an example of such a generative system in music, Eno offered the music of Steve Reich. In Reich’s early tape music, for example, he would set two tapes playing a simple sound or piece (e.g., a few seconds of a preacher’s end of the world sermon in “It’s Gonna Rain”) in sync on two separate players and then slowly speed the play of one of the tapes until they moved out and back into sync. What Reich found interesting about this phasing technique, as he called it, was how the continuous variation of tempo could itself generate subtle yet complex rhythms and acoustic effects.

This was also what interested Eno (Phillip Glass, and others) in Reich’s work, and Eno went on to make his own generative music through a continuous variation of simple tape loops (Music for Airports is the best example of this work), and it is what interested Eno in the computer simulations of Conway’s game of life, which is one of the things discussed in the video Jon linked. The game of life is also an example of how simple rules, when iterated over thousands of generations, can generate complex patterns (a phenomena associated with cellular automata, the concepts of which were formulated by John von Neumann). In the case of Reich’s music, the complex acoustic effects are similarly the result of a simple transformation rule being applied to two equally simple melodies. 

In 1967 Reich set out to write a piece in the phasing style that could be played on an instrument. The result of this effort was a piano piece called Piano Phase. It’s a good illustration of Eno’s point, and it’s easier to listen to than the piece Eno claims influenced him the most, which was Reich’s “It’s Gonna Rain” (which needs to be listened to with headphones on both to fully appreciate the effect/affect and keep anyone else in the house from screaming at you to turn that #&%@ off). Here’s a performance of Piano Phase:

    

Perhaps philosophy itself could be thought of as a generative system.

Continental Connections Thursday #7: what is philosophy?

In this week’s Friday version of continental connections (I was too swamped with beginning of the semester duties to get this done earlier), I want to expand upon a couple of points that were made in posts on this blog in the last week. In her post on methodological pluralism (here), Catarina called for a conjunction of four different methodologies that, when done together, will result in a more thoroughgoing philosophical inquiry. In the comments, David Chalmers argued that there was something else besides the four methodologies Catarina listed, what he called “substantive philosophical thinking and reasoning,” or “philosophical abduction,” and he argued that it is at the core of philosophy.

I agreed and argued that what I take to be the core of philosophy, following Deleuze and others, is problematics, or the creation of concepts vis-à-vis problems. Catarina argues that problematics falls under her fourth methodology, what she calls "conceptual reflection," and she is probably right.  In a follow-up comment John Protevi pointed out that a subsequent way to think of the history of philosophy would be as a genealogy of problematics, an analysis of how one problematic changed into another – e.g., how did Descartes’s problematic become Kant’s? Understood this way, the history of philosophy is not to be understood in terms of progress, and John, rightly I think, points out that this may well leave us with another point of bifurcation within philosophy, but one that spans both continental and analytic philosophies, and this would be between those who would argue for and those who would argue against progress in philosophy.

Continental Connections Thursday #6: impossibility of thought

 I have been unable to put together a continental connections post of late due to a study abroad program in Scotland I was heading up. The timing of the program worked out well, however, for I was able to attend the Hume Society conference in Edinburgh and meet up with Eric (all of which was very nice). Now that I'm back in sultry Louisiana I should be able to post more regularly. Sticking with Hume, and following up on the discussions of PSR from my previous post (here), I'll connect Quentin Meillassoux's arguments against PSR with the arguments of David Lewis's defense of the same, showing how Deleuze, with his notion of the impossibility of thought (and his concept of concrete universals), differs from both.

In his book After Finitude: an essay on the necessity of contingency, Meillassoux devotes an entire chapter to what he calls Hume's Problem. The central arguments of this chapter are intended to address objections to the claim, and preciesly the claim Meillassoux seeks to defend, that "not only things but also physical laws are really contingent...these laws could actually change at any moment for no reason whatsoever." Meillassoux's strategy in avoiding the objections is to solve "Hume's problem," which he states as follows: "is it possible to demonstrate that the same effects will always follow from the same causes ceteris paribus, i.e. all other things being equal?" For Hume, and for Meillassoux, the answer is "no," and Meillassoux ushers Hume's famous billiard-ball passage from EHU to the center of his argument:

When I see, for instance, a Billiard-ball moving in a straight line towards another; even suppose motion in the second ball should by accident be suggested to me, as the result of their contact or impulse; may I not conceive, that a hundred different events might as well follow from that cause? May not both these balls remain at absolute rest? May not the first ball return in a straight line, or leap off from the second in any line or direction? All these suppositions are consistent and conceivable. Why then should we give the preference to one, which is no more consistent or conceivable than the rest? All our reasonings a priori will never be able to shew us any foundation for this preference. (EHU section IV)

Continental Connections Thursday #5: "The World is an Egg"

I have been unable to put together a post the past few weeks due to a busy travel schedule to, among other places, the Deleuze Studies Conference in Copenhagen. As one of the instructors at this year's Deleuze Camp (or workshop as I'd prefer to call it to avoid thoughts of boy scouts, letters home to mom, etc.), I was given ample time to develop some thoughts associated with what is certainly one of the central projects of Deleuze's thought - if not the central project - which is to account for the emergence of identifiable beings without presupposing a predetermining identity. Perhaps not surprisingly, there was much overlap between my lectures and those of the other Deleuze scholars who participated in this year's camp - Dan Smith, Ronald Bogue, and Ian Buchanan.

Continental Connections Thursday #4: pure experience

In “A Pluralistic Universe” and in some of his essays, William James develops the notion of a pure experience, which he defines as being ‘plain, unqualified actuality or existence, a simple that.’ This is not a subjective that, nor an objective that, but is rather for James the ‘one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed.’

Part of James’s motivation for this move to ‘pure experience’ was a lingering problem that he felt persisted with Hume’s philosophy. Among other problems, the one most relevant to the idea of pure experience is that Hume’s form of empiricism failed to do justice to novelty. To see something as a novelty would entail, on James’s reading of Hume, seeing it as an effect that is related to the cause of which the novelty is the effect, but then by Hume’s system this novelty is already contained in the cause as that which enabled us to see the relationship between a cause and a novel effect. James is quite forthright that this would be damning to his understanding of pluralism, if true: ‘The effect in some way already exists in the cause. If this be so, the effect cannot be absolutely novel, and in no radical sense can pluralism be true.’

 

Continental Connections Thursday #3: Kafka's event-full night

 

Late in the evening of September 22, 1912, while his parents and sister were asleep in their own rooms, Franz Kafka, a 29-year-old insurance officer and writer, sat down, as he had done so many nights before, to write. This night would be different, however. When Kafka next got up from his small desk, after an all-night stint of writing, he had completed the story ‘The Judgment’, the story that would be Kafka’s watershed moment, the event of his life as a writer, or of his life tout court. Kafka himself recognized the significance of the event. Two days later, after reading the story aloud to friends (among whom were Max Brod), Kafka wrote in his diary that ‘The indubitability of the story was confirmed.’ Driving this point home, Reiner Stach, in his biography of Kafka, argues that the Kafka we associate with literature, the Kafkaesque world we have come to know, was born that night:

"Suddenly – without guide or precedent, it seemed – the Kafka cosmos was at hand, fully equipped with the ‘Kafkaesque’ inventory that now gives his work its distinctive character: the father figure who is both overpowering and dirty, the hollow rationality of the narrator, the juridical structures imposed on life, the dream logic of the plot, and last but not least, the flow of the story perpetually at odds with the hopes and expectations of the hero."

 

Continental Connections Thursday #2: On clarity and exact thinking

 In this short 40 second clip, Bertrand Russell expresses what is likely a widely shared sentiment - clarity and exact thinking can serve a therapeutic function. Inexact thinking allows for our prejudices, biases, and self-interest to come into play without our noticing, but if we pursue a path of clarity and exact thinking, we will notice. Whether or not "philosophy in the old-fashioned sense," as he puts it, is by its nature immersed in inexact thinking he does not say, though he no doubt thinks a healthy amount of it is so immersed - Russell is nonetheless quite clear that this is not what the world needs now, or it's not the philosophy that will save us from ourselves.

Continental Connections Thursday #1: White Light/White Heat

White Light/White Heat refers, as many probably caught, to an album by The Velvet Underground, and hopefully this will not to be a random reference given what I want to make of it. As one of the premier experimental rock bands of the 1960s—their first album was a joint project with Andy Warhol—The Velvet Underground, following the inspiration and lead of front man Lou Reed, would frequently draw upon the use of feedback distortion to the point where it became nearly indistinguishable from white noise. To be fair, Lou Reed also had a knack for writing traditional songs as well, with catchy melodies and a good sense for the use of harmony. In 1975 Lou Reed took his white noise tendency to an extreme when he released Metal Machine Music, which is to many ears (mine included) largely a compilation of white noise. There is some debate about whether or not this album was released as a joke or as a way to quickly complete his contractual obligations to the record label he had become disenchanted with. Whatever the motivations, one should not be too quick to discount the use of white noise or discredit a work that makes use of it.