Another Very Brief Note On Isaiah Berlin

I have been enamored with the thought, writing, and even the oratory of Isaiah Berlin ever since I first discovered his work sometime in the early to middle 1990s, that I never tire of discovering newer things about him or finding new applications of his work to current events and everyday non-academic life.

I want to focus on a particular move he always makes which forms but one part of his general wisdom. What he always does is to start by having what appears to be this comprehensive gaze, looking at wide reaches of vast historical time and its accompanying thought, chiefly among these his analysis of the great Romantic revolution and how it basically upended the entirety of the traditional/ ancient, as well as classical worlds.


But Berlin's move is always to go as deep into what he is describing almost as the greatest lawyer for the defense would, and still further as someone living inside or even born into the world he is describing.

Isaiah Berlin will go deep into whatever it is and then he will reverse course, suddenly pull back and outwards and say something to the effect of "but of course this world or object I am examining is far from perfect, is not entirely correct and needs some kind of countervailing force or dissent".


This move forms the basis of Berlin's worldview, not only his pluralism, but an attitude towards being in the world. It is the attitude of one who wished to be seemingly a skeptic and believer at one and the same time. Some might see it as the mark of an essentially moderate or centrist cast of mind. But this is not exactly right. The word that comes closest is that much debated word liberal. It is very close to the cast of mind of yours truly.

A good example of Berlin's brilliance as orator can be found here:


Unlike today's "thought leaders" Berlin was a genuine public intellectual. The thought leader today all too often advocates for a very specific case or cause, even an ideology. The public intellectual in Isaiah Berlin's sense sought to bring subjects into the widest public discourse with an aim at exploration and even genuine enjoyment.

The example I want to use is in his essay "The Sense Of Reality" which was delivered at Smith College in Northampton, in 1956. He takes a wonderfully long time discussing how  some humans have noted that some things seem inevitable in a natural and/or mechanical sense, while still others take the contrary view that things seem not inevitable but rather unpredictable, as "artificially" willed into existence and predicated on contingency, even randomness.  In short, how both contrary attitudes seem apparent at different times and in different reigning orders:

"Everyone, no doubt, believes that there are factors that are largely or wholly beyond conscious human control. And when we describe this or that scheme as impractical or Utopian we often mean that it cannot be realized in the face of such uncontrollable facts or processes. These are of so many kinds: regions of nature with which we cannot interfere, for example the solar system, or the general realm dealt with by astronomy; there we can alter neither the state of the entities in question nor the laws which they obey." 

Berlin goes on at great length in this vein, even discussing the reaction against mechanistic or reductionist views, for example, the influence of Hegel as well as Darwin and Marx. He admits, and not with any diminution of respect, that we have much to learn from such developments. indeed in one passage he is unabashed in his passion for the greatness of certain minds in history:

"It is when one of these nerves is touched, nerves which lie so deep within us that it is in terms of them that we feel as we feel and think as we think, that we are conscious of those electric shocks that indicate that some genuinely profound insight has occurred. It is only when this unique, immediately recognizable, disturbing experience comes that we are in the presence of this peculiar and very rare form of genius, possessed by those who make us conscious of the most pervasive, least observed categories, those which lie closest to us and for that very reason escape description, however much our emotions, our curiosity, our industry, are mobilized to record the whole of what wee know." 

How different this is than the current view which would only interrogate with suspicion or dismiss with disparagement "great" minds from the past!

Berlin is describing the unparalleled excitement that comes with a kind of discovery or breakthrough with more customary and traditional ways of knowing, and a development that is inseparable from the "specialness" of certain minds who appear to make the breakthrough. Partisans of rationality and the Enlightenment are right to conclude from passages like these that Berlin is never entirely in "their" camp, however much he respected their tradition. Why Isaiah Berlin matters is that he refused, for the most part, to be solidly in any discernible camp, neither fully rationalist, nor fully romantic.

But then he goes on:

"For Marxists and, indeed, all those that social or individual life is wholly determined by laws at least in principle discoverable, men are weaker than they supposed in their pre-scientific pride; they are calculable and in principle capable of omniscience. but as we ordinarily think of ourselves, especially as historians or men of action - that is, when we are dealing with particular individuals and things and facts - we see a very different spectacle of men governed by few natural laws; falling into error, defeated, victims of one another, through ignorance not of laws, but largely of the results of human acts, those being most successful who possess (apart from such, which is perhaps indispensable) a combination of will-power and a capacity for non-scientific, non-generalizing assessments of specific situations ad hoc; which leads to a picture of men as free, sometimes strong, and largely ignorant that is the precise contrary of the scientific view of them as weak, determined and potentially omniscient." 

I love how he pairs omniscience and weakness here, contrary to usual habits which would have us think that the position of omniscience would usher in only maximum strength. But above all, as always, he says science alone is never enough. We live today in a world dominated by two views, one you could call religious (and/or spiritual) and the other scientific. Though the scientific and the spiritual are thought to be opposites (with the important exception of those who hold that both science and religion tell essentially the same story, or work and evolve in tandem) they both have a consensus and similarity that is less positive: in both there exists a rule bound sense of determination. A law is a law whiter given by a supernatural force or scientific proof or discovery and these appear to pronounce upon what is to be done.

The scientific view is the dominant one in our current epoch, for it claims to the fullest knowledge possible at any given time - which is considered to be something like a final argument. Indeed, science is so dominant that it is practically a requirement when any subject is broached in major media outlets, it seems de rigueur  to always say "what the science has to say" on the given subject - whether we are discussing eating and nutrition, music appreciation and performance, or ethics and morality, and. of course, sexual behaviors. I am reminded of a recent podcast on dreams which was all about what science tells us dreams in fact actually are rather than what people have simply always thought about them since the latter might appear self evidently inadequate. This is a very different way of discussing dreams than as a source of both mystery and revelation, or as a mere entertainment to pass the time.

Another important thing to note about Isaiah Berlin is his influence on prominent and helpful minds who are currently active. Berlin's work never becomes dated and is applicable to real life situations rather than mere academic speculation or specialization. To name only two: Timothy Snyder, the political historian and commentator and contemporary philosopher  Kwame Anthony Appiah are both deeply influenced by Isaiah Berlin.

 I think Berlin points to something that is neither science nor spirit exactly. It doesn't not contradict nor challenge these but does not wave the flag for them either. This "something else" of Berlin refuses systemization; it might refuse even definition, and Isaiah Berlin held it to be real. In much the same way that he though freedom itself was a real fact of human existence, and thus of reality. Yet the only way Berlin was able to conclude as he did was to pass through a great many views that had come before him and enter into such views with the greatest sympathy, even if the views in question were initially alien to him or at least not far from intuitive or self evident. To me, such a process or style of thought is itself one kind of wisdom.

http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk

1970s Cinema: my introduction to a screening of BLUME IN LOVE

Mazursky calls his film Blume In Love and it must be said at the outset that 1970s cinema, and artistic production most generally, was preoccupied with questions of human emotion in all of its guises. If you are going to watch a 1970s movie you are going to have to, as the saying went then, "get in touch with your feelings". And further, really feel those feelings. You are never asked to actually do anything about them. That would be to create, say, "the" revolution, which, as Fassbinder famously said, "doesn't even belong on the screen".

What is important is that you know your feelings:  the feelings of both your own and others, and that these feelings be allowed to "hang out." 1970s movies are like one really long consciousness raising session.  A lot of stuff comes up and of course it isn't always pretty. Some of tonight's movie won't be pretty - it's surface beauty and sophisticated charm, of which there is also plenty, notwithstanding. The attitudes of the titular character towards women certainly can be as far from pretty as is imagined. But the important thing is he is trying. And he of course will get as good as he gives. But the bare expression of all is the end in and for itself.

It's more in the spirit of Lenny Bruce's plea to reflect on the truth of "what is" rather than "what should be."  This is one of the reasons why movies that otherwise seem to have a quite diverse or opposite surface, or come in different genres, nevertheless will immerse you in a scene, or many scenes, where a sense of real time plays out, that are, in a word, durational.

This will happen in any kind of picture, even action ones. And this happens as much in, say, Hal Ashby's The Last Detail, as it does in a Jacque Rivette picture. You see it Andrei Tarkovsky as much as you do in Sidney Lumet. And not only in scenes with more than one character: this arresting of action (or, as I refer to it in my book, immersion in the moment) happens when it lets us sit with Jane Fonda as Bree Daniels in Klute when she is by herself, or sit with Elliot Gould as Philip Marlowe as he is waking up in bed in Long Goodbye, realizing that he must feed his cat, or sit with Walter Matthau as Coach Buttermaker  in a car, possibly inebriated, in the opening of Bad News Bears.

Bertolt Brecht (and later Augusto Boal) had a chart where he said that in the classical or "Aristotelian"  theater every scene happens to serve other scenes, a subsequent or following scene, but that in the epic theatre the scene plays for or serves itself. Or, as Sherman Alexie put it in another context, "Aristotle was not an Indian." And by immersion to which I oppose what I call classical condensation, I do not mean that what we are witnessing is necessarily more naturally absorbing; plenty of the highest edited acton pictures, which are the very essence of "condensation",  could be called immersive in the sense of being riveting. I simply mean this quality of staying with the characters as they play out their lives in a present minded sense.

The reason for this in depth playing out of a scene, refusing cutting to a new one, is the conceit that in so doing the actors in the scene will reveal something of themselves and in turn reveal something of ourselves to ourselves.  1970s filmmaking is an aporetic art: it has many more questions than it has answers to, and the questions are some of the best ones you could ask. As in a Socratic dialogue these are the sort of questions that don't admit of easy definition. As in "what is justice"? Or, in tonight's case, "What is Love?" The search for the right question is always central, not any correct answer. 1970s cinema is as much an actors' cinema as it is a naturalistic photographer's cinema.

Of all the emotions, it is the nature of love that was the 1970s' great theme. What is love? When does it go right, and when does it go wrong? What is love for? It connects tonight's movie with others close in time period in particular Cassavetes' Minnie And Moskowitz, certainly Mazursky's An Unmarried Woman, only four years later from Blume, again another Cassavetes in Woman Under The Influence, Frank and Eleanor Perry's Diary Of A Mad Housewife, Lovers And Other Strangers, Sidney Furie's Sheila Levine is Dead And Living In New York. Of course in Jean Eustache's La Maman et La Putain where all of the characters never stop talking about love for all three plus hours. It haunts Kaufman's Invasion Of The Body Snatchers too: for an urgent fear of not having a genuine emotion, of losing your humanity, is a common theme in these pictures. For Cassavetes it reaches its ultimate expression in his Love Streams, a 1970s movie that simply happened to have physically a 1980s production/release date but is, as they say, stone 1970s spiritually. More recently, if you count the early 1980s as recent, Joan Micklin Silver (with help from Anne Beattie) tackles quite similar terrain as tonight's film in her Chilly Scenes Of Winter. And most recently, I can't help but feel that some of that spirit is carried on in Lena Dunham's Girls.

Blume In Love in Mazursky's oeuvre could be seen as a spiritual sequel to his Bob Carol Ted And Alice, that earlier film also being all about love. Blume's philosophic, essayistic opening continues in a different vein the popular psychological therapy discourses and concerns of that earlier film. Notice in particular the snatches of people seemingly plucked from daily, real life in the opening, the interest in documenting and commentating on life as it is lived and found and in the locations one would have found in daily life. This is the strategy of using documentary techniques in a fictional context.

Getting more specific to Blume, all of Mazursky's considerable gifts are in fullest flower: the usage of a diverse range of colorful characters for maximum emotional effect, (Just putting together George Segal, Kris Kristofferson, Susan Anspach, and Paul Mazursky in an acting role is exhibit A), a constant sense of humor about life, no matter how bad things can get, a love for all human creatures wherever they find themselves, an unapologetic almost Capraesque, commitment to affective sentiment, (and not far off from the Renoir films they have been playing here). I

In short, a point of view that could only be called humanistic if that word can be freed from any ideological, spiritual or partisan specificity. I know of no filmmakers that can get to the heart of genuine human emotion between two people (Harry And Tonto is master class in that) any better than Mazursky and he has few peers in this regard. He made his pictures for people in the audience, not an imagined ideal audience, nor a great unwashed audience that he can preach to, but potentially, well, anybody. The photographer Vilmos Zsigmond, when asked what made pictures of the 1970s special, the context being a discussion of Mark Rydell's Cinderella Liberty, said they they tried to make movies by and for people, as if people actually mattered. I sincerely hope you experience at least some of that spirit tonight since that was certainly what they set out to do.

New "Album" Hard Listening and Easy Listening

"I sit at the piano and write at the piano. I will freely improvise for an hour or two, to try and get this stuff out of my system. I'm writing a piece right now that has an orchestral feeling to it, with bursts of sound and energy. When I compose a piece it has to have a few elements to it. It has to be beautiful whatever that word may mean to you. Part of what that means is that it might have to be ugly in places, in order to be beautiful. I look to develop enough contrast. I also think in terms of color and texture, and will often write a piece of music where I will stay on one chord to develop it and really violate that chord. I'll take that chord and play it inside and out, then throw a pop thing in there, or something Elton John did. i'll do it consciously in a way to irk or disturb the listener who isn't expecting it. Or maybe I'll bring you to 1933 with Harlem style piano. I like breaking down boundaries and making a single piece of music feel like it has the whole history of music within it. I want people to be reminded of what musicians have done in the past. So it's almost a way of honoring the past. My goal is not to reinvent the wheel but rather for the music to be interesting and exciting and reflect the past. I think we as humans have to understand that we humans make and create stuff. We could debate about whether what we make is the Sistine Chapel or some junk, but what's most important is that humans create things." (from bdcwire interview, Mitch Hampton)

My last post was on that most important of themes Love, last February, on Valentine's Day.

You might be tempted to ask what I have been doing over the spring and summer. Well mostly I have been working on my music. After months of deblogging I am back to do a little promotion and little philosophic reflection.
http://bdcwire.com/list/know-your-neighbors-back-bay-pt-i-mitch-hampton/
Now when that great of an amount of time has gone by, especially given the rapid rate of change you could worry about all of the newness that you would feel pressured to reflect, assuming that it could even be processed.

Luckily I am back to discuss music, in particular the release this month, on October 14th of my first solo recording work in, well, over fifteen years. It is called Hard Listening, I suppose to reflect the influence of Easy Listening. I am most happy with it. Not only are all of the pieces original, they were all recorded on the most beautiful piano I could ever hope to find, and for the most part were done in a single take, "live" with no digital manipulation.

There were so many inspirations for this particular album. The oldest and most important inspiration was studying with the great pianist and composer Stanley Cowell, at New England Conservatory of Music. he taught me so many things, chief among them was the truth that though a pianist should be a good ensemble player and comp in a rhythm section, the central focus should be on a pianist's ability to be a complete solo pianist. Doubtless this conviction was in part inspired by the fact that the greatest pianist of them all, Art Tatum, played on Cowell's family piano when Cowell was still a child, in Ohio.

Cowell would have his students come in and prepare any piece of music as if that piece of music were meant to be written and performed by the piano alone, regardless of the original material. He wanted to hear good bass, and the full orchestral range of the piano and all registers. I cannot underestimate the spiritual and aesthetic value of studying under a master like him. It was the kind of experience for the ages, like a real apprenticeship from an older world. Here was a musician that could and would go from something as funky and "contemporary" as this:

 to this:

Maybe my so-called extreme eclecticism is similar.

One inspiration for Hard Listening were those album covers from the past.

Another inspiration was an obscure indie film by Pamela Corkey called Easy Listening.

The other inspiration was the fact that I consider a lot of what is called easy listening music to be good or enjoyable music and was curious about it being considered dated or irrelevant and also curious about why it was demoted or rejected by so many people.

I almost want to write an essay called the Myth Of Relevance.

The most recent inspiration was from rewatching the movie Lifeguard from 1977, about which I wrote on this very blog a few season ago herehttp://themoderatecontrarian.blogspot.com/2012/10/towards-aesthetic-of-1970s-cinema.html One scene depicted a woman bringing a man home and her worrying that her female singer-songwriter album with a pensive and mellow piano and guitar would offend her date's presumably more masculine tastes.

She says, "if you don't like that kind of music I can put something else on". It was very effective that this was Anne Archer delivering the line.

My heart and brain reeled. Kind of music. Something else on. Appropriate music. Good music. Bad music. Cool music and uncool music. Music for "getting it on." Easy listening music. Mellow music, Art music. THAT kind of music. What does this all mean?

I'm a trained musician and I have played just about every kind of music you can think of. I don't like all of it, much of it is not even my favorite. Little of the music I like as much as the music of my mentor Stanley Cowell. I am not as eclectic as this album might have you guess. But I can't but help respond to the world's music and find in it a limitless fount.

I do have preferences. I would really rather listen to any Soul Train show from the 1970s that practically the whole corpus of "classic" rock. I really find the trumpet and flugelhorn of Freddie Hubbard more inspirational to me than many pianists. I would rather listen to Duke Ellington than Brahms. I would rather listen to Patrick Williams' television scores than most contemporary concert music! Influence is a mysterious thing.

I agree with Miles Davis that art and life are "all about style." Styles are made up of little gestures or details.

For example the late and very great Bobby Short had a habit of punctuating in between the musical phrases he sung these wild upward arpeggios on the piano. Even more remarkably, he would often hit or slap the top C key of the keyboard as part of these arpeggios, seemingly in indifference to whatever the key of the song was.
In a similar vein, the pianist Bill Evans would start a solo portion of a piece with the most glowing and radiant statement of the dominant of the key, usually with added extensions, really usually what some call a sus chord of some kind. It set the tone, the stage for the piece, it always struck me as like a plant and the sun meeting in sympathetic harmony. Both of these ideas were the initial inspiration for the very first piece on the recording, The Royal Blue Trickle. Yet I doubt anybody listening is going to think necessarily of either Bill Evans or Bobby Short even though both, in so many ways, are guiding spirits behind this whole recording.

I grew up watching Soul Train every Saturday so that would have to be a spirit or a soul guide on this album as much or more than anything else especially as Don Cornelius passed away recently.



As a result of such inquiry, forms of pop made their way in, but on my own personal terms. Yes you might hear rock in here but I hope the articulation will be more Cedar Walton than Steve Winwood. (Nothing against Steve Winwood).



Even though I have some sympathy for Stravinsky's hyperbolic claim that music doesn't express things, especially in a contemporary climate in which tendentious and irresponsible musical scholars try to claim that there is a spirit of sexual pathology or masculinist flaws in something as wonderfully abstract as Beethoven, I nevertheless wanted to make a philosophical argument but in musical language, in the most abstract musical form no less, music without words: piano alone. Music might not have the specificity of narrative representation but it is the most highly expressive art of which I am aware perhaps because of the very absence of such specificity.

Thus, when I write and perform a twelve minute work called Feminist Singer-Songwriter Without Words it is a nod to Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words, a musical interpretation of the story of women's liberation in the Berlioz programmatic mode, a way for me to "wrestle" with cliched folk material about which I have some ambivalence, a way to celebrate political feelings that I endorse, and a way to embrace "Americana", folk rock, and 1970s culture more generally - all at once. I asked myself - philosophically, conceptually, rhetorically - if I didn't have any words and I were a woman in the mid to late1970s and wanted to do something instrumental and though unconstrained by any particular stylistic restrictions but still acknowledged my love for Bob Dylan and Carole King and Elton John like a lot of my peers, and by some fluke I got assigned to write a "classical" piece of music for some feminist anniversary of some kind, what would the resulting music sound like? This imagined hypothetical though experiment of a woman would be confronting many things at once: love for the identity and meaning of a certain music, need to stretch and expand out of an alleged comfort zone, the need to communicate as well to a wider public than her sisters in the revolution.

Except there is a catch. That piece doesn't end like that. Now the way I would write it is to take the end result I just described and hand it over to Charles Ives or maybe through some ideas of Bill Evans. I like to go out once and a while and I do like dramatic contrast. As much as I experiment on this album with trance-like ostinatos and repetitions, I do have to deliver some contrast. Music for me is a very delicate matter; the end result may have a rough texture at times, but it has to be right, and I might spend a long time indeed to get it to where I am satisfied.

A lot of my love for things has very little and at times frankly nothing to do with all of the things surrounding that thing that I love, all of that context that academics and now popular audiences go on so much about. That is why, in the end, when I hear a Patrick Williams or Henry Mancini piece it matters not in the least that it was intended to accompany this or that banal or forgotten television show because I find the music to be itself so good. I am using my ears to hear what was created and am not interested in having my attention distracted unduly by all of the stuff surrounding this musical creation. The world needs both a Patrick Williams and Gustav Mahler. It needs both a Pedro Coasta and Sam Peckinpah. It matters not whether we call it high or low or popular or unpopular, but whether in some way, in the most generous sense, it moves us.

I do hope everybody enjoys the music on this album as much as I enjoyed making it, I even enjoyed writing about it on here, which is a rare thing for me.

On Love

Since this is Valentine's Day I should like to attempt to make an inquiry into what Love is. Everybody knows that Love takes different forms; some of which may be the most exalted, say, the love for God, the love for a loving and supportive family, if that is your good fortune, and the love between committed partners who have genuinely decided to share their lives with one another for the "long haul", as they used to say. Of course, I should mention that there is an earthy, lusty side of love that is often less exalted, though a constant and ineradicable drive of its own and making claims upon us in a all sorts of pleasurable, painful, mischievous and benign ways. Yet all of these different things are associated with the single word love: the choice of having a single word may be a truthful expression of some underlying or overriding unity or, conversely, it may be a "reductionist" denial of separate needs.

The picture you have before you is the very first Valentine's card I received, in response to the first of such cards I ever sent. I can say now, and did say then (much to the chagrin and even consternation of this young girl, for we were both children, though precocious children) that I "loved" this girl.

Note that in the card she made it a point to admit that she received other valentines, in spite of mine being her favorite, and that, though she was learning to play the flute, also made it a point to thank me for drawing an electric guitar. Drawing the electric guitar was my own dim and stunted attempt to acknowledge her, and the world's, love for rock&roll, a love I did not share; I had though this took some imaginative comprehension and sympathy on my part. Yet note also that she mentioned that I left out her instrument which was the flute, which she in turn drew in the form of a self portrait. She clearly wanted my picture of a rock band, which was what I thought it was, to perhaps resemble Jethro Tull rather than the Rolling Stones or Kiss. In my overemphasis on the importance of rock, as it seemed to me the world was drenched in guitars, in oversight I left out the very instrument she was learning to play. This omission was innocent on my part but she certainly took notice and it was significant for her. Though we were friends for a while after that our lives took very different paths. She haunted me as we both grew older, though I played the smallest role in her consciousness.

As a freshman in high school I took the initiative to ask her out on a "real date", though we would not have used such a formulation. It was our first of such dates and was to be our last. I remember that she picked me up in a car, as she was a couple of years older than me, and I was not yet driving. When she was a child she a "Waltons" and hippie style of dress, with lots of overalls and plaid flannel shirts (and this in the Florida climate!) and lovely, naturally curly hair. This was the style of her mother. Yet now, a few years later she had remade herself into a very Glam sort of New Wave girl. This was appropriate because our date movie was the movie Valley Girl. She was very similar to Cyndi Lauper and had hoop earrings and a loud magenta dress and three inch heels. I was simultaneously confused that somebody could undergo   what I mistakenly took to be a fundamental personality change and was incredibly aroused by this change. In the parking lot, after the movie, I took hold of her and planted a kiss on her mouth, the very first intentional kiss I ever had or gave. She pushed me away and said some thing about not wanting me in "that way" in a language that was as incomprehensible to me as Farsi. This response was not what any boy or girl who had such feeling and initiative would ever expect or want. Awkward is a word that might not fully express this event, though that would be a good start.

There is is much that can go wrong in Love, so much potential for misunderstanding. Practically all of love, including the non-romantic familial and friendship kinds, is constantly plagued by a rarely considered, though innately challenging fact; that it must involve the contact, the meeting, and , alas, the the opposition of two utterly singular, thoroughly independent, free and separate wills. These two wills are always, already pursuing projects of all kinds - whether personal plans or public work. These pursuits of one of the two wills may or may not involve the other, and in fact might have been developed prior to the very meeting of both wills. There may be a difference of taste, maybe profound and radical. however much is held in common there will always be two selves attempting to interact with, deal with, even simply understand one another. These two wills must constantly negotiate, take the other into account, now with grace, now with power or aggression, now with ignorance or inattention, now with mutuality, now with something that feels like full union and integration, though even in this latter, the underlying or overriding separateness of two whole selves is always a constant, however much union is achieved.

This last fact, our sense and experience of ourselves as self regarding and freely choosing actors and agents is actually one of the most important and valuable parts of being human. Indeed, the revolutions which eventually brought about our highly imperfect, flawed democracies were precisely predicated upon this individualized humanity as I have been describing it here. We are not part of some undifferentiated mass of people, without our own private wills, nor should we be. Yet our very embodies sense of having and needing boundaries and pursuing what interests us alone often conflicts with ideas and ideals of love. Perhaps all humans are ever striving to accommodate both the freedom and dignity of separateness (Kant's "dare to use your own reason", "declaration of independence") of what is mine alone, with the opposing need and claim of merging and sharing.

This then might be a good provisional and working definition then of love: this difference or working through the problem of such difference is itself what Love is: a dialogue or relationship between two differing claims upon our humanity: to honor what is private and what is shared and hold the two in some kind of balance. In conclusion, this very process is what we could give the name Love.

Philosophic Reflections at the Close of 2012

I have often praised the prosaic and the quotidian in these pages. I feel our preference for and privilege of the Tragic and dramatic is a kind of sin at times, a defect in how we perceive stories (or that we perceive in stories) and understand our lives. We may think we need the large revelatory moment and the heroic moment but it is extraordinary how much we distort and what great beauty we miss in the process.

Yet the world's events increasingly appear to demand such an outlook in extremis. (Though a part of me thinks we actually cause these events in order to fulfill this preference!) I can't nor won't write on the seemingly daily horrors that have been hitting our "so-called civilization" (in Gandhi's formulation). I shall leave the writing on that truly evil event in Sandy Hook, Connecticut (and President Obama was so wise to invoke the conception of Evil, though it is a risky and at times misused formulation, especially as we live in an age so glib and assured in an empty and easy type of secularism) in the hands of those close to it, those professionals more knowledgeable than I, and others who have a gift or strength of empathy that I believe to surpass my own powers. And I don't want to contribute anymore to the sensationalism that may engulf it.  Even if it is statistically rare in some dimwitted and overtly quantified Utilitarian sense, if we are at all alive to its horror, we surely feel an outrage such that one Event like this is always one too many. It is too common for many of  us to bear with any sense of basic or decent humanity.

My standpoint  on my blog has always been one of reflection and embrace of infinite and eternal mystery.



One good thing to do when the world seems to be falling apart, and it can only be done when you and the people in your immediate environment are not being killed or attacked, is to take time and reflect or meditate: apart from reading spiritual wisdom like Yeats or great religious meditations and teachings as in the Sermon On The Mount, it might be good to stop action and dwell upon ultimate matters. I want to discuss some ultimate things, hopefully in a way that preserves their mystery. We need to explain when challenged by unfathomable violence for example, but we also need to dwell in mystery too and deal with the most important questions of all: the APORETIC ones that are designed not to be answered but to express inquiry, to churn around, and ultimately lead to deeper or better questions.


It goes without saying that, with the media attention on crises, wars, crimes, storms, and the like, coupled with a relentless celebrity culture, we are encourages to further and deepen our attention to such drama, especially drama that does not directly affect our immediate environment.

Rather than ask why this tendency might be the case, and I will simply assume it is a negative tendency for the moment, it is better to ask questions of a more ontological nature. Especially during a holiday season. Jesus Christ and the religion He is said to have founded is completely predicated on such questions. All of Christ's teachings are rather like one great question, much more than specific prescriptions.

Rather than dwell on the evils of the past week or year or be desperate for salvation and answers I think it is best to ask what and who it is we are.

What is the human being?

Now of course Socrates would go around and ask what Justice and Love are and other ultimate matters. But all of us should take time to ask those questions. For one thing, when we ask such questions we are put into a certain relation with ourselves and others which is objectively superior to many of the alternative kinds of relations. We aren't trying to sell something and our very question implies that we aren't experts and might be uncertain or wrong.

If you ask such a question you will find that you will always already be brought to a less than violent place. You will become aware that as people we have a certain self regard. Conversely, to go through life and to never ask the question, or, worst of all, to come with readymade answers to the question even if the answers are ethically unimpeachable or pure is insufficient at best and wrong at worst. There is the risk that you will not see who is in front of you when you meet someone new for the first time, but also the risk that you will be very busy evaluating, ranking, and possibly discarding some people according to your prior blueprint. If you do have such a blueprint, that is perfectly alright, but at the very least be honest about your blueprint and that it is a blueprint and know what you are doing. Don't mistake your blueprint for a universal Law unless you are absolutely sure it is a universal Law. Be cautious about making your claims objective for all times, places, and all people.

One of the virtues of young children is that they are always asking questions like these. Even better, because they have not developed shame, defenses or ideas about what is cool or uncool about certain questions they often ask some real good ones as demonstrated in a crude and simple way in this television show: The Courtship Of Eddie's Father, starring the late, great Bill Bixby.


When I was in college, specifically at the New England Conservatory Of Music, people often teased me about my insatiable curiosity; moreover they seemed amused that I would ask childlike or even childish questions. As a response I wrote a jazz composition titled Why Is That? to capture my inquisitive nature, in an act of self deprecatory defense. It is at once the simplest two part writing piece possible, quarter and half notes, but I snuck in some harmonic complexity nevertheless.

All of which is to say that one is never too old to ask questions, good or bad, and that curiosity should never die with the dullness and even jadedness of age. And that the kind of Aporetic questioning I defend might just very well be another form of what is normally called Love.

An Immodest Defense of Emerson

It was with the greatest shock, incredulity and finally anger that I opened up a copy of the New York Times Magazine of December 4 in this final month of a surely awful year of 2011 to come upon an article attacking my hero Ralph Waldo Emerson. Reading this piece by one Benjamin Anastas made me realize why I am such an irregular reader of the New York Times and, while I will not go so far as Gore Vidal who infamously called it a "bad paper" I have to conclude that it has, much like The New Yorker under Tina Brown's reign, fallen prey to the worst twin vices of a sophomoric and cheap populism and utilitarianism or instrumentalism.

Would it were so that the article is a bit of a popish prank and not to be taken as a definitive piece on Emerson, yet I can't help but feel that it is very much a piece of its time and raises the issue of how and why context and relevance should be dislodged from center stage in favor of values that are at least a bit more capacious, to say nothing of transcendental.

I don't have space enough and time to do justice to Emerson. Alas, I don't want to do a close reading of Emerson's "Self-Reliance" in order that I may totally refute this - I don't know what to call it - cultural criticism.

Emerson, whatever else he may be, is to American arts and letters something like our Shakespeare. I don't remember the last time a piece with a punk or Rock irreverence indulged in a take-down of the Bard, except perhaps to wrangle over whether in fact he or the Earl Of Oxford was the biographical and historical author of the plays. Indeed, pop culture and media is all too happy to praise Shakespeare, but usually for the worst of reasons, as in a dissection of the cleverness of the narrative strategies.

The first problem then is a basic lack of respect for Emerson. Anastas does not mince words. The subtitle refers to the influence of Emerson's "Self-Reliance" as a "foul reign", Emerson's essay is called pap, and worst of all it is compared with the worst of our popular motivationalists and hucksters, but, incredibly, to the disfavor of Emerson: "Is there anything worth salvaging among the spiritual ramblings, obscure metaphysics and aphorisms so pandering that Joel Osteen might think twice about delivering them?"

Joel Osteen? Joel Osteen is a sort of fundamentalist redneck who crossed over to mainstream non-fiction, is he not?

This is the first misreading: that Emerson is part of a so-called American single line and that he is a forerunner of Rick Warren, Dr. Phil, Wayne Dyer, and Werner Erhard to pick some of the most representative examples. How do I know that Emerson is not of their party?

For one thing Emerson is not engaged in a propositional and representational project.

And the language of Anastas reveals that at heart Anastas is every bit the stereotypical socialist and materialist. He hates metaphysics and is impatient that any mention of selfhood that treats the self with any importance at all (although, Anastas misreads Emerson so deeply that Anastas takes Emerson to be one who believes in something like a real and unified self far more than Emerson, the latter ever the profoundest of mystics, ever does). I get the feeling that spiritual is a code word here for unscientific and for any kind of snake oil. As for politics, Emerson never ascribes to the self or subscribes to a view of the self that has anything remotely in common with American conservatism or, in the pathetic case of Ayn Rand, Russian/American paleo-Conservatism. Nowhere in his writings does Emerson tell us to forget the poor or to justify poverty (His essay 'Compensation' is usually dragged into the proceedings as Exhibit A for the Marxist attack upon Emerson, but "Compensation" is trying to raise all sorts of problems about the problem of free will and evil, not to justify the status quo). Emerson (like, say, Chatal Ackerman in film) is interested in questions of consciousness more than he is in practical politics. (Anymore than Ackerman is a straightforward Feminist.)

In short, though Emerson can be labeled, if you must, as a kind of individualist he is no stoic and he is no right-winger. He is not even, as we shall see, really an individualist, because he feels that selfhood contains and is always already constituted by the surrounding environment, the whole human race, and perhaps even more.

As for the question of science versus spirituality, for all of his scientific and socialistic pretensions, Anastas never makes any genuine or coherent case against Emerson. This leads to the second problem, that of misreading or misinterpretation, above all the question of style.

Emerson, unlike Anastas, really believes in style. Anastas is quite a stylist himself, indeed uses it quite well, but the style chosen is the post-Pauline Kael style of flash, crackle and pop as in when Kael was asked why she defended so many entertaining Hollywood movies replied "what is wrong with entertainment? Do this people think it should be punishment?" But Anastas does NOT think that style is the measure of a thing. For Anastas verification is the only measure.

Anstas' first error is to hew to a very old view of language or style whereby words (or, in cinema, editing, lighting, mise en scene etc.) are a means to transparency, and the function of sentences is to get at the essence of things. But there is a problem here because Emerson is really a Modernist avant la lettre, and Emerson simply does not have an Aristotelian view of language. In practical terms Emerson is closer to a Proust, even a Beckett or Chantal Ackerman. That is, the way Emerson is usually read - as a kind of visionary or sage - is precisely to fall into the very attitude towards the world Emerson most wants us to be rid of. In this sense Emerson is quite American in his distrust of official titles and claims to innate gifts. (And his critics are often Continental)

Yet Emerson comes to us in disguise, as a Yankee populist preacher. This should remind us that the most extraordinary things (Emerson's oeuvre) are always misread as more ordinary than they really are, (as in the reception of Robert Frost's poetry, for example, or Duke Ellington's music, the latter initially and falsely consigned to the genre of mere dance music) and that extraordinary things arrive dressed in modest or civilian raiment. (Though this last comment on my part will strike those with a Continental cast of mind as hopelessly American in more than one sense of that unstable and slippery designation).

Let us look at the opening of Self-Reliance, at the offending words that Anastas feels gave rise to a host of sins of our post-1968 world: relativism, New Age excess, selfishness and worse:

I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which were original and not conventional. The soul always hears an admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may. The sentiment they instil is of more value than any thought they may contain. To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost,—— and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton is, that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men but what they thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried. Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact, makes much impression on him, and another none. This sculpture in the memory is not without preestablished harmony. The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray. We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents. It may be safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be faithfully imparted, but God will not have his work made manifest by cowards. A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise, shall give him no peace. It is a deliverance which does not deliver. In the attempt his genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no invention, no hope.

Notice throughout his tone: it is magesterial and measured. It is also suffused with greatest passion. He creates a rhythm through a certain syntax. We are. A man is. God will not. It is delivered. The eye was placed. This is Biblical and spiritual language to be sure. If Anastas is of the party of science he will not be pleased by this kind of tone. Yet the tone is, in language, something like that of John Coltrane in A Love Supreme, in music. It is curiously at once completely secular and free of any partisan creed or catechism and yet built from the syntax and tropes of scriptural and sacred writing and oration. This combination of the two is part of Emerson's genius.

Emerson is positing here that there is such a thing as genius or greatness, that there is something special about a John Milton, that there is value to artistic originality. He is also saying, along with Kant, that we should dare to use our own reason, and not rest or lean on the opinions of others. The alternative to this picture of life is not good community, cooperation or socialism. The alternative to Emerson's "ideal", if it can be called that (because for him it always already exists and is not dependent upon futural schemes or dates), is actually something like everyday tyranny at best or totalitarianism at worst. This is Emerson as a champion of Liberty, broadly understood, and as a small d democrat.

The whole essay starts off with a quite explicit theory of not only what art is but how to know great art when one encounters it. Nowhere in all of the oration of a Werner Erhard or a Dr. Phil is anything like a theory of art ever put forth.

Anastas' error goes in both directions. We cannot hold Emerson responsible for the errors or outrages of self help hucksters or for eroding our sense of deference towards meritocratic authority anymore than we can hold Karl Marx responsible for a Joseph Stalin or the Eastern Bloc histories. We also cannot merely read Emerson in a way that is only relevant to our present day concerns.

"I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which were original and not conventional. The soul always hears an admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may. The sentiment they instil is of more value than any thought they may contain".

He is also saying the sentiment trumps content. This is Emerson being most modernistic. Like Susan Sontag, it's style all the way down for him.

Here is Emerson rejecting anything like selfishness:

"Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not. The same particle does not rise from the valley to the ridge. Its unity is only phenomenal. The persons who make up a nation to-day, next year die, and their experience with them".

So much for great and heroic visions of selfhood. The unity is "only phenomenal". Only. Anastas has not read closely enough.

And style is of the essence here because, unlike the motivational preachers, religious or secular, of our time, Emerson rarely communicates in the syntax of reductive, declarative sentences. Yet he tricks us: he always begins with declarations. But it is still a trick nonetheless. This is his most accessible work, yet one comes upon sentences with twists and turns like the following. The most important strategy Emerson uses is to make one or two explicit declarations but then, in an hypnotic fashion, to undo them as much as defend them:

"I suppose no man can violate his nature. All the sallies of his will are rounded in by the law of his being, as the inequalities of Andes and Himmaleh are insignificant in the curve of the sphere. Nor does it matter how you gauge and try him. A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza; — read it forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing. In this pleasing, contrite wood-life which God allows me, let me record day by day my honest thought without prospect or retrospect, and, I cannot doubt, it will be found symmetrical, though I mean it not, and see it not. My book should smell of pines and resound with the hum of insects. The swallow over my window should interweave that thread or straw he carries in his bill into my web also. We pass for what we are. Character teaches above our wills. Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment".

At a first reading it appears that he is saying; this is what a character is; this is how a self works. We end up according to who we are. And so on.

But notice he says "I suppose that no man". Why the suppose? And what are we to make of "contrite wood-life which God allows"? Why is it pleasing? Should it be pleasing? Especially after an apparent celebration of will? Notice how excessive this seems when compared to the previous declaration. Notice too how he piles example upon example: poetic metaphors from Nature and Myth for example, cultural allusion, and then insists that it "spells the same thing". Had Emerson really wanted to give an instruction or sermon why does he insist upon this hypnotic accumulation of density, of stuff, especially in the context of telling us to ignore past traditions or rote book learning? Why does he interrupt with references to swallows and Alexandrian stanzas? It seems to me that these accumulations provide a proper "key" to understanding Emerson, surely more than any clear message.

He seems to say that we should not analyze, yet this whole essay is a kind of analysis or diagnosis of conformity and an offer of a solution to the problem of that conformity. Yet there is nothing more self possessed and powerful than his tone throughout. He wants some kind of conformity between he and the reader. Then again he wants us to argue too. He wants us to assent to the greatness of a Milton yet wants us to not assent to what "doesn't work for me" in contemporary parlance. But Emerson never tells us what to do with the culturally or emotionally stunted person who can't see Milton's value or even read Milton (or worse, sees in Milton only a crude sociological value, as in, "how did a Christian like Milton think of his faith in that particular time period?)

Even most contradictory, he says that what is important is what is "new in Nature", yet remarks elsewhere that there is nothing truly new and that society neither exactly progresses or declines.

He even suggest both that we cannot help what we do, and yet that our will is free and determines our lot in life, as in "we get what or who we are." A misinformed reader will likely say in response, "which is it Waldo"? A Joel Osteen would never equivocate so because he literally has the arrogance to assume he can save our souls.

It is most telling that Anastas attacks the work as rambling. Emerson, like jazz, is rambling. He does not get to the point. Like much of American art, it is episodic rather than classical.

When Anastas calls it rambling he is confronting a particular style.

Emerson will have none of this clarity. Because he is interested in the "zigzag of a hundred tacks". He is not interested in a seamless and straight line.

If we are reading Emerson properly we should be a bit confused, in truth. How are we to be true to ourselves and yet live in harmony with others? First I am told to idealize the child and in another place I am told to criticize the rote learning of so many children. I am told that no man can violate his nature but also told that many are conformist and thus in violation of their nature, or else it is in their true nature to conform. Since we are being told not to conform, then what do we do with and about the conformist?

But these zigzags are a means chiefly of creating sentiment, as opposed to thought. If you read Emerson for content alone you might consider him undistinguished, even dated. But if you fall into the hypnosis of his style, the accumulation of all of his many exhortations, something will happen to you, inside of your consciousness, something not unlike the effect of certain experimental movies or certain immersive improvisational music. Emerson is not interested in proofs so he is destined to disappoint or disturb a certain kind of skeptic like Anastas.

A real inheritor of Emerson is the saxophonist John Coltrane. Another is filmmaker Fred Wiseman. Both could be considered spiritual ramblers of the highest order. The comparison will give a sense of what I take to be valuable in Emerson.

It is not accidental that in a dispirited age such as ours, when so many problems seem to admit of communal solutions, especially in a broken economy with so much suffering, that a poet of sentiment like Emerson would come to be regarded with suspicion. But that is not his problem but ours. There is a crucial role for sentiment in our life, not the sentiment of communal emotion and agreement, not the sentiment that does away with intellect altogether, but rather the venerable attempt to think without thoughts that underscores so much that has been exciting about the Modernist project. Emerson wants us to put different uses for our intellect, not to save the world or understand it, but rather, I think to savor it, to experience it, which though it surely involves the brain is an altogether different matter than conceptual cognition.

But the question of just what this difference is - between ordinary cognition and experience - and where such difference lies, is a question with which I will end this discussion.

Gratitude, Civility, and the Nature of Emotion

For the purposes of this particular post I have little or no interest in the origins of this Thanksgiving that we Americans celebrate once a year in the Fall. I do not wish to celebrate our ancestors, nor to curse the evils of how Native people were treated; still less do I care to lecture on how best we ought to "celebrate" this peculiar holiday. Rather, I want to make some cumulative notes on philosophic matters concerning gratitude more generally.

As can be observed in the brief comedic exchange from Barney Miller, the best humor or comedy is generated by a quite complex web of mutual incomprehension between two people, the absurdity that ensues when desired or accepted outcomes are thwarted by such clashes, mistakes in identity, or in this case, world outlooks and temperament etc. This is the kind of material that was eventually expanded to the highest art form in Larry David's magesterial Curb Your Enthusiasm series.

Yet this most humorous of exchanges is a rich starting point for the most serious of discussions of gratitude. I take Inspector Luger to be a figure for the rules of civility and traditional sentiment, a vision of moderation and social consensus. "Don't worry me and spoil everybody's fun with your metaphysical and philosophic speculations, do the right and civil thing and simply wish others Happy Thanksgiving and in return accept a mutual meeting." On the other hand, Inspector Luger is being the unthinking philistine and detective Dietrich is being the sincere thinker, approaching Socratic territory, and if you are at all curious about the world, would seem an attractive conversation starter (presumably at another more appropriate time).

There is a real question here. Do emotions have to have or always implicitly have objects? And does it matter?

It seems to me that it might matter less than we think. Whether we like it or not, or even whether we conceptualize it or not, the universe is shot through with value and meaning (to quote Akeel Bilgrami on Gandhi). That is, whether or not we believe in or feel a cause of our state, we are, all of us, in one kind of state or another, experiencing the world in such a way that something, however great or small, is at stake.

As you are reading this post I am sure that you, dear reader, are in some kind of state. You might be annoyed while reading this. You might be anxious about family or cooking the turkey. You might be elated, or even distracted, you might be sleepy or well rested, but the important point is that you are experiencing at this moment something of value because you are in a certain kind of relation with the world. Though we understandably take this for granted, it is nevertheless one of the precious and even scandalous things about our humanity.

Looked at in this way, I can imagine being in a certain kind of state that may just be powerful enough so that we may experience thankfulness as an immediate instinct. The positive state may be reason enough for our thankfulness, placing the issue of a clear cause or object of our emotion into a secondary status, (notwithstanding the issue of the believer for whom the Creator is always already omnipresent). This is a thankfulness that a serious nonbeliever can and should, as it were, get behind.

The trouble is, such a state can only be experienced after the foundation of certain preconditions. In this case we are brought back to my Thanksgiving exchange and example. Inspector Luger says that the saying of "Happy Thanksgiving" is connected to "good breeding" as if you'd be an awful barbarian to call it into question or not say it.

In a balkanized world such as ours, full of manifold, competing and sometimes ruthlessly oppositional identities on display, like so many varieties of organic cookies at the local health supermarket, it gets difficult to negotiate competing values.

It is not so much the case that we are two Americas, one conservative and one liberal, but rather the case that we are potentially hundreds or thousands of Americas, (and most importantly, not in the sense of individual identity or liberty but rather group identity) all speaking in languages walled off from all the others by "imaginative mutual incomprehension" in Thomas Nagel's brilliant formulation.

There is a lot to say here about civility but I shall leave the last words to Robert Pippin:

"If civility can be understood as an enactment in daily life of mutuality or the actual establishing of the norm of rational agency, as an active attempt to recognize and help to promote each other as free beings, then, as suggested, such a dependence and commonality must already exist and be experienced in daily life as existing."

In such a climate it seems that for simpler pleasures, if indeed one is lucky enough to be able to experience such pleasures, gratitude is always appropriate. You may be gracious towards a person in particular, it may towards an entity. But the state itself could be at once rational and Romantic or at least be meaningful enough to please both Romantics and Rationalists among us. It is connected to Pippin's notion of civility as "not a duty, a responsibility, or an entitlement but already a manifestation of something else not subject to moral will or legal coercion."

It is useful to meditate upon what one has left once one has eliminated all of these false ways of describing civility. Such meditation would go a long way towards thinking about our emotions as an art, as a reason, or an irreducible virtue, not amenable to quantification or fiat. The first priority, of course would be to realize how "shot through with meaning" each of us stands, maybe even by the simple fact our existence, with no further need of justification or explanation.

A Personal Declaration of Independence

On this long weekend of the July fourth, I hereby declare my own independence. I hold to an independence from all that is systematized in our daily lives, to all narrowing of possibility and stunting of imagination.

Through an act of will, however unfree that will may in actuality be, I wish an independence from any creed, doctrine or guru that would have us be in any way finished, finalized, understood and explained. I recognize that such explanation explains away.

There are many facts to be said about us, and our structures and institutions might hold necessity, in much the same way as a flower needs soil in which to grow and flourish. But this necessity does not give any of us the justification to forget our inner conscience or real nature. At every moment of life we must take an inventory of these structures and ask if they are good for us, or just so much convenience and habit. This sense of being that resides in all of us, from the most abject to the most elevated among us, always holds great promises and powers. One has only to listen, but what if it were only that easy! What will be heard is different for every human being yet nevertheless is the only way to know how or where to turn, and most importantly, why. Any compromise of the truths to be found in that place of being ends in some kind of ruination. If we coast along in ignorance of the truth in question we may be happy half of the time, and we may even find a degree of comfort, but we will be only half alive to this world.

And we must ask ourselves if an alleged necessity is right by our nature. It will be very different and vary from one to the next. A scholar who tends to their garden knows it is not right for their constitution to be in an after hours club in town. But someone whose heart is in the bustle of that club and is invigorated and fortified by the electricity of the human connections to be found there does not belong on the farm or even in the study holding the world’s greatest wisdom. What would be noisome and empty to the scholar, is, for the partygoer, a living human comedy with vibrancy, with all of its glories and all of its flaws. Somehow, by each following their nature, in the apparent chaos that ensues, some measure of harmony will be achieved.

I remember some time back in the early nineties when I was discussing with an anarchist friend the dissolution of the old Soviet empire and its replacement by independent and sovereign states based on tradition and group identities with shared history. Although nobody in their right mind would have been sorry to see that awful empire fall I was suspicious and confused about the prospect of all of these new nations and histories to take into account. It seemed like a great deal of trouble to me. Moreover I wasn’t sure independence wouldn’t form new tensions and excessive tribal pride. My anarchist friend was only happy about the turn of events. As he succinctly put it: “I think everybody should get out of everything.”

Everybody should get out of everything. John was surely unto something. It is not merely that as a nation we are entangled in a barbaric war as wasteful of spirit and body as much as purse. It is not only that each of us, as a result of having made a bargain for temporary security, is mired in a complex interdependent system whose success threatens our very survival.

The problem lies rather in the province of ontology. As never before in human history, with the likely exception of the medieval period in the West, we are constantly told, by way of mass communications of all kinds, who we are, what we are, and what we are meant to do about it.

We are told of how every gesture we make and every though we think is incredibly important, of what evolutionary purpose all of our vanity has served. The lowest habit of the most abject, pitiful creature and the highest reach of the most elevated Samaritan are flattened onto the same plane and analyzed and explained to us in the most banal of terms: perhaps as positive and negative sides of a single coin.

One time, not so very long ago, we were told who we were on the recommendation of arcane, incongruous, and improbable texts believed to be penned by a god. Now we are told who we are in the form of brute facts, with which nobody dares to argue on risk of being though delusional or worse. That what we are told now is demonstrable or true is scarcely an improvement. The net effect serves only to limit human possibility, all the more so, since today’s map of the human has that blunt force of fact in its favor. Never before have we been so systematized and. It is little wonder, then, that leading research neuroscientists seriously consider the possibility that robots or machines that resemble us in every way from the outside would ipso facto be indistinguishable from us on the inside, since the private experience inside of our skulls that each of us lives all of our lifelong days is thought to be unreliable at best or literally an illusion at worst.

Doubtless, we can all appreciate the pleasures of certain knowledge. Much like that which can be gleamed from a PBS science special or the daily act of reading the morning paper, there are things about us which can be understood and quantified. There is more to us than that, however. That this something more, has been the cause of much religious nonsense and fanaticism is most unfortunate, as it is no cause for denying the obvious.

But that sense of our own existence - call it consciousness if you will - is the one thing of whose existence we can be sure. Ironically, the very thing thought in certain respectable quarters to be utterly unreal - because they are out of reach of the third person, objective view - turns out to be all that, in the end, we have. Descartes had a real sense of this insight in his “I think; therefore, I am” quote. One might reverse this formulation. At first we are. There is being. There is something prior to thought, whether that thought be discursive or transcendental in nature. That something has no proper name, brooks no easy explanation and is slippery when one attempts to grasp it. Yet each of us knows it and knows further that “it” is the only thing to which we can turn to remedy any problem. It is intensely personal and unique yet has universal import. In my more elegiac moments I might call it love. Fear has no place here; indeed, it is stronger than any clumsy caution we might feel to be necessary. That is why we can escape any systems laid out for us. We can surprise ourselves and others. We are but works in progress and it is work never done.

Year's End: A New Year Plea For the "Foxy"

In keeping with my general antipathy to year end resolutions and summaries in particular, and closure in general, this post shall be a late one in the new year. But its lateness is not only for reasons of precision and exactitude on my part: it is above all for reasons of alienation from the whole cultural business of such ways of viewing time and destiny. In short, there is nothing worse than a wrap-up. Everything about it is explicitly and implicitly infected, riddled with all sorts of fallacies.

One of these fallacies is a linear temporality that makes us servants to the future and enemies of the present. Another fallacy is a progressivism or historicism that thinks that there is a quantifiable measure of our many losses and improvements into a final verdict of decline, or as we are wont to prefer, ascent.

I remember one particularly obnoxious wrap-up that circulated through the mail from one of my many married acquaintances. The whole things was so glowing with prideful self assertion; it all but nakedly stated how great everyone involved had been over the previous year and how surely they were to be better in the forthcoming year. It read as an advertisement for a chain restaurant rather than a report on a family, though I would argue there is little difference between the two in our current historical moment.

Related to the wrap-up and though less egregious, yet still problematic, is the resolution.

People make resolutions not only because of the perennial cult of self improvement but because of a peculiarly linear temporality. This temporality admits of a straight line of onward and upward Progress, with History falling in line, in increasing maturity, wisdom, even enlightenment.

To clarify where I deeply stand on such matters I must interrupt with what may apparently be a digression but, as we shall see, connects to where I have been heading all along.

One of the most brilliant, most distinguished minds in legal (or indeed any other kind) philosophy, Ronald Dworkin, has just published a book called Justice For Hedgehogs. Now, given the fame of the author, there will doubtless be hundreds of responses to the book. The book itself is magisterial and as such I am only halfway through it, and there is much good in it and much with which I agree. Yet his central claim, and the book's title are most contrary to my disposition, as readers of my blog will undoubtedly see.

You see, dear reader, though Dworkin is a most brilliant mind and his book covers so much -from the question of free will through the role of the state and even aesthetics - he is on the opposite side to me since I am most deeply influenced by the late great Sir Isaiah Berlin.

This explains Dworkin's title. Isaiah Berlin wrote the essay "The Hedgehog and The Fox: An Essay On Tolstoy's Conception of History".

The Greek poet Archilocus said: "The fox knows many little things but the hedgehog knows one big thing".

While Berlin admits Tolstoy was a combination of the two as a thinker, Berlin himself was an advocate for the "foxy" position as he was a passionate defender of pluralism.

The title is incorrect in more than one way since hedgehogs don't need justice; we foxes, however do. Most of the world, like Dworkin, believes the world is one and that there is a right or wrong answer to most questions. They believer such unity is backed up by some sort of grand metaphysics. Ronald Dworkin is more modest and sophisticated than that: but like grand theorists before him, he aims to create a unifying and unified theory where all things go together.

The last highest and most noble attempt to present such a grant theory was John Rawls in A Theory Of Justice. Yet what made Rawls' theory notable was that it made space for subjective difference and diversity. It recognized irresolvable problems; that is why Rawls felt a need for a neutral space from which to govern.

Dworkin, on the other hand, wants more than neutrality; he seems to want to pronounce what the good and the true are at every turn; where any controversy or disagreement is but a cover for genuine error or misunderstanding of the facts, rather than irreducible, insoluble difference. If freedoms are sacrificed for social justice then there was not really freedom to be sacrificed to begin with, but, rather, a too narrow definition of freedom as license. (Which is how I do define freedom). Yet some freedom we must sacrifice if we are to prevent certain suffering. (The suffering caused by other's freedoms).

Dworkin would retort that we have been under assault from moral relativism, and thus, a variant of objective all inclusive theory like his is sorely needed to set the record straight and keep us safe from fashionable relativists.

But the world is as hostage to monism like Dworkin's as it is to relativism; indeed I consider relativism as serious a sin as Dworkin's monism. It has nothing in common with my or Isaiah Berlin's "Objective Pluralism."

Josh Cherniss states three propositions in his Stanford Encyclopedia entry on Isaiah Berlin:

All genuine questions must have a true answer, and one only; all other responses are errors.

There must be a dependable path to discovering the true answers, which is in principle knowable, even if currently unknown.

The true answers, when found, will be compatible with one another, forming a single whole; for one truth cannot be incompatible with another. This, in turn, is based on the assumption that the universe is harmonious and coherent.

Like Berlin, I deny all three of these propositions which is why I am a thoroughgoing pluralist.

A relativist, on the other hand, believes such problems are clashes of merely subjective points of view. At worst, the relativist denies the existence of true or false statements altogether, denies the existence of good and evil, however construed.

I believe such problems as the inability to answer the three propositions in the affirmative to be caused not by relativity but rather, ironically, by objectivity! It is precisely because we can see - most painfully - the truth of the various sides, and yet see the impossibility of fulfilling all sides simultaneously; it is because we can see the inevitable necessity of tragic choices that we pluralists are anything but relativists.

And, above all, because the world is not one in any systematic way, it is perfectly possible for there to be some answers that are clearly right or wrong, as in the science of gravity, Hitler's evil, Bach's grandeur, and so on, and simultaneously other answers that are undecidable, like trying to weigh the relative merits Japanese filmmaker Ozu in comparison with French filmmaker Robert Bresson.

Yet Ronald Dworkin wants to apply his monistic inclinations to a comprehensive legal theory. It is a curious thing to be reading a book in which I agree with so many of his conclusions (about issues of the day in the courts) yet disagree most vociferously with how he arises at our shared conclusions.

But I have said too much about this issue. Please enter this new year in the spirit of the fox. Be flexible. Don't be afraid of being called a dilettante if you happen to have more than one single minded interest. Take each day and each case, one at a time. Think for yourself. Not all situations are identical. No two people are alike. Respect the profound differences around you. Not merely differences backed by group identity and and pride of membership; those as of late have been more acceptable to tolerate. But pricklier and trickier differences: ones that reside in the innermost recesses of an individual human heart.

And that is all I can stand to say in anything like the spirit of a new year.