OOO and landscape architecture

The connection is made HERE.

more Philly, cont.

Also, a Chagall show was up at the annex across the street (the Perelman Building, more precisely).

I’ll head over to watch Tim’s keynote at Temple, but his schedule’s even crazier than mine at the moment. He’s speaking at the New School in New York tomorrow, then flying to Chicago to do the DePaul keynote the next day.

I’m unable to reconstruct where I was spending my time here in December 2002. I was being guided around by someone who knew Philly slightly better than I did, and who was able to take shortcuts through department stores, etc. Only a few things look familiar. And back in the 1990’s I was spending most of my time when here out in the Haverford/Bryn Mawr area.

more Philly

For lunch, I met Morton at THIS BURMESE PLACE where he’d been tipped to go by his conference organizer. Wow. Good tip.

After that, since nothing is more satisfying than shared enthusiasm, I suggested that we go to the Art Museum, which contains one of the favorite paintings of both of us: Henri Rousseau’s “Carnival Evening.” We must have spent 20 minutes talking it over, and found some new things.

But in the end we were just as charmed by:

Paul Klee, “Fish Magic”

if you’re ever under interrogation

Last night I mentioned that the second guy at the airport, the one who really interrogated me, was quite a bit nicer than the tough-talking buzz-cut kid I first dealt with.

What I forgot to mention is how my conversation with the second guy ended. It seemed like it might go on forever, until he asked me what I was going to speak about at Villanova. When I said “metaphysics,” he gave me one of those little speeches that say: “You and your big words! I don’t even know what metaphysics means, and I’m not going to ask.” It was good-natured in tone, not anti-intellectual, but the important point is that my use of the word “metaphysics” ended the interrogation.

And this reminded me of something Bill Martin told us in class one night after his voyage to Peru in the 1990’s. He and a small group of Western Leftists had been arrested at a hotel and taken to a prison to be interrogated by military police. When they came to Bill and asked who “sent” him to Peru, he responded (naturally, not by design) with a long technical speech about Marx. The reaction of the military police was to say: “Shut up! We’ve heard enough from you!”, and they moved on to the next person.

Bill told us half-jokingly at the time that it might be a good lesson to remember for anyone who’s ever interrogated. Last night’s experience reminded me of it. Interrogators don’t want to hear your big words. You can possibly bore your way out of a jam with what sounds to them like pedantry.

vultures descending upon Borders

And I was one of the vultures today, picking up as many 30% discounted books at Borders on Broad Street as I could.

Generally, I targeted durable and high-quality volumes whose cost normally pinches a little bit: Library of America volumes, mostly.

observations on Philly

Philadelphia looks great these days– a far cry from the depressing eyesore of my first visit here in the late 1980’s. I’ve been a number of times since, but not since late 2002, until now.

However, there seem to be some mental health issues here. It’s not too surprising to see homeless people walking the streets at 6 AM making bizarre speeches (as I saw this morning). But there’s been at least one fairly crazy person in every business I’ve entered so far, mostly people saying weird, extended things to themselves in normal conversational voices. Late middle-aged women seem to be especially prone to it here, and many show hard-to-describe physical symptoms as well. I really wonder if there might have been some sort of city-wide mercury poisoning incident at some point, or something like that.

more on why I admire good literary critics, theater critics, historians, wine-tasters, etc.

Here’s Erich Auerbach on Stendhal, doing the sort of thing we rarely do in philosophy and which for obvious reasons is never done in science:

“Beyle-Stendhal was a man of keen intelligence, quick and alive, mentally independent and courageous, but not quite a great figure. His ideas are often forceful and inspired, but they are erratic, arbitrarily advanced, and despite all their show of boldness, lacking in inward certainty and continuity. There is something unsettled about his whole nature: his fluctuations between realistic candor in general and silly mystification in particulars, between cold self-control, rapturous abandonment to sensual pleasures, and insecure and sometimes sentimental vaingloriousness, is not always easy to put up with; his literary style is very impressive and unmistakably original, but it is short-winded, not uniformly successful, and only seldom wholly takes possession of and fixes the subject.”

I especially like “short-winded,” which I would never have thought of myself but hits the bull’s-eye with one of Stendhal’s failings in a way I hadn’t consciously noticed until Auerbach used the word. In any case, this is a good passage of literary criticism, and of course Auerbach is widely respected. (The passage comes from his classic work Mimesis.)

Now, what if someone were to say to Auerbach: “Prove it!” This would be a ridiculous demand, because you don’t really “prove” things in criticism. You try to offer a refined personal judgment, and in so doing you expose yourself to the counter-judgments and possible scorn of readers. When I read Auerbach, though I’m not a professional literary critic, my reaction is something like: “I know a good man when I see one.” (William James writes somewhere that the whole point of education is learning how to “know a good man when you see one,” given that none of us can be specialists on everything.)

Or consider another example. When Auerbach calls Stendhal “short-winded,” imagine someone pounding the table and shouting: “Define your terms!” (This often passes for the philosophical act par excellence.) Auerbach wouldn’t be totally helpless here. He could no doubt clarify at greater length, and using examples, what he means by short-winded. And this might be pedagogically necessary in some cases, but it wouldn’t add too much to the insight. The simple, brief term “short-winded” is as clarifying as a lightning-flash if you’ve read and enjoyed Stendhal recently enough to have him fresh in your mind.

The same with wine-tasters. Daniel Dennett uses this example: “a flamboyant and velvety Pinot, though lacking in stamina.” Assuming the person who describes a wine this way isn’t just a pretentious ass (you’d have to know a bit about them), it’s a perfectly successful wine-tasting result. Reading this description, it’s not that hard to imagine what the wine tastes like. If you read wine-tasters’ judgments over time, you’ll form an estimate of how good they are at their job. Replacing statements like “flamboyant and velvety Pinot” with tables of chemical data isn’t going to do the job. (The point of the current post isn’t to criticize Dennett, which I’ll be doing soon elsewhere; I just borrowed his wine-tasting description because it’s a good example.)

The same with historians. You don’t decide whether or not Gibbon is still a relevant historian of Rome by counting up how many mistakes he makes, or how many times you agree or disagree with what he says, but by spending a number of hours with his voice and coming to see that this is a person of insight and rare literary power.

As I’ve complained a few times recently, we don’t have much of this sort of thing in philosophy, because we’re immediately supposed to decide whether a philosopher is “right” about this or that issue. There’s too much of a focus on the validity or certainty of philosophical arguments, and too little on their ripeness and adequacy (Whitehead makes a similar point). This explains the strange fact that, even though reading difficult philosophers like Hegel or Heidegger is a good workout for your brain, you can feel your intelligence surge even more if you read a literary critic of Auerbach’s caliber or a historian of Gibbon’s rank. They train you to see subtle gradations in lighting, to take note of the several sides of every event, and to use a wonderful economy of language in striking at the nerve center of any literary or political or military figure.

Obviously, this sort of thing wouldn’t work in the natural sciences: describing a particular chemical as “a flamboyant and velvety inert gas, though lacking in stamina” would be a useless and even ridiculous scientific statement. In chemistry one is concerned with fully quantifiable properties, not with some elusive and complicated ambiance surrounding the chemical, as we are with literary works, historical figures, or wines.

But what about philosophy? Is the language of Auerbach or a wine-taster really useless in philosophy? As an experiment, let’s take the Auerbach passage above and enter Schelling in place of Stendhal:

“Schelling was a man of keen intelligence, quick and alive, mentally independent and courageous, but not quite a great figure. His ideas are often forceful and inspired, but they are erratic, arbitrarily advanced, and despite all their show of boldness, lacking in inward certainty and continuity. There is something unsettled about his whole nature: his fluctuations between realistic candor in general and silly mystification in particulars, between cold self-control, rapturous abandonment to sensual pleasures, and insecure and sometimes sentimental vaingloriousness, is not always easy to put up with; his literary style is very impressive and unmistakably original, but it is short-winded, not uniformly successful, and only seldom wholly takes possession of and fixes the subject.”

Whether or not you “agree” with this judgment of Schelling, it’s certainly a plausible and defensible view of him. And even more importantly for our present purposes, the passage just cited does not strike me as unphilosophical. In principle, it might shed some light on Schelling and his unique combination of strengths and weaknesses.

However, my guess is that some philosophers would call this a vague and impressionistic reading of Schelling. What they would mean is that they’d want you to say which of Schelling’s arguments are right and wrong.

And we can do that too, and should. But there’s a lot more going on in a philosophy than its explicitly stated arguments, and here again I would point to Whitehead’s insight that no verbal statement is an adequate expression of a proposition. Much more is implied in any reality than language can ever fully translate. This is why the work of interpretation remains infinite, and why philosophy needs a bit more of the wine-taster’s gift.

Philadelphia A.M.

Killing a few hours before meeting Tim Morton for lunch, as OOO’s double-flank assault on Philadelphia commences with his lecture at Temple tonight.

What a pleasure it is to get up in the morning and walk around an exotic American city– and I don’t mean that with even the least trace of sarcasm. I’m grateful to Egypt for many things, and one of those things is that by becoming the new normalcy for me, Egypt has turned the U.S.A. into an exotic country, allowing me to see it with fresh eyes on my rare trips back.

I’d say it took 5 or so years for that effect to begin.

excitement at Fermilab

It really sounds like they may have found either a fifth force of nature or at least an exciting new particle.

HERE.

“If it is real, it would be the most significant discovery in physics in half a century.”

The Federal

What a sweet piece of design this appears to be. Click HERE.

As you’ll see after clicking the link, I’m interviewed here by Jonas Žakaitis. It may be an arts magazine, but that was possibly the toughest and most technical interview to which I’ve ever been subjected.

If memory serves, it is a joint Belgian/Lithuanian journal. It doesn’t seem to be available online (and why should it be, when the physical version is that beautiful?). The cost is only 5 Euros, though.