Category Archives: Aesthetics

What Is Performance Philosophy?

Posted by on April 19, 2013 12 comments

Last weekend I attended a conference of philosophers, artists, and various people with ideas called “Performance Philosophy: Staging a New Field.” The aim was to mark out an area of concentration that could be distinguished from studies of performance arts, as well as from the focus on the performative within philosophy, but which would link the two and even take seriously the possibility that performance is a kind of philosophy, and philosophy is a kind of performance. As someone who works on the multiplicity of knowledge, and therefore non-discursive forms of knowing and thinking, this interests me, but really my connection to the topic goes further than that.

I’ve always thought the rise of theatre and philosophy around the same era in Ancient Greece was not coincidental – they are two sides of a coin, extroverted and introverted methods of human self-reflection. Life as a self-reflective creature is performative, and like the actor, we might accept a role, seek out a better one, sink our teeth into a part or ‘strut and fret the hour upon the stage’. The theatre mimics while philosophy wonders but both are triggered by and concerned with the duplicitous nature of the human experience, the ability to think one thing and do another (for instance), the separability of the mind.

As technology increases, the overlap is only more pervasive – documentaries, mockumentaries, reality television, and all forms of social media find new shades on the performative-introspective scale, and while the intended topic is obviously not always existential, it is a continuous undercurrent to any observation of life. The aesthetic has seemed like the modern world’s answer when faced with a search for meaning, but life itself as aesthetic brings us back full circle.

The conference included many points of view and approaches, and there was clearly interest from a range of different backgrounds. One plenary speaker warned against fusing philosophy and performance, suggesting that it is only in their distinction that we gain from the discussion.  Others presented as practitioners with philosophical interests – a musician exploring time theory, a dancer interested in the body as a cartographic machine, a map of history – and part of the purpose of the conference was to work out how broad the area is, and whether it is distinct from, or perhaps more a bringing together of, various other fields already undertaken. In any case, it was certainly a place full of ideas and discussion, which is the key component of a good conference, and I look forward to seeing what comes next.

Did Seth MacFarlane Celebrate Rape on Film?

Posted by on March 1, 2013 11 comments

I blundered across a Salon article by Katie McDonough in which she claims that Seth MacFarlane’s now infamous song “We Saw Your Boobs” celebrates rape on film. While the piece is not really philosophical, it did get me thinking about matters of both ethics and aesthetics, especially about humor and ethics.

Long ago when I was a graduate student one of my friends told the following joke:

Q: “How many feminists does it take to screw in a light bulb?”

A: “That’s not funny.”

The point of the joke was, of course, to make a statement about the infamous lack of humor often attributed to feminists. On the one hand, it certainly makes sense that feminists would be serious—after all, they are concerned with such serious and humorless matters as oppression, misogyny, and sexism. It also makes sense that they would regard certain jokes as being far from humorous and, perhaps, even as morally wrong.

On the other hand, there is the view that such seriousness and rejection of humor is a defect of character. That is, it is a flaw to take oneself and one’s causes so seriously that humor is not tolerated. There is also the concern that the assessment of something as not being funny might not be a matter of aesthetic assessment but a moral condemnation.

One reason that my friend’s joke stuck in my mind is because my friend was slowly dying of non-Hodgkin Lymphoma when he told it. As might be imagined, it does not get much more serious than death, yet he was able to tell jokes—even jokes about himself and his oncoming death.

In general terms, the main concern seems to be about the ethics of humor—that is, when is something not funny because of its actual (or alleged) connection to what is morally wrong, serious, or otherwise apparently unsuitable for humor? This, of course, brings me to the matter of MacFarlane.

While I missed MacFarlane’s performance, I did catch clips of it that made the news and saw some of the infamous song.  As might be imagined, I thought of it as the sort of thing one would expect from the Family Guy guy. McDonough, however, sees something sinister lurking behind MacFarlane’s foolishness.

McDonough notes that “four of the films MacFarlane crooned about featured nudity during or immediately following violent depictions of rape and sexual assault, stripped of their context and played for laughs Scarlett Johansson found herself on the list because of a real-life violation: Her nude photos were stolen from her phone and leaked online.”

McDonough then spends the remainder of the article describing, in some detail, the scenes from the four movies. As she claims, these scenes typically involve rapes and the “boobs” shown are often made-up to look battered and beaten.

McDonough quotes Roger Ebert’s review of The Accused to make her view clear: “Verbal sexual harassment, whether crudely in a saloon back room or subtly in an everyday situation, is a form of violence — one that leaves no visible marks but can make its victims feel unable to move freely and casually in society. It is a form of imprisonment.”

In the case of Scarlett Johansson, she did not appear nude in a movie—rather nude photos of her were stolen and leaked. In response to the incident, Johansson said, “I don’t want to be a victim and say, ‘Oh, well’ and just hide my head in shame. Somebody stole something from me… It’s sick. I don’t want people like that to slide.”

As such, McDonough’s seems to be claiming that MacFarlane is celebrating rape on film because he mentions four films in which the nude scenes are connected to rape. She also seems to suggest that MacFarlane’s mentioning of Johansson is also a form of verbal sexual harassment.

I agree with Ebert, but there is the question of whether or not MacFarlane was engaged in immoral behavior of the sort attributed to him. That is, was he celebrating rape on film and engaged in verbal sexual harassment?

On the face of it, he did mention the four films and he did mention Johansson. Presumably he was aware of the content of the films, but elected to mention them anyway. However, there is the question of whether or not mentioning the films is, in fact, celebrating rape on film.

The term “celebrate” would seem to entail a rather strong endorsement and to claim that MacFarlane was celebrating rape on film would seem to require more than the fact that he mentioned films in which rape occurs. While he could be accused of being somewhat insensitive for including the films, it could also be claimed that he included them not because they involved rape but because they involved nudity. After all, he had an entire song about boobs and needed enough material for the song. Presumably, he also wanted to include as many of the actresses as possible and hence needed to use whatever nude scenes were available to sing about.

He does not, of course, actually endorse rape or attacking women in the song—it is, it seems, a foolish song about seeing boobs intended to be the sort of humor that he does and this is a far cry from celebrating rape. After all, if he sung about films showing boobs that happened to include a war, he would hardly be celebrating war.

It could, of course, be claimed that by singing about seeing boobs he is engaged in verbal sexual harassment. This raises the question about what counts as harassment. On the face of it, one general condition for sexual harassment would seem to be that the target regard herself as being sexually harassed (of course, there can be exceptions). In the case of the song, the specific women did not seem to take it as harassment (the reaction shots were apparently pre-filmed).

It could be replied that while the specific women might not have been harassed, it was harassing to anyone who felt harassed by it. However, feeling harassed does not seem to be a sufficient condition—after all, a person could feel harassed by something that is not harassment at all. This is, obviously enough, analogous to something be offensive. While what offends a person can be regarded as offensive (that is, it does offend the person) it is rather another matter to claim that it is offensive (in the sense that it has qualities that should be regarded as offensive). Naturally, it would be a bad idea to take feeling harassed (or offended) as a sufficient condition since any absurd thing could make a specific person feel harassed (or offended).

There is also the matter of intent. While a person could offend or harass without intending to do so, moral culpability generally requires that the person intended to harass or offend. In the case of MacFarlane, he probably intended to offend but did not intend to celebrate rape on film.

As such, I am inclined to believe that MacFarlane was not celebrating rape on film and thus I would not regard his song as morally reprehensible in this regard. There is, of course, the aesthetic question of whether it was funny or not, but this requires developing an account of humor rather than addressing the ethics of the matter. Naturally, I have not resolved the question of whether or not something can be immoral or serious yet still funny.

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The Age of iSolation

Posted by on February 20, 2013 21 comments
Cover of "Kindle Wireless Reading Device,...

Cover via Amazon

After my three hour committee meeting, one of my colleagues, Steve, and I had a conversation that began with Twitter and ended up as a general discussion about the coming age of iSolation (trademarked).

Steve told a story of the eerie silence as he approached his classroom and how what greeted him was not an empty room, but a room full of students all interacting with their smart phones, tablets and other devices. No one spoke or paid the least attention to anyone around him or her. I added my own tale of feeling vaguely disturbed by students walking in groups, yet interacting only with their phones and not each other. Unless, perhaps, they were Tweeting or texting the people with them.

The conversation then turned to the push for online learning and how it might be the case that we will see the last generation of students who get to choose between being taught in person and being taught online. Naturally, the push for online learning is driven mostly by economic concerns: having masses of students enrolled in online only classes that are auto-graded (or graded by low paid graders) would replicate the exploitative or automated model (or both) of factories. This would mean far lower costs and thus far higher profits for those owning the machines of education and the lucky few left to run the process.

We did, however, set aside the economic motivation to consider an important question (at least for educators): would the online model be better than the traditional model in terms of providing quality education?

This sparked a side discussion about digital books and digital music. Steve is Jazz person and is of the school of thought that the analog approach is superior to the digital approach-not just in terms of the music but also in terms of the social aspect. He spoke of how he used to go to music stores and be able to discuss music with others of like interest. The idea of joining a Facebook group to post about Jazz had little appeal to him, perhaps even less than the vision of people downloading digital music in iSolation from each other.

I added in my view of books-namely that while I find the Kindle very appealing because it allows me to carry hundreds of books when I travel, I still value the experience of reading an actual book.

Thinking about this, I realized that my preference was based not in any rejection of digital books (I like my Kindle and love the books I sell for the Kindle). Rather, I value the full aesthetic experience of reading an actual book. There is, I contend, a different aesthetic experience when it comes to a physical book: its design, the weight in one’s hand, the act of turning the pages, and so on all create an experience that has aesthetic value and one that cannot be (as of yet) replicated by a digital book. In support of this claim, I made an analogy between seeing a movie and going to a play based on the same story. While the movie will provide an aesthetic experience, the play will provide a different one in virtue of its nature. Likewise, the same would seem to hold for digital books and actual books.

Being a philosopher, I did note that our concern over the shift to the digital world might simply be a manifestation of the usual lamentations of people as they grow older and things are not as they were when they were kids. I imagined my ancestors of long ago lamenting the kids and their new-fangled writing and how it would wreck everything. Why not, I imagined them saying, just stick with speaking and remembering? As such, I believe it is important to consider that my concerns are fueled not by reason but by feeling.

That said, I believe it is equally important to consider that my concerns might have a foundation-that is, worrying about the age of iSolation is not just a matter of yelling at the damn kids to get off my lawn, but a point of legitimate worry regarding the road we are now following.

In conclusion, buy my damn books.  Then get off my damn lawn. :)

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Joel Marks on aesthetics wars

Posted by on January 28, 2013 21 comments

I’ve been reading Ethics without Morals: In Defense of Amorality by Joel Marks (Routledge 2013). I’ve written a sort of review for Free Inquiry, and expect it to be published a month or two down the track. I also have some (rather different) initial observations over here at The Hellfire Club. In summary:

This book deserves a larger audience than it is likely to find in the rather expensive academic edition published by Routledge. Though Marks is an academic philosopher, there is little or no technical verbiage, and the text should be accessible to general educated readers. I suspect that a very similar book from a trade press, written by an author with more of a profile with the general public, could be a big seller in the mode of the most recent books from Sam Harris, but this one will probably find only a niche audience.

Meanwhile, there’s plenty of scope to discuss small aspects of this rather nice little book. Marks is a (de?)converted moral sceptic. He denies that any “metaphysical morality” exists, while thinking that many people actually do believe in such an elusive thing. This puts him on the path to being an error theorist, believing that huge numbers of moral judgments are ipso facto untrue simply because they contain terms that don’t refer to anything in the real world (“morally wrong”, etc.). For Marks, our judgments of what is right or wrong are ultimately grounded in subjectivity – what we actually care about, find admirable, or distasteful, or whatever – and there is no ultimate truth about what, for example, we should care about. Contrary to what is widely believed or assumed, Marks thinks, morality eventually rests on various subjective responses.

This is all fairly standard stuff from error theorists, moral sceptics, relativists, and the like. But Marks goes a step further and argues the case for moral abolitionism. He’d like us to stop using moral language such as “morally wrong”, or just “wrong”, much as non-religious people have largely abandoned talk of “sin” (and we have abandoned talk of “witches” in the literal sense of women with magical powers, etc.). Not only does all moral language fail to refer to anything in the real world, Marks thinks; he considers it positively harmful. Read Chapter 4, where he sets out his case for this position. Oh, and of course Marks is aware that some language with a subjective element needs to be used if we are to communicate at all. E.g. he has not expunged the word “desirable” from his vocabulary, though he acknowledges that nothing is objectively desirable.

Which leads me to one of the book’s long endnotes. Here, Marks discusses the fact that most of us now accept the subjectivity in judgments about beauty, artistic merit, and the like. So why not give up saying that “Movie X is good”, or “Y style of art is superior to Z style”, or that a specific joke is funny, or that certain people were great composers? I might add such judgments as that certain Hollywood stars are “sexy” or “beautiful” (they might not appear so to an intelligent warthog-like creature from a neighbouring galaxy!).

Marks is pragmatic:

However, were the heated arguments [about these issues]… to become a basis of universal discord, rampant persecution, and armed conflict, then, because so much suffering were caused by our mistaking something subjective for something objective, I might very well want to urge that we eliminate the aesthetic way of speaking that lent itself to this abuse.

Fair enough, I think, although there is a further question as to how we are able to have arguments that are often not heated, but calm and rational, about aesthetic issues such as Marks describes. Is it all like abstruse and vacuous theological talk (as Marks tends to think of moral debate), or is something more rational happening here? I think the latter, although I agree that, strictly speaking, aesthetic claims have an irreducible subjective element. They may depend on a shared subjectivity among the people in the conversation, but they do depend on subjectivity. I suggest that a further exercise for philosophers is to try to unpack how we are able to talk as sensibly and coherently as we do (so it seems to me) about these aesthetic issues, and also about issues relating to such “moral” matters as people’s “good” or “bad” characters.

Violence, Fantasy and Civilization: Django Unchained

Posted by on January 14, 2013 10 comments

The current issue of reducing gun violence in America has cleaved into two basic premises: that there is a problem of violence, and that there is a problem of technology. Both of these are rich areas of discussion, but in this post I’m going to focus on the role of violence in America.

One of the strangest parts of the Sandy Hook massacre was its growing familiarity. Details were new and horrific – reading the names of 20 tiny children brought President Obama close to tears, and many who saw his speech besides – but the lone gunman killing helpless targets en masse, not for specific reasons but rather out of spite, rage, entitlement or power seems to be a cultural pattern and already stories have followed that confirm that. Yet in looking to history it’s hard to think anything has changed about humanity—the opening of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, for instance, famously describes a man being torn apart by horses. The notion that violence could be specific to the modern American landscape seems laughable to anyone who’s dipped into the archives at all.

So can the enormous disparity of gun deaths be attributed directly to which deadly technologies are available to the consumer in the United States? Before going into this question too far, we have to consider why there would be such an interest in those technologies among a population to begin with, and while there are a number of potential arguments, one of them is certainly aesthetic. This returns us to the question of the American relationship to violence. The issue here is that danger, excitement, risk and power are symbolized by weapons, and associated with an ideal of freedom. In other words, violence of a certain kind is associated with the aesthetic of freedom.

Quentin Tarantino got a little upset the other day at being asked whether he thought the violence in his movies was socially destructive. His reaction is understandable given how often he has been asked to explain himself, although it’s too bad he wasn’t willing to have the discussion about Django Unchained in particular, as the movie is an interesting reflection on the American psyche. The line that sums it up is delivered during a tense moment: “He’s just not as used to Americans,” Django says, referring to his German friend’s discomfort at a brutal scene. Given that Tarantino just made a movie that was explicit about German brutality it’s clear this is not a simple claim that America is full of worse people than other parts of the world. But there is something worth thinking about in this quote.

In general, Tarantino’s movies depict a hero within a corrupt world of some kind, and shows the complications of belonging to a moral subculture (accentuated by connecting the characters to the broad popular culture otherwise—like jewel thieves talking about Madonna or hit men discussing burgers). In Django Unchained, the corrupt world is America. Actually, it’s a hybrid of two Americas, the antebellum South and the Wild West—and each of these plays an important role in the larger concept of America.

Both the South and the Wild West have been romanticized in American cultural history. Looked at from the perspective of the powerless, there is very little to find charming about the South, and in Django Unchained Tarantino puts on display torture methods and practices commonly brushed under the carpet in other depictions—things like neck irons, hot boxes, angry dogs and brandings.

The constant, oppressive violence of the South is systemic, and it can be seen as based on the acceptance of the economy that perpetuates it. Human usury is woven into the market and so into the culture, and post-hoc defenses are easily created and believed by those in charge. Slaves have the choice of seeking a relative level of comfort within the system or risking torture and death, and are labeled by their oppressors as naturally incapable of self-determination when they choose the more prudent if less admirable route. The system does not provide a method by which to change the system.

The Wild West, however, is a storybook form of America—the individual cowboy who can bring about justice on his own. The violence that occurs here is understood differently, as it is not the result of an oppressive system, but of an individual taking a stand. Tarantino divides the two types of violence clearly in the way that they’re presented, and there is a gloss of fantasy over the actions of the cowboys. Nonetheless the complications peek through.

There is a scene in Django Unchained when the surviving plantation owners are returning from a funeral, thinking Django is on his way to a punitive fate, and we see them entering in their finery to a home whose walls are literally stained with blood. It’s humorous somehow, and visually evocative, but it is also deeply tragic and metaphorically apt. Even if we root for Django to bring chaos to the lives of hateful masters, the impotence of this devastation is ultimately evident. The violence of the Wild West is optimistic whereas the Southern violence is repressive, and Tarantino’s presentation of a cowboy as a counterpoint to a slave-master is perfectly intuitive. But revenge is not as simple as some (perhaps even the director, at times) imagine it to be: although the violence is cathartic and exciting, it still brings baggage with it, and the emotional weight of causing death and destruction doesn’t result in a clean slate. The Wild West violence may be a positive when compared with the authoritarian, systemic violence it is reacting to, but in a larger sense it is hardly more than a further part of the structure, the other and more risky option initially provided (quietly enforce a corrupted system, or become a corrupted individual in response to it.) The movie is not just a revenge fantasy; it’s an epic tragedy.

Freedom in its deeper sense comes with its own burdens. Sartre addressed this on an individual level through the idea of personal anguish, claiming that once you truly understand what it is to make a choice, you recognize the weight you bear. Victor Frankl put it in broader social terms, and suggested that a “Statue of Responsibility” should be built on America’s West Coast to balance the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast. In Man’s Search for Meaning he wrote “Freedom is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon whose positive aspect is responsibility. In fact, freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibility.”

Technology and Freedom [Freedom, part II]

Posted by on November 28, 2012 2 comments

In my earlier post, I suggested that we could look at freedom from three perspectives, and I will get back to that at the end of this post. But I want to also look at the way that the ideal of freedom has been affected by technological shifts.

The environment of nature has always put limitations on freedom in that it has always required certain behaviors and disallowed others: there have always been “laws” in nature that we do not have the freedom to surpass. The environment demands a certain amount of food, air, water, work and rest, regardless of how those things are achieved. Nonetheless, so long as no person interferes, the natural difficulties which arise are shrugged off as amoral, merely luck and not much to account for. By this understanding, freedom as an ideal is only limited when human laws get in the way, not when disaster, illness, accident or other natural causes do. This classic American vision of freedom at first seems to contain a Rousseauian assumption that a social contract is unnecessary, that life without a social contract consists of individuals who leave one another alone and seek out what they need in relative peace.

However, such a viewpoint is radically at odds with a world of business. In order for industry and technology to grow, for capitalism to achieve its goals, it is vital that networks and groups – companies and corporations – are formed, compete and grow as well. In fact it seems that the 19th century assumption is more Hobbesian in its premise but just draws a different conclusion: life without a social contract is nasty, brutish, short – and totally awesome. The fewer rules prescribed, the more battles must be fought, but this is a benefit rather than a cost, and the “collateral damage” of those lost in the fight is worth the rise of empire.

But all of this becomes more complicated as technology expands. While nature provided limitations that could not be denied, the freedoms of individuals allow for the alteration of nature and new rules are put into play. In other words, the environment of a contemporary person is less limited by natural factors than by the structure of society. Unless born into specific circumstances, a person cannot simply start hiking, foraging, farming or hunting to survive. Instead, to afford food, shelter and transportation it’s necessary to take part in the economy, and this is thanks to the revolutionary changes put into place by businessmen. Thus the freedom to do anything leads, through technology, to particular limitations for the citizen. It is not the forces of government that put those rules into place, but the forces of invention; even Amish communities allow themselves limited use of certain technologies just to be able to survive (once local resources like lumber get used up and trading becomes necessary).

In other words, society takes over for nature as the primary environmental setting in which people live, and the needs and options are determined according to social rules. The very basics – a job and a place to live – come with various strings attached, and many other aspects will seem necessary to the majority as well, things like the right sort of clothing, cable TV, household appliances, a diamond ring, a nice car, or an iPhone. Conveniences and achievable luxuries in life change expectations until it is assumed that everyone ought to be taking advantage of their availability, and they become simply “the norm”. The more such social roles become defined, not just according to gender or family but also generation, musical preferences, political parties, brands or stores, and all manner of interests, the more identity is socially secured, and freedom is harder to reach. (While one may be free to break social norms, it is always easier for those with resources than those without, as social approval is usually needed to get a job, and in any case social acceptance is a constant component of life choices.)

To return to the three aspects of freedom I discussed in part one of this post, we can link back to a classic trichotomy: one could think of these forms of freedom as elements of the true, the good and the beautiful. The first form, freedom as what you are physically able to do, describes what is actually possible and factual—but truth as potential, through the lens of technology, is an active and relative descriptive. What is possible is always becoming, not a final determination. As technology grows, even nails in coffins are looked upon like puzzles that might unlock.

The second, the choice an individual can make, is clearly in keeping with the history of the good, the right, or the legal. This too is entangled with the changing options of a world with new identities and roles. Goodness has always been perspectival in practice given the necessity of conflicting interests, even if certain thinkers have maintained belief in an ultimate form, but here it takes on a Sartrean component—what is good is whatever you are willing to live with. The individual bears the burden of complete freedom to make moral decisions, as even those who claim absolute answers can at best be “one absolute answer among many.”

Finally, the notion of what is most beautiful or appealing to the soul includes freedom in another way. Here it is the feeling of freedom as an emotion being connected to the feeling of beauty. Kant’s theory of beauty speaks of aesthetic judgment, or the mental sensation of recognizing something as beautiful, as a “free play” between imagination and understanding. Since the understanding is the ability to conceptualize or see things as belonging to categories, beauty is the ability to go beyond that and experience the item in a way that breaks free from rules or standards. Although it is merely concerned with a direct experience of the environment, and not the meaning of one’s larger social role or way of life, there is something analogous about beauty and freedom in an anarchic sense.

Altogether, then, the larger idea of freedom seems to combine an awareness of an unknown future, the weight of responsibility, and the sense of excitement of breaking out of routines. Which aspects are people worried about? It is probable that when spoken of in theoretical terms, it is the second one, a moral freedom to determine one’s own values, that is cited most, but when referred to simply as a broad worry, there are aspects of the other two as well—a sense of fear that opportunities just won’t be available or social constrictions will hold us all hostage.

In fact, I think a strong case could be made that it is that third one, the aesthetic of freedom, that drives concerns about losing freedom. And of course, the more determinations are made to assure factual freedoms, the less the aesthetic of freedom has any place. In reality, the aesthetic of freedom includes tragedy, pain, and risk – it includes competition and even violence – but the volatility inherent to this sensory freedom is at odds with the stability and reliability expected from guarantees and laws, even those that protect freedoms. Freedom writ large cannot be simply defended, but has to be understood as a whole variety of different issues and desires that can be taken in turn.

If the post-Industrial age has brought with it new problems of freedom, they are not tied to certain policies but a much more complex series of historical and technological changes that has produced roles not of family members or craftsmen, but of consumers and servers – roles heavily tied into an economy rather than a community.

The Multiplicity of Freedom [Freedom, part I]

Posted by on November 26, 2012 16 comments

There is a claim made by a portion of Americans—especially among those who lost the most recent election—that they defend the ideal of “freedom” and that it is in danger of slipping away, either under the current administration or just in contemporary culture generally. But the idea of freedom is both vague and complex. Although this is an enormous topic, there are a couple points I’d like to make, one regarding the multiple angles of the concept to begin with, and one regarding how history and technology have had an effect. Today, I’ll look at three ways that the concept of freedom may be grasped: as ability, as choice, and as feeling. In my next post, I’ll follow up with what this means in context.

The first version of freedom is the simple capacity to do something. This is originally inhibited only by the laws of nature—I can walk but I can’t fly, and though I am free to be lazy I still must find food if I wish to stay alive. However, as history progresses this aspect of freedom is impacted by technology and society. For instance, my first example is now false in everyday parlance –modern human beings fly all the time. Donna Haraway’s theory of cyborgs exploits this use of freedom: ultimately, what we are able to do is what makes us free, so technology is a beneficient force. For Haraway, women in particular suffer when reduced to that which nature intends—or demands—and not allowed the creativity of the artificial. Once intertwined with technological possibilities, embracing a “cyborg” nature as she calls it, women can actuate a new level of freedom. This goes against tradition and any idea of natural law, of course, in which freedom is met by clear boundaries.

The second concept is the idea of free will or autonomy, which is not the physical possibility of performing a particular action, but the process of choosing intentionally to do so. (This is the kind of freedom that usually gets tied up in theories of determinism, which I am not going to address here). Nonetheless, autonomy is always complicated by secondary pressures and forces. That is, the individual may define this notion of freedom externally by some form of law or moral boundary that is not identical across the population. It is easy to say we should all be free, but harder to agree on whether that freedom includes certain choices—and as it turns out, much of what is considered taking away freedom by one group is seen as a way to save or protect freedom by another. It is an argument of definitions as much as policy: Is it the freedom of the mother or the fetus that should be under consideration when discussing abortion? Is it freedom of speech to be able to demean someone for their belief, or freedom of religion to be able to practice that religion without persecution? The autonomy of multiple parties has to be accounted for, and is commonly in conflict. The most libertarian approach, where existence and action always win over persecution and impediment, runs into trouble when trying to explain why people can’t be watched, used, and generally exploited since it’s the freedom of the big guys to keep expanding their enterprises. Limitations that recognize protecting freedoms to, for instance, pursue happiness and not just maintain one’s existence, complicate definitions and also leave the edges of each person’s liberty rubbing against each other.

The third is a less specific ideal and one that permeates the American psyche. It is the fantasy of a new beginning, of wild horses and open land on an uncharted continent allowing for anything to happen. This notion can change as time passes, and history begins to settle in. America is a young country, but no longer adolescent. When Emerson wondered what the “new American Scholar” would be like, the Civil War had not even taken place yet. He advised members of the childlike country to stick closer to Nature and Action than Books, to explore things anew instead of being weighed down by history, but now Americans are bound to the traditions of our own books, quoting Emerson instead of following his advice. Even so, the feeling of excitement towards free, open space, a sense of boundlessness and lawlessness, is clearly universal, and there are multiple ways that this desire manifests. The question may be how it is related to the more distilled forms of freedom mentioned earlier.

In our most everyday use, we might say freedom is the ability to do as you choose. This definition could be thought to include both capacity and self-rule. One might presume it to be boundless unless directly challenged, but on closer inspection neither component requires there to be an immediate enemy in order to be reduced. Both the potential avenues a person can travel, as well as their own awareness and determination in making active choices, can face severe erosion due to social and environmental factors alone. In other words, a person’s freedom can be limited by the chance experiences they undergo in life, so that they are stuck in a situation where there truly is no other choice, or in terms of our definition, where they have no freedom.

Does such a situation count as a society taking away freedom? I will look into how this multiplicity of freedom can clarify the nature of the concept, as well as discuss the historical arc of technological change, next.

Peanuts & Aesthetic Identity

Posted by on October 22, 2012 7 comments
A Charlie Brown Christmas was the first Peanut...

A Charlie Brown Christmas was the first Peanuts television special. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In a recent essay cartoonist Scott R. Kurtz objected to the creation of new Peanuts content. This essay led me to consider the matter of aesthetic identity and the creation of this essay.

In the specific case of Peanuts, Charles Schulz was rather clear that he was the only one who could draw Peanuts. While there has been, as of this writing, no attempt to create new Peanuts strips, Boom Studios released a Peanuts comic book with new content that was not created by Schulz. There is also a rumor that the folks behind the movie Ice Age will be making a Peanuts movie written by Charles Schulz’s son and grandson.

Obviously, the continuation of characters and settings beyond the death of the original creator is nothing new.  Nor is the transfer of creative control of characters and settings anything new. Characters such as Superman and Batman live on after their creators have died. Star Trek continued after the death of Gene Rodenberry with the Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Enterprise and a new Star Trek movie. Frank Herbert’s Dune universe has spawned numerous books written after his death, including prequels. The same is true of Asimov’s Foundation series.

In general, the legal matters regarding the continuation of characters and settings when they are no longer in control of the original creator can be easily settled. After all, it seems rather well established that such intellectual properties are just that, properties. As such they can be inherited, bought and sold like any other property. So, if a company owns the legal rights to Peanuts, then they can do with Peanuts as they wish within the specifics of their rights. Naturally, there can be nasty legal battles and disputes when it comes to specific properties, but this is not anything special to such intellectual properties.

Since I am not a lawyer but a philosopher, I will not focus on the legal questions. I will, instead, focus on the philosophical matters.

One point of concern is the matter of ethics. To be specific, there is the moral question of whether or not the creations should be continued after the death of the creator. This can, of course, be tied to the legal concerns in many ways. If, for example, the creator agreed to this continuation in a contract or other agreement, then it would seem that the continuation would be morally acceptable. If the creator made it clear that s/he did not want the work continued, then even if someone (say a relative who inherited the property) had the legal right to continue the work, then doing so would seem morally dubious. This would also apply to cases in which characters and settings had entered the public domain. While people would have the legal right to use the characters and settings, there is still the moral question of whether or not they should do so—especially when their efforts degrade the characters and settings. For example, the John Carter movie is based on Burroughs’ works which are now public domain. However, the treatment of these excellent works was so awful that it seems that Disney acted in an immoral way by degrading the characters and settings with an inferior work. While the moral concerns are both interesting and important, I am also concerned with the matter of aesthetic identity.

Philosophers have disputed the matter of identity for quite some time and have focused on specific types of identity, such as personal identity. Fortunately, aesthetic identity can bypass many of the usual metaphysical problems regarding identity since the fictional characters and settings do not have the ontological status of actual people and settings (unless, of course, one believes that fictional worlds are also actual worlds). However, there are still concerns about identity in the context of aesthetics.

In the case of characters, the concern is similar to that of personal identity: when a character is continued by someone other than the original creator, is the character still the same character? To use a specific example, if someone else draws and writes Charlie Brown, is that character still Charlie Brown in terms of his aesthetic identity? Or is it just a character that looks similar and says similar things—a mere imitator? In some cases, it would seem that the continuity of aesthetic identity is possible. After all, it seems reasonable to claim that many comic book characters retain sufficient identity to still be the same characters even though they are drawn and scripted by different people (and played by different actors in movies).  Interestingly, it can be argued that in some cases even the creator of a character fails to preserve the aesthetic identity of a character. What is needed, of course, is a full account of aesthetic identity of characters—a project that goes beyond this short essay.

In the case of settings, the aesthetic identity would also be a matter of concern. For example there is the question of whether or not the Dune universe in the newer prequels is similar enough to Herbert’s Dune universe in terms of its aesthetic qualities. While the identity of a setting would include the obvious factors such as getting the locations, inhabitants, history and such right, there is also the matter of capturing the “look and feel” of the setting. So, while a book might get all the facts about the Foundation universe right, it might fail to capture the aesthetic qualities that make the Foundation universe the Foundation universe. As with the aesthetic identity of characters, the specific conditions of the aesthetic identity of settings would also need to be developed.

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Being in Uncertainty

Posted by on October 21, 2012 23 comments

Like millions of people I watched Felix Baumgartner’s space jump last Sunday. He leapt from a tiny capsule pulled 24 miles into the sky by a helium balloon. He fell to the ground from the edge of space, breaking the sound barrier, and several records, in the process.

I found his achievement moving and compelling. And this surprised me because quite often I find extreme feats of this sort rather sterile, and perhaps a little bullet-headed.  When someone walks across the Antarctic, or climbs Everest without oxygen, it seems to involve a chest-beating determination to assert oneself against nature. The self-assertion makes it seem a small inward-looking response to the largeness and awesomeness of the world. It reminds me of the character in William Golding’s novel Pincher Martin who takes huge pride in surviving against the odds on a tiny rock in the middle of the ocean,  staving his hunger with vile rock-dwelling creatures and sheltering himself by squeezing into a tiny jagged hole. The astonishing twist in that story shows  his pride in that narrow victory to be the very same thing as his failure to see and appreciate something much larger and more beautiful than his deluded and debased survival.

Golding’s novel has a belief in God at its centre. So as an atheist, I read it at arm’s length. I can’t share its central vision.  Some or all of Baumgartner’s jump team are atheists too. That’s the message I took from mission control’s reassurance to Baumgartner that “his guardian angel” was with him. The notion of a guardian angel is so kitsch, so primitive and so not a part of most religious people’s  experience of faith that it seemed to me that these colleagues of Baumgartner were stating their atheism at the same time as they indulged an (entirely understandable) need to supplicate (someone, something) for their friend’s survival.

That these scientists felt drawn to this playful but clumsy invocation of a supernatural entity in which they probably disbelieved gives me a clue about why I found Baumgartner’s jump so moving.

There is an atheist’s plight, I think. Not for all atheists, but for some atheists most of the time, and perhaps even for most atheists some of the time. The plight is this: there is no God, but sometimes invoking the concept of God seems a very compelling way indeed of doing justice to the strangeness, the beauty and the peril of our lives.

An atheist invoking God in response to peril can easily be seen as a momentary weakness, a panicked irrationality, so it is not terribly interesting. More interesting is the way an atheist might feel when contemplating the strange empty  infinity and complexity of the universe and the sheer oddness of being a conscious presence within it. We might not be at all tempted to say that the idea of God needs to be invoked to explain the universe. But the idea that God exists and that we humans are in a state of separation from that God can seem like a very vivid way of experiencing our awe in the face of a not-yet-fully-explained universe and also of capturing  some central philosophical problems. The idea of a God from whom we are separated and whom we strive to rejoin (the idea of a fall followed by redemption) has in the past lent philosophy some of its fundamental structure. Hegel’s self-positing spirit, for example, is a version of God coming to self-knowledge through a process which involves first the generation and then the overcoming of separateness.  And even if we eschew Hegelian ways of thinking,  the idea of a God that we must strive to rejoin feels like a rich metaphor for the traditional philosophical project of characterising reality in a manner which makes it both independent of us and yet within our knowledge. The truth (if it is a truth) of the atheist’s claim that there is no God sometimes seems like poor compensation for the loss of the religious worldview –  because that worldview is a very beautiful and metaphorically fertile orientation to the strange condition of being conscious in the world.

So, just as Baumgartner’s colleagues summoned the idea of a guardian angel to fill the space left by their disbelief in God,  I too look around for metaphors to fill the space left by my own disbelief in God. And Baumgartner’s endeavour at the physical margins of our world, the point where it joins the universe, seemed to fit the bill. Where Pincher Martin, in Golding’s novel, squeezes himself into a small hole on a small rock and feels big, Baumgartner took himself to the edge of the largest possible space to (in his own words) “see how small he was.” It was (corny expressions seem unavoidable here) an encounter with the infinite. The symbolism of falling also has poignancy. It speaks of a chosen passivity, a surrender, very different from the assertive striving  of a Pincher Martin, and very resonant with Christian mythology. Finally the sheer pointlessness of jumping from space seems a rather heroic defiance of the meaninglessness that threatens to engulf us when we look at a vast universe empty of mind: it embraces meaninglessness joyfully and colonises it with purpose.

I don’t want to spend too long teasing out the symbolism of the jump. Instead I want to ask a question. It seems from the above that we (or many of us) have a need for what might be called aids to reflection, aids to the contemplation of certain fundamental features of our presence in the world. If a belief in God is not available to us as a supplier of such aids, we look for it elsewhere. What I want to ask is this: Can a religious person endorse this status of religion as being, not the provider of truth but simply a provider of resources for reflection? If we reject every distinctively religious claim (that there is a god, that there is a soul, or an afterlife, or reincarnation …), if we say that religion offers us no truths of its own but only resources for the contemplation of the truths of science and philosophy, and if we say that religion is not even the only supplier of such resources because art and literature and jumping men are also resources, might it still be possible to be religious? Note that I’m not asking  a question about the value of religion, considered from outside the religious perspective. I’m asking whether the religious perspective itself can survive a certain view of its status. In a review of Alain de Botton’s Religion for Atheists John Gray quotes  Keats to suggest that “the heart of religion isn’t belief, but something more like what Keats described as negative capability: ‘being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’.” But can a religious person really and wholeheartedly subscribe to such a view?

I think that this question translates into (at least) three more specific questions (only very roughly formulated here):

(1) Is it really true that a religious practitioner can give an entirely “non-creedal” account of religion, one that does not claim there to be any distinctively religious truths  and states that religion is simply not about belief? Quakerism, for example,  advises us to “remember that Christianity is not a notion but a way.” But is it, in fact, possible for a religious person consistently to sustain this religious non-cognitivism?

(2) If religion turns its back on the notion of religious beliefs, can it still maintain a distinctive territory for itself, or does it simply become a part of art and literature? If we contemplate God without asserting his existence, and derive very important lessons from the contemplation, what – if anything – makes this different from contemplating, say, Achilles, or Hamlet, or Dorothea Brooke?

(3) A version of religion which denied the existence of God, and of every single other supernatural phenomenon, would be a very profoundly revisionist one. It might be one that almost every single religious practitioner rejected. Is such extreme religious innovation coherent? Or does religion have to be defined in terms of (certain very general) widely shared features of people’s actual religious practice?

Perhaps these questions seem unmotivated: if one rejects religious belief, why struggle to find common ground with religion? That might very well be a good question. But the extremity of the current antipathy between atheism and faith seems to call for an exploration of different, happier and more mutually enriching forms of interaction between them.  So I’d be grateful for any comments that considered the three questions above. If John Gray and Keats are right, and religion is, not about belief but about “being in uncertainty,” are those questions the right ones for the project of making sense of religion so-conceived? How could they be better formulated? What further questions are there for that project? What direction might the answers take?

 

Politics & Alternative Reality Fiction

Posted by on September 7, 2012 11 comments
First issue of Amazing Stories, art by Frank R...

. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Since I am a philosopher, it is hardly surprisingly that I also like science fiction. On specific genre within science fiction is that of alternative reality. In this genre, a fictional world is created that is just like the actual world except for some key differences. In the case of alternative history fiction, the key differences arise due to some change in historical events—thus creating an alternative fictional timeline.

The idea that the world could have been different is not only a matter for science fiction, but is also a matter of considerable interest in philosophy and science. Philosophers have long written about possible worlds and scientists got into the game fairly recently. From a philosophical standpoint, writers who create alternative histories are making use of counterfactuals. That is, they are describing a world that is counter to fact.  For example, an author might explore what happened if the American Civil war ended, counter to fact, with the country permanently divided. As another example, an author might set her story in a world in which the Axis won the Second World War.  A recent example of this sort of counterfactual alternative history is the movie Inglourious Basterds.  This is a rather clever piece of science fiction in which Hitler is assassinated by Jewish soldiers. There are, of course, also more extreme versions that slide towards fantasy, such as the tale in which Lincoln hunts vampires.

In addition to liking science fiction, I also like politics. Interestingly enough, recent American politics seems to involve some interesting exercises in alternative reality fiction and counterfactual history.

While political narratives typically distort reality by including straw men, lies and partial truths, some narratives actually present entire counter factual worlds. In some cases the extent to which the reality of the speech differs from the actual world would seem to qualify the speech as science fiction. After all, it is describing a world somewhat like our own that does not exist, except in the imagination of the creator and those that share the creator’s vision.

In an earlier essay I discussed the extent to which facts have been rejected in favor of what could be regarded as counterfactual views of reality and this matter has been addressed by others. One interesting addition to politicians presenting limited counterfactuals is the creation of entire counterfactual narratives, some of which can be regarded as complete alternative histories and descriptions of alternative realities. For example, the Republican narrative of the Obama administration is that it is some sort of secret-Muslim socialist tyranny that is at once ineffective and a relentless destroyer of jobs and liberty. Paul Ryan’s speech is an excellent example of this sort of narrative. The world he describes is somewhat like our own and a version of Obama is president of that America. However, the world of Ryan’s speech differs from the actual world in many important ways, as presented by Sally Kohn over at Fox. The actor Clint Eastwood also nicely illustrated the counterfactual approach of the narrative by blaming Obama (or rather a chair standing in for Obama) for the invasion of Afghanistan—which happened long before he was president. Romney is, interestingly enough, creating his own counterfactual history regarding his past but also being targeted by the Democrats attempts to craft a narrative in which he is an uncaring oligarch who will take the country back to Bush’s policies. Political people also spin positive narratives, typically creating fictional pasts of an ideal world that never was and also of a wonderful world that never shall be. While I could list examples almost without end, to keep up with the latest truths, lies and distortions from politicians and pundits of all stripes, PolitiFact is an excellent source.

In the case of science fiction, the authors are aware they are creating fiction and, in general, the audience gets that the works are fictional. Of course, there can be some notable exceptions when fans lose the ability to properly distinguish counterfactuals and alternative histories from truth and history. William Gibson presents an innovative fictional example of reality failure in which a photographer assigned to take pictures of surviving 1930s futuristic architecture begins to slide into an alternative reality, the Gernsback Continuum, in which the world of 1930s pulp science fiction became real. This story can now serve as an interesting metaphor for what happens in the alternative realities crafted by the creative minds of political speech writers and political pundits. They are, indeed, engaged in works of creativity: changing facts to counterfactuals and presenting fictional narratives of a world that was not, a world that is not and a world that almost certainly will not be.  As in the “The Gernsback Continuum”, people can become drawn into these alternative realities and live in them, at least in their minds. This creates the fascinating idea of people living in fictional political worlds that are populated by fictional political characters. Naturally, it might be wondered how this would work.

One obvious explanation is that people who do not know better and who are not inclined to engage in even a modest amount of critical thinking (checking the facts, for example) can easily be deceived by such fiction and accept it as reality. These people will, in turn, attempt to convince others of the reality of these fictions and they will also make decisions, such as who to vote for, on the basis of these fictions. As might be imagined, such fiction based decision making is unlikely to result in wise choices. As I have argued in a previous essay, people tend to not be very rational when it comes to political matters. Even when a factual error is clearly shown to be an error, people who accepted the claim because it matches their ideology will tend to be more inclined to believe the claim because (and not in spite) of the correction. This has the effect of making true believers almost immune to corrections in the case of factual errors. While this is clearly a problem for those who are concerned about facts and truth, this supplies those who spin the counterfactual narratives with the perfect audiences: believers who will reject challenges to the narrative in which they dwell and thus are willful participants in their own political continuum, be that the Republican Continuum, the Democrat Continuum or another one. For these people, art does not imitate life nor does life imitate art. Life, at least the political life, is art—albeit science fiction.

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