Bertrand Russell, the urge to touch the absolute.

Real life is, to most men, a long second-best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible; but the world of pure reason knows no compromise, no practical limitations, no barrier to the creative activity embodying in splendid edifices the passionate aspiration after the perfect from which all great work springs. Remote from human passions, remote even from the pitiful facts of nature, the generations have gradually created an ordered cosmos, where pure thought can dwell as in its natural home, and where one, at least, of our nobler impulses can escape from the dreary exile of the actual world.

...Philosophers have commonly held that the laws of logic, which underlie mathematics, are laws of thought, laws regulating the operations of our minds. By this opinion the true dignity of reason is very greatly lowered ; it ceases to be an investigation into the very heart and immutable essence of all things actual and possible, becoming, instead, an inquiry into something more or less human and subject to our limitations. The contemplation of what is non-human, the discovery that our minds are capable of dealing with material not created by them, above all, the realisation that beauty belongs to the outer world as to the inner, are the chief means of overcoming the terrible sense of impotence, of weakness, of exile amid hostile powers, which is too apt to result from acknowledging the ail-but omnipotence of alien forces. To reconcile us, by the exhibition of its awful beauty, to the reign of Fate —which is merely the literary personification of these forces—is the task of tragedy. But mathematics takes us still further from what is human, into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual world, but every possible world, must conform ; and even here it builds a habitation, or rather finds a habitation eternally standing, where our ideals are fully satisfied and our best hopes are not thwarted. It is only when we thoroughly understand the entire independence of ourselves, which belongs to this world that reason finds, that we can adequately realise the profound importance of its beauty.

Russell, "The Study of Mathematics", in Philosophical Essays, most of the above quoted, in reverse order, in a review by Santayana.

"Mathematics seems to have a value for Mr. Russell akin to that of religion. It affords a sanctuary to which to flee from the world, a heaven suffused with a serene radiance and full of a peculiar sweetness and consolation."

I am the last to deny the need of insisting, in ethics, on ethical judgments in all their purity and dogmatic sincerity. Such insistence, if we had heard more of it in our youth, might have saved many of us from chronic entanglements; and there is nothing, next to Plato, which ought to be more recommended to the young philosopher than the teachings of Messrs. Russell and Moore, if he wishes to be a moralist and a logician, and not merely to seem one. Yet this salutary doctrine, though correct, is inadequate. It is a monocular philosophy, seeing outlines clear, but missing the solid bulk and perspective of things. We need binocular vision to quicken the whole mind and yield a full image of reality. Ethics should be controlled by a physics that per- ceives the material ground and the relative status of whatever is moral. Otherwise ethics itself tends to grow narrow, strident, and fanatical; as may be observed in asceticism and puritanism, or, for the matter of that, in Mr. Moore's uncivilized doctrine of retributive punishment, or in Mr. Russell's intolerance of selfishness and patriotism, and in his refusal to entertain any pious reverence for the nature of things. The quality of wisdom, like that of mercy, is not strained. To choose, to love and hate, to have a moral life, is inevitable and legitimate in the part; but it is the function of the part as part, and we must keep it in its place if we wish to view the whole in its true proportions. Even to express justly the aim of our own life we need to retain a constant sympathy with what is animal and fundamental in it, else we shall give a false place, and too loud an emphasis, to our definitions of the ideal. However, it would be much worse not to reach the ideal at all, or to confuse it for want of courage and sincerity in uttering our true mind; and it is in uttering our true mind that Mr. Russell's essays can help us, even if our true mind should not always coincide with his.

You'll never understand hate unless you've felt it. It's best to have felt it and transcended it, but better never to have felt it than never to have transcended it.

Russell on James and Santayana in his esssay on James in A History of Western Philosophy

His warm-heartedness and his delightful humour caused him to be almost universally beloved. The only man I know of who did not feel any affection for him was Santayana, whose doctor's thesis William James had described as "the perfection of rottenness." There was between these two men a temperamental opposition which nothing could have overcome. Santayana also liked religion, but in a very different way. He liked it aesthetically and historically, not as a help towards a moral life; as was natural, he greatly preferred Catholicism to Protestantism. He did not intellectually accept any of the Christian dogmas, but he was content that others should believe them, and himself appreciated what he regarded as the Christian myth. To James, such an attitude could not but appear immoral. He retained from his Puritan ancestry a deep-seated belief that what is of most importance is good conduct, and his democratic feeling made him unable to acquiesce in the notion of one truth for philosophers and another for the vulgar. The temperamental opposition between Protestant and Catholic persists among the unorthodox; Santayana was a Catholic free-thinker, William James a Protestant, however heretical. 

Letters of William James Vol. II

...The great event in my life recently has been the reading of Santayana's book.[Interpretations of Poetry and Religion] Although I absolutely reject the platonism of it, I have literally squealed with delight at the imperturbable perfection with which the position is laid down on page after page; and grunted with delight at such a thickening up of our Harvard atmosphere. If our students now could begin really to understand what Royce means with his voluntaristic-pluralistic monism, what Münsterberg means with his dualistic scientificism and platonism, what Santayana means by his pessimistic platonism (I wonder if he and Mg. have had any close mutually encouraging intercourse in this line?), what I mean by my crass pluralism, what you mean by your ethereal idealism, that these are so many religions, ways of fronting life, and worth fighting for, we should have a genuine philosophic universe at Harvard. The best condition of it would be an open conflict and rivalry of the diverse systems. (Alas! that I should be out of it, just as my chance begins!) The world might ring with the struggle, if we devoted ourselves exclusively to belaboring each other.I now understand Santayana, the man. I never understood him before. But what a perfection of rottenness in a philosophy! I don't think I ever knew the anti-realistic view to be propounded with so impudently superior an air. It is refreshing to see a representative of moribund Latinity rise up and administer such reproof to us barbarians in the hour of our triumph. I imagine Santayana's style to be entirely spontaneous. But it has curious classic echoes. Whole pages of pure Hume in style; others of pure Renan. Nevertheless, how fantastic a philosophy!—as if the "world of values" were independent of existence. It is only as being, that one thing is better than another. The idea of darkness is as good as that of light, as ideas. There is more value in light's being. And the exquisite consolation, when you have ascertained the badness of all fact, in knowing that badness is inferior to goodness, to the end—it only rubs the pessimism in. A man whose egg at breakfast turns out always bad says to himself, "Well, bad and good are not the same, anyhow." That is just the trouble! Moreover, when you come down to the facts, what do your harmonious and integral ideal systems prove to be? in the concrete? Always things burst by the growing content of experience. Dramatic unities; laws of versification; ecclesiastical systems; scholastic doctrines. Bah! Give me Walt Whitman and Browning ten times over, much as the perverse ugliness of the latter at times irritates me, and intensely as I have enjoyed Santayana's attack. The barbarians are in the line of mental growth, and those who do insist that the ideal and the real are dynamically continuous are those by whom the world is to be saved. But I'm nevertheless delighted that the other view, always existing in the world, should at last have found so splendidly impertinent an expression among ourselves. I have meant to write to Santayana; but on second thoughts, and to save myself, I will just ask you to send him this. It saves him from what might be the nuisance of having to reply, and on my part it has the advantage of being more free-spoken and direct. He is certainly an extraordinarily distingué writer. Thank him for existing! 

Santayana, "The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy"

But there is another distinguished man, lately lost to this country, who has given some rude shocks to this tradition  and who, as much as Whitman, may be regarded as representing the genuine, the long silent American mind—I mean William James. He and his brother Henry were as tightly swaddled in the genteel tradition as any infant geniuses could be, for they were born in Cambridge, and in a Swedenborgian household. Yet they burst those bands almost entirely. The ways in which the two brothers freed themselves, however, are interestingly different. Mr. Henry James has done it by adopting the point of view of the outer world, and by turning the genteel American tradition, as he turns everything else, into a subject-matter for analysis. 

"A gentleman never lets politics get in the way of a friendship."
---

All of it included in the rewrite.

J Post: Former deputy director of the CIA says Israel shouldn't make deals with Al Qaeda.

“Don’t make deals with them. Pressure them. Fight them. Turn against them, otherwise they will turn against you.”

Haaretz: One Syrian killed in Druze attack on IDF ambulance carrying wounded rebels.

David Rothkopf, Oren Agonistes

Israel's former ambassador to Washington has ignited a firestorm of controversy over his criticism of Barack Obama. Has he gone too far...or have his critics?

Southern mythologies and Zionist mythologies are collapsing for the same structural reason and also at the same time.

still...
Duncan Black:

You aren't an oppressed, and you didn't have a noble cause in the Civil War. Deal with it.

The poorest states, first to last: Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee, West Virginia, Louisiana, Montana, South Carolina, Kentucky, Alabama, and North Carolina. etc.

The New York Times vs Analytical Marxism, updated.

Economic segregation is a problem in preschool classrooms across the country. Decades of research show that poor children do much better academically in economically mixed classes than they do if they attend school only with other poor children. Research also shows that well-off children are not harmed academically by going to school with poor children.

repeats

For the Rengiers, the decision was clear: Their son would go to public school.
“It was not the question if we could afford it or not,” said Ms. Rengier, whose husband was transferred to the city because of his job as a lawyer and tax consultant. “It was a question of whether it was real life or not.”

 ---

I wrote a book called "If you're an Egalitarian How Come You're so Rich?" And the final chapter discusses fourteen reasons people give for not giving away their money when they're rich but they profess belief in equality, twelve of which are, well, rubbish. I think there are two reasonable answers that a person who doesn't give too much of it away can give and one of them has to do with the burden of depressing yourself below the level of your peer group with whom you're shared a certain way of life; and in particular, depriving your children of things that the children around them favor. 

follow the link for the history. It ends up here, with links to the sources.

The letter and the spirit of the law.

"Lawyers... are the rule of law." Lawyers and comedians.

I forget how many times I've written this: When Leiter was at Austin he held the Joseph D. Jamail Centennial Chair in Law.

"It is no secret that contemporary philosophy is under the spell of the Other"

The entirety of a comment, not mine.

People being what they are, anything is possible. Sordid, secret affairs of the heart, driven partly by ambition and partly by lust, being what they are makes this at least doubly true. Frankly, I wouldn't give 0 credence to either a scenario in which G's allegation of rape is part of an elaborate ass covering narrative on her part. Nor would I give 0 prior credence to the proposition that it was Ludlow who was doing the ass covering. Heck, I wouldn't give 0 prior credence to the thought that it was not G herself who first chose to frame their relationship in terms or rape. Could be, for all the evidence shows, that it was the folks G sought counsel, solace or advice from who first said to her, "Don't you realize that you were raped by him?" Perhaps only then, sometime after the fact, she herself came to see this as rape, not out of some hidden or nefarious motive, necessarily. Who knows? 

The point I keep wanting to make is that sex and power and self-doubt make for extraordinarily fraught situations. And you combine that with the complexities of human psychology and you get, well, a mess. Which is one reason I disagree with those who think that this story is uniquely G's to tell (or, heaven forbid, Ludlow's to tell.) I wouldn't trust either of them as teller of this tale. Their stories would be likely full of self-deception, dishonesty and self-serving confabulation. You'd need a story teller willing to take a completely honest, possibly brutally so, look into the psychology of each party. You'd need a story teller with no interest in choosing sides, One that was willing to state hard truths about each. Only then could you get a story you could begin to trust. Or so it seems to me.

Yes, I'm commenter "anomalous". Leiter rejects everything under my own name now and he's blocked me on twitter.

He's never understood that the hermeneutics of suspicion applies even to those who use the term. The irony is he gets the line from Ricoeur, without understanding his point.

Naturalism undermines individualism, but not republicanism. It undermines philosophers' pretensions but not lawyers' trade.

The pathology of "liberal Zionism" at TPM and Tablet

Today’s terrible news of the shooting in Charleston, South Carolina, reveals that innocent African Americans, yet again, have fallen victim to unprecedented violence and hatred. This time, it took place in a church—a place of prayer, community and worship. I have written and re-written drafts of a call to action, but I have thus far held my tongue. I cannot remain silent any longer.

Atrios

Is It That Hard
I get that conservatives want to downplay the existence of racism,

one, two, three
cut to the chase

Craft is a social activity. Craftsmen take pride in their abilities, defined as something other than acquiring wealth, because their audience respects them for their skills and at their best for their refusal to pander. The integrity of craftsmen relates to the integrity of those who respond to them. Structural integrity is "the state of being whole, the condition of being unified, unimpaired, or sound in construction." But this isn't absolute, since absolute integrity would mean indifference, so the result is a divided consciousness, integral but looking outward. And the relation of craftsmen to their craft and to their audience becomes the model for lawyers' relation to their clients and the bar, and by extension again of individuals to one another: loyal to themselves but responsive to others. Laws are formal in the sense that democracy is formal, and structural integrity becomes a form of moral integrity. The rule of law is the acceptance by individuals of their being bound by social process and through that to each other.

Two in a row, from Leiter. He's pathological. 

Disability rights activists want philosopher Peter Singer to lose his job...

...since, after all, if your views are offensive, you are not entitled to be employed, right? Peter Singer is, by my lights, a pernicious presence in philosophy, but my lights or the lights of disability activists are irrelevant to whether he should be employed. This is what academic freedom means: academics can hold views that you think are appalling, stupid, worthless. Maybe you are right, and maybe you are not. But the lifeblood of the academy is insulation from such outbursts of indignation. 

This latest outburst doesn't really matter, of course--Singer has weathered worse. But it is symptomatic of something dangerous. 

European Court of Human Rights upholds website owner liability for defamatory user-submitted comments

An important decision, striking a small blow for making cyberspace less of a cesspool than it presently is. See esp. page 44 of the opinion. As is so often the case, American law is an outlier here, providing the maximum protection for defamation and hate speech, including especially in cyberspace.

I've gone back to work on the damned thing. It needed it, and not just because the references are becoming dated. Starting from the beginning. Adding things, not starting over.

Introduction

On April 16th, 2009 The New York Times published a review by the critic Roberta Smith of  Picasso: Mosqueteros, at the Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea. The review begins

In the main, Picasso only got better…

When I read those words I laughed. I thought the argument was absurd and still do, but I jumped on reflex. That’s not always a problem; there are limits to the human capacity for recall. Years after an argument we remember the result not the details. But that means that no matter how hard we fought our response now is based on received opinion, even if received from our younger selves, so it’s good occasionally to revisit the past in detail, especially in cases where our relation to the past is the thing under debate.

And for me this begins in childhood, in the 1960s, as the witness to arguments over literature and law, high culture and left-wing politics, not among the students but their teachers and advisors. I grew up between the old left and the new, in a milieu of politics and classical esthetic conservatism, of Henry James and political action, both legal and illegal. My parents risked arrest and the loss of their children to the state while being elitists of the first order. I understood how odd that was in the context of the world at large, but not -and this stays with me- in the context of the intellectual world. It took a long time for me to realize that I understood the contradictions more than my parents did, when all I remember for myself is knowing that contradictions were inevitable and that articulated contradiction is the goal of intellectual as opposed to mechanical life.

Propaganda was disdained in our house as art but not as politics; Eisenstein and Brecht made beautiful hybrids. When I first encountered contemporary intellectual arguments for artistic prescription I thought they were strange. And later reading “Art and Objecthood” Michael Fried’s description of what was then the new theatricality in art seemed to me as brilliant as his argument against it was absurd. I was surprised that someone would make such demands (defending in a effect a “prescriptive grammar”) as late as 1967. But the more I read the more examples I found. Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, from 1975, struck me as similarly perverse. How was it possible to argue for the “destruction of pleasure” -pleasure currently defined and definable by male eyes- without risking the prospect of the pleasure of destruction? And isn’t such pleasure at the heart of capitalism? I was reading in the early 80s. I really had not been paying attention. And this was in art school, where I was told for first time that I couldn’t be a leftist because I worked with my hands. It was years before I saw the full comic absurdity of that claim, directed against any notion of “mastery” but so obviously throwing out the proletarian baby with the bourgeois bathwater. At the time my only reply was that none of us could be leftists because we were artists, and that the mastery thrown away was the mastery of craft, provisional by definition and thus open to debate, to be replaced by ideas that in the minds of those who held them were beyond question. At the center of all this conceptualized art and politics was a moralizing snobbery. Activism, until the AIDS crisis, was minimal, and later among the self-appointed vanguard was in defense of the vanguard itself, as seen more recently, with both vanguardism and AIDS crisis in decline, in The Trouble with Normal, and Against Equality. My parents’ politics by comparison were high bourgeois, almost aristocratic, founded in a mix of noblesse oblige and democratic responsibility, as shown in a decades long engagement with street level issues of law and policy, and which for a few years meant serious risk of arrest. They were far more radical in their beliefs than many who claimed to be, but they were never vanguardist.

You can mourn the death of what you love, or dream of a new object of that love, but you can’t replace the world with a fantasy without the ideal ending up as parody, as kitsch. I’d thought that was a truism, not something worth arguing. Intuitively I’d understood Eliot in his poetry to be writing desperation as art and as a sullen teenager loved Prufrock the same way I’d loved the drawings of George Grosz and the lyrics of Brecht: as decadence against decadence, a moralism acknowledging itself as a symptom of everything it claims to oppose. But when I made a comment to my mother about Eliot and his High Church bourgeois misery, her startled reply, that the poems were “about language,” threw me for a loop. She quoted Eliot on Henry James and I’d like to think she remembered the context and was just responding to what she assumed was a vulgar interest in biography, gossip, or “content” but I can’t be sure. As I said, we re-fight old arguments in shorthand, and sometimes miss the point.

James’s critical genius comes out most tellingly in his mastery over, his baffling escape from, Ideas; a mastery and an escape which are perhaps the last test of a superior intelligence. He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it.... In England, ideas run wild and pasture on the emotions; instead of thinking with our feelings (a very different thing) we corrupt our feelings with ideas; we produce the public, the political, the emotional idea, evading sensation and thought.... Mr. Chesterton’s brain swarms with ideas; I see no evidence that it thinks. James in his novels is like the best French critics in maintaining a point of view, a view-point untouched by the parasite idea. He is the most intelligent man of his generation.

My parents didn’t give their children credit for much, including anything resembling an understanding of what Eliot called “the objective correlative” or the relation of communicative form to ideas or emotion, but I’m not sure still they themselves even when they were younger acted on anything more than a highly tuned sense of reflex.

I’ve never had a problem seeing Eliot’s work both as brilliantly complex craftsmanship and as a desperate defensive mechanism propelled by fears of political, social, and sexual failure: impotence of every sort. To separate one from the other -form from subject- would be like separating sadness from the blues, or militarism from marching bands. But that separation is something Modernism demanded, either in terms of “pure” form, or of subject matter reformulated as “ideas”, “content” and reducible to ideology.

We need now, finally, to separate Modernism from modernity. They are not synonyms. Modernism is an ideology and modernity merely a situation: it’s where we’re at. The dream and lie of Modernism was the fantasy and the nightmare of disenchantment, of the fiction of the scientist or revolutionary vanguard as instrument of reason alone.

Consider a discipline such as aesthetics. The fact that there are works of art is given for aesthetics. It seeks to find out under what conditions this fact exists, but it does not raise the question whether or not the realm of art is perhaps a realm of diabolical grandeur, a realm of this world, and therefore, in its core, hostile to God and, in its innermost and aristocratic spirit, hostile to the brotherhood of man. Hence, aesthetics does not ask whether there should be works of art.

The words of a moralist.

The field of Aesthetics as a product of the Enlightenment is the theory of art in the shadow of production, art as something to be taken or left, optional, superfluous or “parasitic”, as if Weber’s ideas were somehow less German than his hats. Why do military men wear uniforms? They’re the outward manifestation of an ethos. And the record shows that every ethos precedes its clear articulation in language or labor. By the time anything becomes known as an idea, it’s been around for awhile.

Modern art, the art of modernity and nothing more, is at its best (like that of any age) the most honest observation of its time. All the products of modern culture are modernist in this limited sense, but what we call art does so knowingly: aporias and contradictions are a given. Modernism celebrated the range of fantasies that modernity inspired: Marx was a Modern, Marxists were Modernists. But all the fantasies have aged badly, devolving from idealism into reaction and now farce.

Most of this is history, but we’re still in the process of coming to terms with it. Modernism is dead, its defenders aren’t. Roberta Smith’s Picasso is Picasso after Clement Greenberg. Like contemporary defenders of reason, revolution, and enlightenment, she’s not describing the works she’s defending a fantasy of what they’re supposed to mean.

The day man at the desk in my cheap hotel in London was an Iraqi Kurd, 15 year resident in the UK. He said he used to get £17 an hour, and now he gets 8. "It's the immigrants from Eastern Europe. I don't blame them. It's what happens with capital."  

In late May, about 35 technology employees at Disney/ABC Television in New York and Burbank, Calif., received jarring news. Managers told them that they would all be laid off, and that during their final weeks they would have to train immigrants brought in by an outsourcing company to do their jobs.

The training began, but after a few days it was suspended with no explanation. In New York, the immigrants suddenly stopped coming to the offices. Then on June 11, managers summoned the Disney employees with different news: Their layoffs had been canceled.

“We were read a precisely worded statement,” said one of the employees, who was relieved but reluctant to be named because he remains at the company. “We were told our jobs were continuing and we should consider it as if nothing had happened until further notice.”

The layoffs at Walt Disney World and at other companies have added fuel to a debate about temporary visas, including H-1B’s, that outsourcing firms use to bring immigrants, mainly from India, for technology work. The visas are meant for foreigners with specialized skills to fill discrete positions when Americans with those skills are not available. In the applications large companies must file for the visas, they have to confirm that no American workers will be displaced.

6/18 It's getting worse and worse.
---
A simple explanation of why the "seminar" is sinking like a rock.
The titles of four posts, the first and last are in response to Danielle Allen's book.

Reading Our Declaration in Support of Black Radicalism
To help poor people, give them money (Draft excerpt from Economics in Two Lessons)
Justice for Janitors Day
The craft of interpreting the Declaration of Independence

Theorizing at Crooked Timber is rigorous even of the formalism is only that: they're skillful engineers of air castles. When they get down to practical matters they like to keep things simple. They want to help. And why would you want to undermine the good intentions of the best and brightest? The first post above is getting the drubbing it deserves. At the same time the whole thing reminds me how the language of concern at CT is almost always the language of us and them. And although I've used many different examples of where their self-described enlightenment is illusory, the best example, for them as for liberals in general, is the relation of Zionism and Palestine.
---
A political theorist discovers constitutional law. And Henry does too?
Heather Gerkin (Yale and Balkinization)

The craft of interpreting the Declaration of Independence

In Our Declaration, Danielle Allen writes neither as a philosopher’s philosopher, a historian’s historian, nor as a textualist’s textualist. She writes instead a dazzling scholar in the midst of a full-blown academic obsession. And, strangely enough, she writes like a lawyer.

Lawyers, not philosophers

Drift

Gordon S Wood in the NYRB

Allen, who is a professor of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, came to this extraordinary conclusion when she was teaching for a decade at the University of Chicago. But it was not the young bright-eyed undergraduates whom she taught by day who inspired her. Instead, it was the much older, life-tested adults whom she taught by night who created “the single most transformative experience” of her teaching career.

A philosopher changed by experience. I thought of linking to to Healy's wife directly, but roundabout is better

Also relevant to recent discussion of research vs teaching.
Also this: "Not the idea of democracy, or the meaning of democracy, but democracy."

The geek rediscovery of humanism continues apace.
---
more, 6/24

Comment is Free: There is no comparison between transgender people and Rachel Dolezal.
The author's blog is titled, A Self Made Woman. Sexual neoliberalism. [archive.org]

repeats: Justine Tunney, narcissism and self-hatred, fascism; the demand that the world see you as you see yourself; the desperate need for approval.

Eminen did not "choose" his modes and manner, and he doesn't claim to be black. Neither did my brother, and neither did I. The few times in my life I was told that I was black it was meant as a compliment, and it didn't give me the right to call myself black, say I was cool, or give myself "the gold star". Compliments by definition are given by others, and people who give them can take them away. That's the fucking point.

My father never called himself white. He was a Jew who looked like a Jew: a Semite. "Are Jews white or black?" etc.


nothing but repeats. it must be summertime.
[if the video goes: I Wanna Be Black, Lou Reed]
---

The two links: here and here

A friend from London, on Facebook: "eros obscured. I'm loving it."

One shot, with some color work. It reminded me of a kind of technicolor British surrealism, Powell and Pressburger; color maybe a bit dark, and the blue sky still seems off. I didn't notice the relation of the sculpture, the McDonalds ad and the image of RuPaul. Did I see the sex first mostly through its cinematic references? But I caught the fleeting reflection of the London Eye and The Gherkin. Powell would approve.

Back in NY, my own provincial backwater.

Holbein and Irony

In the distance: Kurds protest yesterday, with communists and others, against Erdogan and the AKP, outside the National Gallery. I made my usual comment to a couple of the marchers, that I would have voted for him the first or second time but like Churchill and Moses, after the job is done it's time to go. "Thank you, and goodbye."  I wasn't sure if they were in the mood for a joke but they were. They nodded and laughed. Erdogan changed the game but the change will outlast him.

see also Tunisia and the tragedy of Egypt
http://blog.edenbaumstudio.com/2015/02/necessity-is-mother-of-invention.html
html

Mayfair

Duane Hanson at The Serpentine

http://crookedtimber.org/2015/06/02/the-aims-of-higher-education-problems-of-morality-and-justice/

"I imagine CT readers will be particularly interested in CB’s excellent chapter on philosophical defenses of the humanities,..."

http://blog.edenbaumstudio.com/2015/05/eric-rauchway-real-liberals-fight.html

People are more complex than their ideas. Preferring people come what may, regardless of their ideas and opinions, is anti-intellectual or vulgar, but following their ideas and their contradictions, their tastes, the preferences that defeat intention, the gamut of their and our behavior and our record of behavior, is the only model of intellectualism we have. The rest is formalism and technics, and in pure reason the conflation of one with the other.

Ideas are flat; people are not.

Brighouse, out of the past: "I would say, in fact, that the first amendment tradition has a terribly distorting effect on American public discussions of free speech."

Google it. I don't have the patience. Please, God, give us an end to the intellectualism of priests.

http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2015/05/how-to-handle-terrifying-ideas-a-modest-proposal-for-college-reform

Posted elsewhere. Typed into a mobile.

I came here via an approving link from an academic philisopher (Leiter) who nonetheless has concerns over the "harm" following Waldron, of hate speech. "I know it when I hear it" seems to be the logic. All I can hear is cognitive dissonance. The author here is known for arguing that some people should do us all the favor and not vote; I doubt he was referring to any members of the Bush family, since even George W is the product not only of one of the most prestigious preparatory academies, Andover, (fellow alumnus David Graeber) but also both Yale and[!] Harvard. And now he's writing on a libertarian website. My favorite bit of libertarian wisdom comes from Peter Thiel, who opines:

"I must confess that over the last two decades, I have changed radically on the question of how to achieve these goals. Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible."

Freedom of speech is the inseparable counterpart to freedom of inquiry. Citizens in a democracy have the obligation to be informed in order that they may govern. The freedom of the individual serves the freedom of the people, the self-governing community of equals. Individualism for its own sake is anathema, though with a wry smile. There's no democracy without irony, just ask a lawyer. Better that than the dictatorship of the self-righteous. And really, is there any other kind?

Fucking idiots. Search for Jason Brennan on my page. [here] I made the same obvious points on his posts at the Princeton Press blog.

Related, on the contemporary academic definition of "knowledge" that would include the above, and so much else. The last comment, by commenter T, on D Davies' absurd post. DD: "Bankers have had their day under scrutiny." He ignores the fact they've come away unscathed.
http://crookedtimber.org/2015/05/26/libor-for-the-universities

“Between the 1960s and the early 1980s, higher education began to serve a more diverse population of students, with many students having greater work and family commitments. At the same time, faculty interest in teaching declined as colleges and universities increasingly emphasized their role in producing new knowledge through research and scholarship. We began asking less of our students during this period, and their performance fell to meet our expectations. The good news, such as it is, is that the steep decline arrested itself in the early 1980s.”

https://www.aacu.org/publications-research/periodicals/its-about-time-what-make-reported-declines-how-much-college

Brighouse's indignant defense of Davies is hilarious. Rationalists rationalize.

The confusion of reason and knowledge. Discussion of the number of angels that can fit on the head of a pin is not a discussion of and does not result in knowledge. Political and philosophical formalisms, "I have come to the conclusion that anarchism is true" (Robert Paul Wolff) Jon Elster's claim to be a scientist, Rawlsian liberalism, economic "science" etc. The "research" model of art-making. The poetry of high purpose.

We're all more complex than our ideas. If you don't accept that, you're headed for a fall.

In re John Nash: Gödel-Addington

Mathematics in human terms is moralism, and moralism is failed politics.

The single figure floating, in the foreground as if it were collaged, incompetent, brilliant because he understood it was better to leave it broken then to fall even harder trying to fix it and that somehow it worked. A painting made of things accepted not designed. The godawful faces. And hanging across from early large even more incompetent Cezannes.

http://balkin.blogspot.com/2015/05/maybe-freddie-gray-should-have-made.html

Graber makes my argument, the obvious one: for gays, now, but not then; for Palestinians now, more and more (though I'm not sure he'd want to admit the parallel); for American blacks...?

Cultural change leads.

repeats. the lot of it.

for various reasons.

Corbusier and modernism: the contradictions of a pharaonic organicism; authoritarian technocratic not democratic.

"Plato, we know, looked back with nostalgia at the immobile schemata of Egyptian art."
Gombrich

"A religion is a form of utopia: when it disappears, alternative utopias appear" Emmanuel Todd

"Charlie’s approach to politics contributed to a confusion of the mundane world of political discourse with the sphere of ultimate values."
Goldhammer

The idealism and authoritarianism, or moralizing Puritanism, of Plato and John Rawls.

Not for the first time in France; the revolution [sic] will be carved in stone.

In the great portrait of Innocent X, in Rome, the sitter is looking to his right and up, meeting the painter's gaze and ours. We like Velazquez are standing.This seems to make the Pope uncomfortible, but he holds his tongue.

Velazquez at The Grand Palais.
My original reason for the trip.

"So, too, our Collegiate Gothic, which may be seen in its most resolutely picturesque (and expensive) phase at Yale, is more relentlessly Gothic than Chartres, whose builders didn't even know they were Gothic and missed so many chances for quaint effect."
MacDonald.

Velazquez knew at some level that he was an avatar of bourgeois democracy, and so did his greatest patrons. That's how it fucking works. 

Quibbling with MacDonald, not contradicting him. He'd get the fucking joke.

The Mona Lisa

The Venus de Milo

Brian Leiter (see various) is concerned over the harm of hate speech but opposes trigger warnings.

Broodthaers

Notre-Dame

300 kph, France

http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2011/05/02/tariq-ali/who-told-them-where-he-was/

repeats.

Starting from the question: If Tate Modern was Musée de la danse? This project proposes a transformation of the art museum via the lens of dance. 

For two days only, in collaboration with dancer and choreographer Boris Charmatz, around 90 dancers and choreographers will take over the gallery spaces and the iconic Turbine Hall. 

See key works by Charmatz and his collaborators, get involved in a debate about what a dance museum could be and join in as contemporary dancers turn the Turbine Hall into a dance floor for everyone. 

As Tate Modern becomes Musée de la danse temporarily, the project conjures a vision of how art might be presented and encountered differently in the future museum.

Remembering and relearning Yvonne Rainer's Trio A

It began as one man performing what I recognized as bits of Trio A, but then he stopped and gave a lecture monologue about the piece and its history and how dance is notated, handed down, and not, and that he was trying to remember bits he'd lost. He asked advice from a friend in the audience and from someone else who it became clear later was a plant. After dancing together with the third dancer for a few minutes, consulting back and forth, the first dancer left (his friend had drifted back into the audience) and the one remaining switched the topic from Ranier to Trisha Brown. The first dancer was British and it was unclear what relation he had to Rainer. The third was American and she was a former member or perhaps still working with Trisha Brown's company.

It was all very nicely done.

A former Balanchine dancer.

More confirmation of the obvious: art museums not as art museums but as theaters.

In Europe with a phone. This is the best I'm gonna do for awhile.

You can't understand the complexity of Athenian art, dynamic/naturalistic and hieratic, until you see it, and the best of it. Its closest parallels in Asia don't match it. Nothing in Europe matches in since.

Piero

Holbein, Bellini, Botticelli, Caravaggio, Mantegna, Piero. The National Gallery, London.

Caravaggio

Botticelli

Mantegna

Bellini

Holbein, The Ambassadors

Underground/Overground: The Changing Politics of UK Music-Writing: 1968-85

A two-day conference bringing together writers, editors and readers of the underground and trade music presses of the 1970s with academics and other media commentators, to discuss the emergence and evolution of this counter cultural voice and its wider legacy, good and ill, from the 80s to the present day.

A long time.

"A religion is a form of utopia: when it disappears, alternative utopias appear" Emmanuel Todd

"Charlie’s approach to politics contributed to a confusion of the mundane world of political discourse with the sphere of ultimate values." Arthur Goldhammer

Goldhammer The first paragraphs and last.

There is, of course, no justification for the murder of political cartoonists. Nothing I say should be construed as in any way mitigating the horror of the Jan. 7 attack on the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine by two gunmen affiliated with Al-Qaeda in Yemen. In no way do I excuse the crime or accuse the victims of somehow bringing it on themselves. This should go without saying, but as I have learned from the reactions to what I previously published on this matter, it bears repeating, and even then there are some for whom it will not be enough. I should stipulate at the outset that I believe the editors and cartoonists at the satirical magazine exemplified all the courage with which they are credited by PEN America, whose decision to honor the magazine with its Freedom of Expression Courage Award has sparked controversy and led 145 writers to support a boycott of its annual gala. Charlie’s staffers knew that, by taking the course they did, they might be subject to physical harm.

I do not in any way contest the magazine’s right to blaspheme, offend or denounce. I regard some restrictions on free speech under French law (e.g., lese majesty — a protester was arrested a few years ago for wearing a “Fuck Sarkozy” T-shirt — and prohibiting Holocaust denial and apology for terrorism) as undue limitations on political expression. In this respect, I am more of a free-speech absolutist than many in France today.

The possession of a right does not, however, make it imperative to exercise that right. The confrontation between cartoonists and jihadists began when a Danish editor raised the question whether editorial cartoonists might be exercising self-censorship with respect to Islam. He regarded such self-censorship, if it existed, as a potential threat to free speech rights. I do not deny that such a potential threat might exist, but I question whether it was or is a clear and present danger to free speech rights in the West today. Calling self-restraint self-censorship seems to me to foreclose thoughtful response by applying a pejorative label. When communities with very different sensibilities regarding religion must live together, there is potential virtue to self-restraint, which may connote many things, including respect for the other, a desire to avoid conflict on matters where rational discourse will be difficult to achieve and a commitment to avoid inflaming tensions. Discretion is a social virtue, and frankly speaking one’s mind on all occasions can be a form of misanthropy or aggression, as Molière reminds us. ...

Charlie’s approach to politics contributed to a confusion of the mundane world of political discourse with the sphere of ultimate values. However laudable the magazine’s intentions, I believe that such confusion has proved politically unavailing. I would therefore advocate a change of tactics. Honor the dead, by all means, and defend what is defensible. But there is nothing dishonorable about asking whether other forms of engagement might not offer a greater likelihood of success. 

"All lives matter"

"HANDS OFF OUR WELFARE CHECKS!"

"All lives matter"
"Some of my best friends are Jews"
The problems of Charlie Hebdo in two stock phrases, one new, one old.

Writing and rewriting...
I've been sloppy with Hebdo, not always and not so much here, but often enough.

Max Fisher, on the attack in Texas.

But this was not principally a free speech event; it was an anti-Muslim hate event. Pamela Geller is not principally a free speech advocate; her activism has rather focused on curbing the rights, including the speech rights, of Muslims in the United States. The Garland event's most famous attendee and keynote speaker, the Dutch far-right political leader Geert Wilders, has taken similar positions, for example calling for banning the Koran. 

There is of course zero — zero — justification for the two attackers, who shot a security guard in the ankle (read more on the attackers here) before they were killed. No amount of hate speech justifies a violent retaliation, nor does it explain why these two men turned to violence. 

But before we elevate Geller and the event's attendees to free speech heroes akin to the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo, we should understand what the event was really intended to support: hatred and marginalization of Muslims. 

The cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo are not heroes. The Jyllands-Posten cartoons were anti-Muslim as much as cartoons of the Pope are anti-Catholic, but only a fool sees European Muslims as the equivalent of European Catholics. No Jew would accept claims of the equivalence in Europe of Christians and Jews, and anyone else who would is suspect. Siné admitted being anti-Semitic once and then apologized. The second time he refused. He'd never said he changed his mind.

Pedants argue that double standards shouldn't exist, or absurdly that they don't. After the Holocaust and the founding of Israel European Jews and their descendants live fantasies no other minorities enjoy. They identify as white* and their ethnic nationalism is described by whites and by themselves as liberal.  No one in polite society questions if, "Jewish lives matter", is lacking in universalism. The question now in Europe is whether the double standard extended out of guilt to Jews and assumed by Jews regarding Europeans should cover Muslims and other non-whites as well.

The invention of an oxymoron.

French rationalism and political idiocy.
TPM (my highlighting)

One of the writers for satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo, the target of a deadly attack in January, said that the magazine's cartoons portraying the Prophet Muhammad are different from the contest to draw Muhammed in Texas over the weekend.

Jean-Baptiste Thoret, a Charlie Hebdo film critic, told PBS' Charle Rose that there's "absolutely no comparison possible" between the Charlie Hebdo attack and the shooting outside of the Muhammed cartoon contest held near Dallas by anti-Islam group American Freedom Defense Initiative.

"To be honest, I can’t imagine the kind of comparison you can make between the Charlie Hebdo attack January 7 and this event," Thoret told Rose when asked for his reaction to the Texas attack.

Thoret said the contest in Texas was part of a "very harsh movement against Islamization of the U.S."

He said that at Charlie Hebdo, the writers and cartoonists were "criticizing" religion, "not Muslim people in particular."

We're back to Aquinas and the doctrine of double effect. But it doesn't matter what Thoret thinks; it matters what Muslims think.
---

*See also Jason Stanley, and again in the previous post. In the introduction to his new book he refers as he has in the past to Judaism almost exclusively as a faith. It's as if he's never looked in the mirror.
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Credit where credit is due: Arthur Goldhammer in AJA

Charlie’s approach to politics contributed to a confusion of the mundane world of political discourse with the sphere of ultimate values.

Various and sundry, the old with the new.

Eric Rauchway: Real liberals fight fascism

The New Deal gave Americans not only the material capacity to fight fascism, but faith in American institutions.

see recent, on Wickard etc, and Kolko.
repeats, Rauchway defines liberalism:

If Kramer’s report is accurate, you can see why the Columbia faculty got frustrated. They wanted Bollinger to offer a traditional defense of academic freedom, which goes something like this: Academic freedom predates free speech.

...I can think of three reasons Bollinger might have said this, instead of offering the traditional defense of academic freedom.

(1) He doesn’t know the history and sources of academic freedom. This seems unlikely, though that phrase “surprised and bewildered” is worrying.

(2) He knows the history and sources of academic freedom, but he thinks it uncongenial to assert them in this anti-elitist day and age.

Real liberals don't read Foucault.
Richard Yeselson: Is Cosmopolitan Communitarianism still Possible? Was it ever?
Bertram and Farrell answered years ago
Bertram on Martha Nussbaum's Not For Profit

However, the central idea of the book, that receipt of a certain type of humanities education is necessary for people to acquire the capacities for empathic imagination that (according to MN) are necessary virtues of democratic (and indeed global) citizenship strikes me as (a) obviously false and (b) insulting to those of her fellow citizens who haven’t been the beneficiaries of such courses. Those given a more technical education are described as “useful machines” as early as p.2. There is very little empirical support adduced for any of the causal claims in the essay which tend to rely on more or less a priori arguments from various educational and psychoanalytical thinkers that Nussbaum likes. 

Farrell on Gambetta and Hertog's Engineers of Terror

Their preferred explanation lies in the combination of a particular mindset given to simplification, monistic understandings of the world and desire that existing social arrangements be preserved, with key environmental factors (most importantly, frustrated professional aspirations due to a lack of opportunities). Interestingly, Gambetta and Hertog suggest that the same mindset which drives engineers in the Islamic world to become terrorists, may lead to the marked tendency of US engineers to adhere to strongly conservative political views. This is the kind of topic that lends itself to the worst kind of uninformed pop-journalism academics, but as best as I can tell (I’m a consumer rather than a producer of the statistical literature) Gambetta and Hertog are extremely careful about their analysis, and up front about the limitations of their data.

Rich Puchalsky in comments at Yeselson's post

The fundamental failure of past left analysis is looking to the working class as the progressive or revolutionary force. It clearly isn’t. The reliable left-leaning classes are the professional and creative classes below the 1%: the cosmopolitanism of capitalism together with the inability to loot that makes communitarianism possible.

We're back to Rauchway's elitism. Few of the comments are as blunt as that one; most are almost as offensive. And though Farrell is intrigued by Gambetta he approves of this

The role of science has been to gauge the limits of the species, with new technologies and extra-planetary environments being used as virtual laboratories for an ongoing thought experiment. If the mainstream novel employs the lens of the commonplace career – birth and education, marriage and divorce, ambition and failure – SF has pursued the inquiry by abducting the human animal and placing it in alien environments.

The cognitive dissonance is painful to witness. How can you have a conversation with pathology?
Rauchway again: When You Can’t Avoid Knowing Grandpa Was a Nazi

Teege’s brief narrative also encompasses also the memory kept by Holocaust survivors and their descendants: before Teege found out about her grandfather, she traveled to Tel Aviv, made friends there, and lived there. Her discovery imposes silence between her and her Jewish friends. She doesn’t know what she can say. Her grandfather might have shot their grandparents.

“There is no Nazi gene,” Teege insists, struggling against the idea that she must bear some guilt for her grandfather. But she clearly feels that guilt. We all inhabit the world the bloodthirstiest conquerors made; only some of us grew up with them, personally.

The author of the book is a Zionist. No mention of Palestinians.
Jason Stanley is interviewed about his new book How Propaganda Works

In How Propaganda Works (Princeton University Press, 2015), Jason Stanley develops an original theory of propaganda according to which propaganda is the deployment of an ideal against itself. Along the way, Stanley distinguishes various kinds of propaganda and explores the connections between propaganda, ideology, stereotypes, and group identities. Stanley's central thesis is that propaganda poses an epistemological problem for democracy, as propaganda is the vehicle by which false beliefs are disseminated and opportunities for knowledge are closed.

The book's blurbed by Chomsky, as "a novel and significant contribution that should revitalize political philosophy." Propagandists are introducing foreign substances into our precious bodily fluids.

But journalistic forces and manipulation can also act more subtly. Like the Trojan Horse, they introduce heteronomous agents into autonomous worlds. Supported by external forces, these agents are accorded an authority they cannot get from their peers. These writers for nonwriters or philosophers for nonphilosophers and the like, have television value, a journalistic weight that is not commensurate with their particular weight in their particular world. 

…What I find it difficult to justify is the fact that the extension of the audience [made possible by television] is used to legitimate the lowering of the standards of entry into the field. People may object to this as elitism, a simple defense of the citadel of big science and high culture, or even an attempts to close out ordinary people (by trying to close off television to those who with their honoraria and their and showy lifestyles, claim to be representative of ordinary men and women, on the pretext that they can be understood by these people and will get high audience ratings). In fact, I am defending the conditions necessary for the production and diffusion of the highest human creations. To escape the twin traps of elitism and demagoguery we must work to maintain or even to raise the requirements for the right of entry –the entry fee- into the fields of production.

Pierre Bourdieu -and the rest of them- as Jack D. Ripper

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The gift that keeps on giving.  Brighouse, again (most recently here)

Is having a loving family an unfair advantage? Yes, but the state should allow parents to read to their children while perhaps not to send them to expensive private schools. Behind philosophy qua philosophy -the specious search for truth- the power of the state to give and take away. And of course on education G.A. Cohen disagrees.

Liberalism considers the tension between inequality and fairness, but not between freedom and obligation. The state alone regulates behavior assumed to be base and vulgar. A superior force holds our violence in check. It's a model of Weberian authoritarianism; in a nation of laws there is no need for virtue. Cohen thought so, certainly.

It's difficult to expect a person who lives in a particular social niche to depress the circumstances of himself and his family below a certain level even for the sake of principles that he sincerely affirms.

Holbo on Nazis twice. Were The Nazis Right-Wing? In What Sense Were The Nazis Socialists?

For Holbo as for his wife.

As Waring points out herself, tenure or no tenure, she’s not really at liberty to say what she thinks anyway. That’s a handicap for a writer. Maybe she should write about something else.