Abigail Adams bucks the classical philosophers

"Philosophy of Abigail Adams illustrates August’s remembrance"

by

Jenny Lemma

August 26th, 2014

Union-Bulletin.com

Opening August’s backpack is fairly difficult because, well, we seem to have misplaced it. We retrace our steps, trying to recall what we were doing before we lost it. Nevertheless, for a panicked moment or two, we cannot remember where we put it. When we do recover it, the relief of finding it is obscured by the realization of its curious contents.

#Inside, there are no modern devices, no archived electronic files, no flash drive, no i-anythings or e-anythings. Just letters. Many old letters written by a timeless philosopher who urges us to remember: to remember as we evolve, to remember as we progress, to remember as we improve. To remember each other.

#The eighth month’s philosophy is poignant, ageless, bittersweet, tender and very, very human. Abigail Adams may not be the most famous of sages, but her wisdom effectively resonates — surprisingly and shockingly at times — with contemporary readership while offering prudent insight to current events. August’s philosophy is rooted in memory, awareness, honesty and real time, with a little bit of sauce served on the side.

#Honored historically for her role as first lady to John Adams’ presidency, and for several well-known and well-placed sentiments, Abigail Adams’ ideas are not often recognized as constituting an independent, legitimate and weighty philosophical theory. However, hers is just that. Abigail’s entire life, and her commentary about it, is a remarkable example of Kierkegaardian authenticity. It is a primal synthesis of paradox.

#Through her immense surviving correspondence, a massive collection of letters to her beloved husband, John, we hear Abigail’s voice as she personalizes and humanizes historical events against the backdrop of familial concerns. Through her letters, we experience, as Joseph J. Ellis writes in his book, “First Family Abigail and John Adams,” how she and John were not “comfortable denying any important dimension of their respective personalities. And the more they interacted, the more they defied rigid gender categories and completed each other.”

#He continues to explain, “(a)s they were working out their new roles as husband, wife, and parents, the American colonies were being asked to work out new roles within a reconfigured British Empire.” This, he argues, “permits us to recover the messier and more layered mentality of history happening, that is as Abigail and John actually experienced it. The great public events of the time that stand front and center in the history books were only part of the story they were living, and the more private side of their story — their family life — became the lens through which they perceived and made sense of those grander events emanating from England.”

#Ellis elucidates, “Logically, Abigail should have felt torn between her two sides as a traditional New England woman and a fiercely independent personality. But she did not. The apparent contradiction felt to her like a seamless continuity. She could mend a hem while engaging you in a discussion of Macbeth’s fatal flaw. If that caused trouble for some people, that was their problem. ... She was simultaneously a dutiful wife and an intellectual equal, a lover and a friend, a heart and a mind.”

#Her ability to recognize she was a part of history in the making, while attentively addressing the emotional, social, physical, economic and spiritual needs of those around her, is inspiring, comforting and humbling. Yes, it is something worth remembering.

#Against a backdrop of historic magnitude, she tackles domestic problems, struggles with economic investments, worries over the education of her children, advocates for women’s rights and counsels her husband in political matters. As Ellis points out, her ideas are creative, farsighted and, well, revolutionary.

#It is well known that she reminded John in March 1776 to “Remember the Ladies” while contemplating the principles of a new nation’s independence. She urges him, “Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all men would be tyrants if they could. If perticuliar care and attention is not paid to the Laidies we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice, or representation.”

#And, also from the book “My Dearest Friend, Letters of Abigail and John Adams,” edited by Margaret Hogan and C. James Taylor, we hear her visionary thoughts expressed to John in a letter dated August 14, 1776: “If we mean to have Heroes Statesmen and Philosophers, we should have learned women. The world perhaps would laugh at me, and accuse me of vanity, but you I know have a mind too enlarged and liberal to disregard the Sentiment. If much depends as is allowed upon the early Education of youth and the first principals which are instilld take the deepest root, great benefit must arise from literary accomplishments in women.”

#Abigail’s philosophy is not limited to a particular space and time; it is a transcendent reflection, contemplation and theory with great contemporary relevance. For those of us trying to raise children in an uncertain and unfair world, she commiserates with us in our struggles.

#In 1783, she wrote, “I have a thousand fears for my dear boys as they rise into Life.” Moreover, in a letter to John in 1797, she recounts her incensed reaction to a schoolmaster’s limited application of the principles of liberty and equality. Appealing to the sensibilities of the person in question, she asks: Is denying educational instruction to a person based upon the skin color adhering to “the Christian Principle of doing to others, as we would have others do to us?”

#She addresses economic inequality, misplaced adherence to material wealth, struggles with virtues (or vice) within the folly of human behavior. Her philosophy constantly reminds us that this folly is not just theoretical, it is composed of real characters, real people. Our decisions affect real people; our beliefs influence our actions and determine our value system.

#Therefore, Abigail’s August philosophy urges us to remember. To remember the ladies, the less fortunate, the heroes and the sacrifices that are made — not only on the battlefield, but also on the home front when we own our principles and put them into action. She recognizes the gravity of the micro representations of the macrocosm within our communities. Her philosophy demands we remember the children, the marginalized and the less fortunate. To remember, amid the hustle of modern-day living, that fortitude, kindness, strength of character and humor never lose their relevance. To remember we are part of history in the making. August reminds us to remember, so that when others review our place in our own space and time, we, too, will be worth remembering.

[Jennifer Lemma is a philosophy instructor at Walla Walla Community College.]

Thomas the Tank Engine reviewed again

"Thomas the Tank Engine had to shut the hell up to save children everywhere"

Classism, sexism, anti-environmentalism bordering on racism: any parent who discovered these hidden lessons will be glad the show’s star just quit

by

Tracy Van Slyke   

July 22nd, 2014

theguardian.com

There are many terrible children's programs through which parents must suffer during their child's young life. For every Sesame Street, there is an annoying Caillou or an acid-trippy Yo Gabba Gabba. But Thomas and Friends is – or was – the one show with enough subversive messages to make me turn it off for good.

My son, now three-and-a-half years old, thankfully never never went through a manic train fascination like so many other children. But once in a while, he'd get a bug in his brain to watch Thomas, and every time I sat and watched with him, I winced and groaned almost as much as Percy.

When I heard the news this week, that the voice actor behind Thomas's incessant whinging quit the series because he was underpaid, I remembered all of the reasons that I cut my kid off from the show in the first place.

Thomas and those friends are trains that toil away endlessly on the Isle of Sodor – which seems to be forever caught in British colonial times – and, on its surface, the show seems to impart good moral lessons about hard work and friendship. But if you look through the steam rising up from the coal-powered train stacks, you realize that the pretty puffs of smoke are concealing some pretty twisted, anachronistic messages.

For one, these trains perform tasks dictated by their imperious, little white boss, Sir Topham Hatt (also known as The Fat Controller), whose attire of a top hat, tuxedo and big round belly is just a little too obvious. Basically, he's the Monopoly dictator of their funky little island. Hatt orders the trains to do everything from hauling freight to carrying passengers to running whatever random errand he wants done, whenever he wants it done – regardless of their pre-existing schedules.

Inevitably, the trains get in a fight with or pick on one another (or generally mess up whatever job they are supposed to be doing) until Hatt has to scold one of them about being a "really useful engine", because their sole utility in life is their ability to satisfy his whims. Yeah, because I want to teach my kid to admire a controlling autocrat.

But there was one particular episode that caused me to put the brakes on Thomas for good. It revolved around James, a red engine who is described in the opening credits as "vain but lots of fun." (Wait, it's OK to be vain if you can show others a good time occasionally? Great – that's going in my Parenting 101 book.) In the episode "Tickled Pink", poor vain James, is ordered by Topham Hat to get a new coat of paint. But while James has only had an undercoat of pink slathered on, Topham Hatt interrupts and demands that James go pick up Hatt's granddaughter and deliver her and her friends to a birthday party right now.

James is mortified that he has to travel while pink and proceeds to hide from all the other trains along the way. When he's caught, the other trains – including Thomas – viciously laugh and mock him.

"What are you doing James? You're a big pink steamie," says Diesel, the bad-boy engine. (For the record, all the "villains" on Thomas and Friends are the dirty diesel engines. I'd like to think there was a good environmental message in there, but when the good engines pump out white smoke and the bad engines pump out black smoke – and they are all pumping out smoke – it's not hard to make the leap into the race territory.)

But once James gets back on the rails and picks up Granddaughter Hatt and her friends, all seemingly ends well because the girls love pink.

Well guess what? It's not OK. You think a little boy watching Thomas is going to file away the lesson that pink is OK for boys? No, what kids remember is that James was laughed at, cruelly, over and over again, because he looked different and was clad in a "girly" pink color.

And that's not even to get started on the female trains. Well, actually it's hard to get started on them, because they barely exist. Take a quick scan of the more than 100 trains and characters in the Thomas universe – it spans multiple books, toys and continents in addition to a TV show – and you can quickly count on two hands the number of lady trains that populate is Isle of Sodor. Emily – the only lady train to get name checked in the opening credits and the only one who regularly hangs out with the boy trains – is said to "know her stuff." That's the sole description of her personality. What does that even mean?

Last year, the British Labour shadow Transportation Secretary even called out Thomas for its lack of females, saying that the franchise setting a bad example for girl wannabe train engineers everywhere.

At first blush, Thomas and his friends seem rather placid and mild. And there are certainly a lot worse shows in terms of in-your-face violence, sexism, racism and classism. But looks can be deceiving: the constant bent of messages about friendship, work, class, gender and race sends my kid the absolute wrong message.

And really, that theme song makes me scream. Thomas can just go bust my buffers.


Island of Sodor...a model of "imperialism"?

Life after philosophical academia

"What Do Philosophers Do?"

Outside of academia, that is.

by

Rebecca J. Rosen

July 8th, 2014

The Atlantic

The romanticized version of what it's like to be a philosopher must be one of the most appealing careers possible: read great thinkers, think deep thoughts, and while away the days in a beautiful office, surrounded by books, an Emeralite lamp, a hot mug of coffee, and perhaps a cat curled up by your feet. For the very few, your profound thoughts could revolutionize whole fields, herald new political ages, and inspire generations.

Of course, for many, academic philosophy proves a disappointment—an endless slog to publish, the tedium and heartache of departmental politics, and a dismal job market that tends to  people to far-flung college towns, far away from family and friends.

So what is a budding philosopher to do?

An informative series of posts by Helen De Cruz of New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science features interviews with seven philosophy Ph.D.s who have left academia for the private sector. There's a software engineer, a television comedy writer, a statistical researcher, a consultant, a network-security engineer, and a search-engine developer. None of them are what would traditionally be thought of as a "philosopher."

In a few cases, they've found that their new jobs provide surprising platforms for further philosophical examination, such as the television screenwriter Eric Kaplan, who said, “I’m very interested in [the] tension between life and theory and mind and emotions; I explore that both in philosophy writing and in script writing.” Similarly, Claartje van Sijl, who now runs her own consulting and training company, says that the philosophy she studied informs the advice she gives. Her philosophy training, she explains, "has familiarized me with the greatest philosophical thoughts of 2500 years of history that I can now use as a sounding board for my clients’ and my own reflections."
But, for the most part, the philosophers aren't deploying their firm grasp of Kierkegaard in their private-sector work. Rather, it's the skills that philosophers are trained in—critical thinking, clear writing, quick learning—that translate well to life outside of academia. As Zachary Ernst, a software engineer at Narrative Science, puts it, "As a professional philosopher, if you haven't gotten over-specialized and narrow, then you've got really good analytic and communication skills. So you've got the ability to learn quickly and efficiently. You're also in the habit of being very critical of all sorts of ideas and approaches to a variety of problems. And if you've taught a lot, then you're probably pretty comfortable with public speaking. Those skills are very rare in almost any workforce, and they're extremely valuable."

This is not to say that the transition from academia to industry was easy. A few of the philosophers report that the dim view of private industry inside academia can stifle an exploration of what else might be out there. Ian Niles, the search-engine developer, advises, "Don't consider a job outside academia as 'slumming it.' Academia, for all of its virtues, instills a fear of the 'real world' in students, particularly graduate students."
To that end, another one of the philosophers noted that for all the training he received, very little of it led him to conclude that he might be able to make it outside of a university. Carl Baker, who is now a statistical researcher at the House of Commons Library, said, "If I had to highlight one weakness in my postgraduate training it would be the lack of discussion of how the skills developed during a philosophy Ph.D. can be used elsewhere."

And...

"This Is What Your Professors Really Think About You Leaving Academia"

by

Annalee Newitz

July 9th, 2014

io9

As university budgets shrink, more and more graduate students are seeking jobs outside academia. You'd think this would be a good thing for the world, but professors aren't convinced. In fact, many actively discourage their students from striving for non-academic jobs.

The Chronicle of Higher Education's Stacey Patton reports that at a recent conference on the topic of careers for grad students and postdocs, this issue came to the fore. University of California at San Francisco's director of career development, Bill Lindstaedt, showed a slide with comments he'd heard from faculty about students pursuing nonacademic jobs. They were dismissive of the idea that students might need such jobs, despite the tiny academic job market, and expressed no interest in helping students discover other career paths.

UCSF is a medical school, so all their work is focused on medical and scientific research. Here are some choice quotes:

    "The problem isn't that there are too few faculty positions. The problem is that more students and postdocs are CHOOSING not to become faculty."

    -Program director at large graduate program

    "It's my JOB to create more people like me."

    -Senior faculty member

    "I'm very supportive of students in my lab who decide they want to leave academia. But they're smart. They'll figure out how to get there (alternative career) on their own."

    -Senior faculty member

    "If a rotation student comes in saying they want to be a science writer, they're not staying [in my research group]."

    -Senior faculty member

    "They shouldn't get distracted until after quals. And after quals, they need to be in the lab doing research. I don't want my students out of the lab teaching or other distracting activities."

    -Senior faculty member

    "I made it and nobody helped me. Plus, I was the only woman in my graduate program. The best students will always succeed."

    -Senior faculty member
As a science writer, I especially love the comment from the professor about how potential future writers will get kicked out. Because why would you want science writers who had formal scientific training in a lab, anyway? Better to complain later about how science journalists are "dumb" and just "don't get" science.

You'll note that a lot of these comments center on how university professors want their students focused on lab work, AKA the professor's research. So this reluctance to discuss outside careers is as much about wanting cheap grad student and postdoc labor as it is about wanting to create "more people like me," as one faculty member said.

But there are also more subtle causes for this disconnect between what professors prepare their students for, and what they can actually expect in the real world. Many senior researchers came of age in an era when university budgets were not taxed to their maximum, so they don't realize how uncommon a tenure-track position is anymore. And in my personal experience (yes, I was a grad student back at the turn of the millennium) there is also intellectual prejudice against nonacademic jobs. If you want to be a true scholar, you are supposed to stay in the Ivory Tower. Anything else is getting your hands dirty, or catering to mere commercial interests.

Whether it's out of clueless prejudice or a venal desire for low-paid lab assistants, professors may be endangering the future of their disciplines by assuming that university work is the only legitimate path. Scientists and researchers are leaving the academy, no matter what we do. As these freelance scholars come of age, gaining more power and legitimacy, it will be better for everyone if they regard academia as a possible partner in their future work — not as the place that used them up and threw them away.

What is the "right" philosophy?

"Philosophy You Can Use: The Ancient, Practical Wisdom in Stoic Thinking"

by

Ryan Holiday

June 27th, 2014

The Huffington Post

When most people think of "philosophy," their eyes glaze over. It's the last thing they want, let alone something they need.

But this, as you already know, is silly and naive.

Philosophy is not just about talking or lecturing, or even reading long, dense books. In fact, it is something men and women of action use -- and have used throughout history -- to solve their problems and achieve their greatest triumphs. Not in the classroom, but on the battlefield, in the forum, and at court.

It was jotted down (and practiced) by slaves, poets, emperors, politicians and soldiers, as well as ordinary folks to help with their own problems and those of their friends, family and followers. This wisdom is still there, available to us.

Specifically, I am referring to Stoicism, which, in my opinion, is the most practical of all philosophies.

A brief synopsis on this particular school of Hellenistic philosophy: Stoicism was founded in Athens by Zeno of Citium in the early 3rd century BC, but was famously practiced by the likes of Epictetus, Cato, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius. The philosophy asserts that virtue (such as wisdom) is happiness and judgment be based on behavior, rather than words. That we don't control and cannot rely on external events, only ourselves and our responses.

But at the very root of the thinking, there is a very simple, though not easy, way of living. Take obstacles in your life and turn them into your advantage, control what you can and accept what you can't.

In the words of Epictetus:

    In life our first job is this, to divide and distinguish things into two categories: externals I cannot control, but the choices I make with regard to them I do control. Where will I find good and bad? In me, in my choices.

Amazingly we still have access to these ideas, despite the fact that many of the greatest Stoics never wrote anything down for publication. Cato definitely didn't. Marcus Aurelius never intended for Meditations to be anything but personal. Seneca's letters were, well, letters and Epictetus' thoughts come to us by way of a note-taking student.

And so it was from their example, their actions, we find real philosophy.

Because other than their common study of the philosophy, the Stoics were all men of action -- and I don't think this is a coincidence. Marcus Aurelius was emperor of the most powerful empire in the history of the world. Cato, the moral example for many philosophers, defended the Roman republic with Stoic bravery until his defiant death. Even Epictetus, the lecturer, had no cushy tenure -- he was a former slave.

And this shouldn't really be that surprising...

The modern-day philosopher and writer Nassim Nicholas Taleb defines a Stoic as someone who, "transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation and desire into undertaking."

Using this definition as a model we can see that throughout the centuries Stoicism has been a common thread though some of history's great leaders. It has been practiced by Kings, presidents, artists, writers and entrepreneurs. Both historical and modern men illustrate Stoicism as a way of life.

Prussian King, Frederick the Great, was said to ride with the works of the Stoics in his saddlebags because they could, in his words, "sustain you in misfortune."

Meanwhile, Montaigne, the politician and essayist, had a line from Epictetus carved into the beam above the study in which he spent most of his time.

The founding fathers were also inspired by the philosophy. George Washington was introduced to Stoicism by his neighbors at age seventeen, and afterwards, put on a play about Cato to inspire his men in that dark winter at Valley Forge. Whereas Thomas Jefferson had a copy of Seneca on his nightstand when he died.

The economist Adam Smith's theories on the interconnectedness of the world -- capitalism -- were significantly influenced by the Stoicism that he studied as a schoolboy, under a teacher who had translated Marcus Aurelius' works.

The political thinker, John Stuart Mill, wrote of Marcus Aurelius and Stoicism in his famous treatise On Liberty, calling it "the highest ethical product of the ancient mind."

But those influenced by the Stoics goes on...

Eugène Delacroix, the renowned French Romantic artist (known best for his painting Liberty Leading the People) was an ardent Stoic, referring to it as his "consoling religion."

Toussaint Louverture, himself a former slave who challenged an emperor by leading the Haitian revolution, read and was deeply influenced by the works of Epictetus.

Theodore Roosevelt, after his presidency, spent eight months exploring (and nearly dying in) the unknown jungles of the Amazon, and of the eight books he brought on the journey, two were Marcus Aurelius' Meditations and Epictetus' Enchiridion.

Indeed, Teddy seems to represent the temperance and self-control of the philosophy beautifully when he said, "What such a man needs is not courage but nerve control, cool headedness. This he can get only by practice." Likewise he expressed the necessity of action advocated by the Stoics when he famously remarked: "We must all wear out or rust out, everyone of us. My choice is to wear out."

Today's leaders are no different, with many finding their inspiration from the ancient texts. Bill Clinton rereads Marcus Aurelius every single year, while Wen Jiabao, the former prime minister of China, claims that Meditations is one of two books he travels with and has read it more than one hundred times over the course of his life.

You see, Stoicism -- and philosophy -- are not the domains of idle professors. They are the succor of the successful, and the men and women of action. As Thoreau put it: "To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school... it is to solve some of the problems of life not only theoretically, but practically."

The mantle is ours to pick up and carry and do with what we can.

Godzilla 2014...big, beefy, and an environmental reminder

Well, Godzilla has returned and overall has garnered some good reviews. 

"Godzilla: why the Japanese original is no joke"

How could Japan take a man in a suit so seriously? As Gareth Edwards's Godzilla is released, Tim Martin looks at the nuclear nightmares that created the 1954 original

by

Tim Martin

May 15th, 2014

The Telegraph

 Western audiences have spent more than half a century thinking of Godzilla as a joke dinosaur in a rubber suit, a Japanese trash-culture ‘King of the Monsters’ locked in endless battle with giant moths, dragons, armadillos and skyscraper-sized robots. Against this camp backdrop, then, it may seem surprising to hear Gareth Edwards, the director of this summer’s Godzilla film, declare his intention to portray the monster as “a force of nature, like the wrath of God or vengeance for the way we’ve behaved”.

But the idea of presenting Godzilla as the harbinger of man-made apocalypse isn't simply another gritty reboot for an age in which children’s franchises have become big-budget adult entertainment. It harks back 60 years to an almost forgotten chapter in the franchise’s history: the tragic story of nuclear paranoia told by the original Gojira in 1954.

Released in the same year as Seven Samurai, directed by a colleague of Kurosawa’s and starring one of Japan’s most famous actors, the film Gojira was a far cry from its B-movie successors. It was a sober allegory of a film with ambitions as large as its thrice-normal budget, designed to shock and horrify an adult audience.

Its roster of frightening images — cities in flames, overstuffed hospitals, irradiated children — would have been all too familiar to cinemagoers for whom memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were still less than a decade old, while its script posed deliberately inflammatory questions about the balance of postwar power and the development of nuclear energy.

 To its first viewers in 1954, Gojira also evoked a disturbingly recent catastrophe. In March that year, the crew of a boat called the Daigo Fukuryu Maru (Lucky Dragon 5) had been fishing off the Marshall Islands, the string of atolls in the Northern Pacific that had been captured from Japan by the US during the Second World War.

Just before dawn, they saw a blinding flash in the sky and heard what sounded like a thunderclap. Before long a white ash began to settle on the decks of their vessel, which the bewildered sailors shovelled into heaps and dumped over the side. By evening, several of them were vomiting and covered in strange burns. When the Lucky Dragon limped back to its home port of Yaizu a fortnight later, it was clear that the men were suffering from radiation sickness.

It was less than two years since Japan’s American occupiers had made their exit from the country, and memories of the A-bomb attacks that had ended the war were still painfully fresh. When the US acknowledged that the crew of the Lucky Dragon had been caught in the fallout from its secret hydrogen bomb tests on Bikini Atoll, the Japanese reaction was immediate and furious. Other fishing boats were soon found to have been similarly exposed, and the bottom dropped out of the lucrative tuna market. When the Lucky Dragon’s radio operator died that autumn, 400,000 people went to his funeral.

In this tense atmosphere, the opening scenes of Gojira could scarcely have been more provocative. Thudding drumbeats and unearthly howls accompany the stark opening titles, before the scene changes to the deck of a fishing boat in the Pacific, where the crew are relaxing, chatting and playing guitar. The ocean begins to boil. The men are blinded and burnt as they flee in terror. Tapping out his desperate SOS below decks, the ship’s radio operator is the first to die. Once again, Gojira suggested, the Japanese people was being attacked in its homeland by history’s greatest superweapon.

 But why cast such an incendiary political statement as a monster movie? The answer lies with Tomoyuki Tanaka, a producer at Toho Studios in Tokyo, who in early 1954 found himself faced with a professional catastrophe. The film he was preparing, a co-production between the cinema industries in Japan and Indonesia, had just collapsed after the Indonesian government cancelled visas for the main actors.

Tanaka was confronted with a gaping hole in his autumn release schedule, but he had been an admirer of American monster movies since King Kong in 1933 and had recently read about the latest example, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, released the year before. Could he, he wondered, use a similar conceit to explore Japanese fears about the use of nuclear weapons in the postwar age?

Tanaka hired the science-fiction writer Shigeru Kayama to produce a script. Initially, this document made no bones about its influences: its Japanese working title translates as Big Monster from 20,000 Miles Beneath the Sea. More importantly still, Tanaka began to discuss the project with two other Toho regulars: the special effects supervisor Eiji Tsubaraya and the director Ishiro Honda.

Each came from an unusual background. Tsubaraya was a mechanical genius who claimed to have built his first film camera as a child. During the war he had also specialised in modelmaking for Japanese propaganda films. So realistic was his re-creation of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, according to legend, that the American occupying forces assumed it was real and sent it home to be used in newsreel footage. Tsubaraya was as fond as Tanaka of the nascent genre of monster cinema in America. In fact, he clung on for some time to the early suggestion that the antagonist in Gojira should be a giant octopus.

Tsubaraya agreed to undertake the vast task of recreating and destroying a model Tokyo in return for equal billing with the film’s director. This was Ishiro Honda, a former colleague of Akira Kurosawa’s who had assisted him on films such as Stray Dog (1949) and directed several features of his own.

Honda was an ex-soldier who had survived the firebombing of Tokyo, had been captured and imprisoned in China and, on his return to Japan, had passed through the devastation that the A-bomb had wrought in Hiroshima. “There was,” he later said of the experience, “a feeling that the world was already coming to an end. Ever since I felt that this atomic fear would hang around our necks for ever.”

Honda recruited another screenwriter, Takeo Murata, to develop these ideas in the script. At some point, too, the men changed the title to one less baldly revealing of its American origins. The word Gojira is a portmanteau of two Japanese words for gorilla (gorira) and whale (kujira) but it is not clear who decided to apply it to a radioactive dinosaur the size of a mountain. One legend runs that it was the nickname for a burly member of the film’s technical crew, but no one has ever explained exactly who; and, as Honda’s wife later observed, the filmmaking team “loved to joke around with tall stories”.

Planning the destruction of the capital was not without its problems. Two members of the team were detained by security guards as they stood on the roof of a department store, discussing the trail of devastation that Gojira would cut across the city. Back in the studio, Tsubaraya was working on the problem of his lifelike monster.

The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms had already demonstrated the stop-motion animation that would make Ray Harryhausen a legend among 20th-century animators, but Tsubaraya chose to employ a different approach. He built a latex dinosaur suit, fortified with bamboo spars, with jaws that could be snapped at will by the technician inside. He would, he decided, shoot the monster scenes at double speed, then slow them down to give an impression of stomping inertia.

 This technique came to be known as "suitmation", and became an integral part of the camp allure of subsequent Godzilla films. The actors playing Godzilla based their lumbering performance on the bears at Tokyo Zoo, but the thick rubber monster suit, combined with the fierce set lighting required to shoot at double speed, placed drastic limits on their performance. Neither could spend more than two minutes inside it, and both fainted frequently from the stress. One of them lost 20lb on the shoot, and found himself pouring a cupful of sweat out of the suit at the end of each take.

With the film well under way, the producers turned their attention to the music. Akira Ifukube, a university professor and one of Japan’s top composers of classical music, was recruited to develop a score that complemented the doom-laden, apocalyptic tone of the film, as well as to provide the noise of the monster’s footfalls and the sound of its roar. He did so by covering a leather glove in rosin and rubbing it across the strings of a double bass, producing an unearthly dissonant howl. Applying an electronic echo to the instrument’s deep sounds created a noise like thundering footsteps.

For Honda and Tanaka, the allegorical aspect of Gojira was paramount: “Mankind had created the Bomb,” as Tanaka later commented, “and now nature was going to take revenge on mankind”. Contemporary references abounded (“First contaminated tuna,” complains one woman to her neighbour on the train, “and now Godzilla”) and the film’s protagonists carried on a running debate about the validity of using violence against violence.

The final lines abandoned indirectness for a cliffhanger warning: “If we keep conducting nuclear tests,” intoned a wise old palaeontologist over the monster’s remains, “another Godzilla may appear somewhere in the world.”

The sternness of this message made the film a divisive proposition in Japan. Audiences turned out in droves, attracted by a sinister radio drama that was broadcast on national radio for weeks before the film’s release, but many critics felt that its grim scene-setting and overt references to the Lucky Dragon catastrophe were simply too close to the bone.

Its thematic preoccupation with nuclear energy proved even less acceptable to the American distributors who, after buying the film, began an extensive reshoot and recut for Western markets. Scenes were inserted featuring the actor Raymond Burr (later famous for his roles in Perry Mason and Ironside) as an American reporter covering the destruction of Tokyo, while references to American testing and the dangers of radioactivity were assiduously hacked out.

But this radical intervention would prove strangely influential on the franchise's development. Released as Godzilla, King of the Monsters! in 1956, it was panned by critics (one of whom complained of “a dinosaur made of gumshoes and about $20 worth of toy trains”) but a hit with the public, who flocked to see what the posters called its “psychotic cavalcade of electrifying horror”. Bizarrely, this recut version was even exported again to Japan, where audiences turned out once more to watch it with subtitles.

What the public wanted, it seemed, was not grim nuclear allegory but more monster movies, and Toho Studios was there to oblige. In the years that followed, Tanaka found himself presiding over the development of the most famous creature in a new genre of so-called kaiju (monster) movies, battling a cast of bizarre foes in films that soon became a cultish pleasure for children of all ages. In the adventures of Mechagodzilla, Mothra, Son of Godzilla and a host of city-stomping animal freaks, the political philosophising and existential terror of the first film soon became little more than a black-and-white footnote.

William M. Tsutsui, an American historian and Japan expert who has written extensively on Godzilla, explains that the series was at its wackiest and most humorous “in the decades when Japan’s economy was booming. In the Sixties and Seventies, when Japan was growing at 10 per cent a year, the monster became a sort of happy monster, a protective monster, a goofy monster, not a threatening one.”

Despite the giant lizard’s growing international fame, the Godzilla films in the intervening years have appealed more to dedicated fans of monster combat than to mainstream cinemagoers. Toho has insisted on using physical effects rather than CGI, and while Godzilla aficionados may treasure the way in which this limits the films to puppetry and so-called ‘suitmation’, they look fascinatingly low-tech in an age of CGI.

 The human cast, meanwhile, seem wearily conscious that their cheesy lines and daft situations are only there as placeholders before the biff-pow gigantomachy resumes, and low receipts have twice forced Toho to call a halt to its flagship series. Godzilla took a nine-year holiday from 1975-1984, and after the disappointing 50th-anniversary special Final Wars in 2004 Toho demolished its main water stage and refused to license or make any more films for a decade.

Recent events, however, suggest that the moment may be right for Godzilla to return. “In the days immediately after the Fukushima disaster in 2011,” Tsutsui observes, “Google hits on Godzilla spiked. People went back to look at the movies, and look at the lessons filmmakers had been bringing forward about the fears of untrammelled nuclear energy and weapons testing.”

Gulliermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim, released the next year and dedicated to Ishiro Honda and to Ray Harryhausen, suggested a renewal of the fitful interest in the giant-monster movie that had been stirring in America since the millennium with films such as Peter Jackson’s King Kong and JJ Abrams’s Cloverfield. (Even Godzilla fans prefer to forget Roland Emmerich’s disastrous attempt to reboot the franchise in 1998 with a giant iguana.)

Ultimately, though, Pacific Rim was more of a eulogy to the tradition than an exercise in political comment. “I want the joy I used to get seeing Godzilla toss a tank without having to think there are guys in the tank,” del Toro commented. “There’s global anxiety about how fragile the world is, and the safety of citizens, but the film is in another realm.”

This year’s effort, set in the aftermath of a Fukushima-like nuclear meltdown and evoking the panic and disaster of a decade of natural disasters, looks a more serious proposition. As Tsutsui points out, though, the franchise “allows filmmakers to reflect on the tensions and problems with society, and how those can be brought to the surface through a gigantic irradiated lizard walking through a city,” and has, even in its darkest moments, trod a certain line between absurdity and acuity.

It remains to be seen where on this scale Gareth Edwards’s contribution to Godzillan history will fall. But if there’s one thing the franchise has delighted in proving over the past 60 years, it’s that Japan’s most famous monster is always capable of rising again. 

"Godzilla is the latest blockbuster to punish the sins of mankind"

Gareth Edwards' take on the classic joins Noah and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes as another of summer's anti-humanist fables

by

Tom Shone  

 
May 15th, 2014

theguardian.com

My favorite quote from the trades last week was, "Warner Bros has avoided making Godzilla out to be a monster movie." What else are they going to make it out to be? A coming-of-age picture about the Summer that Changed Everything? A Merchant Ivory flick? Actually, the new film arrives in cinemas boasting the highest pedigree of any creature feature hitherto, with an Alexandre Desplat score, and roles for David Strathairn, Bryan Cranston and Juliette Binoche, thus making it the first and surely only time “Juliette Binoche” and “300-foot lizard” will ever be uttered in the same sentence. It’s a good movie – maybe too good, with its visual sophistication leaving its B-movie roots poking through. Was Godzilla ever meant to have $200m spent on him? Wasn’t the original a warning against American technological know-how?

We are a long way from the man-in-a-rubber-suit who wobbled through a model Tokyo in the 1954 original. Newly scaled up to keep pace with the latest skyscrapers, Godzilla is glimpsed teasingly, through Cloverfield POV shots for the first hour, before finally taking centre stage to defend mankind from MUTOs – giant nuclear mutants that look like the queen alien in Aliens and snack on nuclear missiles like Twinkie bars. The scenes of cataclysm, most of them at night, have a sulphurous power, as if director Gareth Edwards had prepared by boning up on Gustave Doré's engravings for Paradise Lost. At one point we see a mountain – or a silhouette our eye had taken to be a mountain – move, in one of the best such sleights of hand since Spielberg’s headlights-in-the-rearview-mirror gag in Close Encounters. If only Edwards had held it longer.

Needless to say, all human scale is obliterated. Cranston, as the nuclear engineer reduced to conspiratorial babbling, may be the smartest casting choice of the summer: when even Walter White throws a hissy fit, you know things are bad. He and Binoche hold the screen for as long as they are allowed, but soon have to make way for the demographically-approved chosen ones, Elizabeth Olsen and Aaron Taylor-Johnson. Taylor-Johnson is a physical actor who likes to storm into a room and pace its four corners like a lion, but when faced with the sight of two giant nuclear mutants treating masonry like meringue, he wears an expression of mild consternation, as if remembering he’d left the oven on. He spends most of the movie trying to catch a train to get back to Olsen, but we couldn’t care less. Unlike King Kong, this was never a story scaled with a human adversary in mind. “What are we supposed to do?” asks Navy Commander David Straithairn. “Sit back and watch?”

Well, actually yes. What makes Godzilla such a curious summer blockbuster is it rootedness in failure – specifically the feeling of stunned national impotence that gripped Japan in the aftermath of the second world war. Cultural studies professors like to peel back the keloid-scarred skin of the series to reveal the lurking atomic bomb subtext lurking underneath, but there’s no “subtext” about it. That’s what Godzilla was about. It’s the text.

“The theme of the film from the beginning was the terror of the bomb,” said producer and Godzilla creator Tanaka Tomoyuki. Passing through the ruins of Hiroshima upon his repatriation to Japan, the 1954 film’s director Honda Ishuro noted “a fear the earth was already coming to an end”. He filled his movie with visions that directly summoned the spectres of Nagasaki and Hiroshima: families pulling cart-loads of possessions, children being relocated in army trucks, hordes of injured refugees, churches of widows and orphans, hospitals overflown with the dead and the dying, the camera lingering on a little girl her eyes glazed in shock whose irradiated body sends the geiger counter off the scale.

“Godzilla functioned not simply as a figure of war incarnate or a metaphorical admonition of nuclear annihilation, but also became a reproachful symbol embodying the spirit of Japan’s war dead,” writes William Tsutsui in his book Godzilla on My Mind: Fifty Years of the King of the Monsters. Very little of this, needless to say, made it through into the bowdlerized, American edit, which smoothed over the moral crisis of radiation with the calming tones of Raymond Burr recasting Godzilla as just another monster on the loose, recalled to the screen again and again for what amounted to prolonged bouts of monster-on-monster pro-wrestling. Mankind was relegated to the status of stupefied observer, like those cavemen that cowered in the corner of Ray Harryhausen epics while the dinosaurs duked it out above.

Edwards has more than honored the spirit of the original. Those hospitals are now filled with Americans and tended to by Elizabeth Olsen, while refugees collect in giant sports stadiums that recall the aftermath of Katrina. The American psyche wold appear to be in roughly the same state of disrepair as that of Japan in 1954. We’re ready for Godzilla in a way we weren’t in 1998, when Roland Emmerich rolled out his remake. If the cycle of disaster movies that gripped audiences in the 1990s were notable for their jocular oops-apocalypse tone – “Ha ha! It's the wonder of nature, baby!” boomed Phillip Seymour Hoffman, as tornadoes ripped up the south in Jan De Bont’s Twister – our contemporary variants are joke-free zones in which mankind isn’t just threatened with extinction. We're told we deserve it.

Not only do we bring our own nuclear doom upon our heads in Godzilla, but in a few weeks' time, we stand in the dock once again, indicted for crimes against the primate in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. And this just a few Sundays after God annihilated the Earth on account of our wickedness in Darren Aronofsky’s Noah. “The wickedness is not just in them, it’s in all of us,” insisted Russell Crowe’s prophet. “It had to be what He wanted – a world without men. You see that, don’t you?”

The right went into its usual tizzy over Aronofsky’s film, with Glenn Beck saying, “it’s just so pro-animal and anti-human, and I mean strongly anti-human,” but for once, the nut fringe was basically right. The blockbuster has finally gone post-human. The Godzilla movies always tilted audience sympathy towards the monster, of course, but as Edwards' lizard takes a bow and slips into the ocean once more at the end of the film, I felt something else: a nip of the old Avatar blues. The first true hero of summer and he doesn’t even say goodbye.

Daigo Fukuryu- Maru [Wikipedia]
 
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Neil deGrasse Tyson...a philistine?

No worse than Hawking philosophizing.

"Why Neil deGrasse Tyson is a philistine"

The popular television host says he has no time for deep, philosophical questions. That's a horrible message to send to young scientists.

by

Damon Linker

May 6th, 2014

The Week

Neil deGrasse Tyson may be a gifted popularizer of science, but when it comes to humanistic learning more generally, he is a philistine. Some of us suspected this on the basis of the historically and theologically inept portrayal of Giordano Bruno in the opening episode of Tyson's reboot of Carl Sagan's Cosmos.

But now it's been definitively demonstrated by a recent interview in which Tyson sweepingly dismisses the entire history of philosophy. Actually, he doesn't just dismiss it. He goes much further — to argue that undergraduates should actively avoid studying philosophy at all. Because, apparently, asking too many questions "can really mess you up."

Yes, he really did say that. Go ahead,  listen for yourself , beginning at 20:19 — and behold the spectacle of an otherwise intelligent man and gifted teacher sounding every bit as anti-intellectual as a corporate middle manager or used-car salesman. He proudly proclaims his irritation with "asking deep questions" that lead to a "pointless delay in your progress" in tackling "this whole big world of unknowns out there." When a scientist encounters someone inclined to think philosophically, his response should be to say, "I'm moving on, I'm leaving you behind, and you can't even cross the street because you're distracted by deep questions you've asked of yourself. I don't have time for that."

"I don't have time for that."

With these words, Tyson shows he's very much a 21st-century American, living in a perpetual state of irritated impatience and anxious agitation. Don't waste your time with philosophy! (And, one presumes, literature, history, the arts, or religion.) Only science will get you where you want to go! It gets results! Go for it! Hurry up! Don't be left behind! Progress awaits!

There are many ways to respond to this indictment. One is to make the case for progress in philosophical knowledge. This would show that Tyson is wrong because he fails to recognize the real advances that happen in the discipline of philosophy over time.

I'll leave this for others to do, since I don't buy such progress myself. I very seriously believe that Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, or Wittgenstein may have gotten just about everything right all those decades, centuries, and even millennia ago — and I know of no professional philosophers writing today who come anywhere close to rivaling the brilliance and depth of these thinkers.

Tyson is right about one thing: Philosophy is primarily about posing questions. But he's wrong to view such questioning as a pernicious waste of time. If Socrates is to be believed, it may actually be the best way of life for a human being — and quite possibly the only way to avoid the dogmatism to which all thinking is prone, and to which Tyson himself certainly has fallen prey.

Allow me to explain.

Philosophy arose in the West when a handful of ancient Greeks began to question the truth of received (dogmatic) explanations for various occurrences. Whereas it was commonly presumed that the gods were responsible for the weather, crop yields, and a city's success or failure on the battlefield, these early philosophers proposed, instead, that something called "nature," which operates according to regular and necessary laws, might be the true cause.

These early philosophers were forerunners of today's natural scientists, in other words, and one imagines that Tyson would treat them with the kind of condescending respect that scientists often reserve for their forerunners in the history of science. This is especially likely in the case of Democritus, who made an uncannily good guess when he proposed at some point late in the fifth century B.C. that all matter is composed of indivisible particles called "atoms."

Socrates appears to have been one of these natural philosophers in his youth. But at some point he became convinced that the anti-dogmatism of his fellow philosophers concealed an even deeper dogmatism. Like the poets, politicians, and craftsmen he regularly talked to on the streets of Athens, the natural philosophers were incapable of giving a coherent account of their own activity and why it was good. They couldn't explain the nature and origins of the concepts they presupposed in their own thinking. They couldn't consistently define what they meant by such fundamental ideas as truth, goodness, nobility, beauty, and justice. Neither could they consistently explain what they hoped for from the knowledge they so passionately pursued.

If the natural philosophers truly wished to liberate themselves from dogma in all of its forms and live lives of complete intellectual wakefulness and self-awareness, they would need to pose far more searching questions. They would need to begin reflecting on human nature as both a part of and distinct from the wider natural world. They would need to begin examining their own minds and motives, very much including their motives in taking up the pursuit of philosophical knowledge in the first place.

Philosophy rightly understood is the mind's rigorous, open-ended, radically undogmatic pursuit of this self-knowledge.

If what you crave is answers, the study of philosophy in this sense can be hugely frustrating and unsatisfying. But if you want to understand yourself as well as the world around you — including why you're so impatient for answers, and progress, in the first place — then there's nothing more thrilling and gratifying than training in philosophy and engaging with its tumultuous, indeterminate history.

Not that many young people today recognize its value. There are always an abundance of reasons to resist raising the peskiest, most difficult questions of oneself and the world. To that list, our time has added several more: technological distractions, economic imperatives, cultural prejudices, ideological commitments.

And now Neil deGrasse Tyson has added another — one specially aimed at persuading scientifically minded young people to reject self-examination and the self-knowledge that goes along with it.

He should be ashamed of himself.   

Science, philosophy, cosmology

Cosmology is the attempt to understand in scientific terms the structure and evolution of the universe as a whole. This ambition has been with us since the ancient Greeks, even if the developments in modern cosmology have provided a picture of the universe dramatically different from that of Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle. The cosmological thinking of these figures, e.g. the belief in uniform circular motion of the heavens, was closely related to their philosophical ideas, and it shaped the field of cosmology at least up to the times of Copernicus and Kepler.

Nowadays it is not uncommon among scientists to question the relevance of philosophy for their field. This may be part of a simplified view according to which science is mostly about finding the best match between theories and empirical data. However, even on such a view one can identify interesting philosophical issues, like underdetermination of theories and theory ladenness of data. Moreover, apart from matching theory and data, science is often concerned with what the studied theories implies for our deeper understanding of the world. This involves the philosophical activity of interpreting the theories in question, and philosophy thus continues to be an integral part of scientific, including cosmological, thought. One may argue that cosmology is even more philosophical than most other sciences, in that it more explicitly deals with the limits or horizons of scientific knowledge. In particular, as cosmology involves the age-old questions of the possible temporal and spatial limits of the universe, it is naturally associated with irresistible speculations of what may cause or lie beyond those limits.

Read more...

"Philosophical aspects of modern cosmology" by Henrik Zinkernagel

Open mouth, insert foot...Charles Murray's perspective on women in philosophy

"What Charles Murray Doesn't Get About Women and Philosophy"

The conservative author believes that women have contributed little to major philosophical traditions because men are better abstract thinkers.

by

Noah Berlatsky

April 17th, 2014

The Atlantic

"No woman has been a significant original thinker in any of the world's great philosophical traditions." So said the author Charles Murray in a 2005 essay titled "The Inequality Taboo," in which he argued that men are better at abstract thinking than women are. In a recent talk at the University of Austin, timed to promote his new book The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Getting Ahead, a student asked Murray if he stood by this claim. As Amanda Marcotte notes in a piece at Slate, Murray began with condescension (“tell me who you had in mind”), and then added, "Until somebody gives me evidence to the contrary, yeah, I'll stick with that statement."

There are a couple of ways to respond to Murray's claim that women have made no significant original contributions to philosophy. You could, first of all, produce a list of female philosophers. Marcotte takes this path, mentioning names like Hannah Arendt and Elizabeth Anscombe. The problem though, as Marcotte says, is that:

    If you know how the game is played, you'll know that if you start listing philosophers, Murray or any of his defenders will just muse about whether their work is wholly "original," since said women likely have read other philosophers—most of whom are male by virtue of women being squeezed out of educational opportunities and platforms to express their thoughts throughout most of history.

Rather than just throwing names around, then, it seems like it might be more useful to address Murray's question about philosophy more philosophically. When Murray says he is looking for "significant original thinker[s] in the world's great philosophical traditions," what does that mean? What intellectual preconceptions is he operating under? What isn't spoken when he speaks?

Feminist thinkers have actually spent a lot of time philosophizing about women's inclusion and exclusion from lists of most important this or that, especially in the context of literary canons. Murray is willing to acknowledge that there have been important women writers, (since he believes literary thought is less abstract than philosophical thought) but he glosses over the fact that the literary canon, too, is tilted very male. In the Modern Library's list of the 100 greatest novels of the 20th century, for example, the top 14 are all by men (Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse is 15.)

What accounts for this? In How To Suppress Women's Writing (1983) science-fiction author Joanna Russ looked at this imbalance and argued that when women are not included in the canon, the problem is not with the women. Instead, she said, "A mode of understanding literature which can ignore the private lives of half the human race is not 'incomplete': It is distorted through and through." She adds that the statement, "This is a good novel," begs the questions, "Good for what? Good for whom?"

Russ' point is that the claim of universal value—or, in Murray's terms, of abstract thought—is duplicitous. It assumes a culture and an intellectual frame in which there is no power differential; in which everyone is the same as everyone else, and in which you can speak from nowhere to everyone. But that “view from nowhere” does not exist (as many important philosophers, from Derrida to Foucault to Irigaray, have pointed out.) To say that all the best books are by men therefore says as much about the interest, and the relationship to power, of the list as it does about the books selected. It means, among other things, that experience coded as male (of manly old men catching fish, for example, or of lusting after young girls named Lolita) is more important than experience coded as female. "When we all live in the same culture," Russ says, "then it will be time for one literature." But we don't, and it isn’t.

Again, most feminist discussions of canon have focused on literature. But some have expanded the argument to philosophy—at least implicitly. In her groundbreaking book Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins argues that there is an important intellectual tradition among black women, but that this tradition is often ignored or erased because of the ways in which black women have been prevented from entering academic institutions—or even from attaining literacy. To uncover the intellectual tradition of black women, therefore, you have to look not just to philosophical tomes and the pronouncements of tenured pronouncers like Charles Murray, but to oral accounts, blues lyrics, and other marginal spaces. In this context, Collins highlights Sojourner Truth's famous "Ain't I a woman" speech:

    That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman?

Truth here is thinking through, and challenging, ideas about masculinity and femininity—or as Collins says, "Rather than accepting the existing assumptions about what a woman is and then trying to prove that she fit the standards, Truth challenged the very standards themselves." Are Truth's comments more or less original than Nietzsche's paranoid, misogynist assertion that "Woman has always conspired with the types of decadence, the priests, against the "powerful", the "strong", the men?" Of the two, whose take on masculinity and femininity is more subtle, more nuanced, more surprising? For that matter, whose views have been more influential (among what groups?) on that much-brooded philosophical question, "What is woman?" and its supposedly more universal correlate, "What is man?"

Murray's statements about women and about philosophy are based on a slew of preconceptions—about what philosophy is, about which intellectual traditions are significant (not feminism for him, apparently), about which communities get to define "philosophy," and about what influence is considered consequential. When he says that there have been no significant female contributors to philosophy, he thinks he has made a statement about women. But in fact, he is telling us about philosophy—or about his particular, limited view of it. The real question shouldn't be "can woman do philosophy?" but rather "can philosophy make itself worthy of women like Sojourner Truth, Patricia Hill Collins, and Joanna Russ?" Is there a philosophy that can speak thoughtfully about equality, about injustice, and about women? Or does philosophy only exist in the cramped, querulous skulls of white men like Charles Murray, where it can celebrate its own insularity as originality, and its myopia as far-looking genius.

Charles Murray [Wikipedia]

"philosophical self-examination will continue to have a reason for being"

"Philosophy in the Popular Imagination"

by

Andrew Taggart

March/April 2014

Philosophy Now

In my life nothing good has ever come of the “What do you do?” question. Once off my lips, the line “I work on moral philosophy, on ethics,” can lead in only one of two directions. Either my acquaintance, unschooled in philosophy, will be almost preternaturally interested in what I have to say – as if she’s happened upon some sublime creature only thought to exist on blanched parchment – or she’ll be absolutely dumbstruck by the stupidity of a life well wasted. Although it could go either way, let’s suppose she’s alighted on the latter path. “Philosophy… It doesn’t get you anywhere,” she replies, reveling in a truth that she believes is as certain as the claim that night follows day. And I’ve yet to come up with a truly satisfying rejoinder, probably because there’s no such thing. Try a joke, you think? “Oh, I don’t know, it certainly gets you into debt.” Or a plea for clarification? “I suppose it depends on what you mean by ‘get you anywhere’.”

The truth is that neither response will do. For if my conversational partner already thinks philosophy a waste of time, perhaps through having a mistaken conception of philosophy, then she probably (as my former English landlady was fond of saying) “can’t be bothered” to listen to a full rebuttal, and she won’t brook a sharp counterexample either. Like so many others, she’s already made up her mind – or, better put, her mind has already been made up for her.

To do philosophy in the public sphere today is to be immediately put on the defensive, and in most cases, to stand in the wrong. And yet, how we got to this point where philosophy has been put on all fours – either fetishized as being beyond the real world or vilified for playing no part in it – still needs to be explained. A first modest step would be to get straight in our minds how many lay people conceive of philosophy, and why this (mis)conception should matter to those of us who believe, somewhat antiquely, in the life of the mind.

One place to begin is with my interlocutor’s saying that when philosophers discuss something, they never get anywhere. She could mean one of three things by this: first, that philosophers get mired in endless debate, never yielding anything in the way of concrete resolution; or second, that they continually make something out of nothing, causing all parties involved to be brought to a state of mental confusion due to the endless jostling over definitions and the petty squabbling over overnice distinctions; or third, that in the game of philosophy there’s no way to resolve who’s right and who’s wrong. These three doubts, collectively or individually, present considerable challenges to philosophy’s basic self-conception. The first doubt would have it that there can be no authoritative conclusions drawn from a set of competing claims; the second that no mental tranquility can be gained; and the third that there can be no certain judgments concerning winners and losers in the truth game.

Rather than respond to each of the doubts in turn, it occurs to me that it would be wiser to ask what assumptions lie behind my interlocutor’s worries. I suspect that she deeply feels the culturally-widespread loss of faith in the power of reason to help us understand ourselves and our world. She needn’t be a relativist or a deep skeptic to believe this. She may simply believe, for instance, that some combination of emotions, instincts, past experiences, hunches, friends’ advice and expectations, is better than reason at determining how we should act. Against this attitude the philosopher’s belief that reason has its own power to help (as well as its own inherent limitations) requires a profound attitudinal shift: humility must be cultivated where there was once impatience. The light of reason can only shine after we’ve discovered how to quiet our minds and distance ourselves from our ‘empirical selves’ – the chaos of our everyday experience. There’s a long education – an itinerary of sorts – which ultimately leads to this state of mind: a path that the uninitiated hasn’t known or hasn’t taken, and in consequence, can’t find value in.

My interlocutor might concede that if philosophy has any value, it’s philosophy in the sense that everyone has their own personal philosophy. A personal philosophy, she might suggest, is a fundamental set of beliefs that one lives by. Think of a book subtitle like ‘The Personal Philosophies of Remarkable Men and Women’. In this sense of the word, we’d be justified in saying that a coach has her own coaching philosophy, a company its corporate philosophy, a party its governing philosophy, etc.

I’m not so sure that the notion of personal philosophy gets us very far in vindicating philosophy per se, for three reasons. One is that it’s not clear to me how far anyone espousing a personal philosophy is really committed to that set of beliefs. How do we know that he lives his life so that it lines up with his own ‘philosophy’, or that when the sea looks stormy, he won’t jump ship? How far his beliefs line up with his actions has yet to be demonstrated. Another reason is that we would need to know whether his personal philosophy is worth standing by. Merely saying “This I believe!” can’t be the end point of any probing inquiry, but must instead be a starting point. And the last reason, already more than hinted at, is that, whatever it is, philosophy must be more than a doctrine, it must be a certain style of thought – a way of examining one’s life with the goal of determining whether the life I’m leading amounts to anything good, for example. But when someone expresses their personal philosophy, the question of why it’s a good thing to have a personal philosophy still remains unasked, as if it were enough just to have one. So personal philosophies are frequently unphilosophical in nature.

“All right. But if you’re going to dismiss talk of personal philosophy as hopelessly ‘unphilosophical’, you’ll have to come round to agreeing with me that philosophy is otherwise useless,” my non-philosophical friend might (philosophically) argue. “After all, the philosophy you’re talking about has no bearing on the real world. It’s mostly an academic pursuit full of puzzles, word games, and the kind of thing that’s done in universities. It’s up in the clouds, not down-to-earth, and nowhere else useful, either.”

“You’re right, contemporary professional philosophy has, in general, become unhinged from the concerns common to all of us,” I might reply. “And, yes, the worst of it has degenerated into logical puzzles and the search for ingenious counterexamples and knock-down arguments to theories no-one else is interested in. But, beyond these worries, I can hear in your voice the most potent criticism – that philosophy is worthless on the grounds that acting is more important than thinking. ‘Getting things done,’ you imply, should be ranked much higher than ‘pie-in-the-sky reasoning’.”

Suppose for a moment that my interlocutor is right. But then, aren’t there times when we don’t know how to act – as well as times when we’re completely at a loss concerning how to go on, or how we got to where we are – a place where we’d prefer not to be? Times when we’re in a crisis over which we seem to have no control? Times when our lives no longer seem to make any sense? At such times, wouldn’t it be wise for us to try to think our way through the situation, in order to come to some more complete understanding of ourselves and of our place in the order of things? It’s at such tragic moments that the moral philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s questions concerning what we care most about and what (and who) is worthy of our care might ring in our ears. At its best, philosophy asks us to be meticulously honest with ourselves. It impels us to look closely at the hand we’ve been dealt, to determine the extent to which we’ve helped or harmed others, to figure out what ultimately matters to us, and to assess how we’ve lived, in the most fundamental terms we can understand.

Were my questioner then to ask, “Why philosophy now?” my reply would be that we’re living through a historical period marked by great change. The institutions that make up the modern world – education and medicine, family and religion, home and work, among others – as well as the spheres of influence that define our existence – the economy, civil society, the state – are changing dramatically, resulting in new experiments in living being tried out. Some will get replicated and others will be ruled out. Insofar as our time has raised fundamental questions about the nature of our existence (what, for instance, is work? What is meaningful work? What is family? What is justice?), philosophy has returned in the form of a life-need – an activity that, although not fully understood, nor resounding with authority in the public imagination, is more than ever of vital importance. And yet philosophy is vital only if its conclusions are embodied, lived out in practice – that is to say, only so long as they’re taken in, sat with, mulled over, and integrated into our being. In this light, what people should find attractive about the philosophical life is a vision of an integrated soul – a person whose fundamental cares and concerns are integrated into a meaningful whole.

And if, at this late stage, she were to scoff at this seeming self-importance, I might offer the thought that one of the things I’ve learned is not to take myself too seriously. Jane Austen taught me that, along with my myriad failures. Other things I’m still learning include the art of speaking truthfully without bullying or boring; that of being honest without baring all to all; of being accurate without being self-righteous: also, how to be grateful when corrected, open-minded while committed, and, above all, how to love the small things, the grace of them all, and, not least, the sheer fact of my existence.

Reason, it turns out, is neither omnipotent nor impotent in matters of the head and heart. Philosophical wisdom is neither so rare as to be entirely extinct from the world we inhabit, nor so common as to be easily purchasable in the marketplace. Yet thanks to a mature recognition that things aren’t as they ought to be, philosophical self-examination will continue to have a reason for being, because it promises to ultimately bring us peace of mind about the things that matter most.

The progress of philosophy

"How Philosophy Makes Progress"

by

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein

April 14th. 2014

The Chronicle of Higher Education

Philosophy was the first academic field; the founder of the Academy was Plato. Nevertheless, philosophy’s place in academe can stir up controversy. The ancient lineage itself provokes dissension. Philosophy’s lack of progress over the past 2,500 years is accepted as a truism, trumpeted not only by naysayers but even by some of its most enthusiastic yea-sayers. But the truism isn’t true. Both camps mistake the nature of philosophy and so are blind to its progress. Let’s consider the yea-sayers first.

The structure of universities demands that a field be designated as a science, a social science, or one of the humanities. This structure has ill served philosophy. It’s not a science, and it’s not a social science. Therefore it belongs, by default, to the humanities, rubbing shoulders with English literature and art history. And what are the humanities? They are premised, according to one cultural critic, Leon Wieseltier, who is among the most impassioned contemporary defenders of the humanities, on "the irreducible reality of inwardness" and are, in fact, "the study of the many expressions of that inwardness." (Wieseltier’s words were written in response to an essay by my husband, Steven Pinker.)

This definition of the humanities is arguably apposite for the study of art and literature, but most philosophers would reject it, starting with Plato himself. In fact, it sounds like a course-catalog description of the shadow studies in which the prisoners of Plato’s cave are involuntarily enrolled. The man who banished the poets from his utopia would hardly acquiesce in a view of philosophy that rendered it a species of literature. If the arguments of Plato and Descartes, Spinoza and Hume, Kant and Wittgenstein yield us nothing but expressions of our irreducible inwardness, then we can judge them only on aesthetic grounds, as we do Sophocles and Dante, Shakespeare and Milton, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. Some philosophers might agree to the aestheticizing of the field (Martin Heidegger? Richard Rorty?), but many more would not. Henri Bergson argued that the relentless flow of time captures the essence of reality, and that, therefore, all concepts being static, distort reality. Proust channeled this conclusion into the literary techniques of In Search of Lost Time. But while we evaluate Bergson on the merits of his arguments, argumentative validity has no bearing on the accomplishment of Proust.

When it comes to philosophy’s progress, the inward-looking view of Wieseltier decrees that there is none: "The history of science is a history of errors corrected and discarded. But the vexations of philosophy and the obsessions of literature are not retired in this way. In these fields, the forward-looking cast backward glances." Literature and philosophy are crushed together in the hearty embrace. Plato would shudder.

Now for the naysayers. In the past, opposition to philosophy most often came from the pious, who protested the blasphemous arrogance of human reason seeking to supplant revelation. But nowadays the most vociferous of the naysayers are secular and scientific. While the yea-sayer sees philosophy as a species of literature, the naysayer sees philosophy as failed science. He urges us to look at the history of science and its triumphant expansions, which is simultaneously the history of the embarrassing shrinkage of philosophy. Yes, philosophy was the first academic field, but only because the sciences had not yet developed. Questions of physics, cosmology, biology, psychology, cognitive and affective neuroscience, linguistics, mathematical logic: Philosophy once claimed them all. But as the methodologies of those other disciplines progressed—being empirical, in the case of all but logic—questions over which philosophy had futilely sputtered and speculated were converted into testable hypotheses, and philosophy was rendered forevermore irrelevant.

Is there any doubt, demand the naysayers, about the terminus of this continuing process? Given enough time, talent, and funding, there will be nothing left for philosophers to consider. To quote one naysayer, the physicist Lawrence Krauss, "Philosophy used to be a field that had content, but then ‘natural philosophy’ became physics, and physics has only continued to make inroads. Every time there’s a leap in physics, it encroaches on these areas that philosophers have carefully sequestered away to themselves." Krauss tends to merge philosophy not with literature, as Wieseltier does, but rather with theology, since both, by his lights, are futile attempts to describe the nature of reality. One could imagine such a naysayer conceding that philosophers should be credited with laying the intellectual eggs, so to speak, in the form of questions, and sitting on them to keep them warm. But no life, in the form of discoveries, ever hatches until science takes over.

There’s some truth in the naysayer’s story. As far as our knowledge of the nature of physical reality is concerned—four-dimensional space-time and genes and neurons and neurotransmitters and the Higgs boson and quantum fields and black holes and maybe even the multiverse—it’s science that has racked up the results. Science is the ingenious practice of prodding reality into answering us back when we’re getting it wrong (although that itself is a heady philosophical claim, substantiated by concerted philosophical work).

And, of course, we have a marked tendency to get reality wrong. If you think of the kind of problems our brains evolved to solve in the Pleistocene epoch, it’s a wonder we’ve managed to figure out a technique to get so much right, one that is capable of getting reality itself to debunk some of our deepest intuitions about it—for example, relativity theory playing havoc with our ideas of space and time and quantum mechanics playing similarly with our notions of causality. In contrast, philosophical arguments, lacking that important pushback from the world, don’t have a comparable track record in establishing what Hume called matters of fact and existence.

The naysayer’s view of philosophy as failed or immature science denies it the possibility of progress, as does the yea-sayer’s view of philosophy as a species of literature. But neither conforms to what philosophy is really about, which is to render our human points of view ever more coherent. It’s in terms of our increased coherence that the measure of progress has to be taken, not in terms suitable for evaluating science or literature. We lead conceptually compartmentalized lives, our points of view balkanized so that we can live happily with our internal tensions and contradictions, many of the borders fortified by unexamined presumptions. It’s the job of philosophy to undermine that happiness, and it’s been at it ever since the Athenians showed their gratitude to Socrates for services rendered by offering him a cupful of hemlock.

One troubled conceptual border to which philosophers attend concerns science itself. In his essay "Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man," the philosopher Wilfrid Sellars agrees that the proper agenda of philosophy lies in mediating among simultaneously held points of view with the aim of integrating them into a coherent whole. But for Sellars the action is focused on the border between what he calls the "scientific image" of us-in-the-world and the "manifest image" of us-in-the-world. (His actual language is "man-in-the-world." Sellars’s paper was published in 1962, based on two talks he gave in 1960. Certain incoherencies in points of view, reflected in linguistic standards, were yet to come to light.)

"For the philosopher is confronted not by one complex many-dimensional picture, the unity of which, such as it is, he must come to appreciate; but by two pictures of essentially the same order of complexity, each of which purports to be a complete picture of man-in-the-world, and which, after separate scrutiny, he must fuse into one vision." The "manifest image" Sellars explained as the conceptual framework "in terms of which man came to be aware of himself as man-in-the-world. It is the framework in terms of which, to use an existentialist turn of phrase, man first encountered himself—which is, of course, when he came to be man. For it is no merely incidental feature of man that he has a conception of himself as man-in-the-world, just as it is obvious, on reflection, that if man had a radically different conception of himself, he would be a radically different kind of man."

In other words, the manifest image is so central to the way in which we think of ourselves that it is constitutive of those very selves. We wouldn’t be the things that we are without it—the very things who progressively elaborate the scientific image, bringing to the task our manifest image of ourselves as rational beings, "able to measure ... [our] thoughts by standards of correctness, of relevance, of evidence." Our having an ever-expanding scientific image of ourselves is itself an aspect of our manifest image, the sense that we have of ourselves as creatures who not only believe but offer reasons for our beliefs (and for our actions as well, but we’ll get to that). We can’t give up on either of the two images of us-in-the-world without destroying the other. They are codependent even when there are issues between them—which is beginning to make philosophy sound like a couples therapist.

Consider, for example, that relativity theory seems to tell us that time doesn’t flow, that all of space-time is laid out in a frozen all-at-once-ness, with the distinctions among past, present, and future "an illusion," in the words of Einstein, "albeit a persistent one." How can such a view of time be reconciled with perhaps the most conspicuous aspect of our manifest image, implicated in almost every emotion we have—our regret and nostalgia for the past, our hopes and terrors for the future? One can’t revamp our notion of physical time without disturbing our conception of the very things we are.

And there is the scientific image of us-in-the-world elaborated by neuroscience, one in which I am a brain consisting of a hundred-billion neurons, connected by a hundred-trillion synapses, and this brain itself hasn’t a clue as to what’s going on among those synapses. How can this be reconciled with the manifest image of me as me, pursuing my life, remembering it and planning for it, singularly committed to its persistence and flourishing? How can the neuron-level view be reconciled with the manifest truth that at some level our brains undeniably think about things? Where’s the aboutness to be found among those neurons and synapses? And is the scientific image even coherent if we can’t assert that we think about that scientific image, and that in thinking about it, we are thinking about the world?

Once again we come up against the codependence of the scientific and manifest images, even as they sit on the couch with arms folded self-protectively across their chests and resentful ungivingness in their glares, while philosophy, charged with bringing them together, recognizes their mutual needs. As science progresses, philosophy’s work of increasing our overall coherence progresses in tandem. In fact, the scientific image couldn’t even coherently claim for itself its expansionist triumphs without helping itself to philosophers’ work—to explicate what is essential to scientific methodology and why it is uniquely effective, to argue why it offers an image of reality and not just one more social construction.

Sellars is right that philosophy is best viewed neither as inward-expressing literature (in which case give me poetry over philosophy) nor as failed science (in which case give me physics over philosophy), but as the systematic attempt to increase our overall coherence. Still, his conception is too narrow. Philosophy does indeed always involve our manifest image, but it needn’t always involve the scientific image. In particular, some of philosophy’s most significant progress has proceeded independently of science, and here the work of increasing our moral coherence is particularly important. And this is philosophical work that hasn’t kept itself locked away in the Academy, which was where Plato chose to pursue philosophy, but has made itself felt in the agora, where a barefoot Socrates wandered among his fellow citizens, trying to get them to feel the point of his questions so that they might begin to make moral progress.

As living organisms we are primed, unthinkingly, to do all we can to thrive; to be more precise, we are primed, unthinkingly, to do all we can to increase the probability that copies of our genes will survive. But our manifest image of us-in-the-world compels us to give reasons for our actions, and this activity, though undoubtedly compromised by the unthinking processes that science has recently brought to light, proceeds on its own terms. Indeed, the fact that it proceeds on its own terms is part of the manifest image of us-in-the-world. The reasons we are prepared to give to ourselves and one another in accounting for our behavior make no mention of the machinations of the selfish gene. Such reasons would never wash, not even if you’re Richard Dawkins. On the contrary, coherence work of the moral kind pushes in the direction of less influence by those unthinking processes and the presumptions they spawn—all variations on "me and my kind are worth more than you and your kind."

Gregarious creatures that we are, our framework of making ourselves coherent to ourselves commits us to making ourselves coherent to others. Having reasons means being prepared to share them—though not necessarily with everyone. The progress in our moral reasoning has worked to widen both the kinds of reasons we offer and the group to whom we offer them. There can’t be a widening of the reasons we give in justifying our actions without a corresponding widening of the audience to which we’re prepared to give our reasons. Plato gave arguments for why Greeks, under the pressures of war, couldn’t treat other Greeks in abominable ways, pillaging and razing their cities and taking the vanquished as slaves. But his reasons didn’t, in principle, generalize to non-Greeks, which is tantamount to denying that non-Greeks were owed any reasons. Every increase in our moral coherence—recognizing the rights of the enslaved, the colonialized, the impoverished, the imprisoned, women, children, LGBTs, the handicapped ...—is simultaneously an expansion of those to whom we are prepared to offer reasons accounting for our behavior. The reasons by which we make our behavior coherent to ourselves changes together with our view of who has reasons coming to them.

And this is progress, progress in increasing our coherence, which is philosophy’s special domain. In the case of manumission, women’s rights, children’s rights, gay rights, criminals’ rights, animal rights, the abolition of cruel and unusual punishment, the conduct of war—in fact, almost every progressive movement one can name—it was reasoned argument that first laid out the incoherence, demonstrating that the same logic underlying reasons to which we were already committed applied in a wider context. The project of rendering ourselves less inconsistent, initiated by the ancient Greeks, has left those ancient Greeks, even the best and brightest of them, far behind, just as our science has left their scientists far behind.

This kind of progress, unlike scientific progress, tends to erase its own tracks as it is integrated into our manifest image and so becomes subsumed in the framework by which we conceive of ourselves. We no longer see the argumentative work it took for this advance in morality to be achieved. Its invisibility takes the measure of the achievement.

I’ve imagined Plato shuddering at a certain conception of the field he helped to shape. Would he likewise shudder at having been left so far behind by that field? I think not. If he was committed to any philosophical position, he was committed to the assertion that philosophy is progress-making. Think of the Myth of the Cave, which could be subtitled "A Philosophical Pilgrim’s Progress." Even excluding the science-directed philosophy of Sellars’s analysis, which couldn’t be accomplished in advance of scientific progress, still the task of rendering us more coherently integrated was too much for any man, for any generation, for any millennium. Our conceptual schemes are fragmented for reasons that run deep in our psyches, having nothing to do with the reasons that function in our manifest image of us-in-the-world, powered instead by unthinking strategies (strategies that science is beginning to illuminate).

No wonder progress, though real, is laborious. But given enough time and talent—and maybe even a bit of funding—our descendants will look back at us and wonder why we stopped short of the greater coherence they will have achieved.