February 2013

Are You Threatening Me?

By in jests japes jokes jollies, nietzsche

Well, somebody seems to be all eaten up with ressentiment:

“To be incapable of taking one’s enemies, one’s accidents, even one’s misdeeds seriously for very long—that is the sign of strong, full natures in whom there is an excess of the power to form, to mold, to recuperate and to forget (a good example of this in modem times is Mirabeau, who had no memory for insults and vile actions done him and was unable to forgive simply because he—forgot). Such a man shakes off with a single shrug many vermin that eat deep into others; here alone genuine ‘love of one’s enemies’ is possible—supposing it to be possible at all on earth. How much reverence has a noble man for his enemies!”

The Winter Scene

By in poetry

I

The rutted roads are all like iron; skies
Are keen and brilliant; only the oak-leaves cling
In the bare woods, or the hardy bitter-sweet;
Drivers have put their sheepskin jackets on;
And all the ponds are sealed with sheeted ice
That rings with stroke of skate and hockey-stick,
Or in the twilight cracks with running whoop.
Bring in the logs of oak and hickory,
And make an ample blaze on the wide hearth.
Now is the time, with winter o’er the world,
For books and friends and yellow candle-light,
And timeless lingering by the settling fire.

While all the shuddering stars are keen with cold.

II

Out from the silent portal of the hours,
When frosts are come and all the hosts put on.
Their burnished gear to march across the night
And o’er a darkened earth in splendor shine,
Slowly above the world Orion wheels
His glittering square, while on the shadowy hill
And throbbing like a sea-light through the dusk,
Great Sirius rises in his flashing blue.
Lord of the winter night, august and pure,
Returning year on year untouched by time,
To hearten faith with thine unfaltering fire,
There are no hurts that beauty cannot ease,
No ills that love cannot at last repair,
In the victorious progress of the soul.

III

Russet and white and gray is the oak wood
In the great snow. Still from the North it comes,
Whispering, settling, sifting through the trees,
O’erloading branch and twig. The road is lost.
Clearing and meadow, stream and ice-bound pond
Are made once more a trackless wilderness
In the white hush where not a creature stirs;
And the pale sun is blotted from the sky.
In that strange twilight the lone traveller halts
To listen to the stealthy snowflakes fall.
And then far off toward the Stamford shore,
Where through the storm the coastwise liners go,
Faint and recurrent on the muffled air,
A foghorn booming through the Smother–hark!

IV

When the day changed and the mad wind died down,
The powdery drifts that all day long had blown
Across the meadows and the open fields,
Or whirled like diamond dust in the bright sun,
Settled to rest, and for a tranquil hour
The lengthening bluish shadows on the snow
Stole down the orchard slope, and a rose light
Flooded the earth with beauty and with peace.
Then in the west behind the cedars black
The sinking sun stained red the winter dusk
With sullen flare upon the snowy ridge,–
As in a masterpiece by Hokusai,
Where on a background gray, with flaming breath
A scarlet dragon dies in dusky gold.

— Bliss Carman

You Will be Hollow. We Shall Squeeze You Empty and Then We Shall Fill You With Ourselves.

By in augean stables, gender, psychology, race, tribalism

One of my frequent criticisms of religious believers has been the dishonest way in which they profess to humble themselves before a transcendant ideal which, upon closer examination, turns out to be nothing but a projection of their own narcissism. The “true” message of Christianity, for example, amazingly, incredibly, shockingly turns out to be identical with the temperament and culturally shaped beliefs of the speaker. They proclaim themselves lowly servants of a greater whole upon which they nonetheless assert unrestrained creative control. They feign innocence while digging up buried treasure which they themselves planted under cover of psychological darkness.

It’s not much different when it comes to identity politics. White social justice warriors pride themselves on their magnanimity upon ceding “control of the dialogue” to representatives of marginalized groups. If you think you detect a conveniently self-fulfilling prophetic aspect to how those “true” representatives of black interests, feminist interests, etc. are chosen, never fear. There’s a white guy over there with polls, graphs, statistics and unimpeachable rationality who has already figured it all out for you.

Our Way Lighted by Burning Men

By in conspicuous crusading, extraordinary popular delusions, history, philosophy, unintended consequences

Jonathan Haidt, following Jerry Muller’s lead, distinguishes conservatism from orthodoxy:

Orthodoxy is the view that there exists a “transcendant moral order, to which we ought to try to conform the ways of society.” Christians who look to the Bible as a guide for legislation, like Muslims who want to live under sharia, are examples of orthodoxy. They want their society to match an externally ordained moral order, so they advocate change, sometimes radical change. This can put them at odds with true conservatives, who see radical change as dangerous.

Muller next distinguished conservatism from the counter-Enlightenment. It is true that most resistance to the Enlightenment can be said to have been conservative, by definition (i.e., clerics and aristocrats were trying to conserve the old order.) But modern conservatism, Muller asserts, finds its origins within the main currents of Enlightenment thinking, when men such as David Hume and Edmund Burke tried to develop a reasoned, pragmatic and essentially utilitarian critique of the Enlightenment project.

…Muller went through a series of claims about human nature and institutions, which he said are the core beliefs of conservatism. Conservatives believe that people are inherently imperfect and prone to act badly when all constraints and accountability are removed. Our reasoning is flawed and prone to overconfidence, so it’s dangerous to construct theories based on pure reason, unconstrained by intuition and historical experience.

A similar theme which I heard years ago differentiated conservative from radical, not from liberal. Liberal is rather the opposite of authoritarian. Others have juxtaposed empiricism and rationalism in a similar manner. And this theme is also characteristic of the thinking of John Gray and Isaiah Berlin, two of my favorite authors:

Gray, like his friend and mentor Isaiah Berlin, sets himself against all proponents of the grand idea – of progress, of perfectibility, of the right and only way to live. He would, one suspects, champion the bureaucrat over the ideologue any day. We love to castigate bureaucracies – look what a hate-word “Brussels” has become for our latter-day Jacobins of right and left – but consider the alternative. People who kiss their spouses goodbye in the morning, stick from nine-to-five at their humdrum desks, and come home in the evening looking forward to a nice dinner and something on the telly, are surely to be preferred to those cold-eyed demagogues, “the prophets with armies at their backs”, as Isaiah Berlin has it, who conceive a burning vision of exactly how the world should work and are prepared to spill the blood of millions to ensure the imposition of their system.

A Pig Satisfied

By in animals

Christine Korsgaard:

This problem pervades our efforts to think about the other animals, for when we try to think about what it is like to be another animal, we bring our human standards with us, and then the other animals seem to us like lesser beings. A human being who lives a life governed only by desires and instincts, not by values, would certainly be a lesser being. But that doesn’t mean that the other animals are lesser beings. They are simply beings of a different kind. When we look at the other animals through the lens of our own standards, just as when we look at them through the lens of our own interests, we cannot get them properly in view.

We are all born, as Eliot says, in moral stupidity, unable to see others except through the lens of our own interests and standards. Kant suggested that it took four steps for us to emerge from this moral stupidity, but perhaps there is a fifth step we have yet to take. That is to try to look at the other animals and their lives unhindered by our own interests and specifically human standards, and to see them for what they really are. What is important about the other animals is what we have in common: that they, like us, are the kinds of beings to whom things can be important. Like us, they pursue the things that are important to them as if they were important absolutely, important in deadly earnest—for, like us, what else can they do?

Get Yourself Correct

By in race, tribalism

FdB:

When I saw, in this Atlantic Wire piece, that Internet personality “Jay Smooth” was lecturing Radley Balko on his attitude towards people of color, I laughed out loud. It’s like God decided, “I’m going to create the perfect possible example of cultural liberalism’s preference for feelings over material conditions.”

Jay Smooth makes videos on the Internet. So he’s got that going for him. Radley Balko, meanwhile, has gotten actual black people out of actual jail. He has worked tirelessly against police abuse and corruption, the drug war, and mass incarceration, and specifically the mass incarceration of young black men. He’s been cited in court cases where innocent people were freed. His journalism– you know, the kind where you go out into the world and find out facts in order to create change, rather than sit in front of a webcam and use tired slang– has helped to create material change in the world. That matters. You know what doesn’t matter? Tweets about how offended you are by something. Your tweets do nothing. They accomplish nothing, make nothing happen. They do less than nothing: they are nothing that you mistake for something, and thus make it harder to actual apprise the actual situation. Let’s check the percentages, please.

If you’re a white person who thinks that “Jay Smooth” has the right to lecture Radley Balko about race in America, you care more about your social positioning than about the material conditions of the nonwhite people you claim to be speaking for. Period. But then that’s true of white, web-enabled social liberalism in general: it is fodder for the endless cultural and social status competitions of the people undertaking it, and not for the productive purpose of ending racism, or sexism, or homophobia, or other ills. Online social liberalism is a cul de sac.

It’s all just so goddamned good. I can’t add anything but applause! (I only wish Freddie were black, so I could watch good progressives like TBogg and DougJ call him a house liberal and a lawn jockey in response.)

Existential Jazz

By in books, extraordinary popular delusions, foolosophy

Richard Holloway:

What I got from Gray’s book on Berlin was a sense of the tragic and intractable nature of the human condition. Gray writes that the first implication of Berlin’s perspective is a rejection of any idea of a perfect society or a perfect human life. Its second implication is that a developed morality cannot have a settled hierarchical structure that solves our dilemmas by telling us how to act. In political and moral life, we are engaged in endless trade-offs between conflicting goods and evils and there is no infallible system against which we can measure these values against each other. That is why we often arrive at situations in which more deliberation will take us no further and we have no choice but to act.

As Denis Healey reminded us, though we never reach conclusions in politics we have to make decisions. The way I like to describe this approach to life is as a kind of flowing improvisation or existential jazz in which we constantly adapt to new circumstances in order to keep the music going. It is possible to understand the operations of natural evolution in this way and Gray believes that other animals are better performers than we are because they don’t get stuck on fixed scripts the way we do.

…While Gray believes that life can be lived well without such metaphysical comfort, the gentle side of him has sympathy for those who find consolation in these myths of final redemption. The real illusion that Gray is trying to overthrow, in both Straw Dogs and The Silence of Animals, is what philosophers call “teleology”, which is the belief that there is a purpose to life that can be discovered by thought or mediated by revelation. In our determined pursuit of both religious and secular versions of this grand illusion, we have tortured and destroyed each other in unimaginable numbers throughout our history.

…Yet in this book, a new note has entered his writing. To his prophetic contempt for those who destroy others in the name of their theories has been added a lyrical new theme he calls “godless mysticism”, through which he calls us to an attitude of contemplative gratitude for the only life we will ever have.

He writes: “Godless mysticism cannot escape the finality of tragedy, or make beauty eternal. It does not dissolve inner conflict into the false quietude of oceanic calm. All it offers is mere being. There is no redemption from being human. But no redemption is needed.”

Cool, daddy-o. I can dig that.

Wading Through the Market’s Waste, We Locked Eyes, Felt Our Loneliness Abate

By in art, extraordinary popular delusions

Thom Yorke, answering readers’ questions:

You said in an interview once that you don’t like the idea that a banker could be listening to your music. Have you lost hope in people in the banking system? Or do you think artists can influence bankers? Katarzyna Slopien

I think artists can influence only through making music that challenges people, excites them and flips them out. Music that repeats what you know in ever-decreasing derivation, that’s unchallenging and unstimulating, deadens our minds, our imagination and our ability to see beyond the hell we find ourselves in. My problem with bankers or, rather, the banking system is, that it’s the ultimate expression of “Fuck you, buddy”. There is no communal human consciousness, no will to co-operation, we are all slaves to the market. It’s as if it has always been thus. It hasn’t.

These bankers have made personal fortunes by stealing, exploiting and destroying our assets, our workforce, our resources and our planet. All protected, assisted and now bailed out by our governments using our money. High priests to a false god that they’ve done very nicely out of, thank you very much.

That’s the rant over. In answer to your question, I guess lots of them are around my age and I know a few, and I am very aware of having led a very different life to most people my age. I hate to judge on an individual basis but I think whatever wealth has been accumulated in this sphere has not made those who have done it necessarily happy.

I hope, like I said, that sometimes music, maybe even my music, would help unravel the fear, cynicism and greed that stands between us and changing this shit for good. Who knows? Perhaps they’ll wake up tomorrow and say: “You know what? Fuck this. I’ve found my conscience, it was in the suit that’s just come back from the dry cleaner’s and I’m going to jolly well use it.”

Oh, Thom. Are you still on this silly romantic kick? There is no salvation for abstractions like “humanity” through some sort of objectively inspiring “art”; there are only individuals finding contingent meaning and inspiration where they can. What I mean to say is, fuck your derivative, unchallenging, snobbish clichés about how we will finally be free when the last bankster has been strangled with the guitar strings of the last Nickelback. Fear, cynicism and greed are equally integral parts of what it means to exist as a human, both collectively and individually; the progressivist notion that they can be neatly delineated and surgically excised, leaving only the “good” bits behind, is one of the oldest delusions of humankind, and ironically responsible for no small amount of suffering itself. We’re never going to all be inspired by the same things at the same time or desirous of the same ends by the same means. Let me guess: that thought depresses you? Let me reassure you: it doesn’t necessarily have to.

Autofallacio

By in extraordinary popular delusions, psychology

Sam McNerney:

But then something unexpected occurred. Suddenly and paradoxically I only saw the world through the lens of this research. I made inaccurate judgments, illogical conclusions and was irrational about irrationality because I filtered my beliefs through the literature on decision-making – the same literature, I remind you, that warns against the power of latching onto beliefs. Meanwhile, I naively believed that knowledge of cognitive biases made me epistemically superior to my peers (just like knowing Sartre made me more authentic).

Only later did I realize that learning about decision-making gives rise to what I term the confirmation bias bias, or the tendency for people to generate a narrow (and pessimistic) conception of the mind after reading literature on how the mind thinks narrowly. Biases restrict our thinking but learning about them should do the opposite. Yet you’d be surprised how many decision-making graduate students and overzealous Kahneman, Ariely and Gilbert enthusiasts do not understand this. Knowledge of cognitive biases, perhaps the most important thing to learn for good thinking, actually increases ignorance in some cases. This is the Sartre Fallacy – we think worse after learning how to think better.

I can’t recall any particular examples off the top of my head, but this theme is prevalent in a lot of writing about Zen, too — if you think you’ve become enlightened, it’s a pretty good sign you haven’t. But if you think denying that you’re enlightened means that you are, then you’re wrong.

Adjacent to Refuse is Refuse

By in jests japes jokes jollies, socmed

(via)

Gary Stix:

These are “Facebook abstainers,” people who engage in a “performative mode of resistance, which must be understood within the context of a neoliberal consumer culture, in which subjects are empowered to act through consumption choices—or in this case non-consumption choices—and through the public display of those choices.” In other words, is dropping your Facebook account an act of political defiance?

According to Portwood-Stacer, those who commit “Facebook suicide” or frequent the @NotOnFacebook Twitter account, or post to the hashtag #facebooksucks (Facebook no, Twitter si?) or flee to the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine may be embracing a form of reverse snobbery: “taste and distinction are invoked by refusers through their conspicuous display of non-consumption.” Call it reverse Veblenism or maybe just imagine retro hipsters from Williamsburg casting off the psychological bondage of keeping up with social media commitments.

…One refuser named Bruce and his male family members “felt that masculine norms of rugged independence and seriousness—in contrast to the implicit femininity of playfulness and dependence—were bound up in the men’s vocal disidentification with social networking activities.”

I am easily amused.

Vanity of Vanities, Saith the Preacher

By in technology, writing

Angus Croll:

Writing online is so nearly effortless that reading (not to mention reflection, deliberation and thought) has become a chore in comparison. It’s easier to jot off a patronizing, indignant or self-aggrandizing missive than it is to take the trouble to read the whole article or give fair consideration to the author’s perspective. Thus the vicious circle sets in…

Why go to the trouble of producing a balanced or inquiring article for a medium that encourages rapid-fire feedback over deliberation and reflection? And why, in turn, respond to that article with any semblance of balance in a medium that rewards bite-sized bluster over nuance and accuracy? And why, for that matter, bother reading the article at all, when speed is everything, and you’d better get your soundbite in now because they’ll be new outrages to decry tomorrow? Anyone who wanted to learn something about Aaron Swartz before writing about him, to reflect and deliberate on his suicide before offering an opinion was too late, because by then the internet had lost interest and moved on to a hotter topic (horse-meat burgers, or the Harlem Shake, for instance).

“Doctor, it hurts when I do this!” “Well, don’t do that.” Yeah, pretty much. Don’t waste your time trying to be in the conversation but not of it. Be the change you want to see on the Internet! Write about things that matter for however few people want to quietly appreciate it, and let that be good enough.

Security Through Obscurity

By in socmed

So, as we were musing about here last summer, the inevitable is apparently occurring, and the yutes these days are looking for a cooler place to hang out, i.e. Tumblr, where they won’t run into their parents and teachers and a whole bunch of other old, lame people they want to avoid, i.e. Facebook. I found this part funny, though:

Tumblr actually became huge because it is the anti-blog. What is the No. 1 reason that people quit blogging? Because they can’t find and develop an audience. This has been true of every blogging platform ever made. Conversely, blogs that do find an audience tend to keep adding that type of content. This simple philosophy boils down to the equation: Mo’ pageviews = mo’ pages.

But Tumblr does not conform to this calculus, and the reason is that a large percentage of Tumblr users actually don’t WANT an audience. They do not want to be found, except by a few close friends who they explicitly share one of their tumblogs with. Therefore Tumblr’s notoriously weak search functionality is A-OK with most of its user base.

Tumblr provides its users with the oldest privacy-control strategy on the Internet: security through obscurity and multiple pseudonymity. Its users prefer a coarse-grained scheme they can easily understand over a sophisticated fine-grained privacy control — such as Facebook provides — that requires a lot of time and patience. To quote Sweet Brown, Ain’t nobody got time for that.

Tumblr proves that the issue is less about public vs. private and more about whether you are findable and identifiable by people who actually know you in real life.

Someone once told me in response to my puzzlement over Tumblr’s existence that it was a popular alternative to “traditional” blogs because it was more ideally suited to use on a smartphone. Eh, whatever; as with people who claim that tweeting is less “effort” than the brute labor of emailing, I don’t understand and I don’t want to understand. I’m not the target audience. But I do appreciate this ethos, however. I’ve always said that if I ever got inexplicably popular, I’d sneak away like a thief in the night and set up shop elsewhere, like those people you read about who fake their own death to start a new life as a blank slate. Knock on wood, though; I’ve managed to hide in plain sight via the clever use of… a pseudonym. That, and the fact that I tend to write about things of interest to no one else. I don’t know if the humor’s too offbeat, the topics are too quirky, or the prose is too boring, but whatever it is, I’m afraid to think about it too much lest I inadvertently alter the formula.

The Fox Knows Many Things

By in education, foolosophy

Jessa Crispin:

And please note I said educated not intelligent. It’s a different strata. Because even if you do decide then to autodidact yourself, there’s this strange anxiety among the Ivy League whatever, or at least there is sometimes with me. When I’m writing about a new topic, I dread making an ass of myself, and I can blame my decision to leave college after one year for that. (Not to mention, the fact that what preceded that education-wise was a rural education, one focused on turning its students into farmers, because that is what they were going to be, and not poets.) I read a lot of books on the subject before I dare to write about it, but what if they are the wrong books? What if someone in college told everyone else what the right books are, and everyone knows I read the wrong ones? It’s a strange dynamic, to work in an intellectual field without the intellectual background.

Secret handshakes and code words, yep. Luckily, I don’t work in an intellectual field. I might as well stand in front of the gates of academia with a straw hat and overalls, long grass shoot hanging off my lip, befuddled look on my face, watching the turnip truck upon which I had only moments earlier been a passenger disappearing over the horizon in a rooster tail of dust. Per the Peter Principle, the blog format is pretty much my highest level of competence.

Armida’s Garden

By in art, nietzsche

One day the wanderer slammed a door behind himself, stopped in his tracks, and wept. Then he said: “This penchant and passion for what is true, real, non-apparent, certain — how it aggravates me! Why does this gloomy and restless fellow keep following and driving me? I want to rest, but he will not allow it. How much there is that seduces me to tarry! Everywhere Armida’s gardens beckon me; everywhere I must keep tearing my heart away and experience new bitternesses. I must raise my feet again and again, weary and wounded though they be; and because I must go on, I often look back in wrath at the most beautiful things that could not hold me — because they could not hold me.”

— Nietzsche

Michael Clune:

I divide the writers, artists, philosophers, and critics engaged in this effort into two camps. The first I call the “reasonable” camp. These writers recognize that no actual artistic object can retain its freshness after repeated experiences. Critics from Viktor Shklovsky to Michael Fried see in the continual innovation of musical, literary, and visual forms an attempt to counter the effect of time on experience. Once we become accustomed to Cézanne’s way of arresting our senses, we move on to Picasso. After Joyce’s verbal explosions, we take up Beckett’s minimalism.

Not just any new object will do the work of pleasurably extending intense perception. The object needs to be balanced between familiarity and novelty; the new thing must give the mind some foothold in the known, otherwise we just tune it out as noise. And the history of art—with each new artist taking up and transforming the forms of the old—provides a perfectly reasonable process for delivering time-slowing artifacts poised between old and new.

Very reasonable—but the true heirs of Augustine and Keats adopt the unreasonable approach. The reasonable writers respect the temporal constraints of perception. They transfer the desire to enhance life through art from the individual work to the historical succession of forms. The unreasonable writers, those who want the impossible—writers from Thomas De Quincey through Marcel Proust, Vladimir Nabokov, and John Ashbery—seek the creation of a work that will permanently arrest perception at the moment of the first encounter. The simple logic of children and utopians drives them. We want to stop time. Only through the persistence of the intense perception of the same object can we be assured that our ancient ambition has been achieved.

I know the feeling well from listening to music. There’s a certain hypnotic magic that accompanies a favorite song for a little while, inspiring a euphoric sense that surely, this time, the feeling is too perfect to ever fade. I should know; I’ve felt that way thousands of times. And each time, even as rationality and memory are patiently trying to claim otherwise, part of me finds it impossible to resist the desire to believe it. No, no! The melody, the rhythm, the poetry, they’re perfect! This is revealed musical truth here! I’ll never let familiarity breed contempt!

All my beautiful friends have all gone away
Like the waves
They flow and ebb and die

— The Cult, “Revolution”

Like I said: thousands of times. That pattern, itself, is what’s eternal. And to me, there’s a comfort in that. I wouldn’t really want it to be different. As a panta rheist, how could it be otherwise? Ebb and flow are both necessary parts of the same cycle. But each time we outlast or outgrow something we’ve loved, it defines the borders of our separateness all the more sharply, feeling like death and mourning in miniature. I do feel like there’s probably some sort of primal desire in humankind to submerge oneself in something greater, something all-encompassing, where we could shrug free of the burden of our own responsibilities and sense of existential isolation. Clune’s “unreasonables” are those who feel that burden more strongly.

I yearn to belong to something, to be contained
in an all-embracing mind that sees me
as a single thing.
I yearn to be held
in the great hands of your heart —
oh let them take me now.

— Rilke

When You’ve Once Said a Thing, That Fixes It

By in augean stables, language, psychology

“It’s too late to correct it,” said the Red Queen: “when you’ve once said a thing, that fixes it, and you must take the consequences.”

Daniel Levitin:

There are a host of other problems. Recall that the IAT rests on the assumption that more difficult mental operations—such as resolving conflicts in attitudes about others—take more time. But there are other reasons that a mental operation can take more time. One is unfamiliarity—we respond more slowly to words and images that are unfamiliar because they require more retrieval and processing time. Another is the confusion born of linguistic and conceptual associations. The word “old” is often used as a synonym for “worn out,” “spent” or “obsolete” when we’re talking about technological products like computers, cars or sewing machines. When prompted by that word while taking an IAT, our brains automatically call up these associations; despite what the authors would have you believe, the fact that we have such associations doesn’t mean we hate or devalue our grandmothers.

Another confounding factor is that the brain is designed to detect patterns of co-occurrence and responds to learned associations based on a lifetime of hearing word pairings. If I hear the word “bread,” the first word that comes to mind might be “butter,” even if I never eat butter, never buy it and for that matter don’t even eat bread. But associations aren’t the same as biases. My quickness in conjuring one word when hearing another says nothing about an “implicit bias.” It says even less about how I would treat another individual. Common sense would tell you this.

Such linguistic associations occur at a shallow, superficial level of processing and reflect only statistical patterns in the language, not held opinions; and not everyone who knows the stereotypes about race, age or gender believes them.

Attempting to find moral significance or straightforward causality in word choice sounds like the concept of a Freudian slip, rebranded for our modern age. Honestly, the more I learn about language — and I’m hardly any sort of scholar — the more deeply amazed I am that such flimsy, abstract signs allow us to understand as much as we do and communicate at all.

Without Music, Life Would be a Mistake

By in music, philosophy

Kathleen Higgins:

Actually, I got interested in non-Western philosophy very early. The high school English teacher that told me that philosophy was what I was interested in read an excerpt from J. Krishnamurti in his class one day, and I insisted after class that he loan me the book. I also took a Chinese philosophy seminar my first semester in graduate school. Another motivation for my interest was that, having majored in music as an undergraduate, I’d been fascinated by a course I’d taken on Indian music. Indian music was tremendously sophisticated, but based on very different structural choices than the Western tonal tradition had made. I was quite interested in the philosophy of music, and I was rather disappointed, studying philosophy in grad school, to discover how much of Western tradition after the ancient Greeks more or less ignored music. When I was introduced to Chinese philosophy, I found just what I was looking for, a philosophical tradition that paid a lot of attention to music and its relation to the good life quite generally.

Y’know, that actually sounds fascinating. I’ve never looked at Chinese philosophy with an eye toward that perspective. I’d be interested to see how it compares and contrasts with the Greek concept of mousikê.

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