Ciao

Are you looking to buy a car? Well, there’s the FIAT 500, newly introduced to the States. FIAT had been absent from these shores for almost forty years (quality control, anybody?); indeed, Italian cars in general have been conspicuous by their absence—except for a handful of Ferraris for a few megabuck people and a Maserati for Johnny Sack on The Sopranos (forget about Alfas and Lancias).

But back to the FIAT 500: it’s a car so small that you could park it in your linen closet, with enough spare room for a few sheets and a bed sham. (And that sham probably has more horsepower.) Nevertheless, assuming you do want a 500, don’t go running down to your local car dealer begging for one--because, according to the FIAT ads in the New Yorker (where one would have expected instead to see glossy layouts for the latest Mercedes and BMWs), the little Tinker Toy car is “available at a FIAT Studio.”

Looking for further information about the car, I clicked onto the website for Autoweek magazine. Members of the staff had driven around in the 500 and the one thing they all seemed to agree on is that it’s “cute.”

Pretentiousness is bad enough—but pretentiousness and cuteness? That’s barfable.

Ask the Wrong Question . . .

From The Economist:

JOSHUA KNOBE, a pioneer in the field of "experimental philosophy" at Yale, has contributed a fascinating piece to the New York Times' online philosophy forum on the intuitions of ordinary folk about what constitutes the "true self". Mr Knobe takes up the illustrative example of Mark Pierpont, a once-prominent figure in the evangelical Christian movement to "cure" homosexuality who (surprise!) felt himself strongly attracted to men. So, who's the "real" Mark Pierpont? Mr Knobe writes:

One person might look at his predicament and say: “Deep down, he has always wanted to be with another man, but he somehow picked up from society the idea that this desire was immoral or forbidden. If he could only escape the shackles of his religious beliefs, he would be able to fully express the person he really is.”
But then another person could look at exactly the same case and arrive at the very opposite conclusion: “Fundamentally, Pierpont is a Christian who is struggling to pursue a Christian life, but these desires he has make it difficult for him to live by his own values. If he ever gives in to them and chooses to sleep with another man, he will be betraying what was is most essential to the person he really is.”

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/06/ideology-and-self

(Knobe’s original piece: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/05/in-search-of-the-true-self/)

***

In his essay Knobe asks, “How is one to know which aspect of a person counts as that person’s true self?” “Philosophical tradition,” Knobe says, has “a relatively straightforward answer”:

This answer . . . says that what is most distinctive and essential to a human being is the capacity for rational reflection. A person might find herself having various urges, whims or fleeting emotions, but these are not who she most fundamentally is. If you want to know who she truly is, you would have to look to the moments when she stops to reflect and think about her deepest values.

But in contrast to the philosophical idea of the true self, Knobe says that people outside the field

are immediately drawn to the very opposite view. The true self, they suggest, lies precisely in our suppressed urges and unacknowledged emotions, while our ability to reflect is just a hindrance that gets in the way of this true self’s expression.

Knobe, himself, feels that neither of these definitions “fully captures the concept of a true self.” Knobe goes on to describe an experiment to test people’s ideas of a true self. To cut to the quick: the experiment determined that liberals thought that the true self was liberal and conservatives thought—well, you can guess. The findings of this study—a project of “the emerging interdisciplinary field of ‘experimental philosophy’”—Knobe says, “seem to point to an interesting new question.”

Does our ordinary notion of a “true self” simply pick out a certain part of the mind? Or is this notion actually wrapped up in some inextricable way with our own values and ideals?

(Those are two questions, but who’s counting?)

***

Well, ask a wrong question (or two) and you’ll get a wrong answer.

Knobe’s philosophical quest for the true self is grounded in the concept of “essentialism”—that is, there is underlying essence that defines the self and that is what makes it “true.”

But consider in contrast another New York Times essay, “What You See is the Real You” by psychoanalyst Willard Gaylin (Oct. 7, 1977). The essay begins as follows:

It was, I believe, the distinguished Nebraska financier Father Edward J. Flanagan who professed to having "never met a bad boy." Having, myself, met a remarkable number of bad boys, it might seem that either our experiences were drastically different or we were using the word "bad" differently. I suspect neither is true, but rather that the Father was appraising the "inner man," while I, in fact, do not acknowledge the existence of inner people. (Beautiful sarcasm, assuming you remember what Father Flanagan was all about.)

Gaylin goes on to confess that psychoanalysts have “unwittingly contributed” to a confusion that “has led to the prevalent tendency to think of the ‘inner’ man as the real man and the outer man as an illusion or pretender." We are asked to consider two cases. In the first case, a ninety-year-old man lies on his deathbed,

joyous and relieved over the success of his deception. For ninety years he has shielded his evil nature from public observation. For ninety years he has affected courtesy, kindness, and generosity -- suppressing all the malice he knew was within him while he calculatedly and artificially substituted grace and charity. All his life he had been fooling the world into believing he was a good man. This "evil" man will, I predict, be welcomed into the Kingdom of Heaven.

The second case is that of a “young man who earns his pocket money by mugging old ladies.”

I will not be told [says Gaylin] that the young man . . . is "really" a good boy. Even my generous and expansive definition of goodness will not accommodate that particular form of self-advancement.
It does not count that beneath the rough exterior he has a heart—or, for that matter, an entire innards—of purest gold, locked away from human perception. You are for the most part what you seem to be, not what you would wish to be, nor, indeed, what you believe yourself to be.

And what you “seem to be” is determined by what you do. This is the existential answer to Knobe’s essentialist quest. Gaylin sums up:

The inner man is a fantasy. If it helps you to identify with one, by all means, do so; preserve it, cherish it, embrace it, but do not present it to others for evaluation or consideration, for excuse or exculpation, or, for that matter, for punishment or disapproval.
Like any fantasy, it serves your purposes alone. It has no standing in the real world which we share with each other. Those character traits, those attitudes, that behavior—that strange and alien stuff sticking out all over you—that's the real you!

Body of Knowledge

One of the biggest laughs I’ve had in recent days came when I was watching a DVD of Agatha Christie’s The Body in the Library, the version with Joan Hickson as Miss Marple*. After opening the downstairs curtains to start the new day, the maid rushes upstairs to her mistress’ bedroom, knocks on the door, and after perfunctory invitation to enter, announces, “There’s a body in the library.” What a delicious send-up, I thought, of the artificiality of the upper-class countryside world in which Christie’s murder mysteries take place.

My delight in Christie’s self-parody (for such is what I thought it) continued with the reaction of the master of the house to the news of the corpse:

(Quoting the novel itself here) “Do you mean to tell me,” demanded Colonel Bantry, “that there’s a dead body in my library—my library!”

The butler coughed.

“Perhaps, sir, you would like to see for yourself.”

*

“It’s frightfully awkward, Mater, but I’m afraid there’s a

dead body in the library.”

“Not now, Blotto. We have guests.”

Such is the beginning of Blotto, Twinks and the Ex-King’s Daughter, Simon Brett’s spoof of the Christie-esque genre of British gentry murder and adventure novels. The scene ends with aristocratic twit Blotto addressing the butler:

“Bit of bother in the library.”

“What kind of bother?”

“Dead body.”

“I will deal with it at once, milord.”

*

In a previous blog entry, “In Character” (February, 2011), I discussed the rigidity of character that allows others to type us and to laugh at us. Not just a rigidity of character, but also a rigidity of style is open to the laughter of others. And since as the 18th Century French author Georges Leclerc, Comte De Buffon declared, “Le style est l'homme même” (“The style is the man himself”), the laughter directed at a rigidity of style is ultimately laughter against the person himself.

Simon Brett’s parody of Christie interests me less than what I took to be Christie’s self-parody. That is because deliberate self-parody implies self-knowledge. Engraved on a pillar at the entrance to the Oracle of Delphi was the admonition “Know Thyself.” And perhaps there is no greater way of demonstrating self-knowledge than deliberate self-parody.

As time has moved on, I have had increasing doubts that the self-parody was deliberate. But I really hope that it was, and that Christie had the self-awareness (at least in one novel) to laugh at herself.

***

*Avoid the more recent dramatic version of the novel starring Geraldine McEwan, who is totally miscast as Jane Marple. To see McEwan at her best, check out The Barchester Chronicles, which also features great acting by Donald Pleasance, Clive Swift, and especially Alan Rickman as the shifty-eyed Mr. Slope.

Drop the Puck

On Wednesday evening for the third time in the forty-year history of their National Hockey League franchise, the Vancouver Canucks were defeated (this time by the Boston Bruins) in the finals of the Stanley Cup playoff (they have never won the Cup, the ultimate prize in ice hockey). And for the second time in the Canucks’ Stanley Cup playoff history, after the defeat a riot ensued in downtown Vancouver. According to The Canadian Press, “Rioters burned cars, smashed windows and looted stores in the city centre for several hours on Wednesday. . . .The riot caused millions of dollars in damage, left at least 150 injured, including nine police officers.”

Who was to blame for the riot?

Again quoting The Canadian Press (via tsn.ca):

Goaltender Roberto Luongo said it was disturbing to watch images of Wednesday's riot.

"It was disappointing. Those were not the real Vancouver fans that were doing that," said Luongo.

"I think it was isolated groups. It was tough to watch that something like that happened to the city."

Other players echoed Luongo's comments that the team's devoted fans couldn't have had anything to do with the riot.

The responses of the Canucks players were following the line set down by the team’s management. General Manager Mike Gillis claimed, "Those aren't our fans who were doing that."

***

Imagine Hamish McDonald, a Scotsman, sitting down with his Glasgow Morning Herald and seeing an article about how the "Brighton Sex Maniac Strikes Again." Hamish is shocked and declares that "No Scotsman would do such a thing." The next day he sits down to read his Glasgow Morning Herald again and this time finds an article about an Aberdeen man whose brutal actions make the Brighton sex maniac seem almost gentlemanly. This fact shows that Hamish was wrong in his opinion but is he going to admit this? Not likely. This time he says, "No true Scotsman would do such a thing."

Antony Flew, Thinking about Thinking (1975)

*

Flew has given the name “No-true-Scotsman move” to the attempts by debaters to shift the boundaries of evidence to exclude from one’s side all examples that would reflect negatively on one’s argument. And it is a very popular ploy. As the philosopher Julian Baggini has stated:

One reason why the no-true-Scotsman move is so tempting is because none of us likes to think that we keep company with people we find abhorrent.

Why "normalvision"?

George Bernard Shaw relates to the readers of the Preface to his first collection of plays (Plays Unpleasant) an anecdote about a visit to his physician. His physician was pleased to inform Shaw that his eyesight was “normal.”

I naturally took this to mean that it was like every­body else's; but he rejected this construction as paradoxical, and hastened to explain to me that I was an exceptional and highly fortunate person optically, normal sight conferring the power of seeing things accurately and being enjoyed by only about ten per cent of the population, the remaining ninety per cent being abnormal. I immediately perceived the explana­tion of my want of success in fiction. My mind's eye, like my body's, was “normal”: it saw things differently from other people's eyes, and saw them better.

Shaw’s ironic stance is the opposite of another great ironist, Socrates. The latter did not claim the knowledge that “normal” vision granted; just the opposite—he insisted that he knew nothing, an assertion that allowed him to question (and prove wrong) those who laid claim to knowledge.

The problem for Shaw (which he alludes to in the above quotation, “my want of success in fiction”) is that if the overwhelming majority of people (having blurred vision) do not see things as clearly as you do, they are not going to believe you, but their own vision. Shaw said that in order to get a hearing, he tricked his audience by donning the cap and bells of a court jester, thereby following the example of the great Roman satirist Horace, ridentam dicere verum—to tell the truth laughing.

***

I am too vain, even for the purposes of satire, to adopt the pose of a Socratic ironist, pretending that I know nothing. I have, however, appropriated Shaw's idea of a "mind's eye [that sees] things differently from other people's eyes, and [sees] them better" and become "normalvision." But being particularly myopic in actual fact, when I see the truth, it is all rather blurred. So, when I don the attire of a court jester, think "fool."

Be Prepared

“You must have been a Boy Scout,” said the nurse, “because you came prepared." No, I was never a Scout, but if I’m going to have to wait (say, at a doctor’s office), I always have a book with me. And if I’m going to have a lot of down time, then I not only have a book but also my Discman and headphones. Sometimes, however, I am fooled--when I think I’m going to be taken care of quickly and leave my stuff behind. Last year, for example, because I trusted the words “You will be the first patient,” without anything to read, I was forced to endure an endless infomercial about a toothbrush on a waiting room TV.

The other day at the local hospital I was, as the nurse observed, prepared. I had to undergo a five-minute procedure that, because of the prior paperwork and subsequent recovery/observation period, took from six in the morning until one o’clock in the afternoon. But I had my book and my music. It was while I was resting after the procedure, listening to Bach through my headphones, that I noticed that someone had sneaked up beside my bed and delivered a tray of food, very welcome as I hadn’t eaten since seven the previous evening. And what was the delicacy underneath the black plastic cover? French toast. I hate French toast, and I don’t drink coffee, which was in the Styrofoam cup beside it.

French toast and coffee! Clearly, the hospital had adopted the Halloween Diet*.

*If you haven't already, read the previous blog entry..

Take It Off

Although it’s half a year away, Halloween has been on my mind recently. Certainly more on my mind than it generally is along about the end of October. And that is because in my neck of the woods Halloween has been a non-event. No little ghosts or witches have rung my doorbell for at least a decade. Back in the days when, though, I developed the perfect (for me at least) idea of how to prepare for the costumed crowd. I would not purchase Mars bars or M&Ms to distribute—because they would never make it to the door; I would, quite naturally, eat them all before the 31st. Instead, I loaded up on packs of Fruit Stripe gum. There was no way that that product, which never passed my yuck test, would ever pass my lips. So I could unbegrudgingly distribute it at my door.
Which brings me back to why I have been thinking about Halloween so out of season. The reasoning behind my former Halloween purchases of that icky gum has led me to develop the perfect diet—the Halloween Diet. Simply put: if you bring into your house only foods that you would never (short of an absolute famine in the land) let enter your mouth (in my case, mussels, sushi, macaroni-and-cheese, and rice pudding), you would be bound to lose weight.

*

Alas, I can’t help visualizing how good a container of chocolate chip ice cream, a Hebrew National salami, an Entenmann’s cheese strudel, and a couple of bagels look in my shopping cart.