Posted Saturday, June 28
Nietzsche As Educator

A traveler who had seen many countries, peoples and several of the earth's continents was asked what attribute he had found in men everywhere. He said: "They have a propensity for laziness." To others, it seems that he should have said: "They are all fearful. They hide themselves behind customs and opinions." In his heart every man knows quite well that, being unique, he will be in the world only once and that there will be no second chance for his oneness to coalesce from the strangely variegated assortment that he is: he knows it but hides it like a bad conscience - why? From fear of his neighbor, who demands conformity and cloaks himself with it. But what is it that forces the individual to fear his neighbor, to think and act like a member of a herd, and to have no joy in himself? Modesty, perhaps, in a few rare cases. For the majority it is idleness, inertia, in short that propensity for laziness of which the traveler spoke. He is right: men are even lazier than they are fearful, and fear most of all the burdensome nuisance of absolute honesty and nakedness. Artists alone hate this lax procession in borrowed manners and appropriated opinions and they reveal everyone's secret bad conscience, the law that every man is a unique miracle; they dare to show us man as he is, to himself unique in each movement of his muscles, even more, that by being strictly consistent in uniqueness, he is beautiful, and worth regarding, as a work of nature, and never boring. When the great thinker despises human beings, he despises their laziness: for it is on account of their laziness that men seem like manufactured goods, unimportant, and unworthy to be associated with or instructed. Human beings who do not want to belong to the mass need only to stop being comfortable; follow their conscience, which cries out: "Be yourself! All that you are now doing, thinking, and desiring is not really yourself."

This passage - one of my favorites in all of philosophy - is the opening to Nietzsche's essay, "Schopenhauer as Educator". You can read the whole thing here. Good site generally. But I must warn you: the young Nietzsche could have used an editor. Thing is overstuffed by about 50%. And, frankly, the portrait of Schopenhauer that emerges is totally incredible - i.e. bad - as Nietzsche himself came to see. The essay makes more sense if you treat 'Schopenhauer' as a dummy name for some ideal philosophical educator, in Nietzsche's young eyes. And I have to quibble that the translation is too flowery. Example: "Sie haben einen Hang zur Faulheit," is quite plain, so, 'they tend to be lazy' would do, and would actually be funnier. That kind of stuff keeps happening.

Nietzsche having won the election fair and square, I am preparing to teach him. It's funny. I've read Nietzsche, man and boy, for two decades. But I've never taught him, scarcely studied him in any formal setting. And, frankly, I've never studied the secondary literature. Seems to me a professor ought to know the literature, so I am dutifully immersing myself.

My preliminary verdict on this mostly lax procession of borrowed opinions is: 'mostly harmless'. Thus am I confirmed in my lofty prejudice: the secondary literature isn't as fun to read as Nietzsche himself, it doesn't help much (usually not enough to cover sunk opportunity costs, i.e. I could have been reading Nietzsche all that time.) And Nietzsche himself isn't all that difficult. But I really ought to think harder about that last item, oughtn't I?

Nietzsche himself regards his philosophy as difficult. But I think he usually means: in practice. His is a philosophy of life, and he demands a lot of the living, as per above. (Anyway, secondary literature does not help you put a practical philosophy into practice. Remember the Simpsons episode, "Little Barbershop of Horrors": "This guy's got something you'll never have, life experience." And the pencil-neck Harvard-grad cartoon writer weakly replies: "I wrote my thesis about life experience.")

Nietzsche often implies that his works are difficult in a perspectival sense. Well, perhaps it's my innate aristocratic superiority, or twenty years hanging around with the guy, or maybe I'm delusional, but Nietzsche's perspective - so far back as I can remember - has always been fairly clear to me. (Do you find the passage above fundamentally baffling, in any way, whether you agree with it or not? Are you inclined to ask someone else to explain it to you?) At any rate, no one is better at conveying Nietzsche's perspective than the man himself - not by a long shot.

Secondary literature is most useful when there are difficult, hard technical knots to be worked by insistent, cunning fingers. I do not encounter many difficulties of that order in Nietzsche. The scholar/interpreter therefore has great difficulties making himself of use, mediating readers' relationships to Nietzsche.

Of course, passages like the one I quoted can be regarded as invitations to systematicity. Bertrand Russell says this at the start of his very fine book on Leibniz: the exegete's task is to write the system the subject should have written. Arguably this is true of the Leibniz scholar - especially since Leibniz himself was always floucing about Europe in a powdered wig, doing genealogies of the House of Whoever for pin money, and otherwise distracting himself from monads. But I doubt it is true of Nietzsche that the exegete ought to substitute a system for what is actually there.

This is, of course, a classic question regarding Nietzsche: ought he to be read as having a theory or system? I think: only in a very low-level, rough-and-ready sense. Yet he is one of the greatest philosophers of all time.

More tomorrow, if I'm in the mood.
Posted Friday, June 27
Accidents Will Happen

This, via Instapundit. I'm not what you would call a Thatcher fan, but a small one, exploded in the French public sector, might do more good than harm. But, really, what do I know of such things? Not much. I link because there's something ineffably giddy and off-kilter about the young lady's interactions with her fellow human beings. What do you think? Oh, and this was a creative touch, transcription-wise, by the Telegraph:

Jonathan Aitken, the former Tory minister, adds a note of caution. "We're not there yet," he explains. "The prison unions still have a vice-like control."

It is possible Mr. Aitken was making an incredibly clever riff on a punning Elvis Costello lyric from the early 80's. But I doubt it.

UPDATE: And now I check and find the dictionary thinks the Telegraph is in the clear on this one. Now, I ask you ... if a vise is a clamp and a vice is a failing, does that makes sense?
Posted Friday, June 27
It's a pretty big shoebox; (she's not that small.)
Posted Thursday, June 26
Youth Not Wasted On the Young: Photographic Proof
Posted Wednesday, June 25
Veldtanschauung

John and I used to speculate about the traditional, 50's-style vision of family roles Zoë may end up with due to our traditional, 50's-style life. (i.e., John is actually bringing home the bacon while I fry it up in a pan, never, never letting him forget he's a man and so forth.) No need to speculate any further.

Scene setting: Zoë likes to pretend she is various animals, like, say, a baby giraffe, and then it turns out I am the mommy giraffe, and John the daddy giraffe, and so on. All these scenarios have one thing in common: nursing. Yeah, even the bees and frogs. And baby airplanes. Baby airplanes get tired and have to do nursing on mommy airplanes: little known fact.

Last night she decided that she was a lion kitten, and I was the mommy lion and we were safe under the trees in a nest. And daddy was the daddy lion. The mommy lion and baby lion were doing nursing: no surprise there. Then she thought about the daddy lion. "Daddy lion...lion work." She concluded. "Mommy lion home nursing baby lions. Making dinner." So there you have it. Lion work. I was going to explain that actually the mommy lions do all the work, killing impalas for the whole pride while the daddy lion lies around, swatting flies and occasionally seeing off some would-be daddy lion. But then I decided I didn't want to have to explain about the baby impalas.
Posted Wednesday, June 25
Les Cinq Cents Millions de la Begum

Sasha Volokh is Verneblogging. He just read Les Cinq Cents Millions de la Begum. That makes two of us! And let me tell you, it's been a long, lonely haul since way back when - '97 or '98, must have been. I was studying for my Ph.D. language exam in French. I had just finished Verne's moon books. (Sasha wonders whether he should read them next. If I recall they are less successful, as hard-sf, than Wallace and Gromit's Grand Day Out - if that helps.) I picked up Begum in the Smith Family Book Store in Eugene, Oregon. My French-English dictionary didn't have 'Begum' in it, but - on the other hand - I knew how to count. Figuring that balanced out OK, I waded in, gradually working out that 'Begum' must mean Begum. Hence the English title, The Fortune of the Begum - as I now discover. Sasha links to this enticing English edition, which I didn't know existed until now. (The internet was still just string and tin cans back in '97. Is that right? By the by Sasha links to an on-line French edition.)

WARNING: CONTAINS MILD BEGUM PLOT SPOILERS

The good French guy is supposed to inherit the whole pile, but the bad German horns in and, by means of lawyers, steals half. Then they divide Oregon between them. The French guy builds a model city - Hygienopolis? (something like that) - in the Western half. It's located where Eugene, Oregon in fact stands. (The original illustrations didn't look anything like Eugene, or Western Oregon.) The evil German constructs Stahlstadt - Steel City - in Eastern Oregon. Then he builds a great huge artillery piece to fire whopping great shells across the Cascades to destroy nice Hygeinopolis. (Big, big, big guns are a recurring theme with Verne. How do you think Verne thinks we'll get to the moon? Think Dirty Harry meets Apollo 13, but French.) But some intrepid Frenchies put a stop to that.

I've never had anyone to talk to about the only book on the Oregon experience completely untainted by experience of Oregon - until now. (I'm sure lots of French people have read it, yes, yes, but I don't speak French.) I really must email Sasha and thank him for breaking the silence. And now that I know there's an English translation, I can tell my mom - who works on various Oregon heritage projects - to include it on any appropriate lists.

It is, of course, a standard trope in fantastic fiction/adventure books/James Bond movies to set the action somewhere that will connote, for the anticipated audience, the ends of the earth. Outer Mongolia, the top of some Tibetan mountain. A South Sea island. Darkest Africa. Latveria. There some caucasian gentlemen has carved out - for good or ill - a little empire, with colorfully-garbed locals waiting on him hand and foot. It's just sort of funny that Verne picked Oregon. I'm sure this happens to Tibetans and Mongolians and South Sea islanders all the time.
Posted Tuesday, June 24


I slave over a hot scanner, paperbacks to the right of me, Tiger beer to the left; preparing - oh, sixish months worth of pulp fiction templates for this here blog. (Got a fine Western number lined up for y'all next week, so y'all be back.) It's hard to get good pulp in Singapore. Jungle tends to reclaim it, I suppose. But when the Management trekked up to Mallaca some time back we chanced upon a dusty bookstore containing a veritable trove. So now you know. The majority of the pulp pictures you will be enjoying courtesy of me for the next several months arrive via Malacca, Malaysia. Funny world.

Many covers are unsuitable for my purposes, lacking suitably complementary male and female figures. Tonight I shall share a few of these misfits with you. The thematic occasion is Belle's Sunday post on Agatha Christie's The Clocks. Yes, the truth is: pr0n used to be just terrible. Such titillating covers concealing the dreariest interiors! Well, anyway, it seemed appropriate to do something pulpish also to thank Henry for his kind praise of Belle's first chapter. And here are chapters two and three, but you can't see the rest unless you are a smarty-pants publisher; and even then not until Belle has finished it. (Just a few chapters to go.) Sort of a Philip K. Dick-meets Ross MacDonald-fights Fu Manchu-type mix-it-up-type-pulp-sci-fi thing. Anyway, pulpy.

Now how am I going to get my wife's fine first novel published? She being the shy, non-self-promoting-type. Hey, Electrolite is great blog, don't you think! oh, and Making Light is great too. What a smart, funny couple they are, those Nielsen Haydens! And Kathryn Cramer? She might know someone. Fine blog. I think she talking about attention surplus disorder today, something like that. (Now all you visitors click on those links, then they'll check their logs, come looking and get curious. Well, honey, if that doesn't work, you'll have to think of something yourself.)

Here you have them; the fruits of my 'scan first ask questions later' policy. A hastily concocted gallery of ...
Posted Monday, June 23
Itunes

What with a new Steely Dan album out and Colby Cosh blogging his possibly drug-addled reactions to it and so forth I thought I'd offer up a Steely Dan song I wrote a while back. It has a tune of sorts in my mind which is mostly a mash-up of Kid Charlemagne and Janie Runaway. You just need to imagine those tuneless, slightly sneering vocals and lots of slick LA session-guys in the background and I'm sure it'll do fine.

Steely Dan Song

Dez and Jimmy arrived at three
and started to drink G & T’s.
Dez was broke-down, broken-hearted
he said, “you won’t believe what she’s done to me.
She took off for Portland and left me in the lurch
she gave all my money to some eco-hippie church.”

Made the introductions to my new wife
and got out the silver glass.
Forget the razor, here’s my swiss army knife...
she’s only 25 but man, she’s aging fast.
She likes to say that she’s a natural blonde;
she’s put together well but there’s a part that’s not screwed on.

Chorus:
Don’t you know it’s all right
to stay up all night
with those Coney Island freaks till four
But you know it’s all wrong
to stay up all night long
and I’m never gonna see them no more.

When I came down off the coke and stopped directing
the movie in my mind I could barely face her.
She was in the corner, perfecting
her Jimmy Choo’s with a suede eraser.
She said, “when you gonna get your shit together?
I saw you making eyes at my little sister Heather.”

Don’t you know it’s all right
to stay up all night
with those Coney Island freaks till four
But you know it’s all wrong
to stay up all night long
and I’m never gonna see them no more.

Bridge:
I know the sun will soon punch through the paper sky
my mouth’s already dry, thinking about the heat.
The water in the pool looks good enough to drink
but if you start to sink,
you should just close your eyes and try to get some sleep.

Passed out in the TV light she looks pretty
so blonde and blue.
Jimmy’s moving back to the city
he says, “I’ll tell you what you ought to do:
I’ve got a roulette system, and nothing can go wrong
I won big in Carson City till the guys in suits caught on.”

Don’t you know it’s all right
to stay up all night
with those Coney Island freaks till four
But you know it’s all wrong
to stay up all night long
and I’m never gonna see them no more.
Posted Sunday, June 22
Some Things Never Change...and Some Things Do

In the eternal verity department, it's hard to get anything done in Berkeley. An article in this week's Economist, about physicist Marvin Cohen, tells us of his incredible ability to offer accurate, pencil-and-paper predictions about the conductive properties of various materials. And also, a common tale:

Initially, he spent much of his time at Berkeley [in the late 50's, it would seem] socialising with his fraternity, playing the clarinet or saxophone, and going to parties. All that changed when he moved to Chicago for graduate studies. "I really worked then," he remembers. And it paid off.

On the other hand, I think we can all agree that people used to be somewhat - what's the word? - about sex? [Naive? Blinkered? Uninventive? Unresourceful? - ed.] How else to explain this excerpt from Agatha Christie's 1963 novel The Clocks?

Edna restored the toffee to the centre of her tongue and, sucking pleasurably, resumed her typing of Naked Love by Armand Levine. Its painstaking eroticism left her uninterested - as indeed it did most of Mr Levine's readers, in spite of his efforts. His was a notable example of the fact that nothing can be duller than dull pornography. In spite of lurid jackets and provocative titles, his sales went down every year, and his last typing bill had already been sent in three times....

Edna sighed and put in a fresh sheet of paper. 'Desire had him in its grasp. With frenzied fingers he tore the fragile chiffon from her breasts and forced her down on the soap.'

'Damn,' said Edna and reached for the eraser.

You see, there was a typo. It's OK if you have to go back and read it again.
Posted Sunday, June 22
Warning: MAY Contain Matrix Plot-Spoilers

A couple days ago I disagreed with a post on The Matrix: Reloaded over Philosophy 617 way. I said: it better not be a two-level Matrix. And: it is not so weird, actually, that Neo can stop the squiddies cold. And now Juan has risen to Andy's defense, thusly:

I think it would be totally annoying if it doesn't turn out to be a two- (or multi-)layer Matrix. What is the alternative, that Neo has real superpowers? (Real, as opposed to just inside-the-matrix superpowers.) Please Wachowskis, don't do that!

The great thing about a priori philosophical arguments like this is that, in just a few short months, we'll be able to settle them empirically - while eating popcorn. In the meantime, some clarification:

As Andy rightly points out in his original post, multi-level matrix-type scenarios - false bottoms beneath false bottoms - have an honorable place in the annals of sci-fi. (Think Total Recall, for cinematic starters.) Fair enough. But I submit that it will be very annoying if the Wachowski bros. try such a thing here - more specifically now - because it would wipe out two whole movies worth of intricately constructed narrative and, for lack of a better word, philosophical mythology. There are matters of proportion and pacing and structure and balance and character to be considered. Almost any (absolutely any?) story may coherently end: and then he/she woke up. So, yes, the epistemology is quite in order, multilevel matrix-wise. Yet: most stories go all lopsided if you do that to them. I fail to see how throwing everything into the 'it was all a dream' bucket is going to satisfy.

Moving on to point two, I do quite agree that if Neo starts flying around like Superman in the real world ... well, that would be silly. So what is the alternative to supposing his has sprouted superpowers? Well, I was thinking more along the humble lines of a radio. He's sprouted a radio. Remember how Agent Smith gives Neo a gift - namely, that ubiquitous badge of agent office, the earphone thingy? Giving this signifies, from Smith's perspective, that he is now painfully free, cut off, cut loose. But it is clear that it means something from Neo's perspective as well. Why not, symmetrically, that he has grown an earphone thingy and is now painfully bound, tuned-in, wired-in to the machine world, i.e. the real world? I confess to having no idea what is up with Agent Smith, really, but I don't think it would be an embarrassing breach of sci-fi etiquette if Neo turned out to have had his mind altered by Smith to the following degree: he can sense and talk to the machines the way the agents can sense and talk to each other. (A mind/brain modified to send short-range electrical impulses is no sillier than a planet of human AA batteries, surely.) So Neo didn't call down lightning bolts from Asgard, or pull a force-field out of his butt. He just discovered he knew how to send a program command to the squiddies to shut-down.

I think once you realize it isn't so weird that Neo can stop the squid, the two-level matrix hypothesis starts to look a lot less appealing, and a lot of thematic threads sort of knit themselves together. But we will just have to wait and see. Lord knows, I've been wrong, wrong, wrong about squid before.