waste

Recently on facebook (yes, I, too, am on facebook, fond readers; my output is not limited to this, my blog) I "defined" bad faith (as in mauvaise foi, not as in just anything for which the phrase is used in English) concisely if gnomically as "identification with an identity", and followed it up with a link to the Onion classic Asshole Admits to Being Asshole in Supreme Asshole Move, which also, I claimed, exemplified bad faith. Unsurprisingly not all found either of these transparent or informative; hence this post, which attempts to explain why I thought "identification with an identity" was a decent way of getting at (part of) what's intended by "bad faith". This is not actually a good post, I think, but I said I would make one, so here we all are.

I say "part of" because I tend to be guided by Dick Moran's presentation of bad faith in Authority and Estrangement, where he's mostly concerned with what one might call the bad faith of identity (he calls it something, but I can't remember what), as against what Sartre in Being and Nothingness seems more concerned with, what one might (and I think Moran does) call the bad faith of transcendence. (Incidentally, and somewhat irrelevantly, I find Sartre's presentation extremely confusing, because many of the examples of bad faith he gives seem to me to be merely self-deception, and while he does characterize bad faith as self-deception it doesn't seem as if he thinks it's found in every case of self-deception. (For instance, the (not very sympathetic) discussion of the homosexual, pp 107f.) And others, the ones that do seem more significant, don't seem to have anything to do with self-deception, necessarily.) But anyway: the key, I think, lies in Sartre's characterization of a person as "at once a facticity and a transcendence" (p 98 of my edition), and the basic move of bad faith is taking oneself to be entirely a facticity or a transcendence. (Something that needn't involve self-deception!) So the bad faith of transcendence is exhibited by "the man who in the face of reproaches or rancor dissociates himself from his past by insisting on his freedom and on his perpetual re-creation" (100), or, in Moran's example, a habitual gambler who, realizing that his habit is unfortunate, just decides that he'll stop. Indeed, a person is not exhausted by his or her present characteristics, and is changeable, and can give direction to those changes; one enjoys freedom in that respect. But one can't just up and decide to be different—the present facts do matter. (This is the kind of bad faith that Velleman accuses Frankfurt's agents of indulging in, and I think he's right: the writing-off of disfavored actions as not really mine could come straight out of one of the examples in Being and Nothingness.)

The bad faith of identity is what the asshole exemplifies. Why is admitting to being an asshole the supreme asshole move? In this case, at least, because the recognition of assholery brings with it no desire to change into a non-asshole, or acknowledgement that there's anything one might reasonably say against being an asshole. Instead, an asshole is just who he is—it's a fact—so you'd better get used to it. This is bad faith: it just isn't true that a person is an asshole the way (say) a person is dependent on oxygen to live. It's treating a fact about one's person (or personality) as if it characterized one's essence—swinging entirely to the side of facticity. That, more or less, is what I meant by "identification with an identity": one has various identities or roles one plays, self-conferred or conferred by others, which have or are thought to have various characteristic properties. And one can identify with them in the sense of taking the identity not to be something one has, or has adopted, or has had foisted upon one, or whatever, but of being what one is, really and deeply, such that further things about oneself follow from it. One sees it in statements like "I'm an English major, so …"; "I'm an artist, so [something about an unconventional personal life is apt to follow]"; "I'm a geek, so …". One can recognize that one has some, many, or all of the trappings of, and will be assigned, some label or identity; it's a further step to embrace it, and yet a further step to see oneself as defined by it, with further consequences for who one is, what one does, etc. (The flip of the switch would seem to come in a move from "because I do such-and-such, I am a so-and-so" to "because I am a so-and-so, I do such-and-such", but even there, there's a difference in inflection; it needn't be bad faith to affirm "because I am a doctor, I often work long hours".) That's what "identification with an identity" was meant to capture.

Limericks/double dactyls/etc composed but not previously made public (outside of facebook):

1. If there's one thing that's good, and sans phrase,
   It's a will that submits to the laws:
   Not desire and friends,
   But the Kingdom of Ends!
   (See part 3 for some stuff about "cause".)
   
   
2. I admit first of all that I'm sick.
   And I'm spiteful as well---a real prick.
   I'd run into a wall
   To show once and for all
   You can't reckon me as clocks tick.
   
   (you are requested to take the metrical hash of the last line as thematic.)
3. Once as I slowly the
   Streets of Laredo was
   Ambling in outfit of
   Cowboy along,
   
   Cerements spotted I
   Wrapping a cowboy who
   Testamentarily
   Sang me this song.
   
   (Spot me "cerements".)

4. Connolly and Pearse
   Are wearing green
   A terrible birth
   Of beauty's seen
   Easter Shave
   
   
5. I'd put it from a candle
   About a foot away,
   And nosh on Brot und Mandel
   And watch the face decay.
   
   The plea "Oh help me sir!"
   From Cumber then would come,
   "Before my eyes I see a blur;
   I fear my race is run!"
   
   But I would sit back in my chair
   And watch his features melt;
   "This fate will come to foul and fair:
   Now play the hand you're dealt."
6. (The first quatrain here was supplied by the artistic director of Golosa after I pronounced myself incapable of finding a beginning for the second quatrain)
   
   Wordily, wordily,
   Wolfson outdoes himself,
   though for a subject he
   doesn't stray far:
   
   People who order a
   Triple genever make
   Juniperemptory
   Claims on the bar.<
7. (My contribution to a series of limericks composed, at my request, on the rhymes of "unshriven" and "unswiven"):
   
   The bereaved thus by guilt so beriven
   Prayed daily that he'd be forgiven:
   Ivan clove to his wife
   For all of her life
   But she died with her cleft yet uncliven.
   
   
8. There was once a roaming antelope
   Who returned to his wife, hight Penelope,
   And their home in a comb
   Where she wove at her loom
   The plot to the opera Partenope.
   
   
9. Abbreviated verse (the topic suggested by the unfolding of a conversation):
   
   Elizabeth Taylor was really hoopy, i.e.,
   Like Ford Prefect and his towel she'd always know where her hat is,
   And would certainly have underplayed some parts, e.g.
   Phyllis Dietrichson or Dorothy of "Oz" make a good sample,
   She'd've played them psychologically incorrectly, viz.,
   Altogether meek and mild; in a word, tamely.
   
   
10. That stylish young poet, John Keats,
    Was shocked when he first met Bill Yeats,
    For the latter was clad
    Like a suburban dad
    In tennies and t-shirt and sweats.
    
    
11. Jiggery-pokery
    Hapax legomena,
    Terms that appear only
    Once in a text,
    
    Often because of their
    Semelfactivity
    Mean lexicographers
    Must remain vexed.
12. Squiggily wiggily
    Ink-shooting creatures, if
    Wounded or sick or if
    Caught in a snare,
    
    Give themselves up to the
    Eightfold attentions of
    Octopodiatrist
    Medical care.
    
13. Ookily spookily
    summoning rituals
    ought to be over be-
    fore the first light:
    
    If there's no suitable
    antecrepuscular
    shadow surrounding, the
    demons don't bite.
    
14. Jiggery Pokery
    Friedrich von Schlegel schrieb
    Bücher ironisch, ro-
    mantisch, und dreist:
    
    Ein gar willkürlicher,
    dazu gebildeter,
    symphilosophischer,
    bildender Geist.

As is well known, or at least, as is much said, Michelangelo described himself, in sculpting, as merely removing the marble obscuring the sculpture latent within it. (Or perhaps as removing the parts he didn't want. But let's go with the formula previously given.) We can give this a strong reading: the sculpture is already there in the marble and has only to be revealed by the sculptor. In that case, the sculptor can do well or poorly according to how well the thing, when declared done, actually does align with the latent sculpture. That is, the sculpture already in the marble gives the standard of correctness for the sculptor's activities, and it is a valid question, both for the sculptor and for appreciators of the result, whether the sculptor got it right. And that question stands regardless of how satisfied with the sculpture, considered as it were in its own right, anyone might be. Michelangelo's David: a masterpiece, without question, a virtuoso work with which anyone ought be satisfied. But perhaps in that block of marble there lurked—a statue of Perseus. Michelangelo, and we, might be perfectly satisfied with the sculpture. But it's wrong; irretrievably so, in fact.

No one really cares whether or not the sculpture in fact produced corresponds to what lay within the marble, which is as good a sign as any, I suppose, that no one actually believes that there is such a latent sculpture. The example occurred to me, though, during a talk at the APA on the subject of articulating one's thoughts, in which it was presumed that there is a real thought, had but not known, prior to its being put into words. The leading example was: after a seminar, or a colloquium, one is nagged by an inarticulate objection one can't quite put one's finger on, to which one wants to give words, and the leading presumption was a realist one: in such a case, there is a fully formed, determinate, articulated-in-itself (the way a skeleton is articulated; it has joints, verbal parts) thought that one really does have. The only problem is that one doesn't know its articulation. The task of "articulating one's thought" is the task of finding out what words correspond to the thought.

There are several consequences of this presumption. One is that when you think back about the subject matter of the seminar/colloquium, the point of doing so isn't (or isn't just) to figure out what you think about it, to formulate a thought about it. You think about the subject matter because you think it will help you accomplish the task you are actually set, which is to uncover the content of a thought you already had. If you work through the subject matter and come to an understanding with which you are wholly content, which you have articulated (you have given words to it), there's still the question: but is this the thought that I previously had?

I think that no one, when they've come to an understanding, a formulation, with which they're satisfied as regards the subject matter, actually goes on to ask that question. No one cares about it, any more than they care about whether Michelangelo got it right. Good thing, too, because how could you tell? People take having arrived at a response that presently satisfies them as a reason to stop deliberating; it resolves the mental itch that got them started. People speak as if they're trying to get at a thought already had, but they act as if they're trying to give shape to something as yet indeterminate, based on the hunch: there might be a thought to think here. And I think this is a pretty good reason to think that, really, people don't think that they have fully determinate, but unknown, thoughts, in this sort of case, anyway.

(Long-time readers of this blog will not be surprised to learn that I, of course, think that there is no determinate thought prior to the conclusion of the process of deliberation, and that the same goes for desires, as my several posts about Krista Lawlor's paper on desire probably suggested or possibly even said outright—it's been a while. Many years ago I actually used the same line of thought in talking about desires with her, for dissertation-related reasons: you might wonder "what flavor of ice cream do I want?", decide to get vanilla, be perfectly happy with it—and yet, on the view that holds that there was already a fully determinate but unarticulated desire, be wrong! You actually wanted chocolate.)

Here is an innocuous thought: in order for me to be able to make use of, or understand in any but the most etiolated sense, a bit of information, I must already be able to situate myself with respect to it. If I ask who put the bop in the bop-sheb-bop and am told "Kevin", this is helpful insofar as I can tell that it's the name of a person, but if that's all I know, it would be very curious to say that I know who did it. It's slightly better than a shorthand for "person who …" because the name "Kevin" might be intelligible to others as well, but as yet it functions, for me, as such a shorthand. If, emerging from the train station in a foreign city, I can see that I am at the intersection of Rue Georges Perec and Odos Ermou, and know that my hotel is 11 Hegelallee (cosmopolitan city), but am otherwise disoriented, then while I'm better off than if I knew only that I am "here" and my hotel is "there" (especially if I know that "11 Hegelallee" decomposes into a street number and a street name, but even if I don't, I might suspect that other people will recognize the unit as the stable name of a place, which they wouldn't for "there"), but it would be a stretch to say that I know where the hotel is in any robust sense (rather than that I know the name of where the hotel is, say).

So, comes now Ted Poston, in "Know How to Transmit Knowledge?", arguing that knowledge-that and knowledge-wh can be transmitted by testimony but knowledge-how cannot, in a series of examples that one wished confronted that innocuous thought a bit more full-on. He does give it a few sidelong glances, admittedly. In the first glance, he wishes to set aside examples of know-how apparently being transmitted via testimony such as the following: Sam knows how to tie the Bimini Twist, and tells John (an experienced fisherman) how to do so; John now knows how to tie it, too. The reason he gives is that "it is a general skill being applied to a specific novel case" (6) rather than a new skill cut from whole cloth. It is a case "in which a subject has preexisting practical knowledge that is then applied to a new case" (6). One might rather characterize it this way: it is a case in which the subject is prepared to make use of the testimony given. A good instance of knowledge-that being imparted by testimony, on Poston's view, is "(4) Bill knows how Obama will govern. (5) Bill tells Hannah how Obama will govern. So, (6) Hannah knows how Obama will govern" (5), yet anyone would think that Hannah had better be bringing an awful lot of background knowledge about the United States and its politics to bear in order to get anywhere with Bill's speech; that, in other words, she has some general knowledge about the subject matter being brought to bear on this one particular president.

Another possibility, perhaps, is simply that Bill is very patient, and takes a great deal of time to explain things to Hannah, essentially giving her the preparation as well as the information about Obama. Poston's glance in this direction is concerned not with preparation per se but with the complexity of the subject matter; he gives two (similar) examples. In the first, Terence Tao, who knows (all about) topology, tells Smith "all about" it (the "all about" is there because it doesn't count for Smith just to know "that topology concerns the mathematical study of spaces" (7)); then "if Tao tells smith all about topology then Smith will come to know topology, but Smith will not know as well as Tao. Once we control for this fact, the inference is good." (8; remember that control!). Or suppose "Sam knows that all non-trivial zeros of the zeta function have as real part 1/2. Sam tells Jones this. Assuming that Jones understands what is said (he understands the concepts expressed) Jones comes to know this. So the difference in learning is not a result of complexity" (8). If Jones the mathematician is in a position to just hear the words "all the non-trivial zeros of the zeta function have as real part 1/2" and get it, he seems to me to be in the same position as John the fisherman (it also seems to make the example remarkably bad if it's supposed to be about the complexity of the knowledge imparted—recall the mathematical joke that "trivial" is whatever you know the answer to. If Jones is that prepared, it can't be that complex for him). Suppose he isn't, though; suppose he's like Smith with respect to topology, or suppose he's, I don't know, an average fifth-grader; he doesn't even know about trigonometric functions. It would seem to be Poston's belief, which I hope is not his actual pedagogical practice, that fifth-grade Jones, if Sam just talks to him long enough (I suppose Sam can also make use of a blackboard, etc.), will come to understand about the zeta function. That is, Poston would seem to believe that the preparation necessary to understand "all the non-trivial zeros of the zeta function have as real part 1/2" can be imparted via testimony, with the testified-to party not needing to do anything.

How liberating!: if someone just talked to us skillfully enough, we would have no need of problem sets, homework, asking questions, any of that. Advanced mathematics can be learned entirely passively! Poston doesn't say that explicitly, of course, because it sounds absolutely bats, but I don't see how he can avoid it. If he acknowledges that in learning something, the learner too must act, then his argument would seem to fall apart: it would divide into cases where the learner is either already adequately prepared to simply hear something described or discussed, in which case testimony (without audience participation) suffices, and cases where the learner must take part in her learning. In those cases, sometimes the participation will amount to asking for clarification, asking about connections, mental reconstructions, and practicing; in others, it will amount to, er, asking for clarification, asking about connections, mental reconstructions, and practicing. The practice might be completing the square (and learning how to tell when to complete the square, which is something that someone learning all about high school algebra would seem to be learning, but which would also seem to be difficult to impart solely by testimony—lots of know-how (however theorized) goes into acquiring knowledge-that, or is implicitly present in what's characterized as knowledge-that) or it might be mounting the bicycle, whatever.

Recall Smith's inferior knowledge of topology, after being told all about it by Terence Tao. Two things come to mind here. First, if he can count as knowing topology even though he doesn't know it as well as his instructor, why should we be so quick to deny the validity of the inference "(7) Bill knows how to ride a bike. (8) Bill tells Hannah how to ride a bike. So, (9) Hannah knows how to ride a bike" (5)? She probably doesn't know how to ride a bike as well as Bill, but she might be better at it than someone who hadn't benefited from Bill's instruction. If Bill knows what he's talking about and is a good instructor (let's not lose sight of the fact that knowing something, whether it's -that or -how, is not the same as knowing how to impart that knowledge) who knows what pitfalls a beginner might encounter and can talk through them in advance, etc., she might fare a lot better than her uninstructed counterpart. She might not win any races, but I wouldn't put a lot of money on Smith passing topology exams, either. (You might think that with performing a triple Axel, someone with no experience ice skating will derive approximately no benefit from testimony. Seems plausible to me. But I also am very skeptical that someone with no experience of high school math will be able to be brought to an understanding of the zeta function solely from testimony.) Second, Poston says, plausibly, that Tao "knows because he has accumulated knowledge of many truths about topology but also has keen insight and skill" (8). Where did that skill come from? Possibly some of it is down to Tao's being super smart (but on the topic of raw mathematical genius, bear in mind the words of Tao himself), but probably a lot of it comes from hard work, deep immersion, and practice practice practice. Smith can work hard and practice, too; he might get better! But, again, the notion of practice here, and for that matter skill, in the realm of the transmission (or mastery) of knowledge-that, seems dangerous to Poston. Tao doesn't know better because he received better testimony.

One reason I buy that one doesn't count as knowing about topology for just knowing that it's the mathematical study of spaces is that one can be able to say that, even knowing what "spaces" means in this context, without having the first idea what a practicing topologist actually does. Of course, something similar is true of the sentence "all the non-trivial zeros of the zeta function have as real part 1/2"; someone could say that and be like Aristotle's drunkard reciting scientific proofs or Empedocles, or, more aptly, like Aristotle's students "who have just begun to learn a science can string together its phrases, but do not yet know it; for it has to become part of themselves" (in EN 7.3; sadly the Internet Classics Archive allows for no more exact citation). (Or like the Brazilian physics student Feynman encountered who could rattle off equations but not apply them to simple word problems.) So there's a lot of unacknowledged work going into the parenthetical about Jones "understand[ing] the concepts expressed", by my lights; it can't just be that Jones knows about the zeta function the way I know where my hotel at 11 Hegelallee is. But the beefier sort of understanding Jones must have strikes me as being intimately intertwined with Jones' knowing how to do things. And even without that, Poston already refers to Tao's knowledge of topology in ways that implicate skill. Poston quotes Noë on the fact that skills aren't acquired all at once but come gradually with practice; the same is true of knowledge-that, because … it implicates skills. Which suggests that if you can't transmit novel knowledge-how by testimony, then you also can't transmit novel knowledge-that by testimony, either. Which again suggests the breakdown of the argument into the two cases mentioned above: the subject is adequately prepared to receive the testimony, in which case testimony works, or isn't, in which case activity on the subject's part is required. So I'm unmoved: Poston seems unduly glib about the powers of testimony to impart knowledge in the knowledge-that case, in the very kinds of examples that concern him in the knowledge-how case.

What is called awkwardness?. Attention conservation notice: 11,000 words, many pettifogging, and many others digressing, about a five-year-old book.

Yonder we are having a book discussion thingy on Transformative Experience, with the chapters introduced/summarized/responded-to by individual commenters with an accompanying comment thread. I am not one of the volunteers for any of the weeks but, as the poster, had thought I might abuse my privileges to say something anyway. Since the things I have said expanded to great length, I have instead posted them here, below. They are something of a mess, having been said in haste.

I am fond of quoting a bit from Harry Mathews' interview in The Paris Review:

INTERVIEWER

Do you not care whether your stories make sense?

MATHEWS

I don't say there is no sense or no meaning. There is, but it's not one that exists outside of the work. Robert Louis Stevenson--and he's not exactly considered a modernist writer--once wrote: "The novel, which is a work of art, exists, not by its resemblances to life, which are forced and material, as a shoe must consist of leather, but by its immeasurable difference from life, which is both designed and significant, and is both the method and the meaning of the work." For me, that's it. He's really my favorite prose writer of all. His pithiness and efficiency--he says an awful lot in that one sentence.

And so I quoted it elsewhere, where the following was quoted in response:

How to get over, how to escape from, the besotting particularity of fiction. "Roland approached the house; it had green doors and window blinds; and there was a scraper on the upper step." To hell with Roland and the scraper! Yours ever, R.L.S. (to Henry James, 1893)

This seems to me to mirror exactly what Josipovici, at least, took Valéry's concern with sentences like "the Marquis went out at five" to be, in What Ever Happened to Modernism; it's too bad that (at least there) no notice is taken of this peculiar similarity—it would for one thing help Josipovici in his claim that modernism isn't a matter of stylistic habits.

Here's an interesting bit from Amy Bauer's "Philosophy Recomposed: Stanley Cavell and the Critique of New Music", from the Journal of Music Theory's special issue on the fortieth anniversary of ♥ "Music Discomposed" ♥, which by chance I turned to after finally publishing the previous post:

For Cavell, there are no empirical, much less philosophical, guarantors for the value of art, the assessment of which relies on experience and a kind of knowledge “in feeling,” borne by conviction but resistant to prescription or prediction. (77)

Not interesting in itself in isolation, perhaps, but it seemed to resonate with the importance of "sticking" etc. for Lawlor.

Yes, I’m still concerned with “Knowing What One Wants”; what can I say? I write slow, especially when I write one or two days a week at most (and not for very long on those days, even). So! Recall, or learn hereby: Lawlor starts by describing three views all of which hold that “in normal cases, if one knows one’s own desire, that is the result of a constitutive, not a cognitive, relation between the attitude known—the desire—and the reflective attitude involved in knowing about it” (55). “Normal” cases means, roughly, cases where (as I’d like to put it) the knowledge can be self-ascribed first-personally; it excludes, e.g., taking one’s therapist’s word that one wants something. But, per Lawlor, in fact “[k]nowing what one wants can be a cognitive accomplishment, in the sense that one finds out about an independently constitute object of knowledge (one’s desire), through means that are routinely epistemic (namely, through inference)” (56).

This post is pretty long (and not very well organized!), so...

The stream of versification has dried up somewhat, partly because of less, you know, inspiration, and partly because the plum-related stuff is now elsewhere. But:

And: