Author Archives → Frederick M. Dolan

“Bodies”

Michel Foucault wrote about power as if it were an autonomous and automatically functioning machine. To see the world through Foucault’s eyes is to become aware of strategies, deployments, distributions, apparatuses, spaces, adjustments, divisions, and separations, but no persons. Instead, human beings are described as “bodies.” (In The History of Sexuality vol. 1, sexuality is treated as a matter of “bodies and pleasures.”) In hundreds of pages on the topic of power, Foucault almost never mentions the other ways citizens of liberal democracies ordinarily influence their government – by means of political parties, elections, lawmaking, and debate.

The effect is to establish a climate of somewhat spurious objectivity. But it also puts readers on edge. There’s something creepy about this way of talking about power. What?

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Jacques Derrida – Nihilist?

Derrida was certainly accused of nihilism. When “deconstruction” surprisingly made the mainstream news in the late 1970s and early 80s this was a commonly heard charge. I recall laughing with friends when Time (or was it Newsweek?) ran a picture of Derrida’s fellow-deconstructor Paul de Man above the label “nihilist,” presented as straightforwardly as if he were being identified as a Democrat or a Republican.

Why were Derrida and deconstruction newsworthy? In part because newspapers and magazines used to rely on the antics of humanities professors to fill a column or two when the real news was slow. For many years the New York Times had a ritual of listing the titles of panels at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association. No comment was required; the titles were self-parodying.

But another reason – and this explains the great deconstruction scare – concerned the old Socratic question of whether a philosopher’s teachings were corrupting the youth. It seemed that students were learning that there was no such thing as meaning, that aesthetic value was an ideological illusion, and ultimately that nothing was true – there were only falsehoods that were mistaken for truths.

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A Post-Collegiate Gap Year


It was an academic year, 1979–80, but I wasn’t a student. I graduated from the University of California, Irvine in June 1979 and drove a Volkswagen van to New York City, where I lived in Manhattan until July 1980 with no responsibilities whatsoever.

I spent a few weeks getting settled. I parked the van in front of a building in Morningside Heights and hauled my belongings up to my temporary apartment. They consisted of books, records, a stereo, an IBM Selectric typewriter, a signed lithograph by Roy Lichtenstein, and a modest wardrobe.

The next morning I looked out the window and saw that the van was gone. The police told me that it was probably taken by some kids and burned. When I asked why they would do that the cops looked at me as if I were an idiot for failing to understand that they had nothing better to do.

The van had served its purpose; I’d planned on selling it anyway. (My father, who had paid for it, said in his wry way that he would “absorb the loss.”) In a few weeks I found an apartment at Broadway and 111th, one block down from Tom’s Restaurant of Seinfeld fame and a few blocks from Columbia University.

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Kubrick’s Style: Neoclassical Modernism

Stanley Kubrick’s visual style can be characterized by thinking about how Ezra Pound described Imagism. “An image,” he said, “is an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.” Among Pound’s instructions to poets are the imperatives “to employ always the exact word” and “to produce a poetry that is hard and clear.” F.S. Flint added the admonishment “to use absolutely no word that did not contribute to the presentation.” Pound likened the ideal poetic line to the musical phrase, and held that “concentration is of the very essence of poetry.”

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What does Nietzsche mean by this: “To admit a belief merely because it is a custom – but that means to be dishonest, cowardly, lazy! – And so could dishonesty, cowardice and laziness be the preconditions of morality?”

As he often does, Nietzsche omits a premise required by his syllogism, leaving to the reader the task of filling it in.

Let C = admitting a belief because it is a custom, let DCL = being dishonest, cowardly, and lazy, and let M = morality. Nietzsche’s observation takes this form:

If C, then DCL.
If DCL, then M.

Obviously, we’re missing a premise:

If M, then C.

By morality, Nietzsche seems to have in mind beliefs, values, and practices that are adhered to merely because it’s customary to do so. This is contrary to the leading principle of the Enlightenment, according to which something should be done only if it is rational to do it.

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What did Gilles Deleuze mean by “multiplicities”?

In thinking about any aspect of Deleuze’s work it’s helpful to keep in mind his overall motivation: he aspired to a fully naturalistic and materialist metaphysics, one that would adequately embody the modern scientific worldview and extend it to the entire field of human action. He seems to have believed that this required that normative concepts (ideas about how things ought to be, such as justice and morality) be completely purged from accounts of human phenomena. To accomplish this, Deleuze re-described political, economic, psychological, linguistic, and moral phenomena in terms and concepts taken from physics, chemistry, the earth sciences, and dynamics (especially self-assembly, self-organization, and chaos theory).

Many philosophers are naturalists of one sort or another, but most don’t want to simply do away with normative concepts. Instead the idea is to find ways of understanding the normative world (the world of reasons) that are consistent with the naturalistic explanations of science (the world of causes), without abandoning the sense most of us have that human behavior cannot adequately be described without recourse to concepts of justification, responsibility, obligation, and the like. Deleuze dissented from this view in an especially relentless, uncompromising, and highly original and imaginative way. Continue reading →

What is the idea of “difference” in Gilles Deleuze’s “Difference and Repetition”?

Deleuze used the eternal return as a metaphor to talk about something that mattered more to him than getting Nietzsche right: the nature of identity. Deleuze’s real inspirations were Heraclitus and the Stoics. (But then, so were Nietzsche’s.)

In fragment 59, Heraclitus says that any object consists of an “opposing tension, like that of the bow and the lyre.” The string of a bow appears to be (and is) a stable and unified thing, but that is because it is being pulled in two opposite directions at once. The persistence of the bow over time depends on the persistence of this dynamic tension, not that of its constituent parts.

An object might also persist by changing its constituent parts. A river, for example, consists of flowing water. If you step into one, you’ll step into different water than you would have if you’d stepped in a moment earlier or later. Yet it would still be the same river, because a river is flowing water.

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When René Descartes proposed the thesis “I think, therefore I am,” what did he mean? For example, what distinguishes the thoughts of a human from all other animals?

What distinguishes the thoughts of a human being from the thoughts of other animals is that the latter don’t think about their thoughts.

For example, my cat occasionally believes that a mouse is within striking distance. She doesn’t ask herself whether this belief is true or false, or whether the evidence justifies her belief. She merely believes.

Something similar is true of her inclination to pounce on the mouse. She doesn’t ask herself whether attacking and killing the mouse is morally permissible, or not. She merely attacks and kills.

Descartes’s thought – “I think, therefore I am” – is reflexive. Not only does Descartes think, he understands that he thinks, and that other thoughts follow from what he thinks – or so he thinks, and hopes.

As for what Descartes meant, that’s a long and controversial story. The consensus seems to be that it’s impossible to say precisely what he thought, because he was thinking many different things. He might have thought that “I think, therefore I am” was a logical inference. He might have thought it was a self-evident intuition. He might have confused the two.

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On Richard Rorty

In 2020, some previously unseen papers by Richard Rorty (1931-2007) were brought out by the University of Chicago Press as Philosophy and Philosophers: Unpublished Papers 1960-2000. In 2021, Harvard published Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism, with an introduction by Robert Brandom arguing that the lectures it contains represent Rorty’s “final statement.” So far as I know, nothing else has come out since Rorty’s death, but there does exist a set of lectures that I hope is made public one day. In the early 1980s, we grad students sat in the back of the room where Rorty taught his undergraduate course on the history of philosophy. Not only did we get to hear his brilliant, learned, witty, and sometimes hilariously funny lectures, we also came into the possession of the mimeographed notes he distributed, as he explained, so that students wouldn’t have to waste time taking notes of their own. They were passed around, discussed, and affectionately referred to as the Rort Report. I won’t try to reconstruct them here, but if someone wants to make them accessible I’d happily take on the task of preparing them for publication.

Rorty worried that representationalist epistemology had replaced God with Reality. To conceive of knowledge as representation is to proclaim that our supreme cognitive interest is in the correctness of our representations, in effect subordinating ourselves to what is represented – or to put it differently, deferring to the authority of a non-human entity.

To be fully free, Rorty thought, we must reject the idea that something “out there” has more authority over us than our fellow human beings. The only authority we should recognize consists in persuasiveness, broadly construed: the quality of the reasons offered to justify beliefs and practices, certainly, but also the ways in which we inspire one another and the new visions and values we create by re-describing current states of affairs and imagining different ones. Continue reading →

What is Martin Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art”?

“The Origin of the Work of Art” (Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes) is an essay by Martin Heidegger, written and published in various versions from 1935 to 1960. It was drawn from lectures he gave during the same period.
It’s a rich, layered, and complex essay, and it has something to say about virtually everything pertaining to the philosophy of art and aesthetics – and much more.

One important theme is that art is not limited to aesthetic interests. Artworks are about something. They have what philosophers call intentional content. For Heidegger, that means that they are a source of truth, a way in which the world reveals itself. In fact, they exhibit the nature of truth itself, namely that it is “disclosure.” You might say that works of art disclose disclosure. In other words, they are reflexive: not only are they about something, they are about themselves.

Although Heidegger does discuss works of art such as paintings and poems, his main focus in the essay is on buildings that play an important role in the life of a community: the ancient Greek temples to Apollo, Athena, and Hera at Paestum; the Bamberg Cathedral. These works disclose, in an especially vivid, concrete, and immediate way, the understanding of Being shared by the members of their communities. The Greek temples crystalized the meanings of divinity, mortality, victory, and defeat; the Bamberg Cathedral illuminated the meanings of grace and sin.

Heidegger points out that the Greek temples no longer “work” – function – as they did in the past, because we don’t share the understanding of Being in terms of which they made sense. Ancient Greek artworks such as the Aegina sculptures in Munich have been “withdrawn” from their world, and we experience them aesthetically, not as disclosers of disclosure.

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