Philosophy Porn

“…that hardy revengeful spirit which earlier writers had regarded as not inconsistent with the Christian profession.”

-- Ward & Waller, eds. The Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. I:  From the Beginnings to the Cycles of Romance (1907), p. 229.

It is one of the strengths of The New Yorker -- a magazine I have enjoyed weekly for the past half-century almost -- not simply to spray you with a bunch of articles, but to categorize these:  “Our Far-Flung Correspondents”, “A Critic at Large”, and so forth.  What then was my delight to see, in the current issue, an entry in the much less frequent category “Annals of Ideas”!  (Cf. our own ongoing series here.)  Specifically -- very promising indeed -- : “How to Be Good:  A philosopher’s quest for moral truth.” 

So far so good;  though qualms arise when we turn to the actual article, and find the summary:

An Oxford philosopher thinks he can distill all morality into a formula.  Is he right?

Already you can detect that telltale whiff of intellectual pornography, for those alert to such things.   (Predecessors skewered here and here.)  

Still, the reporter would seem to be well-qualified to tackle this task, since, as the bio blurb informs us, “She is working on a book about extreme virtue.”  (“Extreme virtue” is not something that you or I might aspire to, but it apparently is practiced by certain adepts.)

Derek Parfit, we learn, is “thought by many to be the most original moral philosopher in the English-speaking world”;  and though, to anyone of apostolic bent, “originality” is not really the prime ideal to be striven for in this area -- there is many a pop guru for that -- that was no doubt meant as a compliment.  And upon learning that “he became increasingly disturbed by how many people believed that there was no such thing as objective moral truth” (by “people”, the reporter probably means “professors”, but perhaps not), I was prepared to embrace a fellow warrior.

It turns out, however, that the man is a self-proclaimed atheist.  Well, fair enough;  we have alluded to  G.K. Chesterton and  C.S. Lewis, their admiring portraits of atheists doggedly devoted to the pursuit of truth, and saluted one ourselves.   God speed him on his quest, by all means;  but indeed, beginning from that premise, he is going to require some deep ideas indeed.

And these, alas, we never meet.   We learn instead that “He believed that he had little native talent for photography, but that by working hard at it he would be able to produce, in his lifetime, a few good pictures.” (Whether he succeeded, we do not know, as none are shown.)  We hear of his soul-wrenching travails:  “When he was in America, he was compelled to procure his own food.”  That saga has a happy ending, however, as we learn his inveterate favorite order at Thai restaurants (wait for it…. Curry!)  Once he went out -- the wag! -- and “bought three identical black suits” -- thus rivaling Arthur “Two-Sheds” Jackson for sheer loveable eccentricity. Uncharacteristically for The New Yorker, the article becomes downright fawning, as when it reports, with a straight face, that “he learned that Reasons and Persons” (this, not a prayer or a poem, but a full-length book) “was being memorized and chanted … by novice monks at a monastery in Tibet.”

At this point, you’re supposed to be moaning softly, lips parted, “I Want His Ba-by…”

-- Well, bushwah.  In the old days of the New Yorker humorous end-of-column fillers, this would have appeared under the headline “Chants We Doubt Ever Got Chanted by Legions of Tibetan Monks”.

Our present point is this.   It is only once a major thinker’s reputation had been established and understood, that such sartorial and gustatorial trivia  could be of any possible interest.   Those unable to understand Relativity -- whether the Special, or the General Theory, in either its tensorial or its later coordinate-free notation -- can still sigh over Einstein’s sweatshirts and shock of hair.  But… Parfit?  Surely few of the magazine’s readers can have pored through his books;  and the article has so far given us no real idea of what distinguishes him as a thinker.  Towards the end of the article, we are finally given a glimpse;  drums roll, lights dim -- but it is not encouraging:

Then, at last, he was in a position to propose his top-of-the-mountain formula, which he called  the Triple Theory:

An act is wrong just when such acts are disallowed by some principle that is optimific, uniquely universally willable, and not reasonably rejectable.

(Try chanting that.) -- Dumbstruck at this insight, the Oxonian gentleman, in the very act of ravishing and then eating his grandmother, suddenly leaves off, and becomes a vegetarian.  ( Orthoëpic nota bene:  “Optimific” is not a typo;  it is the way you pronounce optimistic when your mouth is full of digestive biscuits.)

Whatever this all may mean, the stakes are high:

With his Triple Theory, Parfit believed that he had achieved convergence between three of the main schools of moral thought, but even this didn’t satisfy him.

(Stout fellow.) -- This is not philosophy, this is sciamachy, as when (in “The Day the Earth Stood Still”) the alien and the professor scribble dueling equations onto a blackboard  to show that they are each really really smart.

Of the rest of our philosopher’s thought, we are given barely a spoonful.  Sample:

            I am now inclined to believe that time’s passage is an illusion.

(Grant me leave to doubt the optimificity of that.)  -- This… delusion, is anyhow not “original”, having previously been put forth by certain crippled physicists.  At any rate he adds:  “I strongly want time’s passage to be an illusion.”   Now, that is telling.   He strongly wants to deny that framework without which free will, and purpose, and morality, fall to the ground.  To this creature we are to turn, for moral guidance?  Why not the Marquis de Sade?  -- And, do tell us, Professor:  Are you now inclined to believe that your much-gazed-upon navel  is an illusion as well ???

“Top-of-the-mountain” -- “Triple Theory” -- This is the language of People magazine, or of Oprah.  And indeed, it directly develops, that like these, which cater to the self-caressing, victim-licking, pruriently empathetic downswirl of our current culture, the present article (nestling in the venerable New Yorker like a maggot in meat) is interested in its fifteen-minute-famous philosopher, not as a thinker, but as a freak -- someone marginally more pitiful than our flabby selves.   Our very first introduction to the man is in the caption to his (ghoulish and overblown) photograph:

Derek Parfit has few memories of his past … a fact that he attributes to an inability to form mental images.

  And:

Parfit’s words … even in speech, all have a similar timbre -- it is difficult to distinguish them.

And: 

He had become, he realized, what psychiatrists call institutionalized.

And:

He had transient global amnesia … He didn’t remember getting married.  He didn’t remember having written his book.

And -- lest you imagine that a marriage, at least, lets him off a certain fashionable hook, for which Oxbridge has long been notorious -- we get some pulpy, purple prose describing his man-crush on Bernard Willams,  a noted adulterer and philosopher:

“Bernard was standing on the roof of King’s College with a kind of haughty, British, aristocratic look --“

(ooh!  ravish me! may I lick your tweeds?)

“-- you know, master of all he surveys, and all of Cambridge was shown below in the distance.

(How greatly do the townsfolk resemble ants!)

“And Derek said, ‘Isn’t he wonderful?’  I’ve seen that only once before, with a picture of Rudolph Nureyev.”

(And Nureyev, as we know, sure knew how to fill out a codpiece!)

However, mere bromance these days is not enough to get you on Oprah;  you also need to weep.  And so he does:

Williams died in 2003.  Even years later, Parfit would tell people over and over again how he had loved him.  He would break down in tears when he thought of how he had never been able to get Williams…

(into bed?  No : )

… to see what he saw about the truth, and how he never would.

The professed concern for “ideas” was just a sham -- a fig leaf or g-string for the reporter’s real concern, which is dish.  And when her subject has been squeezed for such juice as he may afford, she moves on to other quarry, like that new paragon for narcissists, the brainy-but-beautiful exemplar  familiar from the movies and Dan Brown:  in the present case, the author “well known … for writing The Skeptical Feminist” (already we can picture the jacket photo, in a get-up that, in better decades, would have brought a blush to the cheek of a tart, but which now is quite chic for professors), who

was teaching philosophy of science at the Open University.  She was very beautiful and very feminine.

Feminist, and feminine -- get it?  She’s got it all!  (Whether that combo would appeal to any actual guy, we leave to the reader;  but it is perfect for admiring yourself in a mirror.)

Artistically, this is tripe.  Morally, it is pornography.  And philosophically -- it is nothing,  just nothing at all.

*

Fortunately, a sort of antidote to all that is to be found between of covers of this same issue:  a very readable essay by Louis Menand, “Dwight Macdonald vs. middlebrow”.   The puff-piece on the curry-eating philosopher is an example of middlebrow, which Macdonald would have lanced.

Macdonald was an interesting character, characteristic of his place and time, straddling politics and the arts as now so few do.   He seems in general little remembered today -- I sought a bio in the Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature, but none was to be found; space being dedicated in preference to a different Macdonald, a certain Sarah Lawrence poetess, of whom we learn:  “Almost all the poems concern freakish people who have undgone amputation -- either physical or symbolic -- of a body part.”  -- Ach, back in the Oprahoid slime-pit, where we began.

[Update:  Menand has edited a collection of Macdonald's essays.  Reviewed -- albeit dyspeptically -- here.]
[Update, 23 October 2011:  Reviewed more genially here.]
[Update, 26 November 2011] A very informative review.

[Update 17 III 2012] Menand is an acute and wide-ranging critic, though something of a skeptic as regards the authenticity of the so-called "Lost Sonnet" of Saint Augustine -- while still conceding that it may well be "the greatest sonnet -- correction, the greatest poem -- ever written"  (at least, in the original Latin ...)

~     ~     ~

Palinode.

Have I been too harsh?

Anent the miscreants, not nearly harsh enough.  But any unintentional carom effect upon the honor of the grand old weekly, is to be regretted.

Let us therefore express our profound conviction, that the piece in question was approved for publication  during the August doldrums when all the senior staff were away in Maine.   It was approved by the doorman, and probably written by some homeless guy, who is still laughing.

Anyhow, as antidote, here is where I say very nice things about some very fine New Yorker writers:    here and here and here and here and here.

The point here is not to take exception to one particular thinker.  It is possible that the fellow has somewhere penned a splendid line or two (though the present sample seems sorely lacking in optimificalositaciosity).   The point is the degraded --and, here, degrading way, in which the media goes at such stuff.   It pretends to care, but does not care, what the thinker thinks, but only what she wears, or what he drinks.   In the same way:  Excellent work has been done in quantum field theory, but justice is by no means done to it by the standard presentations of physicists stumbling around with their little lanterns, in quest of the “God particle” (technically known as the Freaking Higgs Boson).

~     ~     ~

[Update 10 Jan 2012]
A photographer can make anyone look weird with the right (wrong) choice of light and lenses.
Usually they don't bother to freakify philosophers, but one such contemptible attempt can be viewed here:
http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=4071
Note: aldaily.com dignified this swill by featuring it as today's sole recommendation in the category "Essays and Opinions".

~     ~     ~

You can read a recent review of Parfit, by the ever-judicious Philip Kitcher, here.   Mercifully, it has nothing in common with the New Yorker takedown-cum-puff-piece.  A couple of excerpts:

On the face of it, the thought that morality should have a “supreme principle” is puzzling, for it is not obvious that our ethical life can be subsumed under any single formula. Some people worry about the idea that physical theory can be distilled into some mighty equation, taken to be the core of a “theory of everything,” but the field of ethics appears even less susceptible to such spectacular unification. If ten commandments are unable to suffice, how can we hope to manage with one?

Although the characterization of wrongness appears to involve three different tests, he claims that the three criteria give the same results—acts debarred by one would be ruled out by the other two. The point of exploring and offering all three is to reveal an unexpected convergence among three major traditions in moral thought. In an image he employs repeatedly, the history of ethical theory is described as a series of attempts to climb a mountain from different sides—and now that we are closer to the peak, it is possible to recognize that these are attempts on the same mountain and that the routes are coming together.

The three traditions of thought whose convergence Parfit wishes to affirm are consequentialism, Kantianism, and contractualism.

~     ~     ~

[Update 22 January 2012]

I have just begun to read an unusually well-written introduction to ethics, Simon Blackburn’s Being Good (2001).  And despite the New Yorker’s accolades to Parfit as “the most original moral philosopher in the English-speaking world”, Blackburn does not feel constrained to mention the blighter, neither in the index nor the bibliography.  

[Update May 2014]  In his peripatetic scamper through the capitals of world philosophy, in a valiant search for something illuminating to say about, literally, Nothing (“Why is there something rather than nothing,” is the topic of the book), the philosophically-trained science journalist Jim Holt arranges to go interview Derek Parfit.  Yet, though the reporter must travel all the way to England to do this, Parfit imposes a restriction on the interview  which newsman should be subjected to, and which even Ben Ladin did not have the chutzpah to demand:

He added that, since he was very slow in formulating his thoughts, he would prefer not to be quoted verbatim.  Instead, he would try to answer any questions I had about his written work  with a “yes” or “no” or some other brief response.

-- Jim Holt, Why does the World Exist? (2012), p. 223

(Sounds like a Turing Test.)   And this, note, for an interview broadcast live, where indeed the pressure of maintaining a snappy airtime  often trivializes discussion, and where the subject is his own work, which he has had a lifetime to think about, and approached by a deferential amateur in an attitude of near-reverence.

Accordingly, nothing of interest stems from the empty exercise of the interview itself;  undaunted, our author tricks out his report with quotations from Parfit’s previously published writings (something he could have done from home).   We are reminded of Edmund Morris’s desperate expedient, in his abortion of a biography of Ronald Reagan, where, confronted by the blank mind and depthless shallows of his subject, he filled things in with the imaginings of fiction.