Philosophy Explained With Donuts

in Comedy, Philosophy | August 24th, 2015

We’ve all seen them, on the boardwalks of Venice Beach or of the Jersey Shore: poop-joke t‑shirts that state the gist of various world religions or philosophies by reference to the aforementioned bodily function. Clever they aren’t, but the form adapts to another, more tasteful formulation (pun most definitely intended) in the list above, which briefly describes the philosophical programs of sixteen prominent Western thinkers with reference to that universally beloved food, the donut. To wit: pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus gets summed up with “You can’t eat the same donut twice,” a twist on one of his famous few aphorisms. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy becomes an elliptical series of possible donuts in various language games: “Fried Pastry, Zero, Parking lot spin, Spare tire.” And so on.

No need to point out the oversimplification inherent in this strategy; that’s kind of the point. It’s a joke, after all, but one the author—whoever that is—clearly intends as a means of breaking the ice and getting down to more serious explorations. But what if the donut is the serious exploration? Such is the case in a 2001 article published in the journal Basic Objects: Case Studies in Theoretical Primitives by Columbia philosophy professor Achille C. Varzi.

Simply titled (in the British spelling) “Doughnuts,” Varzi’s paper explores the donut, or “torus” in the language of topographers, as a theoretical object for an ontological thought experiment. In short, he asks whether or not we can say that the donut hole is an actual existing entity or simply a figure of speech, a “façon de parler.” In the traditional view, that of the topographers, who practice “a sort of rubbery geometry…. The only thing that matters is the edible stuff. The hole is a mere façon de parler.”

On another, more three-dimensional view of the relationship “between void and matter,” things look different: “We must be very serious about treating them [donut holes] as fully-fledged entities, on a par with the material objects that surround them.” The real existence of the hole cannot be easily dismissed without running into a problem, “the dilemma of every eliminative strategy: if successful, it ends up eliminating everything just in order to eliminate nothings.” No hole, no donut. (Though, as Simone De Beauvoir apparently recognized, “Patriarchy is responsible for the shape of the donut.”) The donut hole thesis also forms part of the argument in an academic philosophy paper from 2012 entitled “Being Positive About Negative Facts” from Philosophy & Phenomenological Research. On the way to showing that “negative facts exist in the usual sense of existence,” authors Stephen Barker and Mark Jago, both of the University of Nottingham, come to similar conclusions about the donut, with reference to earlier work by Varzi:

Holes pose something of a philosophical quandary and, perhaps as a result of their mystery, are often treated as immaterial entities (Casati and Varzi 1994). Yet we seem to be able to perceive holes, gaps, dents and the like. The view of holes as immaterial objects is, we think, very much in line with thinking of the negative as the metaphysically undead. Given our acceptance of negative facts, we can offer a story about holes on which they are material entities. If there is a donut hole then there is a spatial region involving the instantiation of donut-dough which is intimately connected with an absence thereof.

Make of these claims what you will, but I think what we see in both essays is that serious interest in a frivolous object can produce illuminating discussion. That describes the thesis of the site Improbable Research, who bring us both of these donut examples; their motto—“Research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.” I don’t know if either essay—or even the donut joke at the top of the page—really makes for ha-ha laughs so much, but these arguments about the material existence of the immaterial space of donut holes certainly challenged my thinking.

via Improbable Research

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Judy!: 1993 Judith Butler Fanzine Gives Us An Irreverent Punk-Rock Take on the Post-Structuralist Gender Theorist

in Gender, Philosophy | August 20th, 2015

Punk rock and its accoutrements—including the handmade, Xeroxed ‘zine—pass into history, replaced by Taylor Swift and Snapchat, or whatever. But as a piece of history, the ‘zine will always stand as a marker of a particular era, of the 80s/early 90s explosion of critical consciousness fostered by young kids reading Nietzsche, Foucault, and Camus, then forming their own bands, labels, and networks. Crucial to the period is the emergence of Riot Grrrl bands like Bikini Kill and their assault on oppressive gender politics, in punk rock and everywhere else. And crucial to many such punks’ understanding of gender was the work of critical theorist Judith Butler.

“Riot Grrrl didn’t herald the beginnings of third wave feminism,” writes Sophia Satchell Baeza in Canvas, “we’ll give that to the emergence of post-structuralist Queer theory, and the work of Judith Butler—but it did help define it aesthetically as much as formally for a new generation of indignant feminists.” An essential part of that aesthetic—the ‘zine—spread the tenets of Riot Grrrl anger, determination, and irony to cities far and wide. And, in 1993, a group of intellectual scenesters created the ultimate punk homage to Butler’s undeniable influence: Judy!, an honest-to-goodness Judith Butler fanzine, complete with murky, mimeographed photo spreads and serial killer typescript. (See the cover at the top, with photo of Judy Garland.) “Let’s talk about that real glamour gal of theory, Judy Butler,” begins one free-form introductory essay.

She’s especially good to see live, if you can. Her performances are rife with witty repartee about her mom or whatever and the three times I’ve seen her, she’s been sporting little tailored black jackets. She’s a bit Gap but she’s still a fox.

This cavalier hipster tone hides the voice of a likely grad student, who mentions M.L.A. (the Modern Language Association’s conference), and other post-structuralist theorists like Gayatri Spivak, Eve Sedgwick, and Julia Kristeva. There are footnotes and references to Butler’s classic Gender Trouble amidst much more irreverent, catty rhetoric like “Judy is the number one dominator, and the only thing you or I can do is submit gladly.” It’s great fun, if that’s what you’re into—and if you get the combo of ‘zine aesthetic and academic feminist theory. There’s even a quiz to test your knowledge of the latter’s high priestess professors and inscrutable argot: “are you a theory-fetishizing biscuithead?”

As much as it knowingly pokes fun at itself, in both form and content the artifact represents a perfect hybridization of streetwise mid-nineties punk rock and challenging mid-nineties high feminist theory. Central to the latter, Judith Butler challenges cultural norms in ways that very much inform our popular understanding of gender and sexuality today. And ‘zine culture, though it may appear mostly in museums and retrospectives these days, lives on in spirit in the work of hip, cultural mavens like Rookie’s Tavi Gevinson. Above, see Butler discuss her theory of gender performativity. And Read the entire issue of Judy!, the fanzine, here.

via Progressive Geographies

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness.

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How Can I Know Anything at All? BBC Animations Feature the Philosophy of Wittgenstein, Hume, Popper & More

in Animation, Philosophy | August 19th, 2015

How did everything begin? What makes us human? What is the self? How do I live a good life? What is love? We’ve all asked these questions, if only within our heads, and recently a series of BBC animations written by philosopher Nigel Warburton and narrated by a variety of celebrities have done their level best to answer them–or at least to point us in the direction of answering them for ourselves by not just telling but wittily showing us what great minds have thought and said on the issues before we came along. Most recently, they’ve taken on that eternal conundrum, “How can I know anything at all?”

The already philosophically inclined will have recognized this as the foundational question of epistemology, that formidable branch of philosophy concerned with what we know, how we know, and whether we can know in the first place. Many familiar names in the history of philosophy have stepped onto this field, including Ludwig Wittgenstein, with whose thoughts this series of extremely brief explanatory videos begins. It lays out his analogy of the beetle in a box, wherein each person holds a box containing what they call a “beetle,” but nobody can look inside another’s box to confirm whether their idea of a beetle aligns with anyone else’s.

In Wittgenstein’s view, says actor Aidan Turner, “there can’t be more to the public meaning of a language than we’re capable of teaching each other, and the private ‘something’—the ‘beetle’—can’t have a role in that teaching, because we can’t get at it.” The next video, in asking whether we should believe in miracles, brings in Scottish Enlightenment thinker David Hume, who thought that “if we follow the rule of proportioning our beliefs to the available evidence, there will always be more evidence that the eyewitness accounts were mistaken than not.” Hume’s predecessor George Berkeley makes an appearance to weigh in on whether anything exists—or, more precisely, whether anything exists besides our minds, which convince us that we experience real things out there in the world.

Finally, the series lands on a method we can use to know, one science has relied on, with seeming success, for quite some time now: Karl Popper’s idea of falsification. “Rather than looking for supporting evidence, Popper argued that scientists go out of their way to refute their own hypotheses, testing them to destruction,” leaving those that remain, at least provisionally, as knowledge. Though none of these videos exceed two minutes in length, each one, dense with both philosophical and pop-cultural references, will leave you with more knowledge about epistemology than you went in with—assuming they don’t leave you disbelieving in knowledge itself.

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Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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A Look Inside Hannah Arendt’s Personal Library: Download Marginalia from 90 Books (Heidegger, Kant, Marx & More)

in Archives, Philosophy, Politics | August 14th, 2015

It does seem possible, I think, to overvalue the significance of a writer’s library to his or her own literary productions. We all hold on to books that have long since ceased to have any pull on us, and lose track of books that have greatly influenced us. What we keep or don’t keep can be as much a matter of happenstance or sentiment as deliberate personal archiving. But while we may not always be conscious curators of our lives’ effects, those effects still speak for us when we are gone in ways we may never have intended. In the case of famous—and famously controversial—thinkers like Hannah Arendt, what is left behind will always constitute a body of evidence. And in some cases—such as that of Arendt’s teacher and onetime lover Martin Heidegger’s glaringly anti-Semitic Black Notebooks—the evidence can be irrevocably damning.

In Arendt’s case, we have no such smoking gun to substantiate arguments that, despite her own background, Arendt was anti-Jewish and blamed the victims of the Holocaust. During the so-called “Eichmann wars” in the mid-twentieth century, a torrent of criticism bombarded Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, the compilation of dispatches she penned as an observer of the Nazi arch-bureaucrat’s trial. These days, writes Corey Robin in The Nation, “while the controversy over Eichmann remains, the controversialists have moved on.” The debate now seems more centered on Arendt’s book itself than on her motivations. What do Arendt’s observations reveal to us today about the logic of totalitarianism and genocidal state actions? One way to approach the questions of meaning in Eichmann, and in her monumental The Origins of Totalitarianism, is to examine the sources of her thought—and her use of those sources.

Arendt’s library—much of it on view online thanks to Bard college—offers us a unique opportunity to do just that, not only by giving us access to the specific editions and translations that she herself read and saved (for whatever reason), but also by offering insight into what Arendt considered important enough in those texts to underline and annotate. In Bard’s digital collection of “Arendt Marginalia”—selections of her annotated books in downloadable PDFs—we see a political philosophy informed by Aristotle (see a page from her copy of Nicomachean Ethics above), Plato, and Kant, but also by conservative German political theorist Carl Schmitt, a member and active supporter of Nazism, and of course, by Heidegger, whose work occupies a central place in her library: in German and English (like his Early Greek Thinking above, inscribed by the translator), and in primary and secondary sources.

While it may go too far to claim, as prominent scholar Bernard Wasserstein did in 2009, that an examination of Arendt’s sources shows her internalizing the values of Nazis and anti-Semites, the preponderance of conservative German thinkers in her personal library does give us a sense of her intellectual leanings. But we cannot draw broad conclusions from a cursory survey of a lifetime of reading and re-reading, though we do see a particularly Aristotelian strain in her thinking: that the individual is only as healthy as his or her political culture. What scholars of Arendt will find in Bard’s digital collection are ample clues to the development and evolution of her philosophy over time. What lay readers will find is the outline of a course on the sources of Arendt-ian thought, including not only Greeks and Germans, but the American poet Robert Lowell, who wrote a glowing profile of Arendt and contributed at least four signed books of his to her library.

I say “at least” because the Bard digital collection is yet incomplete, representing only a portion of the physical media in the college’s physical archive of “approximately 4,000 volumes, ephemera and pamphlets that made up the library in Hannah Arendt’s last apartment in New York City.” What we don’t have online are books inscribed to her by Jewish scholar and mystic Gershom Scholem, by W.H. Auden and Randall Jarrell, and many others. Nonetheless the “Arendt Marginalia” gives us an opportunity to peer into a writer and scholar’s process, and see her wrestle with the thought of her predecessors and contemporaries. The full Arendt collection gives us even more to sift through, including private correspondence and recordings of public speeches. The digitization of these sources offers many opportunities for those who cannot travel to New York and access the physical archives to delve into Arendt’s intellectual world in ways previously only available to professional academics.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Theodor Adorno’s Critical Theory Text Minima Moralia Sung as Hardcore Punk Songs

in Music, Philosophy | August 12th, 2015

Image of Theodor Adorno (right) by Jeremy J. Shapiro, via Wikimedia Commons

With the possible exception of John Gray’s Straw Dogs, few works of philosophy confront the barrenness of human life in the modern world in bleaker terms than Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia. Taking its title from Aristotle’s Magna Moralia, or “The Great Ethics,” Adorno’s book subverts the classical idea of the good life as a realistic aspiration in a world dominated by totalitarian systems of control and inexorable, grinding logics of production and consumption. “Our perspective of life has passed into an ideology which conceals the fact that there is life no longer,” writes Adorno in his Dedication. The individual has been “reduced and degraded” by capitalism and fascism, flattened to mere appearance in the “sphere of consumption.”

Adorno’s book—a philosophical memoir of his experience as an “intellectual in emigration”—reflects his pessimism not only in its title but also in its subtitle: Reflections from Damaged Life. How little he could have suspected—and how much he likely would have despised—the kinship between his own postwar angst and the neurotic anger of the American hardcore punk generation to come some thirty-five years later.

Take, for example these lyrics to Black Flag’s “Damaged,” from their 1981 album of the same name:

Right now look at me now
Look at me now
Just shadows
I’m just shadows of what I was
I just want another thing
I don’t even get by for that

One might make the case that Black Flag lyrics—and those of so many similar bands—play out Adorno’s thesis over and over: to quote a much less angry pop band from a later generation: “Modern Life is Rubbish.”

Seizing on these pessimistic parallels between punk rock and critical theory, filmmaker and artist Brian J. Davis recorded an EP of readings from five chapters of Adorno’s book, set to blistering hardcore drums and guitars. (Anyone happen to know who is on vocals?) Above, hear “They, The People,” and “This Side of the Pleasure Principle” and below, we have “UNmeasure for UNmeasure,” “Johnny Head-in-the-Air,” and “Every Work is an Uncommitted Crime.”

As you’ll note, Adorno’s titles allude to well-known works of art, politics, folk song, and theory and—as the publisher’s note in my Verso edition puts it— “involve irony or inversion,” primary rhetorical methods of his “negative dialectic.” The hardcore punks who picked up, however unconsciously, on Adorno’s disaffected critique may have eschewed his self-consciously literary approach, but they were no less masters of irony, even if their targets happened to be much more pop-cultural.

Punk rock Adorno comes to us from WFMU’s Kenneth S as examples of “academic theory… sung by people who can’t sing.” As Colin Marshall pointed out in a post yesterday, Goldsmith has made his own contribution to the genre, singing writings by Walter Benjamin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Sigmund Freud. And to even more humorous effect, we’ve previously brought you the work of M.A. Numminen, Finnish performance artist who turned Wittgenstein’s Tractatus into a bizarre comic opera.

For a much more serious look at Adorno and music—a subject he wrote passionately and controversially about—check out this post on his own avant-garde compositions, which turn out to be much less punk rock than one might expect given his social alienation and despondency.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness.

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

The Theory of Walter Benjamin, Ludwig Wittgenstein & Sigmund Freud Sung by Kenneth Goldsmith

in Music, Philosophy | August 11th, 2015

Walter Benjamin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Sigmund Freud: if these theorists share any quality at all, they share a reputation for not going easy on their readers. Each of them wrote in a way that exudes a different kind of intellectual difficulty — Benjamin’s sudden swerves into the zone where high relevance meets high irrelevance, Wittgenstein’s austere certainty, Freud’s elaborate flights into the near-fantastical — but all of their work poses a challenge to readers approaching it for the first time. And so Kenneth Goldsmith Sings Theory addresses the obvious question: what if you didn’t read it, but heard it sung instead?

“What is it about academic theory that begs to be, well, sung by people who can’t sing?” asks Goldsmith, poet, prof, UBUweb creator, and WFMU radio host, on the station’s blog. He cites examples from a punk-rockified Theodor Adorno to a Finnish eccentric’s conversion of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus into a songbook, eventually coming to his own “adventures into the field,” which you can hear in the Pennsound archive. Just above, we have have Goldsmith singing Benjamin’s “Unpacking my Library” to music by experimental violinist Eyvind Kang [MP3]. “Just as Benjamin lists copies of other books and the associations they bring,” writes Jacob Edmond at Jacket2, “so Goldsmith copies Benjamin, creating an idiosyncratic audio book version. ”

Wittgenstein Part 1

Wittgenstein Part 2

“In his performance of the text, Goldsmith fuses precisely delineated musical sections, or movements, with the chaotic, shifting pitch and tone of his voice, paralleling Benjamin’s observation in the essay that ‘if there is a counterpart to the confusion of a library, it is the order of its catalogue.’ ” Can you find similar parallels between Goldsmith’s manner of singing and the theory he delivers with it when he performs Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations to Igor Stravinsky [MP3 part one, MP3 part two]? Or below, where he sings Sigmund Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, starting on the passage of the “slips of the tongue” which have popularly come to bear Freud’s name, to The Who [MP3]? After all, style doesn’t count for much, as such a strikingly dressed character as Goldsmith knows full well, unless it aligns with substance.

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Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

New Study: Immersing Yourself in Art, Music & Nature Might Reduce Inflammation & Increase Life Expectancy

in Art, Health, Life, Philosophy, Psychology | August 7th, 2015

Of all the philosophical concepts Immanuel Kant is known for, the one I’ve had to struggle the least to grasp is his description of the sublime, a state in which we are overawed by the scale of some great work of man or nature. It’s an experience, in typical Kantian fashion, that he explains as being not about the thing itself, but rather the idea of the thing. Yet the concept of the sublime isn’t his. Philosophers from the Greek teacher Longinus in the 1st century to Edmund Burke and other English Enlightenment thinkers in Kant’s own 18th century have had their take on it. For the classical writers, the sublime was rhetorical, for the Brits, it was empirical. But above all, the sublime is peak aesthetics—a supra-rational experience of art or nature one cannot get one’s head around. To be so fully absorbed, so stricken with awe, wonder, and, yes, even fear—all of these philosophers believed in some fashion—is to have an experience critical to transcending our limitations.

We may not, in either common speech or academic philosophy, talk much about the sublime these days, but whatever we call the feeling of being absorbed in art, music, or nature, it turns out to have physical benefits as well as mental and emotional. “There seems to be something about awe,” says professor of psychology Dacher Keltner. “It seems to have pronounced impact on markers related to inflammation.”

In other words, immersing yourself in art or nature is good for the joints, and it could possibly preempt various diseases triggered by inflammation. Keltner and his fellow researchers at UC Berkeley conducted a study which found that “awe, wonder and beauty promote [lower and overall] healthier levels of cytokines”—proteins that “signal the immune system to work harder.” He goes on to say that “the things we do to experience these emotions—a walk in nature, losing oneself in music, beholding art—has [sic] a direct influence upon health and life expectancy.”

Never mind that Kant and Burke thought of the sublime and the beautiful as two very different things. Whether we become totally overwhelmed by, or just find deep appreciation in an aesthetic experience, the emotions produced “might be just as salubrious as hitting the gym,” writes Hyperallergic. That may seem a crude way of thinking about the spiritual and emotional grandeur of the sublime, but it brings our physical being into the discussion in ways many philosophers have neglected. Granted, the researchers themselves admit the causal link is uncertain: it might be better health that leads to more experiences of awe, and not the other way around. But certainly no harm—and a great deal of good—can come from conducting the experiment on yourself. Read an abstract (or purchase a copy) of the Berkeley team’s article here, and learn more about their work with the University’s Greater Good Science Center, which aims to “sponsor groundbreaking scientific research into social and emotional well-being.”

via Hyperallergic

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

What is Love? BBC Philosophy Animations Feature Sartre, Freud, Aristophanes, Dawkins & More

in Animation, Philosophy | August 4th, 2015

The BBC’s recent series of Nigel Warburton-scripted, celebrity-narrated animations in philosophy haven’t shied away from the hard questions the discipline touches. How did everything begin? What makes us human? What is the self? How do I live a good life? In all those videos, Gillian Anderson, Stephen Fry, and Harry Shearer told us what history’s most thought-about thinkers have had to say on those subjects. But for the latest round, Warburton and The Hobbit’s Aidan Turner have taken on what some would consider, at least for our practical purposes, the trickiest one of all: what is love?

You might not turn to Jean-Paul Sartre, life partner of Simone de Beauvoir, as a first love consultant of choice, but the series devotes an entire video to the Being and Nothingness author’s theories on emotion. The freedom-minded Sartre sees the condition of love as a “hazardous, painful struggle,” one of either masochism or sadism: “masochism when a lover tries to become what he thinks his lover wants him to be, and in the process denies his own freedom; sadism when the lover treats the loved one as an object and ties her down. Either way, freedom is compromised.”

Have we any lighter philosophical perspectives on love here? Well, we have a variety of philosophical perspectives on love, anyway: Aristophanes’ creation myth of the “missing half,” Sigmund Freud and Edvard Westermarck’s disagreement over the Oedipus complex, and the conviction of “psychological egoists” from Thomas Hobbes to Richard Dawkins that no such thing as strictly selfless love exists. The philosophy of love, like love itself, can get complicated, but the clear and witty drawings accompanying the ideas discussed in these videos can help us envision the different ideas they encompass. Should you need even clearer (or less witty) illustrations on the subject, you could always turn to Love Is…, though I have a feeling you’d find that solution a bit too simple.

Watch all of the animated videos in the What is Love? playlist here.

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Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Philosophy Explained With Donuts

Judy!: 1993 Judith Butler Fanzine Gives Us An Irreverent Punk-Rock Take on the Post-Structuralist Gender Theorist

How Can I Know Anything at All? BBC Animations Feature the Philosophy of Wittgenstein, Hume, Popper & More

A Look Inside Hannah Arendt’s Personal Library: Download Marginalia from 90 Books (Heidegger, Kant, Marx & More)

Theodor Adorno’s Critical Theory Text Minima Moralia Sung as Hardcore Punk Songs

The Theory of Walter Benjamin, Ludwig Wittgenstein & Sigmund Freud Sung by Kenneth Goldsmith

New Study: Immersing Yourself in Art, Music & Nature Might Reduce Inflammation & Increase Life Expectancy

What is Love? BBC Philosophy Animations Feature Sartre, Freud, Aristophanes, Dawkins & More

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