Ah, the ancient art of rhetoric. There’s no escaping it. Variously defined as “the art of argumentation and discourse” or, by Aristotle in his fragmented treatise, as “the means of persuasion [that] could be found in the matter itself; and then stylistic arrangement,” rhetoric is complicated. Aristotle’s definition further breaks down into three distinct types, and he illustrates each with literary examples. And if you’ve ever picked up a rhetorical guide—ancient, medieval, or modern—you’ll be familiar with the lists of hundreds of unpronounceable Greek or Latin terms, each one corresponding to some quirky figure of speech.
Well, as usual, the internet provides us with an easier way in the form of the video above of 10 figures of speech “as illustrated by Monty Python’s Flying Circus,” one of the most literate of popular artifacts to ever appear on television. There’s “paradiastole,” the fancy term for euphemism, demonstrated by John Cleese’s overly decorous newscaster. There’s “epanorthosis,” or “immediate and emphatic self-correction, often following a slip of the tongue,” which Eric Idle overdoes in splendid fashion. Every possible poetic figure or grammatical tic seems to have been named and catalogued by those philosophically resourceful Greeks and Romans. And it’s likely that the Pythons have utilized them all. I await a follow-up video in lieu of reading any more rhetorical textbooks.
Can you beat the Mind Boggler, the world’s “most fiendish philosophical brain-teaser” brought to you by Philosophy in the City, a project created out of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Liverpool? Wanting to bring philosophy into “the real world,” Philosophy in the City created a free app that presents a new puzzle each week, in the form of a “jumbled-up philosophical quote.” All you have to do is correctly re-order the puzzle to unlock further reading, including information about the philosopher in the spotlight that particular week, plus exclusive commentary and analysis provided by scholars from the University of Liverpool. You can play the game in “easy mode” or “hard mode,” and also against the clock, just to add a bit of pressure. Right now, the app is only available on the Apple platform. Hopefully Android is around the corner.
I can pop open a copy of Slavoj Žižek’s Interrogating the Realto a random page and I am suddenly ping-ponging from critique of Kant, to a high-five for the “vulgar sentimental” literary kitsch of today, to “the tradition of amour courtois,” to “a completely unreadable” novel called Indecent Obsession, all within the space of four sentences. I may not have any earthly idea what to make of this connect-the-dots, but I want to know what it means. I can look over at the shelf and see on it a volume called The Monstrosity of Christ, a respectful yet tenacious dialogue-slash-debate on Christianity between dialectical materialist Žižek and “radical orthodox” theologian John Milbank. Just in this casual, cursory glance, I might conclude: this is no cranky village atheist (or Marxist as the case may be). This is a psychoanalytic Marxist theorist of breadth. And I haven’t even touched on his extensive engagement with Hollywood film.
It is this magnanimous, playful, and hyper-engaged side of Žižek—that and his unflagging sense of humor and highly visible public persona—that makes him seem approachable. Even if, as the interviewer in the Vice encounter with Žižek above says, “most of [his books] remain impenetrable” to many readers, he is undoubtedly “the most broadly popular anti-capitalist philosopher working today.” The occasion for the interview: a 2012 documentary film starring Žižek called The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, which opens November 1st in the U.S.. Directed by Sophie Fiennes and a follow-up to 2006’s The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, the film has Žižek deploy his rapid-fire referencing ability to “explain why the bulk of us remain enslaved to capitalist power structures.” His material, as with The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, is once again classic Hollywood films like Full Metal Jacket, The Searchers, Taxi Driver, The Sound of Music, and The Last Temptation of Christ. Žižek even takes on such recent, less classic, blockbusters as I Am Legend and The Dark Knight. (Something covered in our recent post.) In the interview above, staged in Žižek’s cozy Slovenian flat, see the philosopher in typically animated style poke fun at himself as he discusses the newest film’s intentions, expands on his revolutionary analyses, and gestures maniacally about the apartment while offering his guest a “f*cking fruit juice.”
The government shutdown and the raising of the debt ceiling — such things are not usually grist for our cultural mill. But all of that changes when a cultural theorist pins the blame for Washington’s dysfunction on the acolytes of a pseudo-philosopher. Writing in The Guardian last Friday, in simple, straightforward prose, Slovenia’s favorite theorist Slavoj Žižek asks and answers a question in the title of his op-ed: “Who is responsible for the US shutdown? The same idiots responsible for the 2008 meltdown”. And who are those “idiots,” you might wonder? Let me spare you the suspense and jump you down to the last two paragraphs of his piece:
One of the weird consequences of the 2008 financial meltdown and the measures taken to counteract it (enormous sums of money to help banks) was the revival of the work of Ayn Rand, the closest one can get to an ideologist of the “greed is good” radical capitalism. The sales of her opus Atlas Shrugged exploded. According to some reports, there are already signs that the scenario described in Atlas Shrugged – the creative capitalists themselves going on strike – is coming to pass in the form of a populist right. However, this misreads the situation: what is effectively taking place today is almost the exact opposite. Most of the bailout money is going precisely to the Randian “titans”, the bankers who failed in their “creative” schemes and thereby brought about the financial meltdown. It is not the “creative geniuses” who are now helping ordinary people, it is the ordinary people who are helping the failed “creative geniuses”.
John Galt, the central character in Atlas Shrugged, is not named until near the end of the novel. Before his identity is revealed, the question is repeatedly asked, “Who is John Galt”. Now we know precisely who he is: John Galt is the idiot responsible for the 2008 financial meltdown, and for the ongoing federal government shutdown in the US.
We’re not saying it’s the most trenchant analysis, but we do like to take note of intellectual dustups. Speaking of, did you miss the Chomsky-Žižek spat from the summer? It went four rounds. Round 1. Round 2. Round 3. Round 4. And ended in a draw.
Americans do not live in a culture that values philosophy. I could go on about the deep veins of anti-intellectualism that run under the country like fault lines or natural gas deposits, but I won’t. Let’s just say that we favor more obvious displays of prowess: feats of strength, agility, and physical violence, for example, of the superhero variety. With this fact in mind, first-year graduate student Ian Vandewalker decided he “wanted to do something that would bring a discipline that is often seen as difficult, esoteric, and even irrelevant, into new light—especially in the eyes of young people.” Remembering a poster he once saw of “an action figure of Adam Smith with Invisible Hand action,” Vandewalker decided he would combine his own love of toys and philosophy into a philosopher action figure series he called “Philosophical Powers!” Here are just a few of Vandewalker’s creations, designed somewhat like professional wrestlers, with their various leagues and range of epithets.
He begins at the traditional beginning, with figures of “Plunderous Plato” and “Arrogant Aristotle” (above), “The Angry Ancients.” Aristotle, known as the “peripatetic” philosopher, has only one power: “walking.” His quality is attested by a rather circular syllogism: “All Philosophical Powers figures are totally awesome. This toy is a Philosophical Powers figure. Therefore, this toy is totally awesome.” Like much of Aristotle’s deductive reasoning, the argument is airtight, provided one accept the truth of its premises.
In the category of “Contumelious Continental Rationalists,” who began the revolt against those Aristotelian “Merciless Medievals,” we have “Dangerous Descartes.” René Decartes may have claimed to doubt everything—every principle that Aristotle took for granted—but he fell prey to his own errors, hence his action figure’s weakness, the “Cartesian circle.” Decartes’ method of doubt produced its own brand of dualistic certainty about his own existence as a “thinking thing,” and the existence of God, hence “certainty” is one of his action figure’s strengths.
Skipping ahead over a century, we have the lone figure in “The Abominable Absolute Idealist” series, “Hateful Hegel.” Hegel is the ultimate systematizer whose embrace of contradiction can seem maddeningly incoherent, unless we believe his metaphysic of “Absolute Spirit.” Given his dialectic of everything, Hegel’s power is that “he is infinite.” His weakness? “He is finite,” of course. Given Hegel’s teleological theory of history, people who purchase his action figure “can expect them to become more and more valuable as time passes.”
The most amusing of “The Antagonistic Analytic Philosophers” is Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was himself an amusingly eccentric individual. Known for his terrible temper, which would often drive him to verbally abuse and strike those poor students who couldn’t grasp his abstruse concepts, “Vindictive Wittgenstein” has the power of “poker wielding ability.” His weakness, naturally, is his “teaching ability.” I particularly like the “notes” section of the figure’s description:
Wittgenstein figures come in two variations: the early model’s recorded messages include nonsense about language being a “picture” of the world, while the later model’s messages include nonsense about games and their “family resemblances” to one another. It’s fun to communicate! (Doll does not actually communicate. Children who claim that Wittgenstein figures talk to them with their own “private language” are mistaken or lying and should be severely beaten by their teachers.)
You can see the whole set at the Philosophical Powers site. It is problematic that we only get dead white men represented, but this is not solely the fault of Vandewalker but also a problem of history and the traditional academic history of ideas. One would hope that the concept is clever enough that it might make philosophy appealing to people who find it dull or unapproachable. That may be too lofty a goal, but these figures are sure to amuse the already philosophically-inclined, and perhaps spur them on to learn more.
As maître of the mid-century French philosophical scene, Jean-Paul Sartre wielded some considerable influence in his home country and abroad. His celebrity did not prevent him from working under the editorship of his friend and fellow novelist, Albert Camus, however. Camus, the younger of the two and the more restless and unsettled, edited the French resistance newspaper Combat; Sartre wrote for the paper, and even served as its postwar correspondent in New York (where he met Herbert Hoover) in 1945. According to Simone de Beauvoir, the two became acquainted two years earlier at a production of Sartre’s The Flies. They were already mutual admirers from afar, Camus having reviewed Sartre’s work and Sartre having written glowingly of Camus’ The Stranger. Ronald Aronson, a scholar and biographer of the philosophers’ relationship, describes their first meeting below, quoting from de Beauvoir’s memoir The Prime of Life:
“[A] dark-skinned young man came up and introduced himself: it was Albert Camus.” His novel The Stranger, published a year earlier, was a literary sensation, and his philosophical essay The Myth of Sisyphus had appeared six months previously. [Camus] wanted to meet the increasingly well-known novelist and philosopher—and now playwright—whose fiction he had reviewed years earlier and who had just published a long article on Camus’s own books. It was a brief encounter. “I’m Camus,” he said. Sartre immediately “found him a most likeable personality.”
As the recently discovered letter above shows—from Camus to Sartre—the two were intimate friends as well as collaborators. Thought to have been written sometime between 1943 and 1948, the letter is familiar and candid. Camus opens with “My dear Sartre, I hope you and Castor [“the beaver,” Sartre’s nickname for de Beauvoir] are working a lot… let me know when you return and we will have a relaxed evening.” Aronson comments that the letter “shows that despite what some writers have said, Sartre and Camus had a close friendship.”
Aronson’s comment is understated. The querulous falling out of Sartre and Camus has acquired almost legendary status, with the two sometimes standing in for two divergent paths of French post-war philosophy. Where Sartre gravitated toward orthodox Marxism, and aligned his views with Stalin’s even in the face of the Soviet camps, Camus repudiated revolutionary violence and valorized the tragic struggle of the individual in 1951’s The Rebel, the work that allegedly incited their philosophical split. Andy Martin at the New York Times’ “The Stone” blog writes a concise summary of their intellectual and temperamental differences:
While Sartre after the war was more than ever a self-professed “writing machine,” Camus was increasingly graphophobic, haunted by a “disgust for all forms of public expression.” Sartre’s philosophy becomes sociological and structuralist in its binary emphasis. Camus, all alone, in the night, between continents, far away from everything, is already less the solemn “moralist” of legend (“the Saint,” Sartre called him), more a (pre-)post-structuralist in his greater concern and anxiety about language, his emphasis on difference and refusal to articulate a clear-cut theory: “I am too young to have a system,” he told one audience [in New York].
While Camus’ political disengagement and critique of Communist praxis in The Rebel may have precipitated the increasingly fractious relationship between the two men, there may have also been a personal disagreement over a mutual love interest named Wanda Kosakiewicz, whom both men pursued long before their split over ideas. Martin also tells that story—one perhaps more interesting in a dramatic sense than the abstract summary above—at The Telegraph. The short documentary clip below also dramatizes their disagreement with interviews, rare photos, newsreel footage, and readings from The Rebel. There is no mention, however, of Wanda.
Ever wonder how famous philosophers from the past spent their many hours of tedium between paradigm-smashing epiphanies? I do. And I have learned much from the biographical morsels on “Daily Routines,” a blog about “How writers, artists, and other interesting people organize their days.” (The blog has also now yielded a book, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work.) While there is much fascinating variety to be found among these descriptions of the quotidian habits of celebrity humanists, one quote found on the site from V.S. Pritchett stands out: “Sooner or later, the great men turn out to be all alike. They never stop working. They never lose a minute. It is very depressing.” But I urge you, be not depressed. In these précis of the mundane lives of philosophers and artists, we find no small amount of meditative leisure occupying every day. Read these tiny biographies and be edified. The contemplative life requires discipline and hard work, for sure. But it also seems to require some time indulging carnal pleasures and much more time lost in thought.
Let’s take Friedrich Nietzsche (above). While most of us couldn’t possibly reach the great heights of iconoclastic solitude he scaled—and I’m not sure that we would want to—we might find his daily balance of the kinetic, aesthetic, gustatory, and contemplative worth aiming at. Though not featured on Daily Routines, an excerpt from Curtis Cate’s eponymous Nietzsche biography shows us the curious habits of this most curious man:
With a Spartan rigour which never ceased to amaze his landlord-grocer, Nietzsche would get up every morning when the faintly dawning sky was still grey, and, after washing himself with cold water from the pitcher and china basin in his bedroom and drinking some warm milk, he would, when not felled by headaches and vomiting, work uninterruptedly until eleven in the morning. He then went for a brisk, two-hour walk through the nearby forest or along the edge of Lake Silvaplana (to the north-east) or of Lake Sils (to the south-west), stopping every now and then to jot down his latest thoughts in the notebook he always carried with him. Returning for a late luncheon at the Hôtel Alpenrose, Nietzsche, who detested promiscuity, avoided the midday crush of the table d’hôte in the large dining-room and ate a more or less ‘private’ lunch, usually consisting of a beefsteak and an ‘unbelievable’ quantity of fruit, which was, the hotel manager was persuaded, the chief cause of his frequent stomach upsets. After luncheon, usually dressed in a long and somewhat threadbare brown jacket, and armed as usual with notebook, pencil, and a large grey-green parasol to shade his eyes, he would stride off again on an even longer walk, which sometimes took him up the Fextal as far as its majestic glacier. Returning ‘home’ between four and five o’clock, he would immediately get back to work, sustaining himself on biscuits, peasant bread, honey (sent from Naumburg), fruit and pots of tea he brewed for himself in the little upstairs ‘dining-room’ next to his bedroom, until, worn out, he snuffed out the candle and went to bed around 11 p.m.
This comes to us via A Piece of Monologue, who also provide some photographs of Nietzsche’s favorite Swiss vistas and his austere accommodations. No doubt this life, however lonely, led to the production of some of the most world-shaking philosophical texts ever produced, perhaps rivaled in the nineteenth century only by the work of the prodigious Karl Marx.
So how did Marx’s daily life compare to the morose and monkish Nietzsche? According to Isaiah Berlin, Marx also had his daily habits, though not quite so well-balanced.
His mode of living consisted of daily visits to the British Museum reading-room, where he normally remained from nine in the morning until it closed at seven; this was followed by long hours of work at night, accompanied by ceaseless smoking, which from a luxury had become an indispensable anodyne; this affected his health permanently and he became liable to frequent attacks of a disease of the liver sometimes accompanied by boils and an inflammation of the eyes, which interfered with his work, exhausted and irritated him, and interrupted his never certain means of livelihood. “I am plagued like Job, though not so God-fearing,” he wrote in 1858.
Marx’s money worries contributed to his physical complaints, surely, as much as Nietzsche’s social anxiety did to his. Not all philosophers have had such dramatic emotional lives, however.
Smoking plays a significant role as a daily aid, for good or ill, in the daily lives of many philosophers, such as that of giant of 18th century thought, Immanuel Kant. But Kant suffered from neither penury nor some severe case of unrequited love. He seems, indeed, to have been a rather dull person, at least in the biographical sketch below by Manfred Kuehn.
His daily schedule then looked something like this. He got up at 5:00 A.M. His servant Martin Lampe, who worked for him from at least 1762 until 1802, would wake him. The old soldier was under orders to be persistent, so that Kant would not sleep longer. Kant was proud that he never got up even half an hour late, even though he found it hard to get up early. It appears that during his early years, he did sleep in at times. After getting up, Kant would drink one or two cups of tea — weak tea. With that, he smoked a pipe of tobacco. The time he needed for smoking it “was devoted to meditation.” Apparently, Kant had formulated the maxim for himself that he would smoke only one pipe, but it is reported that the bowls of his pipes increased considerably in size as the years went on. He then prepared his lectures and worked on his books until 7:00. His lectures began at 7:00, and they would last until 11:00. With the lectures finished, he worked again on his writings until lunch. Go out to lunch, take a walk, and spend the rest of the afternoon with his friend Green. After going home, he would do some more light work and read.
For all of their various complaints and ailments, throughout their most productive years these highly productive writers embraced Gustave Flaubert’s maxim, “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” I have always believed that these are words to live and work by, with the addition of a little vice or two to spice things up.
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Do we have a more energetic commentator on popular culture than Slavoj Žižek, the Slovenian philosophy professor who has risen to the role the Chronicle of Higher Education calls “the Elvis of cultural theory”? In the 2006 essay film The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, Žižek offered psychoanalytic readings of such pictures as The Red Shoes, Alien, and The Matrix. (See him take on Vertigo in a clip featured here before.) Now he returns with a sequel, The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology. At the top, you can see him expound upon the role of ideology in They Live, John Carpenter’s 1988 science-fiction semi-comedy in which wrestler “Rowdy” Roddy Piper happens upon a pair of sunglasses that, when worn, reveal a host of sinister alien commandments behind advertising and the media. “These glasses function like critique-of-ideology glasses,” Žižek asserts.“We live, so we are told, in a post-ideological society. We are addressed by social authority not as subjects who should do their duty, but subjects of pleasures: ‘Realize your true potential,’ ‘Be yourself,’ ‘Lead a satisfying life.’ When you put the glasses on, you see dictatorship in democracy.”
Just above, Žižek looks into the ideology of The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan’s second Batman movie. “Who is Joker?” he asks. “Which is the lie he is opposing? The truly disturbing thing about The Dark Knight is that it elevates a lie into a general social principle: the principle of organization of our social, political life, as if our societies can remain stable, can function, only if based on a lie, as if the truth — and this telling the truth is embodied in Joker — means destruction.” Last year at the Toronto International Film festival, Žižek participated in an on-stage conversation about the project (introduction, part one, two), “explaining” in his inimitably roundabout fashion some of the thinking behind these cinematic cultural analyses. The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology also uses other big-name movies like Taxi Driver, Titanic, West Side Story (and Jaws, some of which you can see him comment briefly upon in the trailer) as jumping off points for extended monologues on the unseen forces that he finds shape our beliefs and behavior. Unseen, of course, unless you’ve got those superpowered sunglasses — or unless, even more unconventionally, you’ve got a mind like Slavoj Žižek’s.
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