On frozen perceptions.

Have you played Beatles RockBand? (What? You can't write a dissertation sixteen hours a day.) If you have, you know that certain "accomplishments" -- primarily earning three or five stars on individual songs -- win you certain rewards -- mostly photographs of the Beatles. These reward photographs are meant to be apt to the accomplishment you earn them for, and they come with a few lines of text to explain how. One of the photographs earned for "Getting Better" gets you an anecdote with a moral: the story that while Paul was the main songwriter, John decided on his own to reply to Paul's "Got to admit it's getting better" with a harmony part of "Can't get much worse." Supposedly, Paul loved the way John's "cynical side" and "dark humor" served as a counterpart to his own sunnier personality, and often cited the anecdote as an exemplary instance of their song-writing partnership.

However, it's total nonsense.

Not that that didn't happen; I expect it did; harmonizers, like people playing any part in a rock band, often have a great deal of leeway with their parts. (The notable exception being, of course, anyone working with Brian Wilson, who wanted to be an auteur composing "pocket symphonies," and who also was an exceptionally talented songwriter working with less ambitious popsters. His vision led him to choreograph every sound he was responsible for, to the point that the Beach Boys apparently spent six months in the studio recording "Good Vibrations." Understandably, most harmonizers prefer getting to sing whatever they want to sing.) So probably John heard Paul singing "Got to admit it's getting better" and responded more or less spontaneously with "Can't get much worse."

But look, "Getting Better" is not a happy song. The lyrics "I used to be cruel to my woman/ I beat her and kept her apart from the things that she loved/ Man, I was mean, but I'm changing my scene/ And I'm doing the best that I can" are not sunny lyrics. What I'm saying is, of course Paul loved John's addition. It brought out exactly what Paul intended for the song.

Why does this matter? Well, really, it doesn't. But I never cease to be amazed at the way people read the then-future back into the past. After the Beatles broke up, John became a "serious" person: a political activist, a performance artist, someone whose devotion to his wife sort of scared people -- and a murder victim. His hits had lyrics hoping for "nothing to kill or die for" and "giv[ing] peace a chance." Paul retained the pop star persona and failed to scare anyone with his devotion to his non-threatening wife or their activism in behalf of animal rights. His hits had lyrics about liking silly love songs and included a James Bond theme tune.

So people remember them that way as the Beatles, too. "Helter Skelter" is taken to be somehow less "typical" of Paul than, I don't know, "Here, There, and Everywhere." Because "Here, There, and Everywhere" sounds more like "Maybe I'm Amazed" and "Yesterday." So they miss that Paul rocked the hardest of the Beatles and sang the shoutiest.* They forget that he wrote funny ("Back in the USSR," "Martha My Dear," "Honey Pie," "Get Back," "Maxwell's Silver Hammer") and also terribly emotional songs ("I've Just Seen a Face," "For No One," "I Will," "Golden Slumbers," the exquisite and never-commercially-released-by-the-Beatles "Goodbye"). And they forget that John wrote tripe like "Mr. Moonlight," the Beatles' worst song by a very large margin. (Granted, "The Long and Winding Road" is pretty unlistenable too, album version at any rate, and that's Paul.) And trivialities like "Ask Me Why." Also maybe they forget that "Imagine" is in fact a terrible song, and so are most of his other post-Beatles songs. (That one track on which George and Ringo join him and the lyrics are all about how spiteful he feels towards Paul sometimes, I remember enjoying.)

Anyway, my point isn't that John Lennon was not a great songwriter. He wrote some of the Beatles' absolute greatest songs, that is, some of the greatest Anglo-American popular music of the twentieth century: "She Loves You," "In My Life," "I'm So Tired." My point isn't that he wasn't a witty guy with a sardonic streak. Anyone who's seen "A Hard Day's Night" knows that Paul projected the least strong personality of the boys. (They say he was supposed to have an independent scene, too, but it got cut for lack of excitement. Contrast George's brilliant turn discombobulating a television executive who fancies himself an expert on hip, John's sparkling nonsense conversation with a woman who thinks she recognizes him, and of course Ringo's soulful solo adventure. Paul comes across as the leader of the group, in a Leonardo-from-"Teenage-Mutant-Ninja-Turtles" way: he's the one who worries for them.) And of course it's not wrong to note Paul's interest in music hall songs and that influence on e.g. "Your Mother Should Know." And sometimes when Paul tried to write emotional, serious stuff, it went wrong, either salvageably or not so. It's just strange to me that people insist on reading so much back into the music. Perhaps because I discovered the Beatles through my parents' old LPs rather than the radio or "The Ed Sullivan Show," and was born after Lennon's murder, I am missing the way it really looked at the time. But I don't think so. I think the people who were there then were also there later, and later always has a way of seeping back into then.

I see the same sorts of things in ancient and early modern philosophy all the time, but that's an impassioned rant for another day, and a different hang-up.


* No, "Twist and Shout" is not as shouty as "Helter Skelter" or "Birthday." I don't even think it's as shouty as "Got To Get You into My Life." It might be shoutier than "Wild Honey Pie" (otherwise distinguished mainly as the only Beatles song one can imagine the Pixies covering) and "Why Don't We Do It in the Road?," though.

On the forms of akrasia, discussed and under-discussed.

The Greek word "akrasia" is often translated "weakness of will." Literally it is "powerlessness"; the range of common meanings for its adjectival form "akratos" is wide -- unmixed or pure, esp. of wine (cf. "akratizomai: drink neat wine, hence breakfast, because this consisted of bread dipped in wine"; this sense comes from an entirely different verb, "kerannumi," mix, rather than "kratew," have power); uncontrolled or undisciplined; violent (cf. Latin "inpotens," which shares the surprising dual meaning "without strength/violently aggressive"). In an action theory or moral psychology context -- that is, in plainer English, when we are talking about how it is a person makes decisions and acts on them -- usually it means something closer to "not being in control." There is no reference to some special faculty "the will," or to any particular mechanism of control or uncontrol. "Weakness of will" suggests a ditherer or a guilty self-indulger, but akrasia is broader: it covers any case of acting against a decision one has made and continues, in some reasonably strong way, to accept. This is important: problematic akrasia should not just be changing one's mind. The decision is meant to remain firm, yet circumvented. But how can one accept a decision -- think "this is good, this is right, this is what I want," and yet "the good thing that I want I do not do, but the bad, which I do not want -- that is what I do" (as the Tarsian put it)?

The cases most often discussed in the modern literature are of two families. First, the ditherer, as above. This actually doesn't present much of a mystery. In most such cases, the deliberator clearly has just changed her mind -- not necessarily in the words she applies to things, but in how she conceptualizes and evaluates them. For instance she says "I do not want to sin; I want to be good," meanwhile at the first opportunity going against her stated desire and intention, perhaps by worshiping idols or coveting her neighbor's things. -- Notice that, because of its dependence on the decisions and desires of the agent in question -- where "agent" just = "person, considered in the role of someone who acts" -- akrasia is not actually meant to track any objective or external right and wrong. It is solely a matter of an agent's apparent internal consistency. That's why changing your mind isn't akratic -- any more than it is inconsistent for a clock to read "five o'clock" at one time and "five-oh-one" at another. (Puzzles of time are out of our area here.)

The other much-pondered family of cases do present genuine puzzles. These are the instances of "clear-eyed akrasia" so-called: when you the agent really do, as far as you can tell, want x and really have decided on x -- no "I didn't realize"s, no "oh just this once"s -- and yet you pick not-x. Euripides's Medea, deliberating whether to kill her children before the audience's very eyes, is often taken to represent clear-eyed akrasia. People who read her so say that she knows it is wrong but allows herself to be overcome by her anger against their no-good cheating father. (This passage in the play is actually the subject of a fascinating debate between Stoics and Platonists&Aristotelians, on which see Christopher Gill, "Did Chrysippus Understand Medea?".) This is the kind of case in which one seems consciously to go against one's better judgment. People have lots to say about this, and I won't go into any detail. I'll just mention that Aristotle and the Stoics both class this as essentially a branch of the first, unproblematic sort of akrasia, and want to solve its puzzles in the same way. Plato had been troubled by such solutions (also offered by his teacher Socrates), and felt he had to recognize apparent cases of internal conflict as real: to make this possible he divided the soul into three parts, rational, spirited, and appetitive, and assigned each part enough independence to permit for genuine conflicts. Plato literalized the metaphor of the "divided self." (In this he has his modern adherents.) Each part of the soul has its own impulses and aims. The problem with this view is that it becomes difficult to explain what, exactly, makes them add up to one self at all. (When such as Bloom say "two selves," they don't mean it rigorously.) The answer certainly presumes that "add up" is the wrong metaphor there, but what's better, and what can we say beyond metaphors about the larger union of warring selves?

So we do see how clear-eyed akrasia points us towards other issues in moral psychology. They are important and interesting and I'm glad people work on them. But I do wish people spent more time on negligent akrasia. That's failing to act upon your decision because you just didn't think of it, you just didn't put the information together in the right way. This can be very simple: you didn't realize that leaving at two wouldn't get you to the zoo on time even though if you'd thought of it, you would have. But that description conceals at least two different cases. First, you planned to leave at two and did so, and only later realized that that was not the correct way to act upon your decision to get to the zoo on time. Second, you planned to leave for the zoo at one-thirty, but didn't notice when one-thirty came around. Third, you made no specific sub-decisions as to how to execute your decision to get to the zoo by two-thirty, and all morning and early afternoon you felt confident of your decision, absolutely meant to get to the zoo -- and yet failed to make the connection between having that aim and making plans (or just forming intentions) that would instrumentally aid or partially constitute fulfillment of your goal.

That last is the most mysterious to me. Perhaps I'll have more to say in a separate post; meanwhile, this is far too long as it is.