Monday, October 31, 2011
On "Psycho" (dept. of first thoughts).
Alfred Hitchcock thinks of Freudianism as a substitute for psychology.
Sunday, October 16, 2011
On passion and starvation in middle-period Plato.
Not sure yet what to make of thus, but I noticed today that Plato's two sustained examinations of rhetoric and love -- the Symposium and the Phaedrus, both thought to date from his Middle Period -- both contain myths in which groups of people die out through becoming so absorbed in some other activity that they forget to eat.
In Aristophanes's speech in the Symposium, the people Zeus has split in two, frantically seeking reunion with their other halves, languish in each other's embrace until they die of hunger. Now Zeus has already expressed his commitment to keeping the human race viable, so as to continue receiving the gifts and sacrifices only people lavish upon gods. So he changes the way humans reproduce: earlier, we had "spilled seed in the ground ... like cicadas," but now he has made us reproduce sexually (like the Greek gods themselves); so that our natural yearning to be joined with each other will not stifle but promote the continuation of the species. Fascinating myth, brilliant speech, mysteriously placed in Aristophanes's mouth, often taken to be very romantic (as in the linked clip from "Hedwig and the Angry Inch," which do check out if you're unfamiliar). Comic -- really, farcical -- and mournful at once, silly and profound. Further intriguing for its stubbornness in BOTH tying sex to reproduction AND insisting that procreation is posterior to the main point of love -- and continues so past the origin story, for there were three sexes originally -- man-man, woman-woman, and man-woman -- and only people split from the last of them perpetuate the species without further activity, but their love is not the more valuable for it. (The others are satisfied with the "fullness" or "completeness" (πλησμονή) of reunion.) And premised on the idea that people can en masse become so involved in other things that they forget to eat, indefinitely.
The relevant bit of Phaedrus is shorter and simpler: there once was a group of people who -- existing before the Muses had come into being -- had never heard song. But when the Muses arrived, they were so enraptured that they spent quite all of their time in song, forgetting to eat and drink and "they did not even notice as they died." They were changed to cicadas, who sing all day and do not need to eat or drink; and now they praise the Muses constantly after their own fashion.
In both stories gods transform and preserve human beings, in both stories seeking humans' prayers, sacrifice, and praise. In both stories cicadas appear. In both stories an entire group of people is overcome and then consumed by a shared passion. I'm certain that's important, that they aren't like Narcissus gazing at his reflection until he pales and shrinks and fades into a flower by a lake. In both stories the passion grows in response to major changes in their circumstances: devastating, destabilizing loss and the introduction of art, respectively. Neither is affirmed as such; the first story is in Aristophanes's mouth, the second Socrates tells Phaedrus, as a myth, in a complete digression of less than obvious purpose. I don't know what it means.
In Aristophanes's speech in the Symposium, the people Zeus has split in two, frantically seeking reunion with their other halves, languish in each other's embrace until they die of hunger. Now Zeus has already expressed his commitment to keeping the human race viable, so as to continue receiving the gifts and sacrifices only people lavish upon gods. So he changes the way humans reproduce: earlier, we had "spilled seed in the ground ... like cicadas," but now he has made us reproduce sexually (like the Greek gods themselves); so that our natural yearning to be joined with each other will not stifle but promote the continuation of the species. Fascinating myth, brilliant speech, mysteriously placed in Aristophanes's mouth, often taken to be very romantic (as in the linked clip from "Hedwig and the Angry Inch," which do check out if you're unfamiliar). Comic -- really, farcical -- and mournful at once, silly and profound. Further intriguing for its stubbornness in BOTH tying sex to reproduction AND insisting that procreation is posterior to the main point of love -- and continues so past the origin story, for there were three sexes originally -- man-man, woman-woman, and man-woman -- and only people split from the last of them perpetuate the species without further activity, but their love is not the more valuable for it. (The others are satisfied with the "fullness" or "completeness" (πλησμονή) of reunion.) And premised on the idea that people can en masse become so involved in other things that they forget to eat, indefinitely.
The relevant bit of Phaedrus is shorter and simpler: there once was a group of people who -- existing before the Muses had come into being -- had never heard song. But when the Muses arrived, they were so enraptured that they spent quite all of their time in song, forgetting to eat and drink and "they did not even notice as they died." They were changed to cicadas, who sing all day and do not need to eat or drink; and now they praise the Muses constantly after their own fashion.
In both stories gods transform and preserve human beings, in both stories seeking humans' prayers, sacrifice, and praise. In both stories cicadas appear. In both stories an entire group of people is overcome and then consumed by a shared passion. I'm certain that's important, that they aren't like Narcissus gazing at his reflection until he pales and shrinks and fades into a flower by a lake. In both stories the passion grows in response to major changes in their circumstances: devastating, destabilizing loss and the introduction of art, respectively. Neither is affirmed as such; the first story is in Aristophanes's mouth, the second Socrates tells Phaedrus, as a myth, in a complete digression of less than obvious purpose. I don't know what it means.
Monday, October 3, 2011
On not liking Aristotle (sexual equality edition).
Cleanthes the Stoic wrote a book titled "on the fact that virtue is the same for a man and for a woman." His teacher Zeno, his rival Aristo, his successor Chrysippus, and the later Stoic Epictetus also (with varying enthusiasm) accepted this view. The doctrine is Socratic (see in particular the beginning of the Meno and Xeno's Symposium) and middle-period Platonic (think of the female guardians in the Republic, less numerous but quite equivalent to the males); Plato is also supposed to have accepted two female students in his Academy, of whom one wore women's and the other men's clothes. It is also, naturally, a Cynical doctrine, an important illustration of the ways in which living socially perverts our basic natures. Cynics and Cyrenaics, the schools that identified philosophy most closely with ways of living and teaching most closely with performance and demonstration, both featured prominent women teachers. The unmarried Cynic couple Crates of Thebes and Hipparchia of Maroneia became a model of the highest ideals of love as enabler of life; the Cyrenaic leaders are Aristippus of Cyrene, his daughter Arete, and her son Aristippus, known as "metrodidakter" or "mother-taught." The Epicureans were not especially tempted by virtue-talk but they certainly thought that both sexes would live well according to the same principles, and we know of three (I think) female members of the Epicurean community. (Possibly they thought the same of non-human animals as well, who nevertheless were not capable of pleasures as great as humans can have.) The other schools of ancient philosophy -- various brands of logicians and skeptics, mainly -- were by design unwilling to make claims of such a nature. (The Pythagoreans are a more difficult case.)
But Aristotle thought that women were -- biologically, rationally, psychically, virtue-wise -- defective men. True, this was (and implicitly remains) a common view even among "civilized" people, the ones he engaged with. But he spent twenty years in the Academy surrounded by people who thought otherwise -- including presumably the two women there. The idea must have occurred to him. It must have been treated as a respectable if controversial view in at least those circles. Yet he never seems remotely tempted by the thought. He never mentions it as a view that one would uphold only paradoxically, as he does some of Socrates's other unconventional views (such as that no one willingly does wrong). (I am told, however, that Straussians have taken the proclaimed in principle equality of souls of differently-sexed individuals as a sign that the surface meaning of the book is intended to draw us by its patent absurdity towards another sort of reading.) The issue doesn't seem to bother him.
My point is not that all ancient philosophers were feminists but Aristotle. That's not true. Later in the Republic Plato has nasty things to say about particular kinds of mothers, and in the Timaeus he makes us almost a separate enough species -- occupying a separate space on the ladder of reincarnations, below men and above the rest of the animals. Two of the three female Epicureans we hear of are given only insultingly sexualized nicknames ("Mammarion," which Martha Nussbaum briskly translates as "Tits," can hardly have been the woman's real name). When Cynics and Stoics and Epicureans ask "should I marry?" the question is always "should I, as a man, marry?" Chrysippus discusses the meritoriousness or lack thereof of virtuous behavior whose alternative is not tempting under the rubric of "abstention from ugly old women." They weren't feminists. They had, in general, no special concern for women.
But they were humanists; they believed that the human soul or mind or self was first and foremost human. (Again, perhaps not the Cyrenaics or, in some ways, the Epicureans.) They thought that the ways we lived in society needed to be plumbed very deeply before we could pretend any confidence as to whether and what they showed us about what human beings are.
The same dynamic shows up with regard to poor people: the other schools accepted poor people in principle while making little effort to accommodate many of them. (I know of three notable exceptions: Socrates, born into the middle class, self-ruined through failure to work, and supported by aristocratic friends; Cleanthes, who supported himself by manual labor even while heading the Stoic school -- and was rewarded with the insulting nickname "the Ox"; and Epictetus, a slave not freed until middle age, by which point he was already a notable Stoic lecturer.) And the same with regard to non-Greeks. Pythagoras, like many of the natural philosophers of the sixth and fifth centuries, was an Italian; the Cyrenaics are named for their home in northern Africa; Zeno, as a Cypriot, may have been either Greek or non-Greek, we do not know which (though Diogenes Laertius and Cicero in the Tusculan Disputations preserve some charming ethnic slurs against him as a Phoenician); Socrates and the Cynics explicitly self-identified as citizens of the universe in contradistinction to Greeks, as did most of the Stoics. But Aristotle -- not Plato or Chrysippus the aristocrats, but middle-class, Macedonian (the Macedonians think they are Greeks, but other Greeks do not think they are Greeks. They're the Mormons of the ancient Hellenic world), disenfranchised Athenian resident Aristotle -- thinks that all non-Greeks are natural slaves and that any important kind of virtue is impossible without the leisure that comes with wealth.
I would not object to calling Aristotle the most important philosopher of all time, nor perhaps to calling him the most brilliant. And there is much good in his embrace of convention. But it is not a coincidence that the same man is both the ancient philosopher most dismissive of skepticism and the ancient philosopher most oblivious to alternative possibilities of social ordering. It makes him very hard to read sometimes.
But Aristotle thought that women were -- biologically, rationally, psychically, virtue-wise -- defective men. True, this was (and implicitly remains) a common view even among "civilized" people, the ones he engaged with. But he spent twenty years in the Academy surrounded by people who thought otherwise -- including presumably the two women there. The idea must have occurred to him. It must have been treated as a respectable if controversial view in at least those circles. Yet he never seems remotely tempted by the thought. He never mentions it as a view that one would uphold only paradoxically, as he does some of Socrates's other unconventional views (such as that no one willingly does wrong). (I am told, however, that Straussians have taken the proclaimed in principle equality of souls of differently-sexed individuals as a sign that the surface meaning of the book is intended to draw us by its patent absurdity towards another sort of reading.) The issue doesn't seem to bother him.
My point is not that all ancient philosophers were feminists but Aristotle. That's not true. Later in the Republic Plato has nasty things to say about particular kinds of mothers, and in the Timaeus he makes us almost a separate enough species -- occupying a separate space on the ladder of reincarnations, below men and above the rest of the animals. Two of the three female Epicureans we hear of are given only insultingly sexualized nicknames ("Mammarion," which Martha Nussbaum briskly translates as "Tits," can hardly have been the woman's real name). When Cynics and Stoics and Epicureans ask "should I marry?" the question is always "should I, as a man, marry?" Chrysippus discusses the meritoriousness or lack thereof of virtuous behavior whose alternative is not tempting under the rubric of "abstention from ugly old women." They weren't feminists. They had, in general, no special concern for women.
But they were humanists; they believed that the human soul or mind or self was first and foremost human. (Again, perhaps not the Cyrenaics or, in some ways, the Epicureans.) They thought that the ways we lived in society needed to be plumbed very deeply before we could pretend any confidence as to whether and what they showed us about what human beings are.
The same dynamic shows up with regard to poor people: the other schools accepted poor people in principle while making little effort to accommodate many of them. (I know of three notable exceptions: Socrates, born into the middle class, self-ruined through failure to work, and supported by aristocratic friends; Cleanthes, who supported himself by manual labor even while heading the Stoic school -- and was rewarded with the insulting nickname "the Ox"; and Epictetus, a slave not freed until middle age, by which point he was already a notable Stoic lecturer.) And the same with regard to non-Greeks. Pythagoras, like many of the natural philosophers of the sixth and fifth centuries, was an Italian; the Cyrenaics are named for their home in northern Africa; Zeno, as a Cypriot, may have been either Greek or non-Greek, we do not know which (though Diogenes Laertius and Cicero in the Tusculan Disputations preserve some charming ethnic slurs against him as a Phoenician); Socrates and the Cynics explicitly self-identified as citizens of the universe in contradistinction to Greeks, as did most of the Stoics. But Aristotle -- not Plato or Chrysippus the aristocrats, but middle-class, Macedonian (the Macedonians think they are Greeks, but other Greeks do not think they are Greeks. They're the Mormons of the ancient Hellenic world), disenfranchised Athenian resident Aristotle -- thinks that all non-Greeks are natural slaves and that any important kind of virtue is impossible without the leisure that comes with wealth.
I would not object to calling Aristotle the most important philosopher of all time, nor perhaps to calling him the most brilliant. And there is much good in his embrace of convention. But it is not a coincidence that the same man is both the ancient philosopher most dismissive of skepticism and the ancient philosopher most oblivious to alternative possibilities of social ordering. It makes him very hard to read sometimes.
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