Poems By Robert Frost And William Carlos Williams-The Poet And The Crowd: Sunday Timewaster

Maybe I’m just confusing two human pursuits (poetry and politics), and doing justice to neither.  

I’d love to hear some comments though:

Neither Far Out Nor In Deep:

The people along the sand 
All turn and look one way. 
They turn their back on the land. 
They look at the sea all day. 

As long as it takes to pass 
A ship keeps raising its hull; 
The wetter ground like glass 
Reflects a standing gull. 

The land may vary more; 
But wherever the truth may be— 
The water comes ashore, 
And the people look at the sea. 

They cannot look out far. 
They cannot look in deep. 
But when was that ever a bar 
To any watch they keep

-Robert Frost

And now what about going to a baseball game, that fairly individualistic, uniquely American (descended from cricket), and usefully civilizing (fun) sport?:  William Carlos Williams focuses on the crowd:

“The Crowd at the Ball Game”

The crowd at the ball game
is moved uniformly

by a spirit of uselessness
which delights them —

all the exciting detail
of the chase

and the escape, the error
the flash of genius —

all to no end save beauty
the eternal -

So in detail they, the crowd,
are beautiful

for this
to be warned against

saluted and defied —
It is alive, venomous

it smiles grimly
its words cut —

The flashy female with her
mother, gets it —

The Jew gets it straight – it
is deadly, terrifying —

It is the Inquisition, the
Revolution

It is beauty itself
that lives

day by day in them
idly —

This is
the power of their faces

It is summer, it is the solstice
the crowd is

cheering, the crowd is laughing
in detail

permanently, seriously
without thought

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Are we witnessing a certain kind of nihilistic influence on Williams here (a progression from Schopenhauer’s will to Nietzsche’s will to power to most 20th century art?) that we don’t see in Frost?  Aside from the meter and rhyme, do you like one poem more than the other?

I’ll just put up some quotes I’ve put up twice before:

“Public opinion, I am sorry to say, will bear a great deal of nonsense. There is scarcely any absurdity so gross, whether in religion, politics, science or manners, which it will not bear.”

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed. He who molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or decisions possible or impossible to execute.”

-Abraham Lincoln

See Also On This Site:  Review of Denis Dutton’s ‘The Art Instinct’…From The Harvard Educational Review-A Review Of Martha Nussbaum’s ‘Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education.’   Stanley Fish At The NY Times Blog: ‘The Last Professors: The Corporate Professors And The Fate Of The Humanities’  A Few Thoughts On Allan Bloom–The Nietzsche Connection

More Stanley Fish At The NY Times Blog: ‘What Should Colleges Teach-Part 3′

Full post here.

Perhaps it’s necessary to teach (drill?) a series of highly abstract rules that deepen a student’s understanding of his/her own language?
Fish points out:

“By all the evidence, high schools and middle schools are not teaching writing skills in an effective way, if they are teaching them at all“ 

 There’s a lot of truth to this.  Fish, of course, goes after the usual targets:  The people who have put ideology above what may be higher goals:

‘“We affirm the students’ right to their own patterns and varieties of language — the dialects of their nurture or whatever dialects in which they find their own identity and style.”’  

 Yet, how do you pursue those higher goals?  Aren’t there the forces of excessive egalitarianism and individualism at work here as well?(we’re still a young, fairly uncivilized nation with a lot of open space).  

Fish’s answer is pedagogical:

“You have to start with a simple but deep understanding of the game, which for my purposes is the game of writing sentences. So it makes sense to begin with the question, What is a sentence anyway? My answer has two parts: (1) A sentence is an organization of items in the world. (2) A sentence is a structure of logical relationships.“  

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As a side note, a commenter (the 3rd comment) notes:

“Your arguments make sense, if one wants to become a secretary. But if I want to write well, then being forced to write by the rules destroys my creativity just as much if not more than what it teaches me.” 

 Yet, maybe housing creative writing in universities doesn’t help creativity much either.

See Also On This Site:  Conservative Briton Roger Scruton suggests keeping political and aesthetic judgments apart in the humanities: Roger Scruton In The American Spectator Via A & L Daily: Farewell To Judgment

Fish suggested keeping politics out of academia during the Ward Churchill affair:  From The Stanley Fish Blog: Ward Churchill Redux

Does it have to be political, or is that putting the cart before the horse?  Martha Nussbaum tried to tackle the humanities problem a while back: From The Harvard Educational Review-A Review Of Martha Nussbaum’s ‘Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education.’

From Stanley Fish At The NY Times Blog: What Should Colleges Teach?

Full post here.

Fish reminds us of a simple idea:  college writing courses ought to focus primarily on writing…:

“…the students spent much of their time discussing novels, movies, TV shows and essays on a variety of hot-button issues — racism, sexism, immigration, globalization.”

Perhaps at the cost of their writing skills.  Yet, is Fish just going after the easy targets (where political and ideological aims often take precedence) in quoting the ACTA report?:

“Thirty-five years ago there was no such thing as a gay and lesbian studies program; now you can build a major around it. For some this development is a sign that a brave new world has arrived; for others it marks the beginning of the end of civilization.”

“It probably is neither; curricular alternatives are just not that world-shaking.”

Perhaps not.  He highlights what he seems to consider the most insightful bit of wisdom the report (with its own aims) has to offer:

“An “important benefit of a coherent core curriculum is its ability to foster a ‘common conversation’ among students, connecting them more closely with faculty and with each other.”

He seems pretty pragmatic.

Addition:  Of course, as Camille Paglia points out, movies, T.V., popular music etc. arguably is the culture for a great many Americans.  Fish also feels the need to defend his justification of writing in the post.

Another Addition:  Fish responds to his critics.  If we were all held to such standards in our writing…

See Also On This Site:  Conservative Briton Roger Scruton suggests keeping political and aesthetic judgments apart in the humanities: Roger Scruton In The American Spectator Via A & L Daily: Farewell To Judgment

Fish suggested keeping politics out of academia during the Ward Churchill affair:  From The Stanley Fish Blog: Ward Churchill Redux

Martha Nussbaum tried to tackle the humanities problem a while back: From The Harvard Educational Review-A Review Of Martha Nussbaum’s ‘Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education.’

From The Chronicle Of Higher Ed Via A & L Daily: “Myths Or Facts In Feminist Scholarship?

Full article here.  (Once archived, no longer free)

As the A & L daily notes, that’s Nancy K.D. Lemon vs Christina Hoff Sommers.  

Sommers started the criticism here.

I think one piece of the puzzle is Roger Scruton’s argument here, which suggests a failure to keep aesthetic judgment apart from political judgment in the humanities…:

“And since there is no cogent justification for women’s studies that does not dwell upon the subject’s ideological purpose, the entire curriculum in the humanities began to be seen in ideological terms.”

This can spill out into our politics…and we get many people on the right criticizing entire institutions of higher learning…and many on the left mixing race, gender politics and humanities into theories which clearly have ideological aims and political consequences.

Though of course, Lemon is on the faculty at Berkeley Law…

From the comments section:  

“If, in the interest of advancing her cause, she [sic, Lemon]  perpetuates fallacious reasoning, she forfeits her position as a scholar and becomes a mere advocate–something any of us can be, because there are no standards to advocacy. If she pretends to something better, she has to BE better. The same holds true for Sommers, and those who can root out fallacious reasoning on her part are right to do so.

See Also: From The Chronicle Of Higher Ed Via A & L Daily: Christina Hoff Sommers “Persistent Myths In Feminist Scholarship” Roger Scruton In The American Spectator Via A & L Daily: Farewell To Judgment…Revisiting Larry Summers: What Did He Say Again?

You could just try reading Shakespeare, and go from there…

Thanks to iri5

From Lunch With The Financial Times Via A & L Daily: Jared Diamond

Full post here.

A quick visit with Diamond.  I should point out that I’m not familiar with much more than Guns, Germs, And Steel which I read a while ago.  One of the primary ideas motiviating Jared Diamond’s writing is that man’s relationship to nature is vital (I don’t suppose I disagree).  However, he also makes some assumptions about that relationship with which I  disagree.  

There’s also an idea of moral equivalence between cultures in his work (and some kind of deep extension of humanism that is morally compelling), but it clearly this has its limits as well, and I suspect some roots in moral relativism, which of course is yet another Western idea.  

Anyways, here’s a review of his Collapse.

***If you have more information about the New Yorker Lawsuit, and are not an interested party (or perhaps are), please respond should you feel inclined.  I’m still inclined to give Diamond the benefit of the doubt.

Also On This Site:  From Savage Minds: More On The Lawsuit Against Jared Diamond…From The Chronicle Of Higher Education: Jared Diamond’s Lawsuit…and: Jared Diamond: “Vengeance Is Ours” In The New Yorker

From The Chronicle Of Higher Ed Via A & L Daily: “Gaia In The Light Of Modern Science”

Roger Scruton In The American Spectator Via A & L Daily: Farewell To Judgment

Full article here:

So what’s lacking in the humanities?  Roger Scruton has some keen insights:

“The works of Shakespeare contain important knowledge. But it is not scientific knowledge, nor could it ever be built into a theory. It is knowledge of the human heart”

So forget the recent, and rather desperate, attempts to make the humanities into a science  (however…it’s been done before with some success).  Scruton suggests it’s been a long slide for the humanities to arrive where they’ve arrived:

“In the days when the humanities involved knowledge of classical languages and an acquaintance with German scholarship, there was no doubt that they required real mental discipline, even if their point could reasonably be doubted. But once subjects like English were admitted to a central place in the curriculum, the question of their validity became urgent. And then, in the wake of English came the pseudo-humanities—women’s studies, gay studies and the like—which were based on the assumption that, if English is a discipline, so too are they.”

And now that we’re left with somewhat balkanized and politicized departments of English, these departments have become a target of the political right, dragging many people into a nasty fight that eats up political capital:

“And since there is no cogent justification for women’s studies that does not dwell upon the subject’s ideological purpose, the entire curriculum in the humanities began to be seen in ideological terms.”

So how to restore the vision? Scruton advises to restore (and not eschew) judgment:

” Of course, Shakespeare invites judgment, as do all writers of fiction. But it is not political judgment that is relevant. We judge Shakespeare plays in terms of their expressiveness, truth to life, profundity, and beauty.”

This is deep insight and I think the better part of Scruton’s thinking in the article comes when he resists his own political (anti multi-cultural, pro-conservative, pro-church of England conservatism) impulses.  Here are the last few lines:

“It will require a confrontation with the culture of youth, and an insistence that the real purpose of universities is not to flatter the tastes of those who arrive there, but to present them with a rite of passage into something better.”

One could argue that this is necessary though how to arrive there is in doubt.

Here’s a quote from George Santayana:

 ”The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.”

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On another note:  Despite the importance of beauty, the refinement of our experiences through poems and prose, the difficult work of cultivating”taste” for ourselves as well providing a rite of passage for our youth:  Aren’t we still attaching the humanities to something else?

We know the humanities will never be a science.  Politics is always in conflict with the arts.   Much philosophy is indifferent to the humanities at best.   In fact, Plato banned them from his republic (good overview here).

One target here may be somewhat political as well:  anti-social constructionism and anti-multiculturalism, though I am speculating.

Just some food for thought.

See Also On This Site:  Philosopher Of Art Denis Dutton of the Arts & Letters Daily says the arts and Darwin can be sucessfully synthesized: Review of Denis Dutton’s ‘The Art Instinct’

Martha Nussbaum says the university needs to be defend Socratic reason and still be open to diversity:  From The Harvard Educational Review-A Review Of Martha Nussbaum’s ‘Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education.’ 

Stanley Fish also says keep politics out of academia: From The Stanley Fish Blog: Ward Churchill Redux…

Scruton again has deep insight, but will Christian religious idealism have to bump heads with Islamic religious idealism?: From YouTube: Roger Scruton On Religious Freedom, Islam & Atheism 

Thanks to iri5

From Bloggingheads: Tamar Szabo Gendler On Philosophy and Cognitive Science

Discussion here.

Szabo-Gendler aims to bring a deeper philosophical understanding to the cognitive sciences and neuroscience (popular neuroscience especially) by bringing up an important argument that philosophers from Aristotle to Hume have consistently made:

 ”life goes very well when one’s reasoned commitments and one’s habits are in line with one another”

In other words, one’s relationship between the reason and the passions can potentially get you out of whack (addiction would be a good example).  Also, the depths of moral philosophy can help to deepen cognitive science. 

Perhaps it can even guard against excessive idealism (we’re seeking the holy grail of human knowledge kind of thinking) that could be best avoided when thinking about the limits of neuroscience.  Perhaps, as one commenter points out, such idealism is an inevitable product of popularization (and writing) as found in the works of Jonah Lehrer and Jonathan Haidt.  They’re not the first to write books about the pursuit of happiness:

“It’s really irritating to read, for example, Haidt’s book on happiness or Jonah Lehrer’s introduction to _How We Decide_ where Plato and Aristotle (because they regarded man as “rational” in some sense) are presented as having held the ridiculous belief that all or most of our actions must be the direct result of conscious, plodding deliberation.”

I’d also offer that some people who are attracted to and develop skills in music, poetry, literature often find some of their skills transferable in psychology and the social sciences (mutual fear of mathematics? a specific kind of habitual development of the passions?  would Nietzsche be an extreme example?).

Something to think about.

Also On This Site:  Jesse Prinz argues that neuroscience and the cognitive sciences should move back toward British empiricism and David Hume…yet…with a defense of multiculturalism and Nietzsche thrown in:  Another Note On Jesse Prinz’s “Constructive Sentimentalism”

Was Nietzsche really a philosopher?: A Few Thoughts On The Stanford Encyclopedia Of Philosophy Entry: Nietzsche’s Moral And Political Philosophy…A Few Thoughts On Allan Bloom–The Nietzsche Connection

From The Washington Post: A Few Thoughts On Jonah Lehrer’s Review Of Denis Dutton’s ‘The Art Instinct’

From Bloggingheads: Shakespeare and The Second Law Of Thermodynamics

Full discussion here.

Literature and poetry are deep, and of obvious lasting importance.  Perhaps the current platform upon which great works are read in our universities is lacking…but I also wonder what the direct comparison of literature with the natural laws hopes to achieve?

An ancient debate.

See Also On This Site:  Hasn’t the study of literature already modeled itself on the natural sciences? How To Study Literature: M.H. Abrams In The Chronicle Of Higher Ed

What should a liberal education consist of anyways?:

From The Harvard Educational Review-A Review Of Martha Nussbaum’s ‘Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education.’   Stanley Fish At The NY Times Blog: ‘The Last Professors: The Corporate Professors And The Fate Of The Humanities’  A Few Thoughts On Allan Bloom–The Nietzsche Connection

An example of where I think the NY Times went wrong: mixing race, current events, politics and literature in the same shallow pan.  Please let works of art be deeper than that:  From The NY Times: A Brief Interview On Toni Morrison’s New Novel.

-Review of Denis Dutton’s ‘The Art Instinct’

From Commonweal Via Arts And Letters Daily: Terry Eagleton “On Culture And Barbarism”

Full article here.

More On Eagleton here (wikipedia).

There’s pretty deep insight in the article, but you have to sift it out:

“Postmodernism is more perceptive about lifestyles than it is about material interests-better on identity than oil. As such it has an ironic affinity with radical Islam, which also holds that what is ultimately at stake are beliefs and values.”

If he means that both are on shaky epistemological ground, then I agree.  

“Part of what has happened in our time is that God has shifted over from the side of civilization to the side of barbarism”

Perhaps, but maybe only if you envision the following:

“Tragic humanism, whether in its socialist, Christian, or psychoanalytic varieties, holds that only by a process of self-dispossession and radical remaking can humanity come into its own. There are no guarantees that such a transfigured future will ever be born. But it might arrive a little earlier if liberal dogmatists, doctrinaire flag-wavers for Progress, and Islamophobic intellectuals got out of its way”

I guess if you’re dealing in guarantees on transfigured futures (on a Marxist platform) the best you can do is try and update your “beliefs and values…” as well.   

Isn’t good literature deeper than leftist and rightist analysis?

Addition:  If the British left, and Eagleton as somewhat representative of it, can’t sanely recognize that part of the problem is the way that Muslims seek a religious kingdom here on earth, and that there can’t be reasonable discussion of this, then…see here, where Roger Scruton suggests a return to religious virtue: From The City Journal: Roger Scruton On “Forgiveness And Irony”

See Also:  Roger Scruton In The American Spectator: The New Humanism…From Nigel Warburton’s Site: A Definition of Humanism?…From The City Journal Via Arts And Letters Daily: Andre Glucksman On “The Postmodern Financial Crisis”

Review of Denis Dutton’s ‘The Art Instinct’

I think it would be more appropriate to call this a commentary:

Book here.

“What would a universal aesthetics or theory of art look like?”

“…my aim has been to elucidate general characteristics of the arts in terms of evolved adaptations.”

I think these quotations are fairly representative of what most engages Denis Dutton in his new book “The Art Instinct’.   

Landscape painting, for example, can be best understood as exemplifying the traits developed for our own survival within Darwinian natural selection (to which he appeals to the popularity of landscapes as portraying abundant food and water, a good view and a safe place to enjoy it from).

Thus, Dutton may be trying to synthesize Darwin’s theory of natural selection with aesthetic theory and art (and also by drawing somewhat on the philosophies of Kant, Aristotle and Plato).   From this synthesis, Dutton comes up with a rough list of the criterion he thinks art ought to give, possess, or meet:

1.  Direct pleasure

2.  Skill and virtuosity

3.  Style

4.  Novelty and creativity

5.  Criticism

6.  Representation

7.  Special Focus

8.  Expressive Individuality

9.  Emotional Saturation

10. Intellectual Challenge

11. Art Traditions and institutions

12. Imaginative experience

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Dutton then puts these ideas to the test (not scientifically) against a piece of art which openly questions what a piece of art ought to be, and which he finds emblematic of where he thinks art theory and criticism have gone partially wrong:  Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Fountain,’ or likely the most famous urinal in the world.

by hanneorla

Dutton finds that while ‘Fountain’ does meet a majority of his criterion, it is best thought of as an outlier, and an outlier which has influenced art for quite some time now (think Duchamp to Andy Warhol to Damien Hirst) and which Dutton seeks to change by aiming the debate toward evolutionary science and thus broadening it considerably.  

This is where his theory meets with some success.  If I were an art critic, for example, or a theorist or academic making a living in this field, or perhaps just someone who had spent an hour listening to Mozart and been tremendously moved….then I might find these ideas useful in providing a broader context for the experience I had just had (though I still think Nietzsche provides the deepest thought here, which is why he and the existentialists have been so influential).

So, as a theory of aesthetics, Dutton may be on to something.

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However, I grew doubtful as to the scientific validity of his thinking when he tried to apply natural selection theory to orgasms, sex, and chocolate.

As a scientific theory Dutton seems to fall short of the mark:  that the truths and universality of Darwin’s theory of natural selection when applied to the arts fully and best explain why people make art.  I’m pretty sure Dutton’s theories aren’t intended too, nor function, as scientific theories.  In addition, I don’t think many scientists will find his thinking a compelling addition to their respective fields of knowledge.  

I should mention there is some philosophical debate as to whether or not Darwin’s ideas are scientific (upon which creationists seize), but they are quite obviously more predictively successful and universally applicable than aesthetic theories are….and I just don’t believe that Dutton has come up with a true synthesis here that would benefit, say, an evolutionary biologist.

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That said, Dutton does however demonstrate a good understanding of Kant, and where Kant may (or may not) have left room for aesthetics in his thinking.  The ‘imagination’ as defined by Kant was a part of the elaborate metpahysical framework of his, and as Dutton notes:

“Trying to understand what life was like in ancient Rome is an imaginative act, but so is recalling that I left my car keys in the kitchen.  However, the experience of art is notable marked by the manner in which it decouples imagination from practical concern, freeing it, as Kant instructed from the constraints of logic and rational understanding.” 

Dutton also brings up Plato, and Plato’s idealism: that art is an imitation of an imitation…twice removed from the ideal forms that yield genuine knowledge.  

“Plato regarded the whole Greek literary tradition, but especially the Homeric epics that lay at its heart, as setting the worst possible moral examples.”

…so much so that Plato’s Ideal State would cen(sor) them.  

Dutton responds with the following caveat:

“Religion, ethics, and politics all require to some degree adherence to a conceptual stability that even the most conformist artist may wish to test.  The arts never quite fit with the moral demands on which any functioning society depends.”

He seems to understand reasonably well some of the philosophical challenges that await an aesthetic theory…

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All in all, it’s not a bad read.   If you’re interested in the philosophy of art, aesthetics and art theory…libertarian aesthetics?…perhaps the debate within psychology and its philosophical influences (the Pinker/Spelke debate) evolutionary psychology and anthropology…then I would recommend it. 

There are certain targets (cultural relativism and social contructionism particularly) that Dutton, as a libertarian, has in his sights.  Hopefully, he doesn’t focus too much on them…

Addition:  I should add that I’m quite sympathetic to many of Dutton’s themes, and am impressed with the scope of his aesthetic thinking (especially in regard to philosophy). I’m trying to piece together how his theory is pieced together and what it may achieve and what it may not.

Dutton’s bloggingheads appearance here. (read the comments).

Dutton On The Colbert Report here.

See Also On This Site:  From The Washington Post: A Few Thoughts On Jonah Lehrer’s Review Of Denis Dutton’s ‘The Art Instinct’…