Stories & Soliloquies

Tag: philosopher fridays

• Philosopher Fridays: Berkeley

  Posted at 12:15 pm by Michelle Joelle, on March 20, 2015

  Welcome to Philosopher Fridays, where I tackle philosophers I find inspiring, interesting, intriguing, and occasionally, incomprehensible and even infuriating. These entries are not meant to be in any way comprehensive or reflective of the general opinion held by the scholarly community. This will be the last Philosopher Fridays entry for a little while, as I’ll be shifting my focus to building up The Philosopher’s Lexicon in the next few weeks.

  

  BERKELEY: George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, was an early modern philosopher, born in Ireland 1685 and died in Oxford in 1753. While he wrote widely, covering everything from apologetics to medicine, he is undoubtedly most famous for his defense of what is known as empirical idealism, subjective idealism, or immaterialism, depending on who you ask. He took the central tenet of empiricism – simply put, that “seeing is believing” – to it’s furthest conclusion, arguing that sensing objects isn’t merely epistemology important, but ontologically constitutive. To put it even more succinctly, he argued that an object could not exist unless it was being actively perceived.

  In modern parlance, the words “empiricism” and “apologetics” are not often found in such close proximity, but in early modern philosophy, it was not so unusual. Empiricism, in its purest form, is the notion that the only things which can be known – and thus, justified – are things which can be perceived by the senses. If this is the case, argued Berkeley, then there is no reason to believe that there is a true objective existence outside of our experience.

  What we’re left with is pure subjectivity. To the spider, the water bottle appears undoubtedly large, but to us, it seems relatively small. To our view from a position adjacent to the table, it appears to have only two legs, and it is not until we change positions that we are able to verify that there is another pair of legs on the other side, during which time we might lose sight of the original pair.

  Without immediate verification of an object, for the pure (or naive) empiricist like Berkeley, there is no way to say with any certainty that the object exists. Even if we have seen the object before, the moment we turn our backs we no longer have the justification of our perception. All we have available to us, then, is the image in front of our eyes, or the idea of the object we construct in our minds in the object’s absence. With this in mind, Berkeley’s empiricism becomes a doctrine of immaterialism, as there is no way to guarantee that any material object exists independent of a mind immediately perceiving it. The mind becomes the locus of reality, and our perception is more than just a way for us to know the object – perception is constitutive. Thus, “the world consists of nothing but minds and ideas”. Berkeley didn’t just think that something must be perceived in order to be known; he thought that a thing must be perceived in order to be.

  All we can have assurance of is the idea of the object, which we can call to mind at any time, rendering his vision of empiricism utterly idealist in nature. But this kind of empirical idealism comes with a built-in problem: if all we can know are the ideas of objects in our own minds, how can we share experiences, or explain object permanence? How can things continue to exist in understandable and predicable ways (as in ideas), even if we are not there to perceive them? Why wouldn’t everything just be randomly constituted as we perceived things in utterly solipsistic ways? Or rather: If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?

  Of course, if there truly was no one around to hear the tree fall, then there’s no way to say that there was a tree in the first place, far from it making any sound. The answer, for Berkeley, is simple. If there was someone there to perceive the tree, that someone would also necessarily perceive the sound. And here comes his apologetics: the fact that we have shared experiences and object permanence is evidence that there is always someone perceiving all things that exist, and that there must be an immortal, all-perceiving being grounding our existence for us.

  Which brings me to the main reason I’ve decided to devote a week to Berkeley; I give you his answer to the question of the tree, in the form of a limerick:

  God in the Quad
  
  There was a young man who said “God
  Must find it exceedingly odd
  To think that the tree
  Should continue to be
  When there’s no one about in the quad.”

  Reply:
  “Dear Sir: Your astonishment’s odd;
  I am always about in the quad.
  And that’s why the tree
  Will continue to be
  Since observed by, Yours faithfully, God.”

  I thought this would be a nice way to continue the St. Patrick’s Day celebration just a bit longer. Even the most critiqued and rejected philosophy can be delightful if rendered in the form of a limerick, don’t you think?
  Posted in Series | 19 Comments | Tagged Berkeley, empiricism, idealism, immaterialism, limericks, philosopher fridays, philosophy

• Philosopher Fridays: Benjamin in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

  Posted at 12:00 pm by Michelle Joelle, on March 13, 2015

  Welcome back to Philosopher Fridays, where I tackle philosophers I find intriguing in very fragmented ways. In my last two entries, I tackled Walter Benjamin on history, story, and the messy ruins of any dialectical project. This week, I return to Benjamin once more to give a brief overview of his most famous essay: “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction“.

  

  Written in 1936, “Art in the Age” is the rough culmination of Benjamin’s thoughts on the politics of art and the ruins of historicity, connecting the political, the economic, and the artistic in a cohesive critique. While there are many fascinating things to take from this essay about Marxist theory and the destructive nature of progress, what makes this essay stand out above other similar critiques is its romanticization of artistic authenticity, and what he perceives to be its ever quickening decay. In this post, I will be taking up just a very small piece of what makes this essay so fascinating, and extrapolating fairly loosely in my commentary. Please take this as the commentary of a layman, and not a Benjaminian scholar of even the most novice caliber.

  I’ve written before about the power of seeing an original work of art in person. To see a copy of something great – a photograph or print of a great work of art, for example – simply isn’t the same as seeing the real thing. There’s something about the original, unadulterated by changes incurred in producing the copy, that is truly special, but it goes beyond merely the degradation of a copy. What’s different about it is also its uniqueness, its connection to its maker, to its context, and its age, which are all slightly metaphysical qualities. Benjamin calls this unique authenticity its aura.

  The uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being imbedded in the fabric of tradition. This tradition itself is throughly alive and extremely changeable. An ancient statue of Venus, for example, stood in a different traditional context with the Greeks, who made it an object of veneration, than with the clerics of the Middle Ages, who viewed it as an ominous idol. Both of them, however, were equally confronted with its uniqueness, that is, its aura. Originally the contextual integration of art in tradition found its expression in the cult. We know that the earliest art works originated in the service of a ritual–first the magical, then the religious kind. It is significant that the existence of the work of art with reference to its aura is never entirely separated from its ritual function. In other words, the unique values of the ‘authentic’ work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value (Section IV).

  When you reproduce a work of art en masse, let’s say a painting, you don’t just alter the tones of the colors or flatten the texture, you change what it means. When printed on coasters, mouse pads, and t-shirts, a masterpiece is no longer the expression of an artist, but becomes like a brand identity as it is used to express the tastes of the owner of the coaster and t-shirt. And when lots of people do this with a piece of art, it begins to lose its meaning. Munch’s The Scream and Monet’s Water Lilies are diluted into college cliches as they become lodged in our mind’s as “dorm art.”

  It just gets worse for Benjamin when art is designed with reproducibility – or rather, realistic reproduction – in mind. Photography, film, and musical recordings remove from us our reflective imagination:

  …mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the ‘authentic’ print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice–politics (Section IV).

  Beyond that,  Benjamin claims that our connection to the art itself is necessarily mediated in such that there is no original, and whatever authenticity may have been involved in the creation of the reproducible art is effectively cut off. Motion pictures seem to bear the brunt of his critique:

  The camera that presents the performance of the film actor to the public need not respect the performance as an integral whole. Guided by the cameraman, the camera continually changes its position with respect to the performance. The sequence of positional views which the editor composes from the material supplied him constitutes the completed film. It comprises certain factors of movement which are in reality those of the camera, not to mention special camera angle, close-ups, etc. (Section VIII).

  To add to that, post-production in its modern form goes far beyond editing – there are color filters and sound effects and musical scores, not to mention intercut pick ups (shots filmed at a later date), computer graphics layered into the scene, and more.

  While it is certainly possible to see this cumulative process as itself an art form of a collective (as I do – I love film), Benjamin’s point remains: no matter how much of your heart and soul you pour into your performance, your set pieces, your editing, your post-production, or what-have-you, the art-piece itself has no real connection to you or the part you’ve played in creating it, given that your piece of the puzzle can be irrevocable altered by another member of the collective. A brilliantly dramatic performance by an actor can be rendered a farce by a simple change in score. A wonderfully color-balanced scene is ruined by a smudge on the projector lens. A beautifully shot scene may be filled with a cringe-worthy script that even the most talented actor would fail to deliver. The actor, the prop-master, the director, the cameraman, the editor, etc. can never themselves impart the authenticity of artistic creation; for Benjamin, the cameraman could never be simply compared to the painter, who by himself creates the whole of the work of art (Section XI).

  Although theatrical performance can also be parsed as collective efforts – the stage actor still has a script to follow, a director blocking her scenes, and more – this fragmentation seems to matter less on stage. An otherwise mediocre play can be made great by an actor who connects emotionally with her audience there in the moment, creating a holistic experience. Watching a live performance takes more active effort to grasp, because the viewer is more removed from the performance – there is only one angle, there are few special effects, and there is only one location. You cannot help but take an actively imaginative role as you watch, because the moment, once it is passed, can never be regained, it is a special moment between artist and viewer. Movies, on the other hand, in being both mediated and repeatable, are more passive, leaving us desirous of that connection.

  In an answer to the lack of artistic aura, we mythologize the personalities of the actors outside of the films through the “cult of the movie star.” By doing this, we can, he explains, have the notion of the auratic original. To meet the actor is to see the holistic original we never quite get in the experience of a film. Because there is no direct connection without auratic cult and the work of art, our attentions are once again diluted. In chasing the celebrity, we seek the connection we would normally receive from the performance itself.

  In the case of the artwork designed for its reproducibility: “The public is an examiner, but an absent minded one” (Section XV).

  I’ve left out a great deal from this post; Benjamin goes on to speak of optics, of passive and active artistic appreciation, of capitalism, and even of revolution, but what strikes me as most interesting in this piece is his focus on the fragmentation of mechanically reproducible art. I’d like to simply disagree with him, because as I’ve said, I love film. I want to think that there’s an aura created in the making of a film that isn’t inherently different from other collective artistic endeavors. But I can’t bring myself to deny that there is a marked difference between watching a raw stage performance and seeing a brushed up, processed movie performance.

  Ultimately, I think that we can retrain ourselves to take that active role in connecting with films to reclaim an aura tic experience if we choose, just as many people are able to sit passively at a play or in front of a painting and remain unmoved. But there’s still something here that’s both intriguing and compelling. After all, we do still go to museums and plays, and value that which is unique or handmade over that which is widely available and easily reproduced. Perhaps we’re all just being pretentious when we’re turned off by electronically altered music and photoshopped images, romanticizing the artisanal and the raw, but perhaps there’s a good reason to curmudgeonly resist the ever more rapidly merging of technology and art.

  While I can’t say that this essay answers this dilemma all that clearly, it certainly raises some great questions that I still can’t overlook. I’ll likely be returning to it for some time.
  Posted in Series | 10 Comments | Tagged art, art in the age, essays, philosopher fridays, philosophy, the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, walter benjamin

• Philosopher Fridays: Benjamin on Books and Stories

  Posted at 1:00 pm by Michelle Joelle, on February 6, 2015

  Welcome back to Philosopher Fridays, a twice monthly series wherein I post my thoughts on various philosophers. Last time, I gave some background on Walter Benjamin, and this I’ll extend this analysis to two of his shorter essays. While I usually craft a larger narrative for entries like this, I’m going to take up the spirit of Benjamin’s ruins and present, without comment, only fragments of these pieces, both from the Schocken Books volume Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, edited by Hannah Arendt.

  These quotes are not quite “favorites” per se, but instead haunting echoes that I cannot shake. Going back over them now, five years after I read them for the first time, I clearly see that I’ve inherited more than just my penchant for dashes from Benjamin’s essays on books, collections, storytelling, history, narrative, and nostalgia.

  _____________________________________

  From Unpacking My Library: A Talk About Book Collecting 

  “Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories. More than that: the chance, the fate, that suffuse the past before my eyes are conspicuously present in the accustomed confusion of these books. For what else is this collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order?” -p. 60

  “To renew the old world – that is the collector’s deepest desire when he is drives to acquire new things, and that is why a collector of older books is closer to the wellsprings of collecting that the acquirer of luxury editions.” – p. 61

  “…one of the finest memories of a collector is the moment when he rescued a book to which he might never have given a thought, much less a wishful look, because he found it lonely and abandoned on the market place and bought it to give it is freedom… To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves.” – p. 64

  “O bliss the collector, bliss of the man of leisure! Of no one has less been expected, and no one has been able to carry on his disreputable existence in the mask of Spitzweg’s ‘Bookworm.’ For inside him there are spirits, or at least little genii, which have seen to it that for a collector – and I mean a real collector, a collector as he ought to be – ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.” – p. 67

  From The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov

  “Experience which is passed on from mouth to mouth is the course from which all storytellers have drawn. And among those who have written down the tales, it is the great ones whose written versions differ least from the speech of the many nameless storytellers.” – p. 84

  “The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out. This, however, is a process that has been going on for the long time. And nothing would be more fatuous than to want to see in it merely a ‘symptom of decay,’ let alone a ‘modern’ symptom. It is, rather, only a concomitant symptom of the secular productive forces of history, a concomitant that has quite gradually removed narrative from the realm of living speech and at the same time is making it possible to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.” – p. 87

  “Actually, it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it… It is left up to him to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks.” – p. 89

  “Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away. His nesting places – the activities that are intimately associated with boredom – are already extinct in the cities and are declining in the country as well. With this the gift for listening is lost and community of listeners disappears. For storytelling is always the art of repeating stories, and this art is lost when the stories are no longer retained. It is lost because there is no more saving and spinning to go on while they are being listened to. The more self-forgetful the listener is, the more deeply is what he listens to impressed upon his memory. When the rhythm of work has seized him, he listens to the tales in such a way that the gift of retelling them comes to him all by itself. This, then, is the nature of the web in which the gift of storytelling is cradled. This is how today it is becoming unraveled at all its ends after being woven thousands of the years ago in the ambience of the oldest forms of craftsmanship.” – p. 91

  “…the difference between the writer of history, the historian, and the teller of it, the chronicler …[is that]… The historian is bound to explain in one way or another the happenings with which he deals; under no circumstances can he content himself with displaying them as models of the course of the world. But this is precisely what the chronicler does, especially in his classical representatives, the chroniclers of the Middle Ages, the precursors of the historians today. By basing their tales on a divine plan of salvation – an inscrutable one – they have from the very start lifted the burden of demonstrable explanation from their own shoulders. Its place is taken by interpretation, which is not concerned with an accurate concatenation of definite events, but with the way these events are embedded in the great inscrutable course of the world.” – p. 96

  “The liberating magic which the fairy tale has at its disposal does not bring nature into play in a mythical way, but points to its complicity with liberated man. A mature man feels this complicity only occasionally, that is, when he is happy; but the child first meets it in fairy tales, and it makes him happy.” – p. 102

  “The storyteller: he is the man who could let the wick of his life be consumed completely by the gentle flame of his story… The storyteller is the figure in which the righteous man encounters himself.” – p. 108, 109

  _____________________________________

  It feels a little strange to leave these quotes without any final word, but I think I’m still too caught up with some of these fragments to give any commentary that I wouldn’t immediately wish to rescind. I will be returning Benjamin one last time the week after next to tackle his most famous essay: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, but until then I would love to hear your thoughts on, and impressions of, these quotes.

  Posted in Series | 10 Comments | Tagged benjamin, books, collecting, historicity, history, narrative, nostalgia, philosopher fridays, philosophy, stories, storytelling, walter benjamin

• Looking for Something?

  Search for:

• Follow Blog via Email

  Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

  Join 422 other followers

  Email Address:

  Follow

• 

• Popular Posts & Pages

  • The Writers Roast
  • About my Soliloquies
  • A Bit of Winter Hygge
  • Of Physical Laws and Fictional Characters
  • For Ever, and Ever, and Ever
  • Why the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge is a Good Thing
  • The Philosopher's Lexicon: Apophatic Theology
  • The Blacksmith's Apprentice: a Poem
  • 30 Days of Painting, Day 1: Floral Vine and Lace Doodles
  • 30 Days of Painting, Day 28: Sunset Colors

• Tags

  academia acrylic acrylics aquinas arendt art Augustine awards beach books C.S. Lewis christmas definitions dictionary editing ephemerality epistemology favorite words feynman Fiction film food god harry potter history husserl hygge illustration kindle language learning lexicon libraries links list literary time consciousness literature logic longreads magic medieval Metaphysics music myth my work NaNoWriMo nature painting pensieve philosopher fridays philosophy photography Plato poetry reading reason reblog religion Rousseau science snow spring stories storytelling syllabus temporality theology time tolkien trees vikings vocabulary water colors words writing

• The Archives

  The Archives Select Month November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 October 2015 September 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013
• 
  top blog sites