Andrew Taggart

Archive for December, 2011|Monthly archive page

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On the sorry state of gift giving

In philosophical counseling, ethics, education, politics, meditation on December 31, 2011 at 5:29 am

In modern culture, the ethos of gift giving has come to resemble the genre of the apologia. The defendant–guarded, vigilant–is made to choose between pre-emption, exculpation, and exoneration. These are her weapons.

“But I wasn’t sure what to get you.”

A reminder of how tenuous our acquaintance, how limited our imaginations.

“I know, I know, I was so busy shopping for everyone this year that…”

A reminder of how exceptional our vanity, how miserly our spirit besides.

“I thought I would surprise you, but clearly…”

A reminder of human folly.

“No, I like it. Really I do. Thank you, darling.”

A reminder of the problem of dirty hands: petty truth-telling or painful lying, false gratitude or unwanted candor.

“Gift cards and cash are always welcome, say experts.”

A reminder of the vast extent of our agnosticism, of our obese belief in freedom of choice.

“I know you like science, so I got you a newt.”

A reminder of how fallacious our reasoning, how undiscriminating our judgments.

“Well, if you don’t like it, you can always take it back. I’ve left the receipt in the box.”

A reminder of how great our fickleness: of our failure to commit to one other, of our daily infidelities.

Let’s review: Children ask for what they shouldn’t, then receive what is needless, trivial, or harmful. Adults indulge in useless rituals and overzealous brinkmanship to assuage their doubts, curry favors, or honor long-lost pasts. This, in turn, leads to complaints that are summarily lodged followed by apologies summarily offered and reparations speedily effected. The result, naturally, is a signed treaty the point and purpose of which is to guarantee all parties a moratorium on ambient hostility for one more year.

In the sorry state, everyone feels bad. How did we become a nation of sorry gift givers, how help create a culture in which we give disposable things in a halfhearted spirit to people we barely know on the assumption that whatever we give can always be returned? Hold, sit, and dwell here for a moment… It’s as if we’d never felt love.

We live apart in countless ways.

A Coda on the Blessed State of Good Thinking

When we err, reality urges us to make amends. Will we attune ourselves to the call? And when we get things right, reality praises us for doing it justice. Will we hear its praise? Both exemplify the giving spirit of good thinking. Both bespeak the blessed state of just generosity.

Have a blessed New Year!

Further Reading

Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, “21. Articles May Not Be Exchanged.”

Andrew Taggart, “The Starting Point of Philosophical Self-Reflection.” See, in particular, “what’s missing?”

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On the meaning of sighs: A philosophical conversation followed by a lullaby

In education, ethics, meditation, philosophical counseling on December 30, 2011 at 5:47 am
The following is a short excerpt from a philosophical conversation I had recently with one conversation partner. Afterward: an afterthought, an extra thought, a lullaby of a kind.
—
She wrote,
I sigh.
Yes I sigh.
The cosmic breath, of all men, of all women
Of more creation, loss and love to come.
 
I replied,
First, “I sigh”: The sigh is the quiet laugh of the tragic:
I.e., it is an acknowledgement of a life and a death that is no one else’s but mine.
It follows that no one else can take my death from me.
 
Second, “the cosmic breath”: The sigh is a mark of my stepping back from the brink.
The sigh implies that I am viewing life as if from above.
It follows that the sigh is sub specie aeternitatis (“under the aspect of eternity”).
 
Third, the puzzle: How can the sigh be at once above me (infinitude) and about me (finitude)?
The solution: The sigh is a sign that the life of which I am a part I am not, finally, apart.
Conclusion: With the sigh, I have overcome despair. Whence the wise final line re: “loss and love to come.”

*

A Memory, a Lullaby

December 25, 2009. I sighed, yes I sighed. I was busy making the world’s shittiest hot chocolate. There was no milk in the refrigerator, the stove was half-warm and wouldn’t heat up, and I was in a fucking hurry. The end result was a chalky mess which I rushed out to hand to my former girlfriend–a beautiful woman, with dark hair and dark eyes, “nothing like the sun”–who stood forlornly beside her Mini. It had been a miracle, I suppose, that the SUV that had crunched the right front fender hadn’t also collected my right femur, tibia, and ankle in the bargain. The car was fucking mangled, and, what’s worse, the hot chocolate was undrinkable. (I drank it later.) Because I could walk, I could still make shitty hot chocolate. She turned from me, my dark lady. Here–Exhibit A–was salvation, light amusement for the mischievous gods.

I nudged (if that’s the word) the Mini onto the side road. Then, I slowly unloaded my boxes back into my old apartment. A dingy place I’d subletted–yes–from a writing friend who was away in South America working on the next great American novel. (We live our cliches, don’t we?) Luckily, I didn’t have much to haul. Half the boxes were filled with books. The other half with a wasted life.

Later that evening, I bought a one-day unlimited Metro card. It was 12 subway rides there and back before I’d managed to stack all the boxes in the Park Slope apartment I’d end up sharing for 3 months with a hipster bartender and a guy working for a start-up (This, of course, was before we got kicked out by the new landlord named Joe.) That night and for the next 3 months, I would sleep on an air mattress next to my philosophy books. The air mattress had a pin-sized hole in it. A memory of lost time: Alone walking home.

Home now. 2 years later. Upper East Side. Here I type beside the morning light, the birdsong, the birch trees, the church bells which should be set to ring in about an hour. Home now, my god. Omphalos. Now I laugh, yes I laugh. To me, life is sweet.

Further Reading

Andrew Taggart, “The Latest Version of my Short Public Bio”

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On layaways, one-click drunk shopping, and being an idiot

In education, ethics, philosophical counseling on December 29, 2011 at 7:01 am

Philosophers are idiots. Evidence for this claim abounds. First off, we’re easily confused. Because of this, we spend much of our days asking for explanations concerning the most elementary truths. Second off, we don’t readily understand topics that everyone else immediately gets, so we’re always asking people to slow down and show us again how they got to where they got. Third off, we can’t seem to remember very much. As a result, we need to be reminded of the meanings of words and then reminded once more after we’ve forgotten them again. Third off, we can’t seem to get a handle on technical terms. Only after having heard them parsed in laymen’s terms might we have a sporting chance of making some sense of them. Fourth off, we can’t manage to get our minds wrapped around complex topics. Whatever is complex, we seem to think, must be made simple before it can be looked at and held in mind–that is to say, before it can be lost again. In conclusion, since the dawn of time, we’ve been idiots.

(Come and knock on my door? I’ve been waiting for you?)

So attractive is this picture of the philosophical life that I can’t help but ask: Would you care to be an idiot with me, if only for a morning? Let’s be idiots together and have a look at a few things the smart people are saying about wealth and buying.

Last night I read the New Yorker column titled “Delayed Gratification,” a column on economics written about once a month by the journalist James Surowiecki. Surowiecki points out that the idea of layaways is making a return, in some cases replacing the idea of buying large items with credit. As I understand it (dimly, very dimly), a person who wants to purchase, say, a washer and drier agrees to pay the store in regular installments until the item is paid for in full. Once it’s paid off, the washer and drier is delivered to his home. Hence delayed gratification: want now, work to secure it, and get it later.

My first thought: I like that! There’s something here about being committed to what you want and about remaining committed to making it your own. My second thought, a deduction: I can imagine that the individual buying something on layaway must have already determined that, among the set of possible items she could purchase, this is the one she thinks is best to work toward the having. Hurray for her.

My third thought: Confusion sets in. The idiot in me can’t make out how this picture of prudent homo economicus differs in any crucial respects from the spendthrift, debt-ridden homo economicus. Both want the same things (i.e., they strive for the same final ends). It’s just that they use different means (techne). The difference is that the first one shows restraint (sophrosyne) whereas the second one chucked his out the door.

My fourth thought: Why are we talking all the time about self-control, self-restraint, etc. etc.? Why aren’t we talking instead about whether our desires are really worth having? Whether these desires are essential? (Do you really need a big screen TV with the plasma thingie?) Whether these items really factor into leading a fulfilling and meaningful life? The idiot in me, the idiot I am remains stumped. If only we inventoried our set of ownmost desires, he thinks, and found that many of them weren’t essential, then wouldn’t the self-control talk be beside the point? Moot. Wouldn’t the need for self-restraint many times go away?

My fifth thought: A note to self: Replace “delayed gratification” with “completeness here and now.” As I say, I’m confused by complexity and don’t get what other people get.

(Assuming you’re still reading…) I opened yesterday’s New York Times to the Business Section (now, there’s common sense all over the place!) and read the front page story, “Online Merchants Home in On Imbibing Consumers.” Wow, what a title! “Imbibing” seems like a fancy pants word for getting drunk  and “home in on” for “attract” or “allure.” So: People who’ve got stuff to sell are trying to attract the kinda drunk people to buy the stuff they’re selling.

What explains the increasing prevalence of drunk buying? Too many Rieslings and lots of Smart Phones. With the Smart Phone (my phone, which was not so smart, went bye-bye, by the by), an individual can buy stuff with one-click shopping. When they’re at home after a long day of work. After the bars close on the weekends. Can buy all kinds of shit right there at their fingertips. So to speak.

Perhaps it’s time to consult the expert. Shall we? Quoting:

“In a shopping context, alcohol would lift people’s moods and make them feel more relaxed,” said Nancy Puccinelli, an associate fellow at the Oxford’s Saïd Business School who studies consumer behavior. “If we see a product and we feel good, we will evaluate the product more positively.”

I’m not quite with it, but I vaguely get the sense that the expert above has said something sorta commonsensical and also sorta obvious. (The expert is training to be an idiot, though she doesn’t know it yet.)

Call me stupid, but why have we have construed leisure time in terms of consumption? Why would we want to live in a world in which we spend our free time drinking wine next to our laptops, then buying crap on our laptops or Smart Phones, then regretting some of these purchases once we’ve sobered up? (No, the answer is not self-control. See above.)

I don’t see how the “delayed gratification” story is all that different from the “buy now Zinfandel” story.

In conclusion: One of my goals in life is to keep being an idiot. This shouldn’t be that difficult.

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On night visions and homecomings

In education, meditation, parables on December 28, 2011 at 6:37 am

On the way to the airport well before dawn, my middle sister told me about the recurring nightmares she’d had when she was a girl. There was the one about the angry man with the red eyes. The one about my mother who’d become the mean witch from the Wizard of Oz. And the one about the Incredible Hulk who’d turned evil. In each case, the dream had been precipitated by an intimation or experience of death. In one case, she’d tried counting by 2′s to distract herself from envisioning; in another, she’d stayed up all night to protect us while we slept. This led to her two weeks of insomnia.

Have you had insomnia recently, I asked. No, that was years ago.

Mid-air and half-asleep, I remembered my recurring boyhood dream. In it, I feel my teeth getting loose. I think they’re going to come out, I bring my hands up to my mouth, but they don’t. The teeth stay put while moving about. Then, I go to speak, but my jaw is half-locked, not locked entirely but out-of-sync. My teeth rub up against each other, painfully but not as painfully as I expect them to, while my jaw moves discordantly, out of tune. The truth is that I can speak, can speak just fine, but the words that come forth clot out. These intelligible words are not the right ones.

For me, this is the shudder of a death that is mine. The meaning of the nightmare is not pictorial but metaphysical. It is not that there is some structural flaw in the architecture of my mouth nor is there some cognitive degradation in the hardware of my brain but rather a metaphysical rivenness in the order of things. In the face of the Unfathomable, my mouth is relatively intact whereas my words cannot but come forth broken. For someone like me who’s lived his life according to right speech, the terror abides still.

And will this be how Death comes, comes kindly for me? With whatever I say being the wrong thing but without the ability to make amends with some last rites? No matter my philosophical meditations on death, no matter my nightly ruminations or morning exercises, regardless of my lifelong preparations (Cicero, recall: “To philosophize is to learn how to die.”), will I befoul the earth and the air, leave polluted a consecrated space, despoil the lives of others in my final moments? That is horrible.

Maybe this is why the wise (and lucky) among us, sensing the end, know to close their mouths and put out their hands and rub.

*

When I got home, I checked the lights and the heat. I looked in the refrigerator and checked the pantry. I turned on the faucets and watered the plants. I imagined having dogs at once forlorn and ebullient. Food, heat, light, life: the basics, the essentials. We’re inclined to think that these are no more than material necessities, but they may very well be inchoate philosophical thoughts.

It could be that our thought-actions are of home. Omphalos. Thought-actions that are a three-fold answer to a three-fold question:

Do you exist, ask the pigeons in the tree. (Yes, here I am.)

And have you forsaken us, plead the plants and the animals. (No, my friends, I’ve not forsaken you.)

And are you grateful, entreat the lights and the heat, grateful for this and for everything. (Yes, I am. Danken, my friends.)

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On fata morgana

In meditation, parables on December 27, 2011 at 3:29 am

The boy I was in third grade headstrong for summer. The last day of school promising happiness, bringing sadness. Friends, acquaintances, occasional playmates all departing.

Alone walking home. An error in desire. An intimation, surely, of errors to come.

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Aesthetics, ethics, and justice ask to be brought into harmony

In ethics, meditation on December 24, 2011 at 6:18 am

Beyond my bedroom window: pigeons atop a barren tree amid the autumn drizzle.

*

Beyond the living room window: a birch tree, leaves burnt by fire, hoary frost unworldly.

Brief Reflections

1. To see an object properly, discriminatively, is to be attentive to its demands.

2. The object asks to be loved. Will you love it?

3. Seeing that the other is wounded immediately entails acting to make amends.

4. Aesthetics, ethics, and justice ask to be brought into harmony. Will you heed the request?

 

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On Anne Page’s courage

In education, ethics, meditation on December 23, 2011 at 6:30 am

The woman was beautiful and strong but sad. Doubtless she married badly. Evidence for this can be perceived in her slightly downcast left eye; in her stilted, rigid left hand; in the spine that gives the impression of needing to be held up by strength of will. To one with her aesthetic temperament, life had to have grown, or had to have always been, cold.

It could, of course, be objected that Anne Page was merely an amateur and that the long hours of sitting would have worn on her. She was not used to this, it could be observed. Doubtless, it was tedious business, this appearance of naturalness. In addition, it is not inconceivable that Dennis Miller Bunker could have been a real bore, singular in his occupation, attentive to his subject while inattentive to this woman.

Still, to explain Anne’s exhaustion by appealing solely to the immediate situation is to close off imagining her inner life: her austere widow peak; her playful left ear; her dark eyes that confront us, asking something of us, revealing something of her inner resolve. There is also in her black dress and her pale beauty the conceit of life holding on amid the quiet despair. Like Madame Bovary, like Hedda Gabler, she must have hungered. Like them, she must have demanded, from this life, to be alive to all, to put all in her mouth. At some blank point (“pain has an element of blank,” writes Emily Dickinson), she must have seen that for her erotic vitality there would be no one.

She will never be at home. This she knows. Courage, she whispers, whispers so loud as to be audible. With this word, she draws me back to her eyes, into her hands. I stand with her for minutes; I long to stay with her until I forget all apart from her.

Note

“Portrait of Anne Page” (1887) is on view at Crystal Bridges Museum as part of its permanent collection.

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The latest version of my short public bio

In education, ethics, meditation, philosophical counseling on December 22, 2011 at 6:54 am

It’s not a bad time to think amid the unsettled restlessness. After a plane from New York deposited me somewhere in the South. As the grass lies yellow and the moors I don’t see but imagine settle in. Might not be a bad time, then, to return to where we’ve begun, to add a few more daubs of paint.

“What now? Where to?”

Allow me to clarify. For a couple of years, I’ve been working through a life-puzzle: how to write a short public biography that “unhands” me from earlier forms of legitimacy and that “transvalues” my conception of a successful life. Last summer, I put the puzzle this way:

Are all public bios, those one to two paragraph haikus, true but misleading?

Before offering my latest version, I want to give some reasons for thinking that rewriting our public bios may be vital today.

A Short List of Criteria for What Counts as a Good Public Bio

1. The virtues should receive top billing. Spotlight on accuracy, honesty, truth-telling; on courage, resilience, and judgment, and the rest.

2. Modern forms of legitimacy should be ‘unhanded.’ No appeal, then, to institutional affiliation, social distinction, number and kind of degrees, prestige, ‘expertise,’ who’s who, etc.

3. We should laud a dignified person. Not, therefore, someone who confesses in public, not the person who is caught in a tabloid, not the individual who presents an overly professionalized brief.

4. We must transvalue our conception of success. From public reputation, social recognition, public accolades, happiness as feeling good just now to a radiant vision of a well-led life.

The Latest Version of my Public Bio

I’m a philosopher at home in New York. I wasn’t always at home. I was raised in a family of gentle virtues but modest concerns, I almost married a woman who was beautiful and strong but sad, and I abandoned an academic career just before it began. When I ask myself whether I’ve learned to love what’s gone without wishing for its return, I can now say yes: yes without reservation. In my present life, I seek to lead, and to help others lead, a virtuous, radiant existence. We set out together to make life work. For us, life is sweet.

Postscript

On Dec. 21, NYT Philosophers’ Stone included a link to one of my short essays, “Public Philosophy and Our Spiritual Predicament.” If you’d like, have a look.

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On being in debt up to your ears (but in a good way)

In education, ethics, meditation, philosophical counseling on December 21, 2011 at 5:07 am

On Philosophy as the Love of Giving

“In gratitude,” the note said. Inside the box was a book by Seneca, Epistles 1-65 of the Loeb Harvard Edition. The old man Seneca is writing to his younger philosophical friend and pupil Lucius, a Roman knight and civil servant. The letters were meant both to educate Lucius in the ways of Stoic philosophy, “the stern nurse of heroes during the first century of the Empire” (ix), writes Richard Gummere, and to be essays addressed to the general reader about the art of living. (Oh but how, in each line you write, to catch the personal and impersonal both?)

My note, which said “In gratitude,” was signed by one of my conversation partners. It damn near made me cry. ”A small token,” he said later. Let me share a little with you.

Letter 34. On a Promising Pupil

“I grow in spirit and leap for joy,” writes Seneca to Lucius, “and shake off my years and my blood runs warm again, whenever I understand, from your actions and your letters, how far you have outdone yourself; for as to the ordinary man, you left him in the rear long ago. [Damn straight, I add.--AT] If the farmer is pleased when his tree develops so that it bears fruit, if the shepherd takes pleasure in the increase of his flocks, if every man regards his pupil as though he discerned in him his own early manhood,–what, then, do you think are the feelings of those who have trained a mind and moulded a young idea, when they see it suddenly grown to maturity?

[...]

“You know what I mean by a good man?” Seneca continues. “One who is complete, finished,–whom no constraint or need can render bad. I see such a person in you, if only you go steadily on and bend to your task, and see to it that all your actions and words harmonize and correspond with each other and are stamped in the same mould. If a man’s acts are out of harmony, his soul is crooked. Farewell.” (241-3)

On the Joys of Always Being in Debt

The worst part of my philosophy practice is that if I’m not indebted to one conversation partner, then I’m invariably indebted to another. In revenge tragedy, payback is assumed, demanded, for an instant it’s bloody sweet, but then cosmic justice (dike) can never be restored. Where revenge tears at the fabric of being, law seeks amends. Law–pale-eyed Athena–was invented so that dues, in principle, could be repaid. Only for the one who’s wounded there’s always a hang-up: something further always remains. The law, all too human, fails to make whole, and that is its flaw. But in Christian forgiveness, the beautiful dream is that the slates shall be wiped clean. Someday, it is said.

I own a business, this philosophy practice, this one down here, but it’s clearly not a good one.  Because a good business bootstraps it from day 1, thereafter operating in the black. Well, I do and I don’t. So, mine has to be abysmal, “ass backwards,” says one conversation partner. My first thought–this, I think, being one of Zeno’s lost paradoxes–is that I’m always behind and can never catch up. Oh well.

—

Farewell, my friends. I’ll be leaving New York later today. Not for good. By plane.

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Of this ineffable

In meditation, philosophical counseling on December 20, 2011 at 5:17 am

My mother covering me, wholly, from the man with the gun. That was the dream. Being at home in the world. Fuck you, Freud.

—

I spoke to my friend and former lover after she’d returned from South Sudan. This would have been about a week or so ago. Life was hard there, she said. Her handler was a wreck and left her things in a wreck. Doctors without borders.

She told me a story of loss: of food, weight, routines, sickness, things. In the midst, so much was gone, so much pared back and down, so much taken and taken away, all the everydayness of things laid bare. She likened the experience to the Book of Job, to having very little, then almost nothing. And then? And then there was the turn.

She said, ”To have everything taken away and to see what’s left.” What’s left: not nothing, not the darkness of the eternal night, not terror, but union, oneness, communion. (She said, “Oneness and whatnot.” “Just take out the ‘whatnot,’” I quipped, “and then see what’s left.”) Without having experienced this–this all ineffable–she wouldn’t have made it. Worse, she wouldn’t have been able to see how to help.

—

As I wrote this, I remembered two lines from a lullaby I’d written one early morning about a warm night in April.

In the midst of the mist of the night, my friend, did you feel the warmth of the night?

And was it then that you opened up your heart, was it then that you felt whole?

Addendum on the Ineffable

I’m of the view that conceptuality goes all the way down and all the way up. The ineffable, accordingly, is not that which is unsayable in principle but that which we have poorly said. It is rather like a stutter. I canvass this view in two places: in the final section, “The Dialectical Character of Experience,” of “Unbounded Naturalism,” Cosmos and History; and more generally in “Adorno and the Question of Metaphysics.” If you’re interested in reading the Adorno, feel free to drop me a note in the Contact form, and I’ll send you an offprint copy. Caveat lector: Both essays are written for academic audiences.

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