In the library, I came across a book from 1956 that was put together as an attempt to re-establish English political philosophy (since it was an English editor, who characteristically refers to none but the most significant philosophers outside England but will discusses minor British names at equal length). It's fascinating in a small way, since it contains thoughts on political philosophy which are recent enough to be recognizable, but far enough in the past that it examines subjects which are now taken for granted. The preface, for example, deplores the fact that English philosophy (from Russell through Ryle) killed the three-hundred-year-long tradition of political philosophers writing in English, who "concern[ed] themselves with political and social relationships at the widest possible level of generality." This tradition is dead, and it outright says that the Logical Positivists killed it. And also the Marxists and the social scientists, the first because they were incorrigable relativists who looked at political theories as necessarily contingent, the second because they thought politics were too important to leave to the philosophers.
Topics in the book include an examination of the possibility of multiple moralities as opposed to a single, rationally decidable answer to every moral question; the grounds for the theory of natural rights; whether or not such a thing as the general will exists; and the philosophical justification of punishment. These topics are all discussed in contemporary writing, but I never see the premises so clearly laid out as they are in older texts, where they were still fresh. There's also an earnestness and sophistication of literary style in the old writing that is generally lacking today, alongside of a naiveté--charitably, a willingness to be naive when necessary.
It's not a book I want to read straight through, but I guess I'm glad it's in the library.
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Monday, May 18, 2009
I'm currently looking through Insound, trying to find things to buy and shifting between two poles. The first pole is thinking that I have the money and I would like to support Insound, the bands I like, and the physical music industry in general. The second pole is thinking, what am I, a capitalist cheerleader?
I feel nostalgic for the early years of this decade, when I spent hours every day downloading music, renaming the files and putting them in neatly ordered folders, driving to Sound Garden in Baltimore and buying a hundred dollars of CDs, alphabetizing the new purchases on my shelf, setting up a record player in my room and moving up half my parents' old LP collection, adding new LP purchases, finding bands to shop for, asking friends what I should buy, looking at all the album art and reading band interviews and dreaming of product . . . and sometimes listening to it, too.
But even the nostalgia is compromised by thoughts of how silly it all is. I look back on it and it now seems to me that I was trying to break through the album covers and into a fantasy world, a place where the music of the spheres was "I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One" and the shifting landscape took on the shapes of indie album art, populated by sixties rockers in their youth who lounged in the fuzzy pastel-green hills and climbed the rotating, swirly discs of color.
I don't ever feel like I'm in this world anymore. I think I'd still want to live in it, but I know that if I ever get there it won't be through buying lots of records.
In the early days of music downloads, I only got albums rather than just the songs I knew, and I burned everything onto CD. I even made cases, getting blank CD cases from Office Depot, downloading the album art and printing it out or making my own covers if art wasn't available. I would listen to music at the computer too, but if I wanted to play it in my room, I needed it on CD.
It was only much later that I got a digital music player, and I brought it to work with me every day, but I also brought a CD player and switched between the two.
For my freshman year of college, I bought a large CD tower and I brought every CD I owned into my dorm room, along with a large CD book full of burned discs, having finally decided that I decided could do without CD cases for most of my burned albums. My collection had grown by Sophomore year, but because of limited space I went without cases and just used the book. Then I took a year off from school and lived in Los Angeles, with few possessions at first but, even though I had no income, a steadily growing music collection. For Junior year I took a move that was radical for me, bringing no music players to Santa Fe but a turntable, a portable Discman and a pair of head phones. As a result, I almost never listened to music in my room even though I kept buying a bunch of CDs online almost every month.
Skipping ahead to my move to Santa Fe in 2006, even though I knew I would be living there for a long time and almost certainly never moving back in with my parents, I left most of my CDs behind in Maryland to save space in the car. I had an 80 GB iPod, and Anne had another 20 GB or so I could fill on her laptop, and so finally in 2006, almost a decade after I became aware of mp3s, I went mostly digital. With vinyl. It's apparently a very common combination these days for people who identify as music fans--CDs are mostly pointless when digital music is so easy to get and listen to and carry around, but people are unwilling to cut ties to music in physical form, or perhaps even just a representation of music in its physical form.
And I'm somewhat there with them, but that part of myself is currently losing the argument with what I guess is a saner and wiser Greg who says, "screw you, hipster. Go find a crumbling urban loft with bad central heating to worship your physical representation of music in."
Not that I have anything against following that hypnotizing vinyl with your eyes as it spins on its metal axis until you feel like you've stepped inside the music like it was some pulsing fun house, holding your breath as it coils and coils, tick tick tick up the big roller coaster climb, so high you can see the ocean from up there, and hey, so that's what the world looks like from outside the atmosphere! And then the release finally comes, your and it breaks your heart with joy.
And also, if there weren't such a thing as album covers, a dimension of band identity would be lost, illustrators would have one fewer way to build a reputation and sell their art, and people like Anne would have no way of choosing music to listen to when browsing a store*. And still, after all these years, I have almost never fallen in love with a band and added them to the music library in my head just by downloading their songs. (Here's to The Bees--known as Band of Bees in the U.S.--for being the first and so far the only one.)
There's another reason I still feel like buying music as well, which is that there's a difference between getting a CD put out by Sony or BMG or Colombia, and buying it from a band, an independent label, or Insound. If I ever put out a book or an album or whatever other physical result of creative effort, I know I'd want people to buy it. I want a world in which artists don't need day jobs, as long as they can find an audience who likes them; I want a world in which people who spend all their time thinking about music can make a living selling it; and in the modern capitalist system, the only way that can happen is if people buy recordings and band merchandise, and go to shows.
But at the same time, I also want a world in which everybody has access to health care, education is extremely well-funded or free, nations aren't divided between masters on the one hand and the slave-producing societies on the other, and nobody gets killed for money, ideology, drugs, or prestige. Buying music isn't going to accomplish any of those things. It isn't even going to get me to my bougie world between the grooves. So I think I'll trim down that Insound shopping cart, or even sit on it for a while.
*I'm not making fun of this practice. Honestly. It is kind of an interesting phenomenon, though, and it probably has something to say about the physical representation of music.
I feel nostalgic for the early years of this decade, when I spent hours every day downloading music, renaming the files and putting them in neatly ordered folders, driving to Sound Garden in Baltimore and buying a hundred dollars of CDs, alphabetizing the new purchases on my shelf, setting up a record player in my room and moving up half my parents' old LP collection, adding new LP purchases, finding bands to shop for, asking friends what I should buy, looking at all the album art and reading band interviews and dreaming of product . . . and sometimes listening to it, too.
But even the nostalgia is compromised by thoughts of how silly it all is. I look back on it and it now seems to me that I was trying to break through the album covers and into a fantasy world, a place where the music of the spheres was "I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One" and the shifting landscape took on the shapes of indie album art, populated by sixties rockers in their youth who lounged in the fuzzy pastel-green hills and climbed the rotating, swirly discs of color.
I don't ever feel like I'm in this world anymore. I think I'd still want to live in it, but I know that if I ever get there it won't be through buying lots of records.
In the early days of music downloads, I only got albums rather than just the songs I knew, and I burned everything onto CD. I even made cases, getting blank CD cases from Office Depot, downloading the album art and printing it out or making my own covers if art wasn't available. I would listen to music at the computer too, but if I wanted to play it in my room, I needed it on CD.
It was only much later that I got a digital music player, and I brought it to work with me every day, but I also brought a CD player and switched between the two.
For my freshman year of college, I bought a large CD tower and I brought every CD I owned into my dorm room, along with a large CD book full of burned discs, having finally decided that I decided could do without CD cases for most of my burned albums. My collection had grown by Sophomore year, but because of limited space I went without cases and just used the book. Then I took a year off from school and lived in Los Angeles, with few possessions at first but, even though I had no income, a steadily growing music collection. For Junior year I took a move that was radical for me, bringing no music players to Santa Fe but a turntable, a portable Discman and a pair of head phones. As a result, I almost never listened to music in my room even though I kept buying a bunch of CDs online almost every month.
Skipping ahead to my move to Santa Fe in 2006, even though I knew I would be living there for a long time and almost certainly never moving back in with my parents, I left most of my CDs behind in Maryland to save space in the car. I had an 80 GB iPod, and Anne had another 20 GB or so I could fill on her laptop, and so finally in 2006, almost a decade after I became aware of mp3s, I went mostly digital. With vinyl. It's apparently a very common combination these days for people who identify as music fans--CDs are mostly pointless when digital music is so easy to get and listen to and carry around, but people are unwilling to cut ties to music in physical form, or perhaps even just a representation of music in its physical form.
And I'm somewhat there with them, but that part of myself is currently losing the argument with what I guess is a saner and wiser Greg who says, "screw you, hipster. Go find a crumbling urban loft with bad central heating to worship your physical representation of music in."
Not that I have anything against following that hypnotizing vinyl with your eyes as it spins on its metal axis until you feel like you've stepped inside the music like it was some pulsing fun house, holding your breath as it coils and coils, tick tick tick up the big roller coaster climb, so high you can see the ocean from up there, and hey, so that's what the world looks like from outside the atmosphere! And then the release finally comes, your and it breaks your heart with joy.
And also, if there weren't such a thing as album covers, a dimension of band identity would be lost, illustrators would have one fewer way to build a reputation and sell their art, and people like Anne would have no way of choosing music to listen to when browsing a store*. And still, after all these years, I have almost never fallen in love with a band and added them to the music library in my head just by downloading their songs. (Here's to The Bees--known as Band of Bees in the U.S.--for being the first and so far the only one.)
There's another reason I still feel like buying music as well, which is that there's a difference between getting a CD put out by Sony or BMG or Colombia, and buying it from a band, an independent label, or Insound. If I ever put out a book or an album or whatever other physical result of creative effort, I know I'd want people to buy it. I want a world in which artists don't need day jobs, as long as they can find an audience who likes them; I want a world in which people who spend all their time thinking about music can make a living selling it; and in the modern capitalist system, the only way that can happen is if people buy recordings and band merchandise, and go to shows.
But at the same time, I also want a world in which everybody has access to health care, education is extremely well-funded or free, nations aren't divided between masters on the one hand and the slave-producing societies on the other, and nobody gets killed for money, ideology, drugs, or prestige. Buying music isn't going to accomplish any of those things. It isn't even going to get me to my bougie world between the grooves. So I think I'll trim down that Insound shopping cart, or even sit on it for a while.
*I'm not making fun of this practice. Honestly. It is kind of an interesting phenomenon, though, and it probably has something to say about the physical representation of music.
Monday, May 11, 2009
I just received a book of German philosophy through interlibrary loan; I knew at the time I was filling out the request form that I couldn't possibly want it once it arrived. The book is by an 18th century thinker named Salomon Maimon. Last names were rare for Eastern European Jews of that time, but he picked one to fit in better among German philosophical circles; he chose this name because of his respect for Maimonides. The book, Versuch über die Transzendentalphilosophie, is Maimon's comments on Kant's first Critique, which I'm still interested in even though six years ago I would have scorned someone who continued focusing on program authors in a non-academic setting. I requested Maimon because I read in a book on the history of philosophy that Kant said in a letter, “none of my critics understood me and the main questions as well as Herr Maimon does.”
When I first graduated, I decided to put off more school for a while, and ended up getting married and having to put off school for longer while Anne gets her undergraduate degree. For the first year after graduation, when I read philosophy (which was rare) I read somewhat contemporary work like Deleuze and Alasdair MacIntyre. Mostly I read novels and news. In the years that followed, every so often I got into a phase where I obsessed about a single subject and read about it all the time, for months: early English plays, biological anthropology, Flaubert, Roman history, the French Revolution. Inevitably, my interest would fade before I had read everything I'd planned to read. The reason is that every time I become interested in something, I keep pushing it back further and further. The interest in plays started as an interest in Shakespeare, but I just kept looking for more context, and I had to consciously stop myself from learning Old English. I read about ten old plays (including "Everyman" and the so-called "Mystery Plays") before I gave up. The interest in Roman history started as an attempt to read Gibbons, and I decided to look at his sources first; I read some Livy and Polybius, but never got past the first chapter of Decline and Fall.
Currently I seem to be approaching the end of an interest in contemporary philosophy, and I've done particularly poorly this time. I pushed back to (of course) the roots of contemporary philosophy, first making a big reading list of philosophers to at least skim (initially starting with Leibniz), then I decided to fill in the reading list with stuff I hadn't heard of, so I checked out a history of modern philosophy . . . and then another . . . and then five more . . . and then even got a book about histories of philosophy, like the history of the historiography of philosophy, but I still haven't read anything written in the 20th century except Austin's How To Do Things With Words, Derrida's Limited, Inc., and several journal pieces about the conflict between Derrida and Searle found therein. I've also read a number of journal articles written by Analytic philosophers, some about the limitations of Analytic philosophy, others about the limitations of certain Continental philosophers, still more about the origin of the perceived divide into these two oddly designated branches.
I still don't know what I would focus on in grad school, but maybe it would be philosophy after all. But no--no, that would be just too horrible. Even Comp Lit would be better than that.
And yet, here's this book with its pleasingly flexible spine and its corrugated green cover--I've never seen a cover like this, with the texture of finely ribbed corduroy that makes my finger vibrate when I run my nail over it. I can't read it without looking up thirty words per page, but I'll probably get through a good bit of it nevertheless. It fills me with more dread than pleasure to see it, and I even expect the contents to be boring, and yet I couldn't resist at least glancing at it. And what does that say about me?
When I first graduated, I decided to put off more school for a while, and ended up getting married and having to put off school for longer while Anne gets her undergraduate degree. For the first year after graduation, when I read philosophy (which was rare) I read somewhat contemporary work like Deleuze and Alasdair MacIntyre. Mostly I read novels and news. In the years that followed, every so often I got into a phase where I obsessed about a single subject and read about it all the time, for months: early English plays, biological anthropology, Flaubert, Roman history, the French Revolution. Inevitably, my interest would fade before I had read everything I'd planned to read. The reason is that every time I become interested in something, I keep pushing it back further and further. The interest in plays started as an interest in Shakespeare, but I just kept looking for more context, and I had to consciously stop myself from learning Old English. I read about ten old plays (including "Everyman" and the so-called "Mystery Plays") before I gave up. The interest in Roman history started as an attempt to read Gibbons, and I decided to look at his sources first; I read some Livy and Polybius, but never got past the first chapter of Decline and Fall.
Currently I seem to be approaching the end of an interest in contemporary philosophy, and I've done particularly poorly this time. I pushed back to (of course) the roots of contemporary philosophy, first making a big reading list of philosophers to at least skim (initially starting with Leibniz), then I decided to fill in the reading list with stuff I hadn't heard of, so I checked out a history of modern philosophy . . . and then another . . . and then five more . . . and then even got a book about histories of philosophy, like the history of the historiography of philosophy, but I still haven't read anything written in the 20th century except Austin's How To Do Things With Words, Derrida's Limited, Inc., and several journal pieces about the conflict between Derrida and Searle found therein. I've also read a number of journal articles written by Analytic philosophers, some about the limitations of Analytic philosophy, others about the limitations of certain Continental philosophers, still more about the origin of the perceived divide into these two oddly designated branches.
I still don't know what I would focus on in grad school, but maybe it would be philosophy after all. But no--no, that would be just too horrible. Even Comp Lit would be better than that.
And yet, here's this book with its pleasingly flexible spine and its corrugated green cover--I've never seen a cover like this, with the texture of finely ribbed corduroy that makes my finger vibrate when I run my nail over it. I can't read it without looking up thirty words per page, but I'll probably get through a good bit of it nevertheless. It fills me with more dread than pleasure to see it, and I even expect the contents to be boring, and yet I couldn't resist at least glancing at it. And what does that say about me?