Ethics: Kant's Morals vs. Mill's Ends

Lecture on Aristotle & Virtue, Kant & Morals

Basics of Ancient World Cosmology:

Before getting into Aristotle and his understanding of the virtuous person, it is important to understand the world view of the ancient world. Many ancient cultures (including the Babylonians, the Persians, the Egyptians, the Indians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Chinese, and even the Hawaiians) have a very similar cosmology. Cosmology is the term used to cover the ancient study of the world, which included physics, psychology, biology, medicine, philosophy, religion and most areas of study all together as a single study by the educated and the wise.

The world was thought to be like a big person (making the individual person a microcosm or mini-cosmos within the larger cosmos or world). The elements, including fire, air, earth and water stacked from lightest on the top (fire and air) to heaviest on the bottom (earth and water). This was not only observed in nature (star fire above, winds next, then earth above water) but also in humans (the mind is fire and visions of light, which heats and activates the breath in speech like orders and commands, and the water in the lower regions and functions of the body which often was identified with chaos). Order and reason were identified with the higher elements (fire and air, mind and breath) and chaos and desire were identified with the lower elements (earth and water, flesh and fluid). When the stack of elements is in order the cosmos and the individual are in order, and when the stack of elements are out of order the cosmos and individual are out of order. The higher elements were believed to be eternal just as the cosmos itself and Being are eternal, and the lower elements were believed to be temporary like the individuals and beings are temporary.

One can find in religion and philosophy in ancient cultures (including Christianity, Buddhism, Indian Philosophy, Greek Philosophy and Chinese Philosophy) the same message repeated again and again: reason and the mind must be placed above and in charge of desire and the body. The eternal way of things is to be placed above the temporary ways and wants. This gains the individual wisdom, reason and insight into the workings of the cosmos. When the lower elements are in charge, there is ignorance and destruction. This framework is important for understanding each individual system of ancient thought as well as their overall similarities and differences.


Aristotle (384-322 BCE)

Plato’s student and the tutor of Alexander the Great and Ptolemy, Aristotle is one of the most famous and influential of Greek philosophers. He was primarily interested in biology and speciation, but his works on the soul (mind, self), Logic, Ethics and politics became more important than his works on the animal kingdom. He was a central influence on the origins of Christianity, Islamic thought and European thought in the middle ages. While he is sometimes called the first scientist and the first logician, his views on these subjects expanded ancient world cosmology and were not the birth of these subjects. Aristotle has been claimed by the West as a founder, but the Islamic world also considers him one of their own and he is depicted in different ways depending on who does the illustrating (see the beautiful Islamic image in the Wikipedia article that portrays him as a very dark skinned holy sage for an interesting counter to Renaissance paintings).

Aristotle’s conception of virtue and human purpose is entirely in line with ancient world cosmology. He believes that everything has a single purpose for which it is intended. It is as if the cosmos, Being itself, is a big mind that creates things for particular uses, and individual beings thrive if they are serving their purposes (ergon in the Greek, or “work”, “job”). We are reasonable to the degree that we see the purposes of things, serve our own natural purpose and use things in accord with their natural purposes. This is known as the teleological view, as the study of purpose is called teleology. Notice that teleology is very big with more traditional people today (including evangelical Christians) but modern Philosophy and Science have broken from this view and find it quite antiquated.

For Aristotle, having oneself in the proper stack and order is being in accord with one’s nature, and this means putting theory and soul/intellect on top and putting each lower element of our minds and bodies in the service of the highest part of the mind, the intellect, which corresponds to the highest good of the cosmos itself. Just as the intellect should be pursued because it is the best and highest part, the good itself should be pursued simply in itself and for no other purpose. This is similar to Kant and Moral theory, but absolutely at odds with Mill and consequentialism which believe that good is the end of things but would not say that intellect should be pursued in itself without regards to the consequences and practical ends. Aristotle does believe that the human individual will naturally flourish and be happy if they are stacked up right and in accord with the human purpose of intellectual activity, but this is secondary and the byproduct of serving ones purpose.

Similarly, in matters of politics, Aristotle believes that the city is not primarily a living arrangement but rather for producing the elite and the virtuous. Thus, the city is not for making people happy but having each individual do their natural job. Just like his teacher Plato argues in his Republic, Aristotle argues that each person must have one thing they do best and it is therefore best for them to do that thing and that one thing only. Unfortunately, both Plato and Aristotle argued that slaves and peasants are meant to serve the aristocracy and women are clearly meant to serve men (Mill will strongly criticize these views, one of the first and few outspoken critics of the subjugation of slaves and women).

Consider the example of lying. The moralist would say that lying is wrong in and of itself, like Kant argues that lying goes against our reason by categorical necessity. The consequentialist would say that lying has bad consequences and results in pain and unhappiness. The virtue theorist, however, would argue that the purpose of the mind and human being is truth in and of itself and so lying is not in accord with righteous and propper human nature.


Modern Virtue Theory

While Aristotle’s virtue ethics and teleological theory were popular in the middle ages in Europe, there was a decline during the 1700s and 1800s as science rose to prominence and questioned teleology. Kant’s laws and Mill’s consequences became the dueling positions of ethics. Recently, however, there has been a revival of virtue theory that rose along with increasing individualism and criticism of positivistic conceptions of science. If we become critical of the idea that there are simple laws that can be known, it opens a space for a return to the idea of the virtuous person beyond airtight moral laws or the complete calculation of consequences.

However, if we do not believe that things have simple and singular purposes just as we have grown critical of laws and calculation, virtue ethics has a problem: what virtues should the virtuous person have? Often these virtues are mental: intellect, wisdom, reason, and understanding. This has been neglectful of the physical body (the home of the physical brain, of course). Another issue that has come to light is the interpersonal aspect of virtue. Virtue has typically been described as personal, but the individual is naturally social (curiously Aristotle argues this when justifying his political views of the city and its proper organization). Confucius, one of the great moral geniuses of the world, has a very interpersonal view of ethics and thus we will consider his views next under the concept of balance (such as the balance of self and other).


As a final note, consider Jain (the ancient Indian forerunner of Buddhism) anti-merit theory:

In Hinduism and Buddhism, karma can be positive (merit and blessing) or negative (demerit and sin). Thus, karma can either help you up or drag you down. For Jains, karma is ALWAYS NEGATIVE, always weight that keeps you down, always division or blockage between you and the ALL. Thus, one tries best to avoid accumulating karma and to destroy the karma one has already accumulated. Jains are famous for their doctrine of the negativity of karma and the radical nonviolence that follows from this principle. Jains wear masks to prevent insects from flying in their mouths, sweep the ground to avoid killing insects (even though the killing would be unintentional, it would still be an accumulation of karma), influenced other Indian thought in promoting vegetarianism, and even don’t eat root vegetables as it kills (up-roots) the whole plant rather than that plucked from the plant. Thus, any accumulation of virtue or merit is distinguishing and distancing oneself from the whole. Sharing much with ancient cosmology and Aristotle, Jains would argue that the purpose of the individual is to join the whole without distinction and therefore we should work to LOSE merit and karma, not gain it.

Kant, Principles & Morals

Kant (1724-1804) was the European philosopher who argued for always following morals and laws universally. His position is opposed by Mill, who believed that morals are only in the service of getting good consequences. This is one of the biggest oppositions of perspectives in ethics. Should we create morals and laws and always stick to them, or should we do whatever results in the best consequences?

As Europe rose in the 1600s and 1700s, science had begun discovering many new truths about the world. This created an opposition between rationalists who believed that the world has absolute laws that we can know certainly by reason and empiricists who believed that we can only assume what we know and that the rules our reason finds could be wrong. One of the most famous empiricists was Hume, who argued that one can only assume that one billiard ball causes the other billiard ball to move.

Kant was "awoken from his dogmatic slumbers" by Hume. Kant wanted to balance empiricism with rationalism, but he comes down on the rationalist side. In all knowledge, including ethics, Kant believed we must use our reason to figure out the universal laws of our rational and ordered universe. Notice that Kant, as a rationalist, trusts that the world and the mind are reasonable and that there are universal laws out there for us to grasp.

The central example we will consider is the moral "Do Not Lie". Kant believed that one should never lie, and our reason can show us this with certainty. He argued that one is seeking unconditional and universal laws in ethics (as well as every area of human knowledge), which Kant also calls categorical imperatives, and so one should only act in a way that one could expect everyone to always act everywhere at any time. If everyone lied all the time, then society would collapse. Therefore, Kant argued, it is one's duty to not lie and hold to this moral and law.

Consider the "guy with the butcher knife" thought experiment. Let us say you are at home, and the doorbell rings. You answer it, and your friend runs in looking afraid. A minute later the doorbell rings again, you answer it, and a scary guy with a butcher knife asks you where your friend is. Kant would allow one to shut the door and say nothing, but Kant would argue that it is wrong to lie to the scary guy and say you don't know or that your friend took off down the street the other way. Even though we can assume that if you lie it would improve your friend's chances of living, Kant would argue that this would be wrong. We can contrast this with the position of Mill and utilitarianism, which would argue that in some circumstances the lie is the lesser of two evils and one should behave in accord with the ends of ones actions rather than stick rigidly to morals and laws.

An interesting issue here is that rationalists and positivists like Kant believe that one should anchor ethics in good beginnings while empiricists and skeptics believe one should anchor ethics in good ends. Kant believes that one must start with good intentions and principles no matter the consequences, while Mill believes that one should aim at the best consequences no matter the principles or intentions one has. As usual, both sides agree that one should have good intentions, principles and consequences, but they come down on opposite sides when arguing for what is really the essence or importance of the matter.

We will come to Mill's position in the coming weeks. Another contrary position to both Kant and Mill is Nietzsche, who we will also hear from soon. Nietzsche does not trust human reason, so he trusts neither Kant nor Mill. Nietzsche argues that people who believe they know the true morals and people who say they know what led to the best consequences for everyone are capable of deceiving themselves and thinking they know what is best for everyone.


Lecture on Mill and Utilitarianism

The last class focused on ethical concepts that focus on the beginning or cause of an action rather than the end or consequence (with the possible exception of balance, which suggests a medium of the two).  Today, we focus on consequentialism and its foremost school, Utilitarianism.  Thus, I had you read the first two chapters of John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism.  In this work, Mill argues that we should always look at our actions and ask if the consequences are ethical (do good/make people happy and reduce harm/pain).  He specifically mentions Kant as wrong about principle and mentions virtue ethics as well, claiming that these two conceptions ignore how we use principle and virtue for happiness and reduction of harm by taking each as a good in itself out of context.

Mill notes: if you call it Utilitarianism, people think it is dry and boring.
If you call it Principle of Happiness or Pleasure first, people think its decadent.
This is why people called Epicurus decadent.

Brief Tradition of Consequentialism (included in Mill’s own text)

Epicurus (340-270 BCE)
Greek philosopher who believed that happiness was the most important thing, and all virtues, purposes and ends are subordinate to it.  From him we get the word ‘Epicurean’ as in ‘Gourmet’, one who appreciates the finer more pleasant tastes of things.  As Mill notes, Epicurus was attacked as a glutton in his time, but he actually had a taste for thought, civilization, and what Mill calls the ‘higher virtues’, mental pleasures in giving to others rather than physical selfish pleasures of drinking every night.  Mill argues that Epicurus took the long view just as he did, so his opponents are wrong to call happy principle people “swine”.

Jeremy Bentham (1750-1830 CE)
The first to come up with Utilitarianism, but Mill gave it the name.
Bentham believed in max happiness, while Mill complimented this with min pain.
Bentham also believed that simple and common pleasures are just as good as sophisticated, saying the common plays are just as good as fine opera.
Mill rejected this, believing that fine society was of a higher happiness than common culture, as mental pleasure is superior to physical, as selfless pleasures (giving to others)  makes one happier than selfish pleasures (receiving from others).

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873 CE)
Born in London, Mill was influenced by Ancient Greek, French, and liberal thought.
His father wrote a history of India, and Mill was for a time involved with his father in the British East India company, the corporation that helped Britain maintain their hold over India.  Mill’s family was friends with the Bentham family, from whom Mill took up his consequentialist, ‘happy principle’ thought.  However, it was Mill who found the name ‘utilitarian’ in a Christian text talking about how evil it was to fall into it rather than believe in the principle as good, and he added the name and developed the thinking, becoming its famous spokesman.

Mill is a central thinker in Logic, Economics and Ethics.
His liberal social thought is his most famous.  He argued for equal rights for all, the end to the subjugation of women and slavery.

Mill’s text: Utilitarianism
Mill’s harm principle as the principle to end principles, putting all focus on harmful consequences.    This is not simply ease or expediency in limited personal vision, but the long view over time of what makes people happy and saves them from pain.

Notice: Mill completely agrees with Kant, we need a test for principles and an overall principle to serve as this text.  For Kant, this test is ‘can it always be followed?’, while for Mill the test is ‘does following the principle make people happy as a consequence?’.  Both come up with a supreme principle.  Thus, for Kant, one should never lie because the principle is most important as beginning or all good action, while for Mill, one should never lie as long as this has good consequences because this is the most important as end of all good action.

Kant says: Always follow principle, and you will likely be happy.
Mill says: Always follow happiness (self and others), and you will likely be principled.

Both also come up with a pure ‘good in itself’: Kant’s is intention (the good-in-itself beginning of an act) and Mill’s is happiness (the good-in-itself end of an act).  Both say that it is impossible to argue for this good-in-itself, but it simply shows itself in us.

We can see two sides to the Utilitarian Principle, maximizing positive and minimizing negative.  Bentham says: Always act to maximize happiness.  Mill agrees, but says the MOST important thing is to minimize the negative (at least, this is what scholars concur in reading his writings and comparing them to Bentham’s today).  Thus, we see the whole principle is ‘max happy and min pain’, but one can lean either way on it.  There are times when maximum happiness can cause much pain (majority over the minority, which Mill speaks about vs. Bentham), and there are times when minimum pain hurts maximum happiness (overprotective parenting, insurance issues, have to break some eggs etc).

Mill admits that there will be continuous problems whichever way we use the principle, but we are evolving in a positive direction slowly and we should stick to the Utilitarian view even when there are problems if we truly (and he thinks we do) desire good consequences basically as human beings.

Attacks on Utilitarianism:

Mill addresses many of these directly in the text.

Interesting Paradox/Problem for Utilitarianism: the Good of the Bad as Example
Mill notes this, as do other modern writers on Utilitarianism noting as Mill does that this is a common attack against the Utilitarian principle as ethical conception/system.  COMPARE: PBS documentaries all the time on slavery and the US overcoming slavery as freedom and our view as Americans of the type of place South Africa is.  COMPARE: Prosecuting Attorney arguing that someone is a habitual criminal so latest normal behavior is prime for relapse vs. Defense Attorney pointing at the same evidence as reform and pulling one’s life together as normal from bad upbringing and environment.  Dennett uses three mile island as ex: this caused good nuclear standards to follow, so we could say as a utilitarian that the catastrophe was just as good as people simply coming up with the standards without the disaster.  Consider that we love villains who go from good to bad and heroes who go from bad to good.  We can very easily see bad as good and good as bad.  The attack on Utilitarianism says that it is prone to confusing bad with good especially compared to systems of principles or rights that are given, not based on their consequences

Marx attacks Utilitarianism with a common argument today: guess who are the ones to tell you what is useful or makes us happy?  Yes: the upper class, who use the lower class as labor.  Obviously, it is the task master or overseer and not the worker who gets to say who is useful in their place and how happy the system is overall.

Mill in fact approves of war to advance civilization, and he approves of colonialism as improving the uncivilized.  Marx and us could criticize him for this short sightedness.
HOWEVER, Mill was a champion against the enslavement of Black people and the second class status of women.  He was an early champion of both, so this is mixed.
He writes, in 1850 on ‘The Negro Question’ words I love:

“It is curious, withal, that the earliest known civilization was, we have the strongest reason to believe, a negro civilization.  The original Egyptians are inferred, from the evidence of their sculptures, to have been a negro race: it was from negroes, therefore, that the Greeks learnt their first lessons in civilization; and to the records and traditions of these negroes did the Greek Philosophers to the very end of their career resort (I do not say with much fruit) as a treasury of mysterious wisdom.”

Defense against anti-environment challenge:
Many could say that ‘use’ and ‘happy’ can easily lead to how we abuse the environment.
More relevant today, Mill loved deep forests and argued that wilderness was necessary in the long view of use and happiness.  We will read on wilderness for environmental week.  This poses us an interesting question: when utilitarianism asks us to take the long view, how long a view can we take?  If we pollute the earth and ignore it for hundreds of years, our long view can still be too short.

Intro Philosophy: Nonsense, Humor & Art

LEWIS CARROLL & THE ALICE BOOKS

Born 1832, Lewis Carroll taught mathematics and logic at Christ Church College at Oxford from college there (1851) to his death (1898).  He wrote the Alice books for Alice and her sisters as well as other children who he enjoyed playing with and having conversations.  He liked to try to teach kids, especially girls, math and chess.  He hated children growing up, because they stopped being innocent and started being deceitful and hypocritical like the adults they imitated.

He was especially fond of children, particularly little girls (which doesn’t come out right no matter how you say it).   This became an issue in the 1930s, where in America in anti-pornography by mail conservative moral craze he was labeled a pedophile.  Freudian readings of the texts had flourished by this time, and Carroll did not help himself with his photography of children or his relationship to the real Alice, Alice Liddell (the daughter of the dean of Christ Church College).  It is thought today by scholars that the family broke contact because Carroll asked for Alice’s hand but he was not noble enough.

Many have tried to crack his books for their symbolism, trying to find the essential meaning underneath.  Some have said that his books are merely political commentary, some say it is making fun of the history of mathematics and logic.  Others say that there is no meaning at all, but it is simply nonsense.  There are things there that are still hiding, and today we look for logic and its puzzles in his nonsensical humor, but listening to late Wittgenstein we likely will not find some particular rule or essential symbolism underneath that solves the text.

There are repeated themes of nonsense, dream, and parody in the Alice books.  Carroll took Logic, Nursery Rhymes, Lessons, Hierarchies and he warped and reversed them in conversations between Alice and her dream companions with hilarious consequences.  Alice is constantly reciting her rhymes she is taught, hands folded, but strange tales come out.  This is paralleled by having ideals and rules but living in the all too human world.  It mocks the way that we are hypocritical and irrational while following rules, standards and ideals while we are in conversation and games of life with others.

Carroll was fascinated by reversals, playing music boxes backwards to hear  “music standing on its head”.  Scholars have noted that he was fascinated not by what worked but the puzzle cases, the problems and mysteries.  The best political example: Carroll fascinated by elite kids speaking to servants as kids.  An example from Looking Glass: Tweedledee tells Alice she is just a dream character, then stop crying as those tears aren’t real…but then he is a dream and his being upset with her is not real either.  Alice in beginning of LG says that she could only tell if lg world has a fire if there is smoke, but it could be deceptive set up.  If we are kind to someone else who we get something from, we see it as genuine, but if that person is nice to us before getting something we could see it as a smoke screen, as not genuine but deception.  Is this real or not?  Likely it is both mixed together, seen from two different and opposite perspectives.

In many ways, the imagination is the same as yet opposite to reality.  For example, consider the horse, unicorn example we had with Avicenna, marking the turn to modern thought considering mental objects and consciousness.  The being of a unicorn is the same as the being of a real horse in the sense that each is one thing, really so.  However, one can always have a unicorn whenever one wants.  One starts thinking, an activity, and there is a unicorn, whereas if there is not a horse you have to go find one  so you can passively just have it whether you are thinking about it or not.  (Consider the Red Queen, who Alice has to approach going backward and running as fast as they can just to stay in place).  Mental objects are ideal, just what they are, while real objects are always imperfect and temporary.  Remember that in ancient world cosmology, the real world is often the fake and temporary world compared to the hidden world, and in modern science and logic the things themselves are imperfect compared to the rules and patterns of behavior.

There are many quotes from the books on logic that Lewis Carroll wrote that support a cynical view of logic, philosophy and science as little more than a dream, a dream which makes life itself less than the ideal:

Studying Logic, “will give you clearness of thought – the ability to see your way through a puzzle – the habit of arranging your ideas in an orderly and get-at-able form – and, more valuable than all, the power to detect fallacies, and to tear to pieces the flimsy illogical arguments which you will so continually encounter in books, in newspapers, in speeches, and even in sermons, and which so easily delude those who have never taken the trouble to master this fascinating Art”. (p xvii)

“And so you think, do you, that the chief use of Logic in real life is to deduce Conclusions from workable Premises, and to satisfy yourself that the Conclusions deduced by other people are correct?  I only wish it were!  Society would be much less liable to panics and other delusions and political life especially would be a totally different thing, if even a majority of the arguments that are scattered broadcast over the world were correct!  But it is all the other way , I fear.  For one workable pair of premises (I mean a pair that lead to a logical conclusion) that you meet with in reading your newspaper or magazine, you will probably find five that lead to no Conclusion at all; and, even when the Premises are workable, for one instance, where the writer draws a correct conclusion, there are probably ten where he draws an incorrect one.” (p 32)

“The Logicians…speak of the Copula of a Proposition ‘with bated breath’, almost as if it were a living, conscious entity, capable of declaring for itself what it chose to mean, and that we, poor human creatures, had nothing to do but to ascertain what was its sovereign will and pleasure, and submit to it…If I find an author saying, at the beginning of his book, ‘Let it be understood that by the word ‘black’ I shall always mean ‘white’ and that by the word ‘white’ I shall always mean ‘black’, I meekly accept his ruling, however injudicious I may think it.” (p 165-166)

“You will find these seven words – proposition, attribute, term, subject, predicate, particular, universal – charmingly useful, if any friend should happen to ask if you have ever studied Logic.  Mind you bring all seven words into your answer, and your friend will go away deeply impressed – ‘a sadder and a wiser man’.”

If you go through the answers to his syllogism puzzles, you find strange final answers:
“No riddles that interest me can be solved”…“No lobsters are unreasonable”…”No Act of Parliament is amusing”…”Some caterpillars are not eloquent”…”Generals do not write poetry”…”Some savage animals do not drink coffee”…and, the only genuine drug reference I have found in spite of the 60s and 70s counter-cultural claims, “Opium eaters do not wear white kid gloves”.


Sylvie and Bruno Limerick (note the many types of non-being)

He thought he saw a rattlesnake that spoke to him in Greek.
He looked again and found it was the middle of next week.
What a pity it is, he sighed and said, that it can hardly speak.


THE ALICE BOOKS

Alice travels to wonderland and through the looking glass by dreaming.  In both places she encounters characters that are trapped in their own perspectives/reasoning such that they are nonsensical to Alice and Alice is nonsensical to them.   The Cheshire cat explains this with his comparison of cats and dogs.  We have to focus on particular parts due to time, but we will go in order that they appear in the two books.


Alice in Wonderland

This was first called Alice’s Adventures Underground, but Carroll changed the title.  In this book Alice falls into a dream and believes she is going underground.  In the second book she falls into a dream and thinks she is going through the mirror.  Both these are metaphors for going into the mind, logical reasoning and imagination together as thought.  Alice is thinking about whether or not to make a daisy chain when she (unknown to her or the reader until the end) falls asleep.  She then sees the white rabbit, fascinating because he is both animal and human, like the human being as both animal body and human mind with reason, imagination, and memory.  She follows the white rabbit until she falls down the rabbit hole, just like she followed her thought until she fell asleep and into a dream world.

Alice passes all sorts of empty shelves with jars and labels, passing pictures and maps on the walls.  All of these things are containers and images, the abstractions of reason and memory but not real things that they hold and represent.  Alice thinks that she will fall through the earth and meet people called Antipathies who walk on their hands upside-down.  Notice the reversal of the real by reason and imagination.

She falls into an underground place that becomes a formal banquet hall.  Here we have the small door to the garden, and the golden key on the glass table.  This is somewhat like the square of opposition, the relationship between universal and particular.  When Alice is big, she can reach the key on the table.  When we are in the mind universalizing things and saying ‘All xs are ys’ we have the key to judging things and thinking about them in the abstract, but when we are faced with the particular things of the real world, and we only have x is some y and some not y, we no longer can reach the golden key on the slippery glass table (like Early Witt’s truth tables and Later criticism of these as slippery ice).  When we think about someone or ourselves, it is easy to say totally bad or good, but when we are faced with the person or being ourselves it is hard to have total ‘All or None’ judgments .  Alice will get to this garden later, but she will find it is filled with the Queen who keeps screaming for executions and a bunch of animals being used in  a court game of croquet.

Throughout this, Alice is questioning whether or not she is Mabel because she no longer knows the things she does.  This is the classic paradox of identity that philosophers today in American Analytics argue about.  Remember Avicenna’s floating man thought experiment and Descartes’ deceiving demon thought experiment.  Both said that all the qualities and limbs can be denied, but self-consciousness, the oneness of the presence of the self and whole, can’t be denied.  While we think it is absurd that Alice could suspect she is Mabel now, soon after this she is called ‘Mary Ann’ by the white Rabbit, who thinks that she is her servant (Mary Ann was a common name for maids in Victorian England), and Alice responds as if she is Mary Ann.  When she enters the house on the white rabbit’s orders, she is worried that she will meet the real Mary Ann.  So maybe she was not so crazy in wondering if she was Mabel.

When she encounters the Pigeon, the Pigeon says that if Alice has a long neck, and has eaten eggs, then she must be a serpent and therefore a threat to the eggs in her nest.  Alice replies, ‘I am not a serpent, I am a little girl’ (sic) to which the Pigeon replies that if little girls eat eggs like serpents, then they must be some kind of serpent.  Notice that the Pigeon is using syllogistic, deductive reasoning here.  The problem is that the world is complex and simple rules like ‘if it eats eggs (x) then it is a serpent (y)’ both make sense to the pigeon, and we can understand how and follow the reasoning, but at the same time are nonsense and simply wrong to Alice and the reader.

Meeting the Duchess in her house, Alice is horrified to see the baby she is holding crying and sneezing while the Duchess calls it ‘pig’ and beats it.  Then Alice takes the baby and flees with it outside, where it transforms into a pig and Alice says ‘if you are going to turn into a pig, I will have nothing more to do with you’, sets it down and it runs off into the woods.

-    -    -    -    -    -    -    -    -    -    -    -    -
Alice at the Mad Tea Party and Wittgenstein’s Later Thought

There is an interesting bridge between Lewis Carroll and Ludwig Wittgenstein in the figure of Bertrand Russell, a bridge which serves as a perfect illustration for our analysis of the Mad Tea Party.  Carroll, Russell and Wittgenstein were all logicians who did their teaching and publishing in England.  Russell met Wittgenstein in 1911, and for a while believed that Wittgenstein would be his successor.  Wittgenstein however came to disprove of Russell’s theory of types in moving to his later views.  Russell’s close circle of Trinity college at Cambridge was in fact dubbed “the Mad Tea Party of Trinity” in fun by many contemporaries.  In his autobiography, Norbert Wiener wrote that it was impossible to describe Russell’s likeness except by identifying him with the classic illustration of the Mad Hatter by Tenniel.  Wiener also pointed out G.E. Moore’s likeness to the March Hare and J.M.E. Taggart’s likeness to the Dormouse.  Thus, many in Russell’s heyday thought his trio resembled Carroll’s Mad Tea Party in more ways than one.

Russell famously stated: “Mathematics is that science in which we do not know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true”.  There is no better statement to illustrate the Hatter’s confusion of particular case with abstract form.  The number three can designate three mountains, zebras, or logicians, but it does not refer in itself to any particular situation of three things.  Wittgenstein, in rebelling against Russell and abstract analysis, in advocating analysis of particular use in situations, indeed came to take a position similar to that of Alice with respect to the Hatter in our dialogue.  The Hatter’s argument does seem at first to make logical sense, but a close look at the uses of the character’s expressions reveals a confusion that lurks between abstraction and the events of the Mad Tea Party.

Among scholars there is consensus that Wittgenstein had a great appreciation of Carroll, but there is a debate as to how much Wittgenstein’s philosophy was indebted to Carroll’s nonsense play.  Carroll’s name appears in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.  Discussing the difficulty of comprehending reversed writing, Wittgenstein notes: “Compare a remark of Lewis Carroll’s” (II xi).  Unfortunately there is no citation to locate this remark in Carroll’s work, but it seems clearly related to the reverse writing of Jabberwocky.  Leila S. May states “we know Alice in Wonderland was one of (Wittgenstein’s) favorite books in English”.  Warren Shibles includes a philosophical analysis of Alice in Wonderland in his collection of essays, Wittgenstein, Language and Philosophy (1969).  In Wittgenstein, Nonsense, and Lewis Carroll, George Pitcher argues that Wittgenstein and Carroll investigate nonsensical situations to use nonsense as a vaccine against itself, as an exercise for the strengthening of reason and the development of insight.  In his essay Pitcher sets out to show the “remarkable extent and depth of the affinity between these two great writers with respect to nonsense”, adding:

I shall try to show that the very same confusions with which Wittgenstein charges philosophers were deliberately employed by Carroll for comic effect.  Second, I want to show that some quite specific philosophical doctrines that the later Wittgenstein attacks are ridiculed also by Carroll.

Pitcher presents several points of contact between Carroll and Wittgenstein:  Both authors are preoccupied with the phenomena of games and rules (for example, both make use of chess and chess pieces).  Both make use of utterances that “sound like English” but do not have a use and thus do not make sense.  Both discuss giving gifts to one’s own limbs as a type of absurdity.  Both repeatedly demonstrate that definitions and rules can be variously interpreted.  Both play with the boundary between quality and identity.  Both show the incomprehensibility of private language and definitions.  Both pose alternate situations, imaginary worlds, that are bound by different rules than our own to show the particular difficulties we have in using language.

Now a forgotten psychiatric practice, mock tea parties were used to teach rules and manners to inmates of insane asylums in Victorian England.  In Alice and Wonderland, Carroll uses a ‘mad tea party’ to make fun of the way we learn and follow rules of behavior and language.  When Alice arrives at the Mad Tea Party of Wonderland, she decides to join the Mad Hatter, March Hare and Dormouse even though she is explicitly not invited.  In response to Alice’s intrusion, the Hatter and Hare become combative.  When Alice responds in turn by calling the Hatter rude, he presents Alice with a riddle, a riddle which we later learn has no answer: Why is a raven like a writing desk?  The passage we analyze begins here, with Alice considering the Hatter’s riddle.

“…I believe I can guess that,” (Alice) added aloud.
“Do you mean that you think you can find out the answer to it?” said the March Hare.
“Exactly so,” said Alice.
“Then you should say what you mean,” the March Hare went on.
“I do,” Alice hastily replied, “at least – at least I mean what I say – that’s the same thing, you know.”
“Not the same thing a bit!” said the Hatter.  “Why, you might just as well say that ‘I see what I eat’ is the same thing as ‘I eat what I see’!”
“You might just as well say,” added the March Hare, “that ‘I like what I get’ is the same as ‘I get what I like’!”
“You might just as well say,” added the Dormouse, which seemed to be talking in its sleep, “that ‘I breathe when I sleep’ is the same thing as ‘I sleep when I breathe’!”
“It is the same thing to you,” said the Hatter, and here the conversation dropped, and the party sat silent for a minute, while Alice thought over all she could remember about ravens and writing-desks, which wasn’t much.

This dialogue is short, but it is quite complex.  Let us divide it into its seven stages, and then show how one stage leads to another.  Each stage signifies a character’s turn in the dialogue, a move they make in the game of the Tea Party.  The dialogue consists of an initial assertion, followed by several plays of substitution.

Alice guesses that she can guess “that”.  Alice’s ‘that’ is not referring to the riddle itself but to the answer to the riddle.  We learn later that this answer does not exist, so Alice’s ‘that’ is not referring to any actual thing.  Wittgenstein notes that we can look for someone who is not there but we cannot hang him when he is not there (§462).  Alice’s ‘that’ is used correctly, even if it is a signifier that does not specify an existent object.

Substituting his own expression for Alice’s, The March Hare makes three verbal substitutions.  He substitutes ‘think’ for ‘believe’, ‘find out’ for ‘guess’, and ‘the answer to the riddle’ for ‘that’.  The March Hare does not say exactly what Alice said, but the only significant difference is exchanging Alice’s ‘that’ for the object it designates.  Based on this change, the March Hare acts as if Alice has misspoken and he is offering a correction, a more detailed expression.  Alice takes the March Hare’s substitution as an equivalence, such that Alice meant something by her expression and the March Hare meant the same thing, grasping her meaning and also expressing it, thus putting two expressions to work for the same meaning.  Violating Alice’s perception, the March Hare replies to Alice as if she has accepted a correction to her expression, not an equivalent substitution.

This reveals something interesting about a bifurcation in our use of ‘you mean’ in conversation with others.  We use the expression ‘you mean’ together with a substitution in both a positive and negative way: positively as equivalences, negatively as corrections.  We say ‘you mean x’ to translate other’s thoughts into our own words, seeking their approval in doing so (as Alice takes the March Hare to be doing by substituting his own expression for hers), but we also say ‘you mean x’ to correct the expressions of others, attempting to express what we believe they mean but they have failed to express (as the March Hare takes his substitution for Alice’s expression).  Wittgenstein speaks of a fuzzy picture, and how often a fuzzy picture is just what we mean by our expression.  Alice’s ‘that’ was correct even if it was fuzzy.  This view supports Alice’s side, that Alice did not misspeak and the March Hare did not correct Alice’s ‘that’.

It is important to note for what follows that the March Hare has brought the word ‘should’ into the conversation.  In replacing Alice’s ‘that’ with ‘the answer’ he is still discussing the particular expression of Alice, but in moralizing he is abstracting meaning from the situation and presenting Alice with a normative substitute for what he perceives as her behavior in this particular instance.  The March Hare is subtly leading away from the situation towards generalization.

Now Alice becomes the one making a substitution for the March Hare’s speech.  Alice insists that, ‘at least I mean what I say – that’s the same thing, you know’.  What does Alice mean by ‘same’ here?  How does Alice use the word ‘same’ in this instance?  When Alice agrees that she ‘means what she says’ and also asserts that she ‘says what she means’, she is not moralizing or providing us with a general rule that applies to all of her expressions.  She is not indicating that she always means what she says or says what she means, but rather that she meant what she said and said what she meant in the particular instance when she said “I believe that I can guess that”.  Because Alice is only discussing one instance, and because in this instance Alice meant and expressed one thing, the two propositions ‘I meant the thing I said’ and ‘I said the thing I meant’ can have the same use in this case.  Thus Alice substitutes one for the other, and pronounces the two to be ‘the same’.  Wittgenstein writes:

The use of the word “rule” and the use of the word “same” are interwoven. (As are the use of “proposition” and the use of “true”. (§225)

If we agree with Wittgenstein that the March Hare did not significantly correct Alice, we can agree with Alice that the coincidence of meaning and saying are mutually supportive when she equates the two expressions.

These two expressions do not always coincide.  There are cases which we call misspeaking, when one fails to say what one means.  There are also cases which we call lying, when one fails to mean what one says.  Typically, but not always, it is up to others to tell when we misspeak, and up to us to tell when we are lying.  Alice’s substitution is aimed at deferring to the March Hare his typically right as a listener to correct Alice when she does not say what she means, but she insists that “at least, I mean what I say”, which is her typical right as a speaker to confirm.

The Mad Hatter disagrees with Alice, but he does not do several things.  He does not argue against Alice having meant what she said, does not argue against Alice having said what she meant like the Hare, nor does the Hatter argue against the idea that ‘meaning what one says’ and ‘saying what one means’ can be ‘the same thing’ in Alice’s case or in any case.  What does the Hatter attack?  The Mad Hatter attacks the general form of Alice’s expression. He is arguing that ‘If x then y’ does not always have the same meaning or use as ‘If y then x’.  He does this by offering a counterexample to this general form:  ‘I see what I eat’ is not the same thing as ‘I eat what I see’.  This is generally true, but we can construct cases in which the set of things one eats is exactly the set of things one sees and vice versa.

Alice started towards generality and abstraction with her guess that she could guess, and the Hare lead the dialogue in this direction with his moralizing about what Alice should do based on her particular case.  Thus when Alice defends herself in her particular case she is already speaking in terms that have been generalized by the Hare.  The Hatter slips in at this point with a valid formal argument that is not in fact talking about Alice’s particular case.  Because our expressions refer to both generalities and particularities with the same terms, it is easy to miss the Hatter’s confusion of the subject.

The Hatter gives us an excellent and subtle example of confusing the subject of conversation by generalizing with abstractions.  He does not realize that he has failed to argue against the possibility of Alice’s case, but is rather arguing that many things do not share the relationship that meaning and saying do when we express ourselves adequately.

Regardless of this confusion, The March Hare backs the Hatter’s attack and produces another counter example: ‘I like what I get’ is not (in most cases) the same as ‘I get what I like’.  The Hare does for the Hatter what he refused to do for Alice: he substitutes his expression as an equivalent expression.  The Dormouse, following the Hatter and Hare adds a further counter example of the same general form: ‘I breathe when I sleep’ is not the same thing as ‘I sleep when I breathe’.  The three of them are in agreement against the universal validity of the general form of Alice’s substitution.  The three argue by presenting cases where ‘I x what I y’ does not always have the same meaning or use as ‘I y what I x’.

If we wanted to attack Alice’s substitution, we would have to show that ‘I mean what I say’ and ‘I say what I mean’ have different uses and are thus not the same.  The Hatter does not attempt to do this, and neither he nor his two cohorts use examples that include either meaning or saying.  Instead, they provide disparate examples that show there are many cases when ‘I x what I y’ is not the same as ‘I y what I x’.  The Mad Tea Party trio seems to be performing a formal analysis of Alice’s expression, but they are in fact confusing an abstracted form for the situation of the case present at hand.  We can ourselves witness this sort of confusion in everyday arguments.

The Hatter, the March Hare, and the Dormouse all form a chord of replies (a very small school of thought) that is in agreement amongst its members in disagreement with Alice, but the Hatter violates this accord.  He disrupts the agreement of the series by turning on the Dormouse.  The Hatter here reverses his position against Alice, arguing that since the Dormouse sleeps all the time, ‘sleeping when breathing’ and ‘breathing when sleeping’ are ‘the same thing’ in its case.  Thus the Hatter has provided a particular case where ‘I x what I y’ and ‘I y what I x’ have the same use and he uses the word ‘same’ the way that Alice does.  The Hatter not only has failed to lock Alice in the room, but he himself walks right out the door he unknowingly left open as if he knew it was open all the while.

The dialogue presents us with both a convergence of meaning and saying (Alice’s defense) and a contradiction of meaning and saying (the Hatter’s attack of Alice and then the Dormouse).  This mirrors the divergence of supplementation and correction found earlier.  In argument, one says things that both agree and disagree with one’s opponent.  In the course of an argument, one can find one’s self getting into contradictions the farther one gets from particular cases, but one can only examine particular cases by drawing similarities across groups of cases by generalizing.  The Hatter is unknowingly demonstrating to Alice that while she may be correct that meaning and saying converge in her expression, meaning and saying can also diverge to the point of contradiction through the course of an argument.

-    -    -    -    -    -    -    -    -    -    -    -    -

Alice leaves the Tea Party and finds a door in a tree that leads to the garden she wanted to get to from the banquet hall she fell into through the rabbit hole, but now she finds that the garden is inhabited by the angry and vengeful Queen of Hearts playing a game of croquet with animals (flamingos and groundhogs) as the game pieces (like Looking Glass game of chess involving characters, Witt and life as games).

Cheshire cat shows up, causes a commotion.  King and executioner get into an argument about whether the head of the Cheshire cat can be beheaded.  This parallels the ‘grin without the cat’ earlier (Math and Logic as head/mind without body, effect without substance).  The executioner argues that the cat can’t be beheaded without a body to separate from the head, and the king argues that anything with a head can be beheaded.

The Duchess is now nice to Alice, angry in her own house the way Queen is angry in her garden.  This is like the pig switch earlier.  Alice is delighted, and decides that pepper made the Duchess angry.  She begins to devise (too) simple rules for causes of emotions (Witt and oven vs. simple essences and causes), ex: sugar makes people sweet.  The Duchess now approaches Alice and begins coming up with an absurd moral for everything Alice says, which annoys Alice (notice that the Duchess is showing Alice her own absurdity).

Now, Alice attends the trial where the King is prosecuting the Jack for eating tarts (notice rhyme setting up the scene).  Alice begins to grow into a giant at the trial, which no one notices until she is called as a witness which is her final act in the dream of Wonderland.  Alice accidentally knocks over the jury box, and puts a lizard back upside down, reasoning that a lizard is just as good a juror either way up (this is similar to some/some not vs. All or None).  Alice tells the king she knows nothing about the case, and the king says this is very important to the jury.  Alice says it is not important at all, and the king goes ‘important, unimportant’, like he is trying to decide which sounds best.  Some of the jury write down important, some unimportant.  Giant Alice finds all of this absurd.  She declares that the evidence is meaningless, the jurors write down that she thinks this as if it is thus true, and she ‘pack of cards’ destroys trial and dream.

-    -    -    -    -    -    -    -    -    -    -    -    -

Through the Looking Glass

In the beginning, Alice is playing with her cat and cat’s kittens, blaming the black kitten for trying to take milk from the white kitten.  Alice says she should put the kitten out in the snow as a punishment for its mischief, then forgets this as she thinks of how horrible her punishment for all of her mischief would be.  Later, we find the black kitten is the Red Queen, who takes on Alice’s vindictive and judgmental side while the White Queen takes on her forgetful and forgiving side.  Alice is a pawn, making her way across the chessboard to be queen, and at the ending banquet the two queens still are confusing her but they are sitting at her sides.

Alice passes through the mirror and into the Looking Glass world (again, like rabbit hole, falling into a dream).  She finds herself in a garden with flowers that interpret her to be a flower (like pigeon thinking she must be a serpent or duck saying ‘it’ is most often a rock or a worm).  They tell her about the Red Queen, who they also assume to be a flower, one very much like Alice.  The Red Queen now meets Alice, who says she has lost her way, to which the Red Queen replies ‘all these ways are mine’ (like Humpty Dumpty thinking he can mean what he wants regardless of what others think AND tell Alice what she should mean).

Alice points to a hill, and the Red Queen says, ‘I could show you hills compared to which that is a valley’.  Alice replies that a hill can’t be a valley, no matter how small, for this is nonsense.  The queen replies, ‘I have heard nonsense compared to which that is as sensible as a dictionary’.

The Red Queen tells Alice she is a pawn in a chess game being played all over the world.  To get going, they both run, but end up not moving.  The queen remarks, “Here, we have to run as fast as we can just to stay in place”.

Much later, Alice meets the White Queen, who lives and remembers backwards and finds this best (mind vs. world).  She tells Alice she is 101, and Alice replies that she can’t believe that.  The White Queen says close your eyes and try very hard.  Alice says this won’t work, as one can’t believe impossible things.  The queen replies, ‘You need practice…when I was your age, I sometimes believed 6 impossible things before breakfast’ (Logic as imaginary abstraction, thus impossible ideals).  The White Queen turns into a sheep knitting with seven pairs of needles (sheep is woolly, knitting wool).  They are now in a shop, and Alice is told to take something.  She tries, but reaching for things they seem to slide out of reach and up into the ceiling (abstractions again).  Then they are suddenly in a boat, and Alice is reaching for the prettiest rushes but they are always out of reach, the one’s she can get wilting in her hands.

Humpty Dumpty – Read pg 168-169, ‘knockdown’ (straw man), who is master of meaning?  Many have noted that Humpty Dumpty is the perfect illustration of Wittgenstein’s argument for the impossibility of a private language.  Meaning is not simply what the individual wants it to be.  Humpty Dumpty gives himself the right to mean whatever he wants, but he is critical of Alice and gives himself the right to tell her what she should have meant.  There are two privileged positions in communication: sender and receiver.  Which one has the true right to say what something meant?  The answer seems to be that both have overlapping rights that can eclipse each other.

Alice meets the White Knight, who has stuff from the whole book on his horse.  He falls off on either side of his horse like human judgement falling to one side or the other on an issue.  He invents things when he is upside down, saying the blood rushes to his head and helps him to think.  His song, “A Sittin’ on a Gate”, refers to a suspension of judgement and logic, being undecided with one’s feet in both worlds.




HUMOR AND MODERN ART

Philosophy can and is used for creativity, using the doubts and insights to create, playing with the boundaries and tensions of the most important things.  Humor and Art are two ways of using one’s insights from Philosophy to do this.  Humor and art are of course ancient, but modern art and humor are very advanced.  Last time, we saw Lewis Carroll was reacting against society and Victorian strict discipline of children, showing the contradictions of authority and the assumptions we make in reasoning that are dependent upon our position in the situation.


HUMOR AS SKEPTICISM

Two early American masters of humor are Ambrose Bierce and Groucho Marx, both of whom were reacting to the horror and absurdity of the times (Bierce to the Civil War, and the Marx Brothers to WWI).


Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)

His Devil’s Dictionary was an early rebellious attack on society.
A San Franciscan (since 1866), he wrote bitterly about the Civil War and the corruption on both sides (Union and Confederacy) then disappeared in Mexico seeking to join the revolution. He had a brilliant gift with pointing out how we are all selfish and ignorant (via one-sided judgments) with humor, attacking the politicians, the military, the rich, slavery, and American society.
Some Entries from his Devil’s Dictionary (1906 ‘Cynic’s Word Book’):

Absurdity: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
Academe: An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught.
Academy: A modern school where football is taught.
Acquaintance: A person we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to.
Admiration: Our polite recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves.
Anoint.: To grease a king or other great functionary already sufficiently slippery.
Beauty:The power by which a woman charms a lover and terrifies a husband.
Birth: The first and direst of all disasters.
Bore: A person who talks when you want them to listen.
Brain: an apparatus with which we think we think.
Cartesian: Relating to Descartes, a famous philosopher who wrote, “I think, therefore I am”, which could be improved as “I think that I think, therefore I think that I am”, as close an approach to certainty as any philosopher has yet made.
Christian: One who thinks the Bible is admirably suited to the needs of his neighbor.
Circus: A place where animals are permitted to see people acting like fools.
Conservative - a statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from a Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.
Corporation: An ingenious device for obtaining profit without individual responsibility.
Debt: An ingenious substitute for the chain and whip of the slavedriver.
Dictionary: A device for cramping the growth of a language and making it inelastic.
Diplomacy: The patriotic act of lying for one’s country.
Disobedience: The silver lining to servitude.
Distance: The one thing the rich are willing to let the poor keep.
Duty: that which sternly impels us in the direction of profit, along the line of desire.
Edible: Good to eat, and wholesome to digest, as a worm to a toad, a toad to a snake, a snake to a pig, a pig to a man, and a man to a worm.
Education: That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the fool their lack of understanding.
Freedom: A political condition that every nation supposes itself to enjoy in virtual monopoly.
Future: The time when our friends are true and our happiness is assured.
Egotist: a person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.
Hand: An instrument worn at the end of an arm and commonly thrust into someone’s pocket.
Hashish: there is no definition of this word.  No one knows what this word means.
History: An account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.
Impartial: Unable to perceive personal advantage from either side of a controversy.
Justice: That which the state sells the citizen in exchange for allegiance and taxes.
Lecturer: One with his hand in your pocket, his tongue in your ear and his faith in your patience.
Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.
Love: A temporary insanity curable by marriage.
Magnificent: Having splendor superior to previous experience, as the ears of an ass to a rabbit or the glow of a glow-worm to a maggot.
Marriage: A master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all two.
Occident: The part of the world lying west (or east) of the Orient, largely inhabited by Christians, a powerful sub-tribe of the Hypocrites, whose principal industries are murder and cheating, called ‘war’ and ‘commerce’, which also happen to be the principal industries of the Orient.
Ocean: A body of water occupying two thirds of a world made for man, who has no gills.
Past: That part of Eternity with which we have a slight and regrettable acquaintance.
Patriot: The dupe of statesmen and the tool of conquerors.
Peace: A period of cheating between two periods of fighting.
Positive: Mistaken at the top of one’s voice.
Radicalism: The conservatism of tomorrow injected into the affairs of today.
Railroad: A device enabling us to get away from where we are to where we are no better off.
Rational: Devoid of all delusions save those of observation, experience and reflection.
Reality: The dream of a mad philosopher.
Reason: To weigh probabilities in the scales of desire.
Responsibility: A detachable burden easily shifted to the shoulders of God, Fate, Fortune, Luck or one’s neighbor.  In the days of astrology it was customary to unload it upon a star.
Revolution: An abrupt change in the form of misrule.  In American history, that whereby the welfare and happiness of the people were advanced a full half-inch.
Rum: A fiery liquor that produces madness in total abstainers.
Saint: A dead sinner revised and edited.
Self-evident: Evident to one’s self and to nobody else.
Selfish: Devoid of consideration for the selfishness of others.
Suffrage: The right to vote for the man of another man’s choice.
Trial: A formal inquiry designed to prove the blameless character of judges, lawyers and jurors.
Truth: An ingenious compound of desirability and appearance.
Understanding: A cerebral secretion that enables on having it to know a house from a horse by the roof on the house.  Its nature and laws have been exhaustively expounded by Locke, who rode a house, and Kant, who lived in a horse.


The Marx Brothers (comedians of the 20s and 30s) were early absurdists, formative for US comedy.  Groucho Marx was amazing with one liners that show a beautifully complex understanding of contradictions involving human pride and judgment, very much like Bierce:

The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made.
There is one way to find out if a man is honest; ask him! If he says yes you know he's crooked.
Why a four-year old child could understand this.  Somebody find a four-year old child.
Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?
All people are born alike - except Republicans and Democrats.
I don't care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members.
I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.
I have had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn't it.
I've got the brain of a four year old. I'll bet he was glad to be rid of it.
Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who wants to live in an institution?
Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.
Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.
Well, Art is Art, isn't it? …And east is east and west is west… and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know.


MODERN ART AS SKEPTICISM

With WWI and modern warfare, there were new human horrors on previously unseen levels.  Similar to the German Pessimism that influenced Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, the horrors of WWI brought great disillusionment with reason, science and society to European intellectuals, particularly for German and French youth who would have a huge impact on modern culture.  Here in the Bay Area, a very similar movement happened in reaction to the Vietnam War.  WWI used more machines and propaganda than ever before, and for this is often called the first modern war.  Oil became the fuel of war and vehicles, planes, jeeps (and after WWI, the Middle East was carved up by European powers as the source of oil).  This was the beginning of machine guns and air warfare, bombing runs, tanks.

Newspapers all became mouthpieces of the government in times of war.  To European intellectuals who conversed across national lines, this showed logic and language being used for authority and empire in the name of reason.  The dominant scholars often sang nationalistic praise, particularly in Philosophy departments.  The students and others came together to doubt and be skeptical of the powers that be on a level that had a new intensity (fueled on Nietzsche, Marx and others).  Modern art and humor start from this point.  They shatter and destroy, ‘ripping’ on the powers that be and the truths we are told by authorities.  Modern art and humor put things out of joint, not resolving contradictions but bringing them explicitly out, possibly more than any culture yet.  They help to simplify and focus work which is abstract and disconnected on purpose as a revolt against the positive collective power of the traditional.


DADA: “guerilla warfare against the Establishment”

During WWI (1915-1917) young intellectuals from all over Europe converged in Zurich, Switzerland.  They shared an opposition to the war and traditional values.  To these thinkers, the stupidity and brutality of the modern age was clearly being sold to the masses through appeals to ‘reason’, ‘order’, ‘logic’, and ‘spirit’.  They found these terms to be hypocritical on a societal level, and declared a crisis of meaning: European civilization, and human reason, the new modern values, are a farce.  Thus, use absurdity to bring out the contradictions in the ‘reason’ and the ‘reasonable’.

Some of these similarly minded youth converged on the Cabaret Voltaire, a beer parlor run by Hugo Ball.  Jazz music was the new rage, violating old traditional standards.  Ball and his friend Huelsenbeck were looking for a fake French name for a dancer in a French dictionary when they found the word dada: ‘baby talk for horse, a child’s rocking horse’.  They decided that this word fit the movement that they felt was going on in Zurich.  The parlor became the first home and center.  Much art that was brutal and bizarre appeared here, a new turn that is critical for modern art and humor.

Dada’s two celebrated themes are brutalism and simultaneity.  Their brutalism, being obscene (sex, swearing, intoxication, nonsense) spoke against society, violating cultural norms using absurdity and obscenity (much like later Hunter S. Thompson, South Park).

Simultaneity is the occurrence of many disconnected elements within a work, a resistance polarized against making the whole coherent.  Collage involves using many different types of media blended together to create (the Dadaists were famous for using newspaper type and pictures in collage, unseen before their time).  Simultaneity and collage in the hands of the Dadaists were used to portray disconnected life, impossible to know as a complete and finished system.  This is both a celebration and a protest, loving yet fearing the contradictions of the world.  The Dadaists invented an impressive set of ‘new’ art forms, including abstract sound poems, abstract (mechanical) music, found art (garbage collage), simultaneous poetry (the reading of many poems at once), and abstract painting.

Out of Zurich, Switzerland and Berlin, Germany, the Dada movement began and quickly spread to Paris, New York, Moscow, Tokyo, and across the whole world.  Our modern culture, which is not simply Western but global, includes the deep and playful skepticism of DADA.  The Beatniks and Hippies of the Bay picked up the Motherwell anthology as a major source.


Great DADA Moments & Quotes:

In one of the first shows at the Cabaret Voltaire, Schwitters showed the audience a one letter poem, a card with a large ‘W’.  He then started to recite the poem, starting with a whisper and ending in a loud wailing siren.

In April of 1920, Orp, Baargeld and Ernst put on an infamous Dada show in Cologne, France.  Sitting next to a tank of red tinted water with an alarm clock submerged at the bottom, Ernst had created a wooden sculpture with an axe chained to it.  A sign invited anyone who wished to use the axe to help destroy the sculpture.  In a Paris exhibit of Ernst’s work, invitations read: “at 22 o’clock the kangaroo, at 22:30 high frequency, at 23 o’clock distribution of surprises, after 23:30 intimacies.”  The exhibit itself was a Dada performance.  Breton munched matches, Ribemont-Dessaignes kept shouting, ‘It is raining on a skull’, Soupault and Tzara played a game of hide and seek, while Peret and Charchoune continuously shook hands.  These performances are early precursors to performance art (which culminated in Situationalism and Fluxus, of which Yoko Ono was a prominent figure).


Huelsenbeck

“It’s a fucked-up foolish world.  You walk aimlessly along, fixing up a philosophy for supper.  But before you have it ready, the mailman brings you the first telegram, announcing that all your pigs have died of rabies, your dinner jacket has been thrown off the Eiffel Tower, your housekeeper has come down with the epizootic.  You give a startled look at the moon, which seems to you like a good investment, and the same postman brings you a telegram announcing that all your chickens have died of hoof and mouth disease, your father has fallen on a pitchfork and frozen to death, your mother has burst with sorrow on the occasion of her silver wedding (maybe the frying pan stuck to her ears, how do I know?).  That’s life, dear fellow.”

“The Germans are the masters of dissembling, they are unquestionably the magicians (in the vaudeville sense) among nations, in every moment of their life they conjure up a culture, a spirit, a superiority which they can hold as a shield in front of their endangered bellies.”

“The highest art will be that which in its conscious content presents the thousand-fold problems of the day, the art which has been visibly shattered by the explosions of last week, which is forever trying to collect its limbs after yesterday’s crash.”


Tristan Tzara

The foremost Dada manifesto writer, Tzara was famous for reading his manifestoes interspersed in Dada performances.  He was a leader of the movement in Zurich, and then later in Paris, where the European scene is considered to have migrated with him.


From Tzara’s Dada Manifestos:

“Dada remains within the European frame of weakness it’s shit after all but from now on we mean to shit in assorted colors and bedeck the artistic zoo with the flags of every consulate.”

“Dada exists for no one and we want everybody to understand this because it is the balcony of Dada, I assure you.”

“I love you so I swear I do adore you.”

“If I cry out: Ideal, ideal, ideal, Knowledge, knowledge, knowledge, Boomboom, boomboom, boomboom,” I have given a pretty faithful version of progress, law, morality, and all other fine qualities that various highly intelligent men have discussed in so many books, only to conclude that after all everyone dances to his own personal boomboom, and that the writer is entitled to his boomboom: the satisfaction of pathological curiosity; a private bell for inexplicable needs…”

“I am against all systems, the most acceptable system is on principle to have none.  To complete oneself, to perfect oneself in one’s own littleness, to fill the vessel with one’s individuality, to have the courage to fight for and against thought, the mystery of bread, the sudden burst of an infernal propeller into economic lilies…”

“Here is the great secret: The thought is made in the mouth.
I still consider myself very charming.”

“A great Canadian philosopher has said: thought and the past are also very charming.”
(Here, the genders on ‘thought’ and ‘past’ are reversed, a common way of mocking Americans speaking French.)


From Tzara’s Lecture on Dada (1922)

“I know that you have come here today to hear explanations.  Well, don’t expect to hear any explanations about Dada.  You explain to me why you exist.  You haven’t the faintest idea…You will never be able to tell me why you exist but you will always be ready to maintain a serious attitude about life.”

“Dada is not at all modern.  It is more in the nature of a return to an almost Buddhist religion of indifference….Dada is immobility and does not comprehend the passions…But with the same note of conviction I might maintain the contrary.”

“Nothing is more delightful than to confuse and upset people…The truth is that people love nothing but themselves and their little possessions, their income, their dog…If one is poor in spirit, one possesses a sure and indomitable intelligence, a savage logic, a point of view that cannot be shaken…  Always destroy what you have in you.  On random walks.  Then you will be able to understand many things.  You are not more intelligent than we, and we are not more intelligent than you.”

We are well aware that people in the costumes of the Renaissance were pretty much the same as the people of today, and that Chouang-Dsi (Zhuang Zi, Second Patriarch of Daoism) was just as Dada as we are.”

Tzara’s invention of the Automism method of Surrealism painters and art long after.

To make a Dadaist poem
Take a newspaper.
Take a pair of scissors.
Choose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem.
Cut out the article.
Then cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them in a bag.
Shake it gently.
Then take out the scraps one after the other in the order in which they left the bag.
Copy conscientiously.
The poem will resemble you.
And here you are a writer, infinitely original and endowed with a sensibility that is charming though beyond the understanding of the vulgar.”


Surrealism:

Gets its heritage from DADA, but had to develop beyond Nonsense as target.  Still hazy in complexity, many things coming together strangely, but now with subtle underlying tensions, often of sex, danger, power, and death underlie the work.  Today pop-surrealism is thriving in the Bay, LA & NY.

The surrealist poem Fable of Jarry:

A can of corned beef, on a chain like opera glasses,
Saw a lobster pass by which resembled it like a brother.
It was protected by a thick shell
On which it was written that inside,
like the can of corned beef,
it was boneless,
(Boneless and economical);
And underneath its curled-up tail
It apparently was hiding a key to open it.
Smitten with love, the sedentary corned beef
Declared to the little live self-propelling can
That if it were willing to acclimate itself
Next to it in earthly shop windows,
It would be decorated with a number of gold medals.

Conceptual Art is a development from Duchamp and other Dada & Surreal artists.  It hit its heyday in the late 60s and early 70s.  Now, one cannot go through a museum without seeing much of its influence.  Following pieces are from Tony Godfrey’s book Conceptual Art.

Dada Duchamp’s Portrait of  a Young American Girl in the State of Nudity:
A sparkplug that reads ‘for-ever’

Later, after joining the Surrealists, Duchamp wound string through the gallery of the First Papers of Surrealism exhibit, connecting everything such that no one could get through the gallery.

Rauschenberg’s contribution to Iris Clert Gallery’s exhibit of Readymades: postcard that says, “This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so”.

Rauschenberg’s erased De Kooning Drawing, framed and exhibited as a new work.

Manzoni drew lines of certain lengths, rolled up the paper strips, put them in boxes labeled with date and line length, sold as artwork.  Also sold balloons of ‘artist’s breath’, and his own shit in cans for their weight in gold.  He signed people as if they were his art.

Warhol Soup Cans & Marilyn silk screen prints: “a hundred Marilyns are better than one”, soup cans put on shelves like canned goods.  Movies ‘Empire’ and ‘Sleep’, as critic Koch said, better to hear about than see.

La Monte Young composed a poem for tables, a performance piece of dragging furniture around on stage to make noises.  He was one of the early performance artists who created ‘happenings’, often including audience members to take down the “fourth wall”.

Simone Forti Fluxus performance: one man try to lie down, the other try to tie first to the wall.

Morris’ Box with sound of own making: wooden box containing a tape recorder w/ loop.

Nauman read Wittgenstein passage from PI reasoning that ‘A Rose Has no Teeth” can make sense if you include the thorns or a cow in the process of rose regeneration or something else, and so he made a plaque for a tree knowing that the tree slowly grows over the plaque.

Baldessari (1971) has students cover an exhibit room with “I will not make any boring art” like students writing as punishment over and over (is this boring?).

Arnatt’s mirror boxes: positive mirror out box next to box-like hole lined with inward mirrors.

Ruppersberg’s Homage to Houdini: set of photographs documenting sinking brick chained in a suitcase of a NY pier (as Godfrey says, ‘Surprisingly, the brick did not escape’).

Michael Craig-Martin’s An Oak Tree, a glass of water on a glass shelf installed.  In a dialogue posted next to the work, the artist claims that the glass of water is, in fact, now an oak tree.

The Nest Group (1978)  had a piece called Let’s Come One Meter Closer, where several of the group’s artists in various places around world each dug a meter deep hole and stood in it.

Mendieta’s Rape performance: after a woman was raped and killed on campus, she recreated the scene in her apartment with herself as victim and invited friends and associates over (hopefully giving them some kind of warning, though this is not said).

Wilke’s What does this represent? What do YOU represent?  A photo of a naked woman surrounded by toy guns, with two phrases above and below.

Almeida’s Inhabited painting: several photos of artist obscuring self with blue paint, then final shot takes glass she has painted and shifts it to peek out from behind it at the viewer.

For great short surreal films, watch Svankmajer