Monthly Archives: May 2013

Mao II by Don DeLillo

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I’ve read almost all of DeLillo’s novels. I didn’t enjoy this one. It’s about a famous novelist who has gone into seclusion, like J. D. Salinger. There are three other principal characters: a young man and woman who live with the novelist and work as his assistants, and a woman who is devoting her career to taking photographs of writers and is given the unexpected opportunity to photograph the famous but mysterious author.

The four characters come and go throughout the novel. There’s a flashback in which the young woman is married at Yankee Stadium under the auspices of the Unification Church. She later ministers to the homeless in New York City. The young man spends most of his time organizing the novelist’s papers. The novelist agrees to travel to London, and then to Greece, in a strange attempt to free a hostage being held by terrorists in Beirut. The novel ends with the photographer visiting one of the same terrorists to take his picture. She has moved on from photographing writers.

DeLillo’s language is poetic, as usual, but there doesn’t seem to be much point to this book. The people all talk the same, in DeLillo’s own style. Observations, often unclear or inaccurate, are made about the modern world. There are long, repetitious scenes in which nothing of interest happens. Mao II won a literary award in 1992. I would have voted for something else.  (1/15/12)

Physicalism by Daniel Stoljar

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Professor Stoljar is the author of the article called “Physicalism” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. In that article, he explains that physicalism is the metaphysical view that everything in the universe is physical or material, i.e. that there is nothing in the world except stuff like matter and energy and arrangements of such stuff. This is opposed to other views, like the ancient claim by Thales that everything is made of water, or the more modern theory of Bishop Berkeley, who said that all of reality is mental. A physicalist, in particular, will deny that there are minds or souls that exist somehow independently of people’s living bodies. 

In his book called Physicalism, however, Stoljar argues that there is no way to state the doctrine of physicalism that will result in a view that is both physicalistic (“physicalism that deserves the name”) and true. Either we have to broaden our definition of “physicalism”, in which case it’s not really physicalism anymore, or we have to restrict our definition, in which case the world isn’t completely physicalistic. 

Stoljar presents lots of arguments for and against his position in great detail (too much detail for me anyway). The conclusion I reached, however, is that although it is difficult to offer a precise definition of physicalism that can deal with every imaginable counter-example (e.g. physics in an alternate universe), it is sufficiently clear what the physicalist position is. Scientists have been investigating the nature of reality at low levels (the subatomic) and high levels (the intergalactic) and cataloging what they’ve found. So far it seems that everything is made up of certain kinds of stuff (photons, quarks, dark energy, strings, whatever).

The physicalist view is that there’s nothing else floating around, in particular, no mental substances, souls, angels or unattached ideas. Stoljar says we can’t sensibly explain physicalism in terms of what there isn’t (he calls this the via negativa), but it seems to me that we can. The list of non-physicalistic things that we need to mention (e.g. souls and mental substances) is not as long as Stoljar suggests.  (1/2/12)

The Man with the Getaway Face by Richard Stark

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Tough guy Parker needs a new face because he’s in trouble with the Outfit. He gets his new face but keeps his old attitude toward other people: “They were in and he worked with them or they were out and he ignored them or they were trouble and he took care of them”.  

This is the second in the long series of novels about Parker, who steals for a living. The time is 1963. The target is an armored car. Parker doesn’t like the setup but he needs the money. The plot doesn’t make a lot of sense, but Parker is always fun to be around, so long as he’s “taking care” of someone else.  (12/27/11)

Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, Introduction: Reason in History by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, translated by H. B. Nisbet

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According to Hegel, history is the process by which Spirit, or the Absolute, or God, or the Idea, or something like that, becomes conscious of itself, understands itself, and thereby becomes more free or generates more freedom in the world, or something to that effect. World-historical figures like Napoleon and Goethe play a crucial role in this process of increasing freedom and self-knowledge, as do certain world-historical nations (e.g. Greece, Rome, Prussia). The state is the principal mechanism by which history progresses, and such progress occurs in a dialectical manner (although Hegel didn’t use the “thesis-antithesis-synthesis” terminology; those were Fichte’s words).

This is an interesting theory, even if it’s simultaneously obscure and implausible. Although this relatively short book is supposed to be the best introduction that Hegel wrote to his own philosophy, that isn’t saying much. It is filled with statements like “the spirit is essentially the product of its own activity, and its activity consists in transcending and negating its immediacy and turning in upon itself”, and “world history is the expression of the divine and absolute process of the spirit in its highest forms, of the progression whereby it discovers its true nature and becomes conscious of itself”. Repeating such statements does little to clarify their meaning.

Hegel was able to express himself clearly in some cases, however. For example: “A mighty figure” — someone like Napoleon, for example — “must trample many an innocent flower underfoot, and destroy much that lies in its path”. And “duty requires that men should defend not whatever country they choose but their own particular fatherland”, for “the worth of individuals is measured by the extent to which they reflect and represent the national spirit”, not by their pursuit of goodness for its own sake, since that is an “empty notion”.

Hegel’s obscurity has helped make his writings a popular object of scholarly interpretation. He might have been referring to himself in this passage: “The intellectual attitude which adopts such formal points of view certainly affords unlimited scope for ingenious questions, scholarly opinions, striking comparisons, and seemingly profound reflections and declamations; their brilliance may in fact seem to increase in proportion to their capacity for indefiniteness”.  (12/4/11)

Hegel in 90 Minutes by Paul Strathern

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I’m struggling through Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of World History and thought this little book might help me understand what Hegel is getting at. It didn’t help at all. The author concentrates on Hegel’s life while disparaging his terrible writing style and overblown, incomprehensible, inconsistent and inaccurate ideas. The book is funny at times, however, and easy to read. It’s a book that someone might look at in order to get an idea who Hegel was and how he expressed himself.  

One of the best parts of Hegel in 90 Minutes is this quotation from Schopenhauer: “The height of audacity in serving up pure nonsense, in stringing together senseless and extravagant mazes of words, such as had previously only been known in madhouses, was finally reached in Hegel, and became the instrument of the most barefaced general mystification that has ever taken place, with a result that will appear fabulous to posterity, and will remain as a monument to German stupidity”.  (11/25/11)