Monthly Archives: May 2013

Salvador by Joan Didion

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Joan Didion and her husband visited El Salvador for two weeks in 1982. This wasn’t a vacation, since a civil war had begun a few years earlier, after many years of political unrest. As usual, the U.S. was supporting the military dictatorship, not the left-wing guerillas. The war wouldn’t end for another 10 years. It was common for ordinary citizens to be tortured or to disappear. When four American nuns and another woman were raped and murdered by the National Guard in 1980, the U.S. suspended military aid to the Salvadoran government, but just for six weeks. The United Nations later estimated that more than 70,000 people were killed during the war.

One reason to read Salvador is to see how little has changed: “The American effort in El Salvador seemed based on auto-suggestion, a dreamwork devised to obscure any intelligence that might trouble the dreamer.” A later Congressional report argued that “the intelligence was itself a dreamwork, tending to support policy … ‘rather than inform it’, providing ‘reinforcement more than illumination’, ‘ammunition rather than analysis’.”

Another reason to read this book is to enjoy Didion’s prose. A couple of examples: 

“For the several hours that preceded the earthquake I had been seized by the kind of amorphous bad mood that my grandmother believed an adjunct of what is called in California ‘earthquake weather’, a sultriness, a stillness, an unnatural light; the jitters. In fact there was no particular prescience about my bad mood, since it is always earthquake weather in San Salvador, and the jitters are endemic.”

“Colonel Waghelstein is massively built, crew-cut, tight-lipped, and very tanned, almost a cartoon of the American military presence, and the notion that he had come up from Panama to deal with the press was novel and interesting, in that he had made, during his tour in El Salvador, a pretty terse point of not dealing with the press”.  (4/13/13)

Speedboat by Renata Adler

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Speedboat isn’t really a novel. It’s more like a collection of extremely short short stories, some featuring the narrator — a New York journalist/academic — and her social circle, and some describing random events that represent the modern world, circa 1975. You could say it’s a kaleidoscopic array of vignettes. It’s enjoyable but not very involving. 

Even though it was written some time ago, it’s remarkable how current the book is. There isn’t much missing, except for the Internet and cell phones. (And a plot.)  (4/8/13)

Monogamy by Adam Phillips

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Monogamy is a short book by the English psychotherapist Adam Phillips. It contains 121 extremely brief chapters on what Phillips calls “the only serious philosophical question” for some of us (the fortunate or affluent). Phillips is given to exaggeration and paradox, but that’s o.k. 

Below are some of his observations on being monogamous, with occasionally flippant responses:

(39)  “If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nowhere to go. Which is one of the reasons why couples sometimes want to be totally honest with each other.” Because they have nowhere else to go or don’t want anywhere else to go?

(62)  “It is no more possible to work at a relationship than it is to will an erection or arrange to have a dream.” Yet doing something on purpose, like smiling, can sometimes make us happier.

(69)  “There is always someone else who would love me more, understand me better, make me feel more sexually alive. This is the best justification we have for monogamy — and infidelity.” Since there will always be someone better, you might as well stop searching. Or not.

(75)  “From the child’s point of view, the mother is — as the father will soon be — a model of promiscuity. She has a thousand things to do. She knows other people.” Yes, she was quite a disappointment that way.

(98)  “If we don’t choose monogamy, our fate will be isolation or the chaos of impersonality.” Or both.

(111)  “Familiarity may increase our affection, our respect, even our time for other people, but it rarely increases our desire for them.” As the song says, how can I miss you if you won’t go away?

(115)  “One way of loving people is to acknowledge that they have desires which exclude us; that it is possible to love and desire more than one person at the same time. Everyone knows that this is true, and yet we don’t want the people we love to start believing it about themselves”. It might be possible, but not everyone believes it is.  (4/1/13)

Sketch for a Systematic Metaphysics by D. M. Armstrong

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D. M. Armstrong is one of the leading philosophers of the past 50 years. He is an Australian mostly known for his writings on metaphysics. This is a short, well-written, relatively easy to understand summary of his metaphysical system.

Armstrong is a materialist or physicalist, who believes that nothing exists except space-time and its contents. He further holds that the world is made up of contingent states of affairs (or facts) and that states of affairs are made up of particulars and universals (e.g. protons and their mass). Laws of nature concern relations between types of states of affairs. 

Universals are only identifiable through empirical means. They only exist if they are exemplified or instantiated. This means that a given number exists if and only if there is a group of particulars that instantiates that number. The number 2 exists, for example, since Mars has 2 moons. Numbers that are not exemplified in this way are mere possibilia. On this basis, however, all but the very largest numbers exist, since any particulars may comprise a group, for example, the group consisting of my desk and the planet Mars instantiates the number 2 (this is called a “mereological sum”).

Armstrong discusses the existence of mind in his final chapter. He endorses an identity theory of mind — mental events and processes are identical to physical events and processes in the brain. He also endorses an identity theory of perception, but wasn’t quite clear to me what he meant by this. Armstrong admits that his theory of the mind faces three particular problems: the existence of consciousness (by which he means “our unmediated access to (some) of our own mental processes”), qualia (secondary qualities like color and taste) and intentionality (how thought and language are “about” something that might not exist). 

Armstrong is more troubled about qualia and intentionality than consciousness. I’m more troubled by qualia than consciousness or intentionality. If the redness of an apple isn’t actually part of the apple, and there’s nothing red inside our heads either, where is the redness at anyway? Armstrong considers his blue mouse pad: “Perception presents us with the blueness as an objective property of something in the world and I think we should accept this, accept that the blue colour is in the world qualifying the pad… I want to identify the colour surface with what the physicists tell us is going on there”. Maybe that’s true, but I’m not convinced.  (3/30/13)

History Man: The Life of R. G. Collingwood by Fred Inglis

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History Man is the biography of R. G. Collingwood, a 20th century English philosopher best known for his work on the philosophy of history and aesthetics. Collingwood has been called “the best known neglected thinker of our time”. Although he was Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford, he stood apart from the main flow of 20th century Anglo-American philosophy. For example, he criticized some academic philosophers for engaging in philosophical parlor games instead of dealing with real-world issues, such as the rise of fascism in Europe. 

In addition to teaching philosophy for many years, Collingwood did historical and archaeological research, especially on the history of Roman Britain. He emphasized the importance of a contextual approach to philosophy in which earlier thinkers are understood to be answering questions of their own time, not necessarily the same questions that current philosophers are interested in. 

Collingwood deserves to have his biography written, since he lead a more active life than most academic philosophers. Unfortunately, he died after a series of strokes at the age of 53. History Man does a decent job of telling Collingwood’s story, but is relatively weak as an explanation of his philosophy. The author is a professor of cultural studies, not a philosopher. The book is marred by some idiosyncratic syntax that requires occasional re-reading, but enlivened by the author’s cultural and political observations.  (3/26/13)