intellectuals and burning libraries

Hazlitt likes to tell you what loves and what he hates. He begins On Reason and Imagination with a declaration of hate right off the bat: “I hate people who have no notion of anything but generalities, and forms, and creeds, and naked propositions, even worse than I dislike those who cannot for the soul of them arrive at the comprehension of an abstract idea.” The critical parameters, here, are ultimately parameters of feeling. But this is not to say that the parameters are straightforward, or that feeling is direct. Passion has its ruses as well as reason does; in fact, it has more of them. It operates by contact, but contact is unpredictable. This is why the case isn’t settled by this Hazlitt’s statement of interest. For instance, the hatred here is about a certain perverse form of love – the love of a certain type for generalities and forms and creeds. And the hatred produces hierarchy – one type is hated more than another. Although what isn’t hated is the typical object of the obsession defining the type that is hated. So we are already in the mouth of the labyrinth.

Hazlitt wrote On Reason and Imagination, according to the edition edited by Duncan Wu, probably before April, 1823. This was almost a decade after Hazlitt had suffered the terrible blow of Bonaparte’s defeat. Hazlitt had experienced his era gather around him like a nightmare. He ‘set out in life with the French Revolution’ – his father was a Unitarian minister, within that dissenting set that welcomed the Revolution and formed the radical wing of the Whig party. For Hazlitt, Napoleon’s rise was symbolic of the bursting of the chains of class that the Revolution was all about, and the war system that arose in England, about which he is marvelously cutting and incisive, was symbolic of the essentially sneaking character of reaction. It was, at the base, a spy system put in place by a corrupt elite that saw its interest in speaking the rhetoric of liberty in order to have a cover under which it could settle down to its druthers, which consisted in cutting the throat of liberty and using massive debt to create an economic order that would favor it. Hazlitt had seen the generation of radicals that had at first welcomed the Revolution – Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth – become lackies of the established order. His revulsion at this betrayal throbs through his work. But he also saw the radical side on which he cast himself increasingly turn to a rebarbative, utilitarian vocabulary, a rejection of the ‘unbought graces of life’ not because they were really bought by the sweat of the peasant and the worker, but because they were graces.

The problem that Hazlitt confronts in On Reason and Imagination is with his own side; it is a characteristic problem of the liberal intellectual. That intellectual finds that his radical sympathies push him to support groups and parties that are otherwise monopolized by his very antithesis – people who have no more sympathy with the imagination than your average businessman. But where the businessman dismisses imagination as a clog on greed, the radical considers it a serious mark of moral depravity, which one must sacrifice for the revolution. This crude demand provides the subtext for the comedy in Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, with the obsolete liberal, Stepan Verkhovensky, discovering to his horror that his son, Pyotr, is an out and out nihilist – an existential philistine, so to speak. Herzen scented this same thing in Bazarov, the radical in Turgenev’s Father and Sons, although Herzen came at this as a socialist, while Dostoevsky, of course, was having his fun as a reactionary. The same relationship – the initial courtship, the alignment of beautiful thinker and hard body radical, the disillusionment and flight – structured the fellow traveler phenomena of the thirties. It is Gide and the Stalinists, or – again on the comic level – Ambrose Silk, in Evelyn Waugh’s Put out more Flags, and Parsnip and Pimpernell – the Auden/Isherwood pair of fashionable radicals. In actual fact, Auden and Isherwood bolted the poltical parties, too. What it is about the liberal intellectual, what it is is this: wherever he goes, he brings literature with him. And that is irredeemably of the ancien regime, irredeemably privileged to the party utilitarian. And if you can’t loot or burn it, at least you can demand that the intellectual give it up in some way – disparage it, assure us all of its essentially useless and valueless nature, of its contingency, of its not mattering. All of this futurity can be seen in Hazlitt’s essay, a preemptive strike in favor of the imagination. I’ll go on from here in another post.

New year's eve traditions

Ah, New Year’s eve!


I know many of LI’s readers will be out tonight. Some of you will be breaking into deserted houses and cleaning out the valuables before the besotted party goers come home. Others will be spraying graffiti on limos, or tossing bricks through store windows, or engaging in other socially valuable anarcho pranks. Others, like LI, are planning on a quiet evening of glue sniffing and Solaris. But whatever rocks your boat, do it tonight with a pure heart! Here’s a little video from Turbostaat to get you started – any of you who are planning on joining the Russian mafia should take notes!

And of course, tonight is the night we traditionally think kindly of the late Rick James.

oh you sweettooth generations!

In our last post, we used G.E. Moore as our intercessor to think about John Stuart Mill. Our interest in the weird troping of happiness in Mill’s Autobiography was piqued by Colin Heydt’s essay on Mill and Internal Culture, which we intended to pursue next. Instead, we are going to perform our usual zigzag – LI is a veritable encyclopedia of zigzags, and damme if I’m going to change now, mes droogs et droogesses – and advert to William Hazlitt.

Hazlitt was a dogged critic and reader of Bentham, wrote one of the great essays about him in the Spirit of the Age, and, as well, made a sidelong attack on James Mill in On Reason and Imagination, an essay that does a lot, even as that lot has, until recently, escaped consideration. In the last ten years, however, there's been a mini-Hazlitt revival in lit crit circles. It is with the latter essay I’d like to start. But start what? Start considering the structure involved in positing an object that is lost if you search for it – the object in question being that mood/emotion/assessment/feeling, happiness. Mill's bland usage of the term conceals, as Moore points out, a divided meaning that slips between that which is the equivalent of the good and that which requires – to use phenomenological language – an aboutness. Moore thinks that we can affect a logical analysis keeping these two senses apart, and that this is how we will start out doing ethics in a proper way; but one wonders, after Moore has won his logical victory, what exactly he has shown. Or rather, one wonders why he thinks that the impulses that are gathered under the naturalistic fallacy can be sorted out simply by better semantics. Perhaps the logical conflation of happiness with the good does arise simply from a mistake in the language of discourse; but instead of simply correcting that mistake, perhaps we should try to chart the deeper structure of it in the mythologies of everyday life.

For that kind of business, Hazlitt was your man. He was not only an essayist, but an artist and a philosopher. A Jacobin who never betrayed the cause, at the same time he was resistant to thinking that the sweetness of life was a mere aristocratic bauble, or that it could be atomized, packaged and sold by means of a calculus of pleasure and pain to a succession of sweettooth generations. And in these intuitions he seems to be our natural intercessor.

the naturalistic fallacy in three rounds

(From the Cites obscurs site)

In John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography, he says a rather strange thing about happiness:

“I never, indeed, wavered in the conviction that happiness is the test of all rules of conduct, and the end of life. But I now thought that this end was only to be attained by not making it the direct end. Those only are happy (I thought) who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way. The enjoyments of life (such was now my theory) are sufficient to make it a pleasant thing, when they are taken _en passant_, without being made a principal object. Once make them so, and they are immediately felt to be insufficient. They will not bear a scrutinizing examination. Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so. The only chance is to treat, not happiness, but some end external to it, as the purpose of life. Let your self- consciousness, your scrutiny, your self-interrogation, exhaust themselves on that; and if otherwise fortunately circumstanced you will inhale happiness with the air you breathe, without dwelling on it or thinking about it, without either forestalling it in imagination, or putting it to flight by fatal questioning.”

The logic of this passage is familiar, even if it is rather baffling. The pursuit of an end, according to Mill, entails the loss of that end, while its non-pursuit entails finding the end. There glimmers, here, the kind of pre-established harmony that Adam Smith identified with the invisible hand – the baker, the butcher and the candlestickmaker all pursue one end, which is the satisfaction of their greed, and enact another, which is the optimal provisioning of society as a whole. And there glimmers here, for those who’ve read their Freud as well as their Smith, a variation of the fort da game – which, remember, is also a way of detouring around an end – bringing Mommy back – to gain an end. “He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life, for my sake shall find it. – Jesus’ paradox uses the condition – ‘for my sake’ – to soften the claim – but Mill, a secular man, is willing to embrace this truth unconditionally. This is the real cunning of reason, the glass bead game it plays with the Es.

G. E. Moore, in Principia Ethica, devoted a good part of his chapter on hedonism to refuting Mill’s elaboration of Bentham’s happiness thesis in Utilitarianism. Moore analyzed like an English gentlemen, which meant that statements contained in Mill’s autobiography were out of bounds. Gentlemen don’t read each other’s mail, Harry Stimson, Harding’s Secretary of State, famously said as he closed down the first U.S. intelligence agency, the Black Room, which had been set up by Wilson. On the same principle, philosophers don’t read each other’s autobiographies. Rather, they joust only with the salient texts, those with the philosophy label clearly stitched to them.

Moore begins the chapter on hedonism recapitulating the terms of what he called the “naturalism fallacy”:

In this chapter we have to deal with what is perhaps the most famous and the most widely held of all ethical principles—the principle that nothing is good but pleasure. My chief reason for treating of this principle in this place is, as I said, that Hedonism appears in the main to be a form of Naturalistic Ethics: in other words, that pleasure has been so generally held to be the sole good, is almost entirely due to the fact that it has seemed to be somehow involved in the definition of good—to be pointed out by the very meaning of the word. If this is so, then the prevalence of Hedonism has been mainly due to what I have called the naturalistic fallacy—the failure to distinguish clearly that unique and indefinable quality which we mean by good. And that it is so, we have very strong evidence in the fact that, of all hedonistic writers, Prof. Sidgwick alone has clearly recognised that by good we do mean something unanalysable, and has alone been led thereby to emphasise the fact that, if Hedonism be true, its claims to be so must be rested solely on its self-evidence—that we must maintain Pleasure is the sole good to be mere intuition.

Moore then analyzes Mill with this fallacy in mind. Unsurprisingly, he finds that in Utilitarianism, Mill was operating as a semantic rent-seeker – that is, he was covertly using unanalyzed terms – like “desireable”, which Moore saw Mill using in two different senses – on the one hand, as a description of what is desired, and on the other hand, as a synonym for what ought to be desired.

Well, then, the first step by which Mill has attempted to establish his Hedonism is simply fallacious. He has attempted to establish the identity of the good with the desired, by confusing the proper sense of desirable, in which it denotes that which it is good to desire, with the sense which it would bear if it were analogous to such words as visible. If desirable is to be identical with good, then it must bear one sense; and if it is to be identical with desired, then it must bear quite another sense. And yet to Mill’s contention that the desired is necessarily good, it is quite essential that these two senses of desirable should be the same.

Moore then makes two further steps. One is to reverse Mill’s terms regarding pleasure – instead of pleasure being the object of desire, Moore think it makes more sense to call it the motive of desire. This involves a tricky bit of casuistry, and an example that can’t be more clubbish:

For instance, granted that, when I desire my glass of port wine, I have also an idea of the pleasure I expect from it, plainly that pleasure cannot be the only object of my desire; the port wine must be included in my object, else I might be led by my desire to take wormwood instead of wine. If the desire were directed solely towards the pleasure, it could not lead me to take the wine; if it is to take a definite direction, it is absolutely necessary that the idea of the object, from which the pleasure is expected, should also be present and should control my activity. The theory then that what is desired is always and only pleasure must break down: it is impossible to prove that pleasure alone is good, by that line of argument. But, if we substitute for this theory, that other, possibly true, theory, that pleasure is always the cause of desire, then all the plausibility of our ethical doctrine that pleasure alone is good straightaway disappears. For in this case, pleasure is not what I desire, it is not what I want: it is something which I already have, before I can want anything.

There’s nothing that makes a person feel more like adopted Alex’s habits in Clockwork Orange than this port wine talk in the works of the Oxbridge philosophy set. After a while, you want to put on your hobnailed boots and crunch the wine glasses underfoot with sadistic glee. But leaving this to one side – Moore definitely has Mill on the ropes here. And now comes a bit of fun – even Oxbridgian philosophers can have fun with a bit of close work in the corner:

But now let us return to consider another of Mill’s arguments for his position that happiness is the sole end of human action. Mill admits, as I have said, that pleasure is not the only thing we actually desire. The desire of virtue, he says, is not as universal, but is as authentic a fact, as the desire of happiness . And again, Money is, in many cases, desired in and for itself . These admissions are, of course, in naked and glaring contradiction with his argument that pleasure is the only thing desirable, because it is the only thing desired. How then does Mill even attempt to avoid this contradiction? His chief argument seems to be that virtue, money and other such objects, when they are thus desired in and for themselves, are desired only as a part of happiness . Now what does this mean? Happiness, as we saw, has been defined by Mill, as pleasure and the absence of pain. Does Mill mean to say that money, these actual coins, which he admits to be desired in and for themselves, are a part either of pleasure or of the absence of pain? Will he maintain that those coins themselves are in my mind, and actually a part of my pleasant feelings? If this is to be said, all words are useless: nothing can possibly be distinguished from anything else; if these two things are not distinct, what on earth is? We shall hear next that this table is really and truly the same thing as this room; that a cab-horse is in fact indistinguishable from St Paul’s Cathedral; that this book of Mill’s which I hold in my hand, because it was his pleasure to produce it, is now and at this moment a part of the happiness which he felt many years ago and which has so long ceased to be. Pray consider a moment what this contemptible nonsense really means. Money, says Mill, is only desirable as a means to happiness. Perhaps so, but what then? Why, says Mill, money is undoubtedly desired for its own sake. Yes, go on, say we. Well, says Mill, if money is desired for its own sake, it must be desirable as an end-in-itself: I have said so myself. Oh, say we, but you have also said just now that it was only desirable as a means. I own I did, says Mill, but I will try to patch up matters, by saying that what is only a means to an end, is the same thing as a part of that end. I daresay the public won’t notice. And the public haven’t noticed. Yet this is certainly what Mill has done. He has broken down the distinction between means and ends, upon the precise observance of which his Hedonism rests. And he has been compelled to do this, because he failed to distinguish end in the sense of what is desirable, from end in the sense of what is desired: a distinction which, nevertheless, both the present argument and his whole book presupposes. This is a consequence of the naturalistic fallacy.

So much for Moore’s fun and games – which is just LI’s way of introing our next post, (we hope), which is about Colin Heydt’s “Mill, Bentham, and Internal Culture.”

Dispatch from Bozoland

In the last post, LI foreswore political commentary. This post will be full of political commentary. Consistency, as Emerson said, is something I’ll cram up your ass if you bring it around here again, got that sport? Or maybe it wasn’t Emerson who said that – that was a marginal note on a Scorcese script. Damn.

Anyway, as I have pointed out and pointed out, the fraud of the GWOT, a fraud at the very root of the Bush administration response to 9/11, was eventually going to blow up in our faces. As we know from every testimony that counts, pre-9/11, the Bushies thought ‘terrorism’ was one of those stupid Clinton obsessions. After 9/11, especially after the nation turned a blind eye to the paniced and clueless president they saw buzzing around the country, the administration still didn’t understand the first thing about Al Qaeda, but they did understand that this was unparalleled opportunity for thievery, for invading countries, and for making political gains. So the laughable Afghan war ended with the press praising President Backbone, and paying no attention to the fact that President Backbone had just let Osama bin Laden go (ah, if only we had tapes of the conversations between PB and his Rove. The idea that OBL would be a Bush yo yo, conveniently caught in 2004, was surely bruited about). Just as they obligingly looked the other way and found a threat in Iraq long before the US mopping up operations against the Taliban went bad in the spring of 2002. Meanwhile, the press obediently took the rhetoric for the fact: and lo, on stone tablets it was writ that the opposition – whether softy Dems or demonstrators against the coming Iraq war – didn’t understand terrorism. This is funny like a cosmic joke. It is so funny we decided, just for grins, to sacrifice more than 675,000 Iraqi lives as a punchline chaser.

So we spent 4 trillion on the GWOT, and we made OBL a video star. It turned out it was harder to yo-yo him than anybody thought, especially as Iraq went south and there was no extra troops available. Funny, dat. The idiot policy in Afghanistan did make the Taliban viable again – and tossing OBL into a country with a considerable, low level network of Islamicist parties and militias, with inside connections in the military and the ISI, was like putting in a plug and play accessory.

The problem that I have, here, is one of vocabulary. I’ve long exhausted the thesaurus for synonyms for stupidity. One wants some word that stretches nation wide to describe the American consciousness in this tawdry, vile decade, but where is that culminating word? How can you describe a people who have their dopey eyes open and watch as they are rooked, as their army is destroyed to make money for a bunch of halfpint corporate desperadoes and the vanity of a catalogue model president, and who still don’t fucking get it? Who allow the press to talk about ‘progress’ in Iraq, when what they mean is that one or another theocratic party has killed enough people to create a local vacuum in which they can peacefully attack, say, women who go to beauty salons?

Ah well. It's bozoland, Jake.

There wasn't any joint: 2007

LI has been reading over our 2007 posts with some disappointment. In 2007, we were much more verbose and much less witty than in 2006.

The main thematic difference between this year and previous ones is political. From 2001 until about June of 2007, we emitted a constant stream of howls. Notably, about Iraq, and the crimes and misdemeanors of the Bush years. But in June we looked back and realized that, for all the denunciation of the feebs, the psychos, the deepily and creepily murderous D.C. set, it mattered not a wit. When the Democratic majority calmly let itself be immobilized and zombified by the Petro Gun club, displaying the same kind of acumen and forward looking spirit which infused the halcyon days of Bremer’s rule in Iraq, it answered the question that foamed on our lips: can this governing elite be saved? At the moment, grassroots politics in the U.S. is a sick joke, if not completely dead. It consists of what, four vegetarian Quakers? It is scary how dead. The slack jawed peckerwood and the cretinous investment banker, that unlikely duo that always emerges in true coup regimes, have so kicked the ass of the angels of our better nature that they seem down for the count. LI’s animadversions on this situation had become less critique and more the bad habit of a man in middle aged psychological meltdown. Fuck it, and fuck them.

In place of politics, LI’s posts became big, boggy steps on the way to our project – tracing the rise of the happiness culture and its tragic flaws. Plus we mixed in the usual welter of LI’s kinks. The language of the posts became self-dealing, inward looking –and rebarbatively explicative. But what can we do? It is in our nature (as the scorpion said to the frog) to be a village explainer, a crackhead on a cracker barrel.

Looking ahead, we doubt we will avoid picking at the scabs of politics completely. Next year is an election year, and that is always like shootin’ time in the shithead factory, as we get down to that rawest strata of the American Volk, a shared and beloved bozoism, mc-ed by a millionaire press squad compounded of sycophancy and hair oil. Fun for all!

So, this is the bad news. The good news is… well, LI has made some steps in the right direction, that is, as far as our happiness project is concerned. My image for this project is of a subterranean groping forward in a great darkness, the exploration of long lost passages clogged with the marbleized detritus of forgotten civilizations, upon which I can shed some flickering little light. The twentieth century, don’t you know. LI is, at least, an intrepid conceptual spelunker. So intrepid that the further I advance, the more I get the feeling that I’m alone down here, and nobody knows what the fuck I’m talking about.

“I knew a man once did a girl in.
Any man might do a girl in
Any man has to, needs to, wants to
Once in a lifetime, do a girl in
Well he kept her there in a bath
With a gallon of lysol in a bath
...
This went on for a couple of months
Nobody came
And nobody went
But he took in the milk and he paid the rent.
...
But here's what I was going to say.
He didn't know if he was alive
and the girl was dead
He didn't know if the girl was alive
and he was dead
He didn't know if they were both alive
or both were dead
If he was alive then the milkman wasn't
and the rent-collector wasn't
And if they were alive then he was dead.
There wasn't any joint
There wasn't any joint
For when you're alone
When you're alone like he was alone
You're either or neither…”

Okay, so much for confession. And contrition, I think I’ve been contrite. I've apologized, here, god damn it! And also, to be frank, I've written some hot stuff too. But I will do better, people; I vow to be funnier in 2008. Honestly. You’ll see.

Recommend

LI’s advice of the day: if you want to understand what is happening in the markets right now, you will read John Lancaster’s LBR essay.
Sample from the essay: Lancaster is talking to his friend, Tony, an investment broker or something – whatever that means nowadays.

“My friend Tony, however, is sanguine. ‘Sorting out who’s in the shit is going to be a nightmare, but when it all shakes out, all it’ll mean is that credit is a little bit more expensive. That’s a good thing. It had got crazy. It was cheaper for companies to borrow money from other companies than it was for governments. That’s nuts. These things are cyclical, it had all just gone too far and we needed a correction.’
‘So we’ll have to stop running around spending money like drunken sailors,’ I said.
‘Well, drunk sailors tend to be spending their own money,’ Tony said. ‘By contemporary standards they’re quite prudent.’”

Oh, it hurts. It hurts!