But on that night of uninterrupted calculation, what exactly was Socrates thinking? Socrates’ almost mystic apprehension of the world of Forms may contribute to the inaccurate idealization of the philosopher as one who can access an indefinable realm of human cognition. Nevertheless, the image of Socrates motionless on a winter night points to an inescapable question: what do we think about when we think about philosophy?

Socrates himself may have an answer: the philosopher, he alleges in Phaedo, orders “intellectual vision” to come as close as possible to the essence of things. Our very own Philip Kitcher reminds us of this when he states that philosophers excel at “anatomy.”

The authors in this issue of The Gadfly all, in some way, seek to grasp the essence buried inside outer form, the reality hidden behind appearance. They all anatomize: whether their subject be a complex novel, a work of art, a musical composition, or even something so elusive as emotional attachment. Through them, The Gadfly seeks to apply the perceptive tools of philosophy to the experiences of everyday life. In this way the Socratic epiphany does not seem so impossibly distant; it is not some unknown event reserved for the few. Instead, philosophy serves us all best as the road towards understanding the structures that lie beneath the surface of experience.

Puya Gerami

The book is in many ways a complementary text to Ranciere’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster, in which the author explores what he calls “intellectual emancipation.” In that text, Ranciere argues that ignorance and knowledge are simply structural positions that the student and the schoolteacher occupy respectively, rather than states of being that define each actor. True intellectual emancipation emerges when both the student and the teacher recognize their arbitrary relationship, allowing the student to pursue her own path to knowledge without adhering to the prescribed ends of formal education.

Illustrated by Keenan Korth

Ranciere applies the same concept to the artist and the spectator of art in The Emancipated Spectator when he defines emancipation as “the blurring of the boundary between those who act and those who look; between individuals and members of a collective body.” Instead of the simple application of “emancipation” to certain works of art, Ranciere articulates his theory by critiquing the conventional postmodern treatment of the spectator. He points out that many postmodern theorists criticize the passivity of the spectator. These theorists believe that the artist must either make the spectator aware of her passivity or else involve the spectator in a way that would make her “abdicate the very position of the viewer.”

For Ranciere, the two distinctions of activity/passivity and artist/spectator are false. Instead, it is ultimately more fruitful to emancipate each actor from his or her structural position in order to reveal that each is an equally creative member in a collective group. The act of perceiving art proves to be as imaginative as the act of creating it. On this view, the artist and the spectator are equally responsible for the consumption and commodification of art and image. While the artist may, through grotesque images, critique the consumer’s commodificiation of art, the artist is actually reaffirming this commodificiation and reasserting the power of late capitalist culture.

Never afraid to tackle political issues, Ranciere dives headfirst into the Arab-Israeli conflict, the war on terror and September 11^th, although he has trouble making these events relevant to aesthetics. Anyone familiar with Ranciere’s work will immediately recognize and appreciate his trademark style in The Emancipated Spectator, while anyone new to Ranciere will enjoy his rigorous and unapologetic treatment of today’s world of images.

Tell me about your background. How did you get into philosophy?

I began as a mathematician, and I got bored with doing mathematics. I thought I wouldn’t do any creative work in it. My tutor suggested that I do history of science, so I did this in my third year at Cambridge, which I had to do to finish my residence requirement for the degree. While I was doing history of science, I got interested in philosophy of science. I then went to graduate school in philosophy without having taken any philosophy classes, which was nearly disastrous. But I survived, and I worked in philosophy of science for  the first part of my career. But I’ve done lots of other kinds of philosophy at various stages along the way.

One of them being philosophy of literature.

Yes.

So what is philosophy of literature? What kind of questions does it ask?

Two different kinds of questions. There is an approach to philosophy of literature that is allied with aesthetics: questions about the presentation of character in literature, the different forms of narration, that sort of thing. Then there is philosophy of literature that is the study of philosophical themes in works of literature, which I regard as something many European philosophers have often done. Many doubled as literary figures in their own right. Think of Camus and Sartre, and in certain respects Schiller and Dostoevsky. You’ve got that tradition well established in Europe, whereas in English language philosophy it’s been much less prominent—although there are some like John Stuart Mill, who is one my heroes.

I was personally extremely excited by Stanley Cavell’s essay on King Lear called “The Avoidance of Love.” It’s a really great essay. That’s what led me to think that there could be serious work done in philosophical explorations of literature. That’s now becoming much more frequent, and a number of people have written philosophical works exploring themes in literature. Henry James is very popular, but others like Robert Pippin and Martha Nussbaum have all written things about this. It’s a developing genre. I’d like to see more of it taught at the undergraduate level. I’ve actually taught from quite early in my career courses on the philosophy of literature. Part of this goes very deep into my past because when I was fifteen, I was in the British educational system and there you had to specialize at fifteen. I really found this a very difficult choice because one side of me really wanted to do English, French and German, and the other side of me wanted to do mathematics and physics. I was quite torn.

I have to say, it was Lydia Goehr who got me to do philosophy of literature at an earlier stage than I thought I would. She invited me to write an essay on the legacy of Don Giovanni in Wagner. That got me started and once I did it was difficult to stop!

In what ways does the philosophy of literature connect with the work you do in other areas?

Well, it doesn’t really connect with the philosophy of science at all. It connects with some of the philosophical questions you ask in CC. So, in a way, all those years I spent teaching CC were perfect for preparing me for these sorts of philosophical questions. Lit Hum and CC are all about the nature of the good life. Literature is often a very vivid exploration of that. I find Joyce particularly good, but not just Joyce. I’m very interested in Thomas Mann, and Shakespeare, of course. I have all sorts of tentative projects for doing things in the philosophy of literature. I’m very interested in ethical and social change, and so a play like Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice seems to me to be a very interesting study of change between two sorts of ethical attitudes: one based on informal relations of sympathy and another based on very definite rules. I think there are vast amounts of stuff you can do in the philosophy of literature. We’ve only just begun.

Illustrated by Daniel Nyari

How does having knowledge of the philosophy of literature enhance the experience of reading?

If you’re interested in philosophical themes in literature, then you tend to gravitate towards particular kinds of literary works. You tend to read them incredibly closely, as closely as you read the most difficult texts in philosophy. It seems to me that as I’ve been doing this I’ve really been immersing myself in some texts in ways that make me feel that my previous readings of them were utterly superficial. You just see things in them, and you follow them through. You read very carefully indeed. It’s a distinctive way of approaching a text. I often find that much secondary literature about a text I find most interesting to probe is often not very probing or helpful at all. People are interested in different things. Philosophers, once they really get inside a text, are going to think about it in a very distinctive way.

What is your favorite book written by a non-philosopher, and how is it philosophical?

Well, this is really hard. The obvious thing to go for would be Finnegans Wake. Joyce’s prose work really wrestles with questions about how lives can flourish and how they can fail to flourish. So you have a bundle of stories of how lives can just be blocked and pinched and narrowed and confined. Then you have in A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man this vision of a character with tremendous aspirations to escape from this pinched, debased world in which life can never really succeed. It’s interesting because Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist, thinks he has to soar—hence the name—and it doesn’t work. We know that it’s dubious at the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and then when we see him again in Ulysses, he’s come down in a complete crash. Ulysses is all about people who have lost a sense of where they’re going. Stephen has lost a sense of where he’s going. Leopold Bloom is lost and wandering, and Molly is lost and wandering. In the end, there’s a movement back together, but it’s left wonderfully uncertain.

And then there’s Finnegans Wake: different style, immensely interesting, difficult and complicated. It seems to me to be all about how you come to terms with your life at a moment when you can’t really do much to change it, when its shape is fixed. It’s immensely complementary to the book I’ve just been teaching in Lit Hum, Montaigne’s Essays, also written under the awareness of approaching death. I think Joyce wrote an extraordinary novel about things that you can’t face directly, and therefore float in dream language and have to be approached obliquely. They have to be approached again and again and again to reassure yourself that you’ve really worked everything through and that the reconciliation, when it comes, is real, genuine and not premature. Joyce was not a tragedian by nature. He wrote a comedy as Dante wrote a comedy. His books are funnier than Dante’s. But his books are funny in that there is a possibility of reconciliation.

Thomas Mann strikes me as also extremely interesting. There’s one thread that runs through two of Mann’s greatest novels, The Magic Mountain and Doctor Faustus. That thread is the conflict between the liberal values of the Enlightenment and the richness and depth and turbulence of reactions to the Enlightenment. Mann is working his way through this material and trying to come to terms with a sense of passion, depth and seriousness of existence that the Enlightenment in some ways doesn’t do justice to, while at the same time recognizing its dangers. It’s no accident that both books turn to the opposition of two figures, one of whom is profoundly dark and dangerous, and the other who is apparently refined and civil and enlightened. The difficulty in both cases is finding either of them to be satisfactory. These are both deeply philosophical books. Not surprisingly in Mann’s case, he has this famous passage in a book that he wrote to try to justify Germany’s participation in the First World War, where he writes about reading Schopenhauer, and the passage concludes, “One only reads that way once.”

What do you think literature can tell us about philosophy?

I think philosophers tend to be very good at what one might call anatomy, that is, recognizing certain kinds of structures. So if you think about Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, it gives you a picture of the categories in which you might try to understand “the good life.” Novelists, as it were, put flesh on this skeleton and really give you a vivid understanding of how one might live through something. Dewey, another one of my heroes, is really committed to this idea that great literature is a way of ethical experimentation, experimentation with values. I think there is something to this idea. In one place he says that our understanding of what is valuable, and what it means and the ways in which values are consolidated and spread has not so much been carried out by philosophers as by great works of drama and poetry and literature. I think that’s a real insight.

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Many philosophers have taken Wittgenstein’s suggestion—albeit, interpreted outside its context—to mean that all that we can say in philosophy is what we can say precisely. The project of analytic philosophy has been to make investigation as precise as possible.

Can a philosopher say anything precise about art? Decidedly, no. It is not that it is impossible to think about art; certainly it is, and the results can be fascinating. But contemplation of art through proper philosophy is, in fact, impossible. Philosophy requires smooth systematization and, to a large degree, the tools of logical analysis. Those tools cannot be applied to something so imprecise as human creativity.
Art relies on the various contradictions inherent in subjective experience. When reading a single passage of Tolstoy’s masterwork, War and Peace, the reader feels simultaneous love and hate, envy and repulsion, affirmation and denial. It is this sort of passage that is likely to receive the astute attention of literary criticism. Napoleon is at once the greatest of all men and the smallest. He is the freest and the most bound. It is up to the reader to decide what to make of this. To a large extent, what we have heard in our introductory humanities classes is true: ”There is no wrong answer.” There are only more compelling answers. But how compelling these answers are is based on wit, persuasiveness and style. Not on logic.

Illustrated by Ashley Lee

Add to this already contradictory, imprecise form of expression an even more contradictory and imprecise possible range of subjective reactions—what does one get? We can only say what we think the artist was thinking. And even the artist is not committed to what he or she is thinking, since much of his or her expression is subconscious. Not every artist is committed to the precise order of Raphael. Consider the chaos of Pollock.

Some principles of subjective experience might be articulated. But this is only possible within the framework of the philosophy of psychology, or even psychology itself. Philosophy of art thus becomes a branch of psychology, and that is certainly not what its proponents want. Philosophy’s greatest success comes when it is applied to disciplines with inherent precision, like mathematics and physics. The body of twentieth century analytic philosophy should be seen as progress in philosophy, just as the advances in mathematics and physics have been seen as progress. It is very doubtful if philosophy will ever have such success in art; in fact, that kind of success may just be unattainable.

Puya Gerami:

In Plato’s Republic, Socrates explains his reasons for banishing all poets from the ideal city-state: he fears the pernicious ‘imitations’ of artists who could corrupt the stable order of his Kallipolis, citing the “ancient quarrel” between poetry and philosophy. For Socrates, reverend martyr of Western philosophy, there is something seductive, mesmerizing and inescapably dangerous in the verse of the tragedian or the sculpture of the artist. Because of this, the philosopher uniquely chooses to banish art from his utopian fantasy. There is no room for creators in the static world of the philosopher-king.

But Socrates’ frustrated attempt to exile art from the realm of the thinker is not philosophy’s rejection of aesthetics. Rather it is philosophy’s recognition of the enigmatic, often unclassifiable nature of human expression. For the last two and a half millennia, a host of philosophers—from Aristotle to Hegel to Benjamin—have attempted to define the dynamics of aesthetic experience. Philosophy seeks to inquire, conceptualize and, above all else, demystify. Thus many thinkers have chosen to critically demystify the seemingly superhuman qualities of art by more fruitfully understanding its complex relationship with human identity and perception.

Illustrated by Ashley Lee

What makes an object a work of art? How do we perceive and define beauty? How does one construct a hierarchy of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ art? These provocative questions can only be approached with the philosopher’s lens, equipped with the ability to distinguish and systematize. Ultimately philosophy can reveal to us the intricate processes involved in constructing and viewing art. Only philosophy leads us to understand far more precisely our differentiation between ‘art’ and ‘non-art’.

Philosophy is at its best when it is used to penetrate the inherent contradictions of reality, carefully annihilating the dogmatic pretensions of received truths. It cannot be limited to the static results and mathematical certainties of logic. Philosophers hope to understand a world, and a human world-view, that is constantly transforming itself. Art is central to our existence because it represents this perpetual flux.

Many of the most revered thinkers became acquainted with philosophy only while falling in love with art at the same time. Sartre’s last book is his attempt to understand the writings of Flaubert; Nietzsche’s first ends with a paean to the music of Richard Wagner. What explains this unique relationship between philosophy and art? If the role of philosophy is to understand what it means to be human, art boldly attempts to express that very wish. Unsurprisingly, the most talented philosophers seem to be astonishing artists in their own right: Socrates banishes all poets from the Kallipolis and lambasts the deceptive rhetoric of the Sophists, but he is perhaps the greatest oratorical wordsmith of all time.

The philosopher is undaunted by what first appears indefinable. If philosophy is the thinker’s mastery of critical understanding, then nothing, not even the protean, difficult nature of art, ought to escape its comprehensive vision.

It is one thing for music to be directed by sentimentality to a greater or lesser degree, and quite another that its beauty be founded on insensible and objective rationality. This opposition can be elucidated by an example.

Consider Alban Berg’s expressionist Piano Sonata Op.1 as a counterexample to Xenakis’ “Concret PH.” The sonata’s highly enriched harmonic language sets it apart from the typical B minor piece. At the time of its composition, tonality was the accepted convention for subjective conflicts in music. Berg operates at the limits of this convention. From the first few measures the listener is meant to understand that behind the music there is a voice speaking. It tells a story and expresses something that belongs to the composer. The role of the listener is to uncover this voice and interpret the story it is telling.

Illustrated by Natalie Robehmed

Xenakis’ “Concret PH” calls for a completely different attitude from the listener. The piece consists of the altered, distorted sounds of burning charcoal; this is the only “story” behind the music. The listener is not oppressed by what the composer is trying to express. The music is not about telling but about showing. One’s experience of the piece is governed by listening objectively.

A notorious result of Xenakis’s formal approach is his use of what he calls stochastic processes. A stochastic composition gives traditional compositional choices over to a probability framework that randomly produces complex masses of sound. The complexity of the sonic interactions is guided and shaped by the structural sound pillars that Xenakis erects for the composition. In the pieces that are “calculated” in this way, Xenakis’ aesthetic choices can only be seen as very thick brushstrokes. While listening to “Metastaseis”, one can observe a rather simple diagram presenting certain fundamental aspects of the piece, relating to the sound landscape or to the textural density operating in time during the piece. The diagram’s description is clear and illuminating; it shows what is happening globally in the music on a single sheet of paper. On the other hand, by listening to the sounds resulting from the stochastic framework at the local level, one hears how the enormous complexity of the music embodies Xenakis’ rejection of traditional craft and artistry.

The masses of sound in Xenakis’ music (whether they are produced by calculation or not) have inner lives, but they do not, on their own, affect the listener emotionally. Even so, Xenakis does not choose to reject traditional beauty to replace it with expressionist “ugliness.” He does not insist on breaking expressive conventions, but proposes a lack of convention. Qualitative judgment of any individual sound is renounced in the midst of the music’s bulky yet unintended complexity. Large-scale clarity is the only valid parameter for judging the sound events that occur in his compositions. One must objectively listen to the piece to really take it in. There is something genuinely soothing about the objectivity in Xenakis’ music as each piece attempts to construct a sound world of its own. The listener is not required to have knowledge of history, or of the life of the composer, or to share a common background in the conventions of tonality. This is the kind of music where only attention to sound is essential for enjoyment.

Milan Kundera’s article is available, in an Italian translation, in the Columbia Music Library as part of a multi-authored book on Xenakis, edited by Enzo Restagno.

By the end of the next day, Napoleon had routed the Prussians and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel had finished The Phenomenology of Spirit. But for Hegel, the night marked more than national triumph or personal accomplishment. It was the end of history itself. The last serious challenger to the progressive ideals of the French Revolution had been defeated in a blaze of glory. From that point forward, Hegel suggested, the ideals of republican governance would grow ineluctably across the globe. The competition of political ideologies, which had driven international history for millennia, had been permanently extinguished.

***

In April 1968, Columbia student Mark Rudd and a legion of disaffected peers stormed Hamilton Hall, taking up positions outside the office of Henry Coleman, Dean of the College. But Coleman, the uprising’s chosen hostage, wasn’t in. Elbowing his way through the crowd to reach his own office door, he stood next to Rudd and boomed, “I have no control over the demands you are making, but I have no intention of meeting any demand under a situation such as this.” Each group had the power to deny the other, and, as a thousand police officers stormed the Morningside Campus with weapons bared, it became clear that neither was interested in détente. Coleman waited through the night to be freed by his captors the next day.

Illustrated by J.X. Daboin

***

It is easy to imagine the class of 2013 sympathizing with Hegel. Their older classmates have weathered hunger strikes and petty dictators, worn out their voices over navy boys and classroom intifadas, and packed Low Steps—twice—to cheer a former transfer student who went on to bigger things. But not this year. Students who first arrived at Columbia in 2009 have toiled on a sleepy green campus, adrift somewhere north of Columbus Circle.

What happened?

It’s hard to claim a lack of provocation. Uyghur Muslim activist Rebiya Kadeer and Islamophobic Dutch MP Geert Wilders both inveighed against enemies—the People’s Republic of China and all Muslims ever, respectively. Student councils debated whether or not to use the boot of oppression to put out your cigarette. For Christ’s sake, a professor punched someone, allegedly on a question of race relations.

All this to little reaction. Kadeer, for example, engendered a protest of about four people with printer-paper flyers. Wilders, perhaps because he was so ludicrously objectionable, also proved a non-starter. Lionel McIntyre, for all his alleged sins, remains a professor at the School of Architecture. If ever there were a time and place to calm down, it was Columbia in fall 2009. Perhaps the ideological struggles are won and the history of Columbia is really over.

Illustrated by J.X. Daboin

Without a doubt, this past year has seen dramatic shifts in the nature of the issues that once excited us. In 2009, Barack Obama’s electrifying promises of change, once the basis for uncompromising popular struggle, became part of a complex and ambiguous political process. Closer to home, the slow development of the Global Core demonstrated that, while questions of multiculturalism persist, the work of radical persuasion is over. Students, even if they disagree about smoking on campus, can hardly challenge the decision-making framework, having directly elected it. It could be that our quiescence, then, is the sign of a university at ease with itself. We have resolved the fundamental conflict—the sharp distinction of interests—at the heart of history. Unlike Napoleon charging the Prussians, we face an amorphous sea of possibilities that move in one direction or another on strange and slow-moving tides.

But it’s hard to make that kind of pronouncement without thinking about Hegel at the Battle of Jena because Hegel, of course, was spectacularly wrong. The struggle over ideals in Europe was not over; it was just beginning. In the two centuries that followed, nationalism, fascism and communism, would radically threaten the identity of Hegel’s Western world. So don’t lose faith, freshmen. Your very arrival ensures that, for better or for worse, the historical narrative has not ended at Columbia University. The new conflicts may be hard to imagine from within the lapse of history. But as Hegel and Henry Coleman knew, the night only lasts for so long.

Illustration by Claire Sabel

How did you become interested in philosophy?

Stephanie: I wanted to take a course to discover whatphilosophy even meant. I still don’t know what it is or means,but I think I don’t know in a more robust way.

Shana: Christia Mercer’s “History of Philosophy II”got me hooked.

Tao: It’s not Stats or Econ(my other two majors).

Which have been your favorite philosophy classes?

Stephanie: Professor Neuhouser’s “Hegel”lecture and “Phenomenology of Spirit” seminar.

Laura: “Phenomenology & Existentialism”with Taylor Carman & “Kant’s Ethics” with Patricia Kitcher.

Shana: “Hegel” with Neuhouser; “Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason” with Patricia Kitcher.

Tao: “Metaphyics” with Achille Varzi.

Which philosopher, dead or alive, would you most like to meet?

Stephanie: Wittgenstein.

Laura: Georges Bataille & Thomas Hobbes.

Shana: Leibniz.

Tao: Marx.

Which philosopher, dead or alive, would you least like to meet?

Stephanie: Schopenhauer?

Shana: Derrida, I guess.

Laura: George Berkeley,what a bore.

Tao: Engels.

How would you sum up your experience as a philosophy major?

Stephanie: Philosophy really helped me develop my closereading skills, which I’ve found useful for writing all sorts ofpapers and intrinsically enjoyable in my own leisure reading.

Shana: Philosophy students arrogantly claim that they cansuccessfuly venture into other disciplines because of theirtraining. I’ve found this arrogance to be quite well-founded.

Tao: Professors matter. The same class can be taught very differently by different professors.

What is your advice to aspiring philosophy majors?

Stephanie: Philosophy classes assign few pages of reading. Do lots of delicious close reading.

Shana: Take grad seminars early and often; one of my regrets is thinking I couldn’t take a seminar on the Phenomenology of Spirit when I was a sophomore. Fear not the G. You don’t have to write a thesis to be a serious student of philosophy.

Tao: Take classes outside your major.

What are your plans after graduation?

Stephanie: I am going to study German and Chinese for ayear, and hopefully hang out with my grandparents in China for a few months. Then, law school.

Laura: Moving to Washington, D.C. and looking for a job.

Shana: Taking a year to learn German and then heading tograd school, hopefully to end up studying Kant or Hegel for five or ten more years.

Tao: Peace Corps.

World life expectancy is rising. According to the United Nations, ten percent of the global population is age sixty or older. In 2050, that percentage will more than double. The shift towards an older population portends that today’s teenagers will have to deal not only with the practical demands of work and home, but also with the by-no-means-small responsibility of caring for their aging parents. It remains to be seen to what extent the wave of aging will alter the parent-child relationship.

In 1892, William DeWitt Hyde, president of Bowdoin College, wrote, “Children owe to their parents obedience and such service as they are able to render. Parents owe to children support, training and an education sufficient to give them a fair start in life.” Most of us acknowledge that grown children should care for their parents, minister to their needs and provide them succor in old age, but do most of us also use such terms as “debt” and “owe” when discussing parent-child relationships? Do we, in fact, owe anything to our parents?

Gratitude and Filial Piety

In the Confucian tradition, the relationship between parent and child was more important than that between friends, husbands and wives and even between ruler and subject. Children, who were considered physical extensions of their parents, incurred an enormous “debt” due to the notion that they “owed” their existence to their parents. To repay their parents for their zi, or nurture, children were expected to practice xiao, or filial piety. They had an obligation to obey their parents, respect them, look after them in old age and perform elaborate rites of ancestor worship after their deaths. In The Analects, Confucius even condoned law-breaking if such a transgression was necessitated by filial obligations.

I do not believe, however, that children owe their parents filial love simply because they are the fruit of their parents’ loins. Nancy Jecker, Professor of Medical Ethics at the University of Washington School of Medicine, rejects what she terms the “Law of Athens,” which establishes a debt of gratitude on the part of children to their parents for begetting them. Aristotle and Saint Thomas Aquinas supported such a view of filial obligation, but Jecker claims that children should treat their parents with filial piety only as a token of gratitude for the beneficial acts that their parents performed out of love—and beyond duty—rather than for the mere act of begetting. Jecker’s refutation of the “Law of Athens” is sound and sensible, given that the “Law” is oblique shorthand at best and sophistry at worst.

Illustrated by Naomi Roochnik

Suppose, for instance, that parents have babies for the sole purpose of eating them (as in Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic world) or selling them to others as food (as in Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal”). Doesn’t it then make sense for such children to loathe their parents instead of being grateful to them for the “gift of life”? The “gift of life” is not enough to warrant the gratitude of children. A parent’s continued nurturing of, and love for, his or her child is the only solid basis for filial piety; after all, it is not uncommon for adopted children to express filial piety to their adoptive parents despite the absence of a biological bond.

Friends Don’t Owe Friends

So what exactly does one make of parent-child relationships? Why are certain terms not appropriate in describing such relationships? Philosopher Nicholas Dixon contends that a parent-child relationship should be based on the friendship model, which seeks to emphasize the voluntary and loving aspects of the parent-child bond.

Unlike the word “duty,” the word “debt” is annexed to the notion of a burden that can undermine parent-child relationships. In J. M. Coetzee’s fictionalized memoir, Boyhood, the author ruefully recounts, “The thought of a lifetime bowed under a debt of love baffles and infuriates him to the point where he will not kiss [his mother], refuses to be touched by her.” It would seem perverse to describe an invidious parent-child relationship using positive words, but if a child has a loving rapport with his parents, words with negative connotations should be omitted from rather than carelessly shoehorned into discussions. Otherwise, one does injustice to one’s parents and to oneself by implying mendacious permutations of the truth.

Confucians perceive filial piety as the wellspring of other virtues. Building upon this idea, academic Philip Ivanhoe urges us to view filial piety as a “cultivated disposition,” an irreducible virtue distinct from gratitude and duty. In her seminal essay “What Do Grown Children Owe Their Parents?” philosopher Jane English argues that one should avoid using words like “debt,” “favors,” “investment” and “owing” when talking about a parent-child relationship. Such a relationship should be viewed as a friendship that is founded on love instead of the exchange of favors that occurs between people who are not friends. English supports her revisionist position by stating that strangers, not friends, exchange favors, which engender debts that can be repaid, canceled or discharged. Once a friendship ends, the demands of mutuality end as well. Sacrifices are vital to sustaining friendships, but the root of filial obligations is friendship itself rather than any sacrifices made. Friends perform voluntary acts of kindness for their friends out of the kindness of their hearts, rather than being motivated by “mutual gain” or the promise of return on “investments.”

To love one’s parents is not necessarily to follow all their advice. If my parents pushed me to become a professional pianist or artist, I could oppose their demand without eroding our friendship, by claiming that I would be happy with neither vocation. A child’s love for his parents naturally grows in accordance with the amount of love bestowed upon him. The “amount of love” is, of course, unquantifiable, but the full weight of its import impresses itself upon the subject through the power of memory. Recalling the attentive care he received as a child, the grown adult seeks to care for his parents out of love, friendship, gratitude and the cardinal virtue of filial piety.

Lessons in Love

Asserting the role of fiction in instilling moral virtue, Thomas Jefferson once remarked: “A lively and lasting sense of filial duty is more effectually impressed on the mind of a son or daughter by reading King Lear, than by all the dry volumes of ethics and divinity that ever were written.” The filial love and respect Cordelia feels for Lear stems from all the love, education, care and nurturing he has given her. Her recalcitrance to her father’s love contest is more poignant than any ingratiating answer could ever be. She proclaims, “You have begot me, bred me, loved me / I return those duties back as are right fit / Obey you, love you, and most honor you.”

When I was younger, I believed that my parents’ prudential wisdom was all the reason I needed to blindly follow their advice. With the recognition that friendship, love and gratitude form the actual bedrock of my relationship with my parents, I have become more appreciative of all they have done to raise me. And so, I welcome the upcoming years of personal growth and continued devotion to my parents.

How could it be that a feeling so potentially damaging to the self is chosen freely? Why doesn’t this rob love of its great hold on us? When we see a friend who is lovesick, are we not supposed to feel pity for them since they are in the clutches of something beyond their control? Or when we are in love, don’t we like to believe that it could not have been otherwise, that there are greater forces at work against which we cannot and should not battle? I think the cure—once a person’s stomach lining has been thoroughly damaged by the barrage of emotional stress associated with this emotion called “love”—lies in the realization that we are responsible for our feelings and what we choose to do with them. This is the philosophical antacid that nature provides to those poor souls afflicted with the devastating pangs of love.

LOVE IS NOT PASSIVE, NOR IS IT A FORCE OUTSIDE US THAT WE CANNOT CONTROL.

I

There are many who deem love a merely as a passive sensation and hold that what we love is what we find agreeable to us. They are bold in attempting to explain something that appears so absurd and seemingly inexplicable through the lens of science. These persons make two assumptions: (i) that we can explain love and (ii) that love is something beyond our choice embedded in the laws of nature.

There are some who go further in making these assumptions and hold that we are determined by an evolutionary model that calculates all our choices. This is a position common among naive biological hacks, the same persons who say our notions of beauty or morality are based purely on what we deem as beneficial to the survival of our species (e.g. in the case of Beauty, men supposedly prefer doe-eyed, full-lipped females because these facial features suggest youth and fertility). Newsweek magazine’s pseudo-Daniel Dennetts want us to believe that there is no self beyond what the body or “mind” (generally under an evolutionary model) dictates. Expounding on the different secretions of love, these thinkers reductively believe it to be a matter of neurons.

Illustrated by Maryn Carlson

II

Those who disregard all things beyond the body unimaginatively mistake love for “comfort.” They are passive and focused on the corporeal, but they are not in love. These are generally persons who are in relationships that are ignorant of and do not celebrate the great cultural, human heritage of “love.” It is true that love does not have to be a burning poetic passion all the time; but the most “human” thing these persons could possibly aspire to is the search for comfortable companionship. They will not drink of the divine ambrosia man has created in this phenomenon called love, but fill their hungry stomachs from the filthy trough of mere animal instinct laid before them. You will hear both parties express (in order to add a “human” dimension), “I cannot open up to someone emotionally if I do not open up physically,” or “We started hooking up and then he kind of just grew on me.” “Necessity” being sated, they then label whatever semi-civilized aspect borne thereafter with the word “love.” The self is passively determined by immediate desires and the search for these to be satisfied.

III

There are yet others who see love as an imperative for that far worse imperative of our current culture, a vague sense of “happiness.” For them, love becomes a duty and a force impelling the lover to action.

It is evident that our culture supposes that in order to lead a fulfilled life, we must find love. It is true that love, like health, enhances our experience. There is a problem, though, in the insistence that love has to work. It becomes beyond our choice to stop caring, struggling and fighting for it. They believe that a feeling of love entails a sort of duty to make this love “happen.” Even in couples where both persons love each other in equal amounts, it is not always the case that they should keep alive this manifestation of each other’s love, (i.e., the concrete, monogamous and exclusive relationship).

These persons will define themselves as “romantics” and speak of the force of love beyond their control, or Love (exclusively romantic) as a sort of god to be worshipped, whatever the price. Sometimes they might define love as some foreign, mysterious and enchanting force that can disappear at any moment. There is a contradiction in all of these statements, which lies chiefly in describing love in cultural, poetic terms while at the same time deeming it as something beyond human comprehension.

IV

We must realize that love is in great part an active matter of the will. We will be able to see this most clearly in the case of the person who does not have to love, but continues to do so. Let us imagine the case of someone whose love is not materialized or reciprocated in any way; imagine the most lovesick fool. Bad timing, physical limitation, misuse of words, a lack of prudence or shrewdness, strategy or manipulation—one or more of these have contributed to the person’s lack of love being returned. What, however, in full knowledge of hopelessness, allows the lover to keep loving? Is the person completely and incomprehensibly blind in their devotion or is there a hidden and defiant element of freedom?

This freedom is very subtle and it lies in the choice to be deceived. Love is the active faculty of the imagination working in tandem with the will in order to choose to be deluded. We see the passive voice here—“to be deluded”—but we shall see that the greater part of love is to be deluded by ourselves. We form a fictive narrative when we are in love in which the imagination goads our feeling.

The narrative of the love story itself begins with the welcoming of untruth. Let us examine the first stage, that of seduction, which lays this groundwork. Do we not choose to be lied to by some over others? Imagine yourself at a party, being hit on by a ridiculous braggart—you easily accept that you are being fed lies because this person does not interest you on any level. Now imagine yourself on that first date with someone you find physically attractive. The person quotes your favorite author, exaggerates their aspirations and “projects,” pretends to care about what your sibling studies, etc. and we are at some level aware of all this. Let us suppose also that the person is not all that great. The “What if?” that arises when the physical presence of the person is gone is the first instance in which we are allowed to enter into the realm of imagination. We allow ourselves to be seduced by “possibility.” We are not yet in love with the person, but what our imagination has conjured up is already making us choose to allow things to happen.

Illustrated by Maryn Carlson

THE MANIFESTATION OF OUR WILL LIES IN THE FORMING OF THE FICTION.

Does it not cause us pain, though, to simply live in our minds? Love is an active choice of the individual to participate in a fiction, and it is when she realizes this that the lack of its materialization in the world of phenomena seems harmless, or at least less painful. We want our ideals and the workings of our imagination to leave their stamp upon the world of things—everyone wants their will to be manifested in their actions. We do not want to live in the clouds—a retreat from the outside world into our mind, believed to be separated and free, is not favored all of the time, although many believe it is the key to a certain sort of happiness, where man is free from the contingency of the external. What is the case with love? If it is a matter of the will does it not cause us pain when it is not manifested, materialized or reciprocated?

This is where the separation between love and desire lies. Desire lies in the realm of phenomena. Desire fetishizes the material and wants it to be arranged in a certain way. But in the case of love-delusion, desire is eventually transcended. This comes when we realize just how paltry the reality really is. Reality does not deserve our fiction—“This is not the man I fell in love with, why should I want to be with him?” Reality is disappointing, sullied and, often, simply not worth it. Sometimes the mere contemplation of an ideal is even preferable, although it can become too distracting. Once faced with the hideousness of naked reality, there comes a point, even after having dragged on for so long, that nothing fruitful can come from letting it occupy our mind.

It is the fault of your myopia and not of the essence of things if you believe that you see firm land anywhere in the ocean of Becoming. You need names for things, just as if they had a rigid permanence, but the very river in which you bathe a second time is no longer the same one which you entered before. (Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks)

Finnegans Wake is hard to understand. More often than not, students of the Wake focus on its narrative content at the expense of understanding the form in which it is delivered, or set aside the ambiguous narrative and treat individual words and paragraphs as puzzles to be solved. I will take a slightly different approach. I will attempt to present a philosophical framework in which to understand its difficult language and its ambiguous and elusive narrative content. I will do this with the help of the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus and the nineteenth-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. My intention is not to argue that Joyce had either of these figures in mind when working on the Wake. Rather, I want to show how these three figures—Heraclitus, Nietzsche and Joyce—fit together to form a compelling philosophical system, and how this system can help elucidate Joyce’s often mystifying text.

Illustrated by Constance Castillo

Finnegans Wake can be thought of as a sequence of dreams that affords its reader access to the dreamer’s unconscious experience. The dream experience Joyce presents is delivered in a “dream-language” suited to the indeterminate and often conflicting nature of the dreamer’s thoughts and anxieties. The experience he wishes to convey requires this dream-language. This is the basis of the theoretical framework I wish to propose for reading Finnegans Wake. However, since the dream-language is both syntactically and morphemically English, this claim needs to be more specific. The project of Finnegans Wake does not require an entirely new language with its own grammar and syntax; rather, it requires what I will call a flexible lexicon. The “Finneganese” lexicon must surpass ordinary language in its capacity for signification in order to be adequate to its content. This flexible lexicon, I will argue, allows Joyce to achieve a level of truthfulness that is otherwise impossible.

In the epigraph above, Nietzsche paraphrases and augments a fragment from Heraclitus. Heraclitus, via Nietzsche, denies stable, eternal, permanent being in favor of flux. The river is a metaphor for this. Those things in the world we might pick out and name as unchanging entities are, in fact, constantly in the process of changing—just as the water of a river is replaced by new water, though we call that river by the same name. Constant and eternal change is, for Heraclitus, the essential nature of the world. His claim that the “rigid permanence” of language is fundamentally unsuited to the nature of reality reveals the unusual capacities of the Wake’s flexible lexicon. Here’s an example:

“Funferall” is perhaps the most famous of Joyce’s made-up portmanteau words. Tim Finnegan’s funeral—the namesake of Finnegans Wake—is an event unlike most other funerals. The story goes that after drunkenly falling from his ladder, Tim Finnegan is pronounced dead. When a guest at his wake spills a bottle of whiskey, however, he miraculously rises from his deathbed. A word like “funeral’” can refer to a single thing, in this case Tim Finnegan’s funeral, and to funerals generally, i.e. to a funereal essence, as though there were an unchanging entity that corresponds to that essence. But some funerals, e.g. Tim Finnegan’s funeral in which the honored dead man is alive and partakes in the fun, bear no resemblance to that essence. The word “funferall,” unlike most words in the English lexicon, allows for Tim Finnegan’s wake to be both a funeral and a fun-for-all. It is flexible in the sense that it can accommodate seemingly opposite properties into a single word.

Heraclitus’ conception of the fundamental nature of the world (namely, flux and contradiction)—which cannot be captured within the bounds of ordinary language—can be captured by a lexicon that is equally as malleable as the entities to which its units refer.

Illustrated by Constance Castillo

The way Heraclitus accounted for the transitoriness of the world was via the phenomenon of, as Nietzsche described it, “polarity.” A seemingly singular, unchanging entity is actually composed of opposite forces, and is itself, in some sense, those opposite things together. Heraclitus’ (and Nietzsche’s) insight is not the obvious point that things change through time. Rather, their insight is that it is contrary to our ordinary conception of the world—one in which there is the constant, “Being”—to truly account for the contradictoriness that constant and eternal flux entails. Because things change and pass out of existence, every entity in the world must be ascribed the opposite properties “being” and “not-being”—for Heraclitus and for Nietzsche this means that in some sense, the fundamental nature of the world is contradiction.

This notion (which is, it is worth noting, quite different from our ordinary use of “contradiction”) applies to the unconscious mind—the territory of Finnegans Wake. A distinguishing feature of the unconscious mind is that it is tolerant of a certain kind of dissonance of which the conscious mind is not. Contrary emotions, even contrary accounts of a single event, condition or thing, might be entertained simultaneously by the unconscious mind, while the same set of contraries might, by the conscious mind, be triaged, and the unfit dismissed or repressed. It is the project of Finnegans Wake to reveal those dissonant emotions and accounts that the conscious mind does not tolerate. The flexible lexicon is the tool with which this project is carried out.

The project of excavating the unconscious mind—and allowing for the confusion that lies at its core—can be messy and unpleasant. It is, as Joyce describes it, “[seeing] life foully the plak and the smut.” As the dreamer examines his life through the central figure HCE, the most repulsive facts of human life emerge. The nauseating, the horrifying, the painful and the mundane are brought to light. The grit of human life—in its conscious and unconscious conditions—is exposed in the radically flexible language of Finnegans Wake. It gives expression to a human scale of contradiction—a scale on which at one end the conscious mind is working in rigid, individuated, non-contradictory terms, and at the other, the unconscious mind is working in murkier territory. It is Joyce’s aim to give every point on this scale a substantial and necessary place (in strictly Nietzschean terms) in his final and most elaborate artwork. For Nietzsche, this kind of expression is true in an important sense. If an artwork gives maximally human expression to human life, it is true to its subject matter. Insofar as Joyce permits of the unpleasant and the everyday—the “plak and the smut”—and the contradictory mental activity that generates it, both via the flexible lexicon I have described, he has provided a truthful and ultimately, I think, affirmative picture of human life. Every awful detail is unearthed and proclaimed in order that it may get the famous “Yes” that concludes Ulysses.

Heraclitus’ account of the world as flux and contradiction has a second implication for Joyce’s project. Individual humans are among those entities that are utterly transitory and hence, in strictly Heraclitean terms, contradictory. Insofar as we are individuals with names and life spans, we are both being and not-being. I have described truth in the sense of maximal expression of a given sphere of the world—in our case, human life.

A second kind of truth is also achieved in Finnegans Wake: the contradiction that underlies the world beyond the scale of humanity is also given expression. The life Joyce examines is a nameless one, and it is nearing its end. The primary figure through which life’s questions are considered is designated by the three letters H, C and E. In perhaps the most telling instance, these initials stand for Here Comes Everybody. In an important sense, Finnegans Wake operates on a level beyond that of the individual, and aims to defend the status of human life generally within an uncertain picture of the world beyond it. For Nietzsche, this is truth-giving in an important sense: if the transitoriness of human existence is permitted and even embraced, then the fundamental contradictoriness of the world is given true expression. In form and in matter, Finnegans Wake is successful on this count; its language, to quote Nietzsche, “[strains] to its limits to imitate music.” It rumbles from beyond the rigid bounds of human language to deliver universal ideas. The dream figures in Finnegans Wake, who have perhaps arrived at their final night, demand more vitality, and they demand it in the fleeting and contradictory form in which it exists. They “[escape] from liquidation by the heirs of their death,” writes Joyce. Their finitude is also their infinitude.