No one will care, but here is Part II at last.

Cardinal flowers earn their name with bright splashes of scarlet.

I recently read a novel by the philosopher Iris Murdoch, The Sandcastle. It was brilliantly achieved, characters all quiveringly true to life, outcomes in suspense until the very end. A compelling fiction. Following my reading, I sought out the late Murdoch online and found a long interview she did with Bryan Magee, on the topic literature and philosophy. At the beginning, I noted that in mentioning philosophers in our “modern times” who were good writers, he named Bertrand Russell but omitted Henri Bergson, who also received the Nobel Prize for Literature. In naming earlier philosophers who were great writers, he included Nietzsche, my nemesis. 

 

Here are links to the interview. I followed Part I with interest and got a little way into Part II, but did not watch all five parts because, having only a couple of weeks ago read another book (nonfiction) that brought back my quarrel with Nietzsche, I wanted to write through my thoughts on philosophy as a personal quest rather than an abstract search, because (another because) in the opening part of their conversation, Murdoch and Magee agree that philosophy is impersonal and, unlike literature, does not involve the personality of the writer. 

I strongly disagree. 

Each weaves according to her nature.

I would say, on the contrary, that philosophy makes a pretense of being impersonal and that the writers of philosophy have all, until very recently, attempted to hide themselves behind language that strives to be objective and “universal.” Looking deeply at the problems on which different philosophers have focused, however, and their very different takes on those problems — not just writing style but the substance of their writing — shows obsessions and prejudices and hopes and fears bleeding through, and for me Nietzsche is a striking example.

As my subject heading to this post indicates, I doubt very many, if any, people will mind that it was way back in 2011 that I posted what I called Part I of my own Nietzsche story. If you want the background, here it is, yes, a full dozen years ago. 

For those not inclined to follow links, I'll summarize by saying that I was writing a chapter on Nietzsche in my dissertation on theories of metaphor and, bending over backwards to give him the benefit of the doubt (following philosophy's "principle of charity," a principle more honored in the breach than in the observance), I was “bracketing” – setting to one side – all his troubling remarks on Jews, women, blacks, and others said to possess a “slave mentality” to focus exclusively on what he had to say about language. How much more generous could I be? 

 

When working on any long piece of writing (and writing a dissertation in philosophy typically stretches over a couple years or more), there is a frequent need to get up out of a chair and move around. Go for a walk. Take a shower. Hit the bars. Whatever it takes to jar the brain enough to get thoughts flowing again. In my case, one fateful day I was pacing back and forth in front of a friend’s bookshelves and pulled a book out almost at random, hardly thinking it would bear on my subject. The title intrigued me: Women and Pornography. The author was Susan Griffin. I opened somewhere in the middle, again at random, and began reading -- idly, at first.

Take a deep breath and plunge forward --

Susan Griffin never once cites Nietzsche in her book. His name does not appear. And yet I kept seeing that name on page after page as I read and as a knot of dread formed in my gut. 

 

In a chapter entitled “The Sacrificial Lamb” (I borrowed the book from interlibrary loan last month and copied the relevant pages), Griffin describes what she calls “the chauvinist mind.” writing 

 

…we discover that just as the racist is obsessed with a pornographic drama, the pornographer is obsessed with racism.

 

She cites the work of Lucy Dawidowicz who concluded, after studying a rock group that proclaimed itself the “master race” and after listing items found in a Hell’s Angel apartment, “Pornography and propaganda have reinforced each other over the decades.” The psychoanalytic term for what the chauvinist’s mind does is projection. What is feared and hated in the self is projected onto another. Here is Griffin again:

 

Over and over again the chauvinist draws a portrait of the other which reminds us of that part of his own mind he would deny and which he has made dark to himself. The other has appetite and instinct. The other has a body. The other has an emotional life, which is uncontrolled. And in the wake of this denied self, the chauvinist constructs a false self with which he himself identifies. 

 

Wherever we find the racist idea of another being as evil and inferior, we also discover a racial ideal of the self as superior, good, and righteous. 

 

Griffin, next page (162):

 

…The chauvinist cannot face the truth that the other he despises is himself. 

 

…The chauvinist insists upon an ultimate and defining difference between himself and the other. 

 

What is it that is feared in the self? Appetite, instinct, emotion, the body and its needs and urges. In short, the power of nature. Thus the “other” is to the chauvinist an “animal,” while he is not – or would have himself not be, but as that is impossible (he is, after all, “all too human”), “his mind is filled with contradiction.”

 

…He both longs for and fears the knowledge of the body. Nature is a part of him. He cannot divide what cannot be divided. His mind is in his body. His body thinks; his mind feels. From his body, nature renders meaning. He is trapped inside what he fears. 

 

Anyone who is still with me this far, if anyone is, might wonder what this has to do with language and metaphor. And didn’t I say I was going to set aside all that other stuff? The thing is, everything I set aside is still right there in the writings on language. That’s what filled me with such horror that I fell into a state of shock. 

Do you need refreshing, cool water? I do. Okay....

How so? The task Nietzsche set himself was to “recover” meanings he felt had been “lost,” and this largely involved discarding later meanings, which he regarded as “decadent.” To simplify, imagine a word as a playing card. It has two sides, two different meanings which may even stand in opposition to each other: one side, the “pure” side, “lost”; the other “decadent,” one he would overcome. (This is an oversimplification, obviously, because meanings are more often multiple than merely dual, but if you want a more complicated image, make one up yourself.) In recovering the lost meaning, Nietzsche would have stripped off the decadent meaning. -- But note the problem: the playing card still has two sides! There is no way to get down to a single side, no matter how many layers are stripped away. The task of recovering an imagined original purity of meaning is doomed. 

And yet nature goes on, unconcerned with our angst!

An obsession with purity is essential to racism, just as it is in countries where women must cover their faces and are forbidden to attend school or drive or even to appear in public. It is not the women who are obsessed with their purity but the men who make the laws, who see their own purity at risk if women are too free. 

 

Policing language is nothing new, either, and you can find examples all over the world. Historically, conquered peoples’ languages have been outlawed by conquerors; various countries strive to keep “foreign” words out of public discourse; and older generations object to new meanings the young attach to older words and phrases. But as I wrote in my dissertation, words are like horses and can be stolen and ridden by those other than self-acclaimed owners, and no one, not even Nietzsche, can ever have the “last word” on any particular meaning. Languages and cultures and meanings evolve, much as do living organisms.

Nietzsche’s Zarathustra raved about clouds staining the “purity” of the sky. I ended my dissertation chapter on Nietzsche with the Gerard Manley poem "Pied Beauty." 

Glory be to God for dappled things—

   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

       For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;

   Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;

       And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

       With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

                                     Praise Him.

 

Coming back now to my disagreement with Iris Murdoch, I offer for your consideration: Plato's rejection of the natural world as nothing but "appearance," reality being entirely and only eternal, ideal and unknowable (the life lessons the narrator draws from Plato are good ones, but do they need the metaphysics?); Schopenhauer's pessimism; Russell's frustration that philosophy could not be reduced to mathematics (this is my own view of him, so read him yourself to see what you think); Bergson's optimism and obsession with time; my own passionate love of natural ephemera and my Bergsonian-Heideggerian obsession with time. I confess I have not read Murdoch's philosophy, but I have no doubt her personality would reside in it, even if cloaked in mystifying universal terms. 

The images in today's post are from my personal life and surroundings, places and things I love, and my hope is that they will encourage philosophobes to come all the way with me, whether or not they slow down to muse or hurry to this final line.

Clouds add so much to the beauty of the sky.

Report From the Field

I will be back at this desk come mid-May

During our seasonal retirement travels to and around the Southwest, the Artist and I find ourselves continually drawn to museums, galleries, and bookstores. It is not surprising, then, that we have made two visits to a large bricks-and-mortar(the phrase used to distinguish what I call “real” bookstores from exclusively online sellers) store selling used books in Tucson, an initial exploratory expedition and a follow-up day trip with the store as destination. 

Frankly, the sheer size of the place and the number of book aisles had me overstimulated the first time around, and I couldn’t take it all in. I found three books to buy and left vowing to return often. My second visit, however, dampened my enthusiasm somewhat but in ways that may speak more to my particular interests and values than to the general world of retail. 

Curated collections. Here’s the thing. In indie used shops like mine and those I love to discover (and revisit) along the way when traveling — First Edition Too in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Landmark Books in Traverse City, Prairie Archives in Springfield, Illinois, Readers’ Cove in Deming, New Mexico — each owner takes pride in assembling, maintaining, and offering to the public a curated collection of used, rare, and out-of-print books. That’s our basic business model. We spent money, when we must, to make discriminating buys; for more easily found, contemporary works issued in large editions and going through multiple printings, I generally offer trade credit rather than cash. Maybe twice as many romance books would sell faster than some of my 19th-century works on agriculture, but for me a bookstore, like a library, needs breadth and depth.

Book buying and trade credit at Dog Ears Books. If I accept a book for trade credit that I’m going to price at $10, my customer receives $5 credit, and with that credit plus another $5 the customer can purchase from me another book I’ve priced at $10. In other words, my trade credit operates only as a 50% discount on other used books but is calculated on a generous basis. If a book brought to me is one I price at $100, the customer receives $50 worth of trade credit, which for many people works well, because when buying outright, unless the book is very rare and something I can’t resist, I cannot afford to pay out in cash 50% of what I hope to get for a book that another customer may purchase with trade credit, thus paying 50% of my listed price. I’d never be able to buy groceries at that rate.

Personal indie atmosphere. Just as all of us with small indie shops put our own personalities into our collections, most of us also make an effort to make anyone who wanders in feel welcome. “It was personal to me,” the Meg Ryan character said in the movie “You’ve Got Mail,” after the Tom Hanks character who has put her out of business tells her it wasn’t personal, just business. Don’t get me wrong. We are in business. We have to make a profit to stay in business. But, for us, our business is also personal, and the best thing that happens in business like ours is that customers very often become friends, inside and outside the bookstore.

Contrast. The three foregoing paragraphs are my background, which I give to explain (1) my disappointment at not receiving a single smile from any of the half-dozen employees at either the buying or the sales ends of the counter in the book Tucson store and (2) my shock at the offer I received for three bags of very good, very carefully chosen books I’d taken in on my last visit, books I estimate I would have priced in my own shop for a total of between $150 and $175. I didn’t expect paring down my Arizona collection to make room for future purchases to be a get-rich-quick scheme, but I did think I might get $20 cash and somewhat more, maybe twice that, in trade credit. 

These were good books, in very good condition! I wish I’d photographed the lot of them before carrying them down the road for our last good-by. You would see what I mean. I mean, I’m a bookseller and a frequent buyer, and I know what is worth buying. Bottom line? I was told $13.50 in trade or $2.50 cash. Two dollars and fifty cents cash, or about a dime a book, whether hard- or softcover, classic reprint or out-of-print and rare. Wow.

I asked if there were any particular kinds of books they liked to see come in more than others and received a laconic and generic suppply-demand-condition reply. “I know,” I told the young man, adding, “I have a bookstore in Michigan.” Did his eyes light up? Did the ghost of a smile cross his face? No, no acknowledgement whatsoever. We were done.

Well, I found two books I wanted, their combined prices totaling $13, and left the store with fifty cents left to my credit and a set of nagging, unsettled questions in my head. Not only the lack of discrimination in valuing but also the lack of warmth and welcome and, beyond that, the small offerings in certain sections of the store. In my much, much more limited floor space, I probably have twice as much used poetry (I have a section of new poetry, as well) and three times as many foreign language books. And yet — in fairness, I must say — the Tucson store has been full of people both times I was there. It is a popular, lively place, and obviously people love it. A friend of mine who lives in Tucson says she and her husband have “date night” there on a regular basis!

A different business model. Finally the next day it came to me. The Tucson store is not at all about offering a curated collection. It is all about — its business model is — moving product. And move product they do. Books are always coming in (I myself contributed three paper grocery bags full), and books are always going out. The pennies paid for books translate to dollars available for staff, and the staff is large. I doubt job applicants are asked to take a literary quiz, as is the case at the Strand Bookstore in Manhattan, and I don’t know how much employees are paid or what the turnover is, but the business is clearly providing local employment. So their business model is working. I couldn’t operate that way, but I recognize that mine is not the only way of selling used books in a bricks-and-mortar store.

I did not see any special rare books or first editions sections. It’s possible those sections exist, and I simply didn’t find them. The store does have aisle after aisle of contemporary popular fiction, and obviously they do a lot of business with that alone. I’ve always said one could open a store, “History and Mystery,” selling used books in only those two categories, and probably 80% of the people who wandered into the store would leave satisfied. The store in Tucson offers more varied subjects, but my point is that their inventory is geared to most popular tastes, thus what was to me a disappointing number of foreign language and poetry titles.

One employee on the floor who asked if I needed help and pointed out a section I’d been seeking stood out from the otherwise stone-faced staff. This one young man smiled! He made me feel like a “valued customer” (as the junk mailers always assure us we all are), rather than an annoying intruder, but maybe, it occurred to me as I was mulling over the differences in book business models, maybe the contemporary American public, inured to impersonal online buying, expects no more from a face-to-face transaction. Perhaps this public would see a warm smile as something dangerous or suspicious? I don’t know. I live in a very different book world.

There were books at the Tucson store worth going back for and “new” titles are always being added to shelved inventory, so I will go back, but my quest now is to find a small but wonderful shop, filled with a curated collection of used books, and run by a stubbornly independent, book-loving, perhaps mildly eccentric bookseller but one who will recognize me as a kindred spirit. Is there any business like that in the greater Tucson area?

Back Again From Southern France

No jet lag this time around, as my travels were done from my own front porch. There were no photographs or other illustrations in Tony Judt’s scholarly study of Socialism in Provence 1877-1914, and yet, at the same time my brain was working overtime to take in his arguments and evidence, it was also picturing scenes from southern France – along with, I must admit, my grandparents’ modest little “farmette” (they called it that) in Ohio in the 1950s and today’s Leelanau orchards and vineyards and CSAs.

One of Judt’s quarrels with research previous to his in French social and political history was a tendency of researchers to lump regions and classes into large homogenous groups and make sweeping generalizations based on a composite portrait thus drawn of the populace. An area might be called agricultural, and a certain percentage of the population identified as peasants, and from that the researcher would assume conservatism and little active interest in politics.

Yet the difference between an isolated mountain hamlet (we ventured up a terrifying road to explore one in the Auvergne in 2000) and a bustling country village connected to other villages and towns by good roads was enormous in the time period Judt was studying. Moreover – as was true with my grandfather and as is true of many Leelanau farmers today – those working the land were not always themselves landless. They could be and often were owners of small property, working others’ land, as well as their own, or working in a small manufactory by day and on their land in the evenings (this was my grandfather’s pattern), or migrating from place to place with the seasons, following available work, or working part-time in the fields and part-time at other jobs. Artisanal workers and farm workers, laborers for others and property owners – these were not mutually exclusive categories. Judt found that while conservatism did reign in poor, remote areas, peasants on better land in the Var region, particularly farmers who actually owned property, were more likely to support socialist politics and programs. They saw collectivism as their best hope for being able to continue living on and working the land, despite bad crop years and market challenges from the larger world.

What impressed me most was the difficulty of categorizing the ways in which people earned their livelihoods. There was my grandfather, working in the casket factory by day and tending his raspberry patch and vegetable gardens and fruit trees in the evenings. There are farmers here in Leelanau who also work office jobs or hold political posts or teach school in the winter. I own a small business, and yet one fall I was among the county’s orchard workers, picking apples for a local grower. This has been the truth of country living for a long time, all over the world.

Another nonfiction book I mentioned here recently, Self-Theories: Their Role in Motivation, Personality, and Development, excited me greatly, and yet when I showed it to a very well-educated friend, with interests far beyond his own field, he laughed and said he would never have picked up a book with that title and cover, never imagined that it could be interesting, much less (as I found it) compelling, thrilling and inspiring. Here is what I sent him and another friend, by e-mail, under the subject heading “This book just keeps getting better and better,” when I was only halfway through the book:

It was published in 2000 by Psychology Press, an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, as part of a series called ESSAYS IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, so I'm talking about a book that is already 16 years old. One of the author's findings is that "we can influence students' theories [about themselves and their intelligence]. Although students came to our study with their own theories, what we told them had a clear impact. This means that people's theories of intelligence are malleable." So students who initially believe their intelligence is fixed can come to believe they can increase it, and this means they will be willing to take on challenges they would otherwise avoid. They can learn to learn! The author carefully says that the studies do not show such changes in belief to be permanent, but the initial belief wasn't permanent, either. Human beings can learn, not simply through trial and error, but by coming to believe they have the capacity to grow.   

She calls the two theories "entity" and "incremental." Entity theories think of intelligence as a fixed trait; incremental theorists (these "theorists" are all of us, at every age of life!) think of intelligence as knowledge and skill, something that can be cultivated and improved. The entity theorists are performance-oriented, and when they "fail," they fall into despair and helplessness, because to them failure is a sign that they are not smart, after all. Incremental theorists have a very different view of failure, seeing it as an opportunity to learn, to employ new strategies, to try harder or focus differently, etc.   

She doesn't stop there. She goes on to see if success and failure in relationships, and responses to perceived setbacks in relationships, follow the same pattern. She finds that they do. And then (I'm as yet only halfway through the book, and there are many, many studies conducted and cited), she finds that entity and incremental theorists not only judge themselves differently but judge others very differently, also. Entity theorists are quick to judge a person's character on the basis of a single action, but the author stresses that these quick judgments are not "impulsive," but "seem to grow out of a belief in character as a unitary thing that permeates virtually all actions and displays itself with great consistency."   

The really great thing is that students in a classroom can, with appropriate readings, change from entity to incremental theorists. The author does not know if the change in belief would be long-lasting [results of research do not preclude but do not establish such a conclusion], but imagine retraining the thinking of people who work in prisons to believe that prisoners can learn and become better, more self-aware people!

My excitement continued through to the last page of the book.

Similar to the way Tony Judt, in Part III of his study, extrapolated his findings to say something about socialism in France in general, Dweck takes her findings (about how people’s self-theories affect the way they view success and failure and influence responses to failure and challenges) and carries those into a larger theory of motivation and personality. In Chapter 18 she surveys other theories of personality and motivation. “Trait theories,” she tells us, are all about description but offer little in the way of explanation. They are particularly weak when it comes to explaining change. Not surprising, as Dweck notes: “In fact, many trait theorists don’t really believe much in personal change....” (This was my objection to the popular Please Understand Me and the Meyer-Briggs personality type test.)

“Motive theories” (she cites various in the group, but I am omitting the lists) leave out anything to do with goals, beliefs, or cognitions. Both biological theories and Freudian theories come in for criticism. Of course we inherit certain temperaments, she acknowledges, but “temperament is not destiny,” and biological theories “don’t look at adaptive functioning.” As for Freud, his theory left no room for impetus toward growth, ignored goals specific to a particular self, and posited all achievement as the result of defenses.

Growth, goals, beliefs – in Dweck’s theory, these are central, with the meaning given by the individual the most important factor in motivation, regardless of words used in explanations. Some “entity theorist” learners may believe luck is a factor but see luck not as unpredictable but as a feature of personality they either have or lack, just as they see ability.

In her final chapter, Dweck addresses questions and objections to her picture of human personality and motivation. One question is posed as follows: “Isn’t It Naive to Believe that Everyone Has the Potential to Change?” Excellent question! Here, in part, is Carol Dweck’s response:

...I have not tried to argue that anyone can become Albert Einstein or Mother Theresa, but I have tried to argue that we do not know what anyone’s future potential is from their current behavior. We never know exactly what someone is capable of with the right support from the environment and with the right degree of personal motivation or commitment. ... The danger of the entity theory is not so much that it argues for human limitation, but that it suggests we can know people’s limitations so quickly and then grants them so little potential for growth. I believe that people and society gain a great deal when we search for ways to help people realize their potential instead of labeling or punishing them when they do not.

Children can become “smarter” and more successful, Dweck has shown, when they incorporate into their belief system the idea that “failure” is an opportunity for learning and growth, not a sign of stupidity or badness. People who take on this new belief about themselves can also improve their personal relationships, no longer seeing setbacks as signals to give up. And everyone can see others differently, too – as capable of change and improvement.

Imagine! Imagine an electorate and a justice system, not only schools, believing in the possibility of personal growth. Imagine not writing off others (or allowing oneself to be written off) with “He can’t help it. It’s the way he is.” Being shy does not mean one must be paralyzed by shyness. That’s just one example.

And it is true at any age. I’ll let the author have the last word:

Some years ago, as I reached one of the landmark ages, I asked myself what I would like to be able to say at the end of my life, and it was this: I want to be able to say that I kept my eyes open, faced my issues, and made wholehearted commitments to things I valued. I did not want to be haunted by a litany of regrets or left with a bundle of potentialities that were never realized. As adults in this society our mission is to equip the next generations with the tools they need to live a life of growth and contribution. Can we make the commitment to help them become smarter than we were?