Friday, December 13, 2013
Wednesday, December 11, 2013
Philosophers' Carnival 158
I'm at the lunatic peak of the grading cycle, in a term in which it is a little more lunatic than normal, so don't expect any profound posting for a bit -- although I might sneak a few things in just to be doing something other than grading ethics journals, ethics exams, analysis papers, late work, and history of philosophy take-home exams, which have been pouring in and will keep doing so until the end of this week.
In any case, Richard has the 158th Philosopher's Carnival up at "Philosophy, et cetera".
In any case, Richard has the 158th Philosopher's Carnival up at "Philosophy, et cetera".
Tuesday, December 10, 2013
The Love of Letters, Overdone
Poets and Their Bibliographies
by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Old poets foster'd under friendlier skies,
Old Virgil who would write ten lines, they say,
At dawn, and lavish all the golden day
To make them wealthier in the readers' eyes;
And you, old popular Horace, you the wise
Adviser of the nine-years-ponder'd lay,
And you, that wear a wreath of sweeter bay,
Catullus, whose dead songster never dies;
If, glancing downward on the kindly sphere
That once had roll'd you round and round the sun,
You see your Art still shrined in human shelves,
You should be jubilant that you flourish'd here
Before the Love of Letters, overdone,
Had swamped the sacred poets with themselves.
Monday, December 09, 2013
Modesty of Attire
Calah Alexander of "Barefoot and Pregnant" has an excellent series of posts on modesty in clothing:
Nuking the Modesty War, Part I: Control Yourself, Not Women
Nuking the Modesty War, Part II: Stop Treating Men Like Pigs
Nuking the Modesty War, Part III: Stop Thingifying People
I've always thought it one of the many signs of the corruption of the modern age that when we think about immodesty in clothing, we start babbling about lust; when our ancestors thought about immodesty in clothing, they worried about vainglory and greed. When Chaucer's Parson, for instance, goes off on an absurd rant about men and women's fashions, what is riling him up is not indecency in our sense but the fact that rich men and women are using their clothes not in a useful or practical way but as a way of treating themselves as superior to ordinary people. While Chaucer is partly making fun of the Parson, he is able to do so largely because it's an exaggerated version of a type of rant everyone would have been familiar with in his day, because immodest dress was associated in everyone's mind with vainglory.
We see this in Aquinas as well, despite the fact that Aquinas has a quite conservative view of the matter. Aquinas notes (ST 2-2.169) that modesty in dress is not a matter of what you wear but of the way you wear it; you are modest in dress precisely to that extent that you wear your clothes moderately. Then he goes on to identify ways in which you could fail to wear your clothes moderately:
(1) By deliberate violation of customary law. In any society there are things that are just taken by people in general to be completely unacceptable to wear under particular circumstances; and if you deliberately disregard this, this is one way of being immodest.
(2.1.1) By excessive attachment to clothes due to the pleasure taken in them that arises from vainglory. This is precisely the case I already mentioned.
(2.1.2) By excessive attachment to sensible things due to the pleasure taken in them that arises from comfort.
(2.1.3) By excessive attention to one's own attire in one's practical reasoning, arising from imprudence.
(2.2.1) By inadequate attention to clothes due to the pleasure of disregarding them that arises from self-indulgence.
(2.2.2) By inadequate attention to attire due to the pleasure of disregarding it that arises from vainglory.
(2.3) By the use of clothes with the deliberate intention of provoking lust. Note, incidentally, that it is the deliberate attempt to provoke the vice of lust, not sexual desire; Aquinas is quite explicit that there are circumstances in which it is entirely reasonable to dress sexually, as long as you still show some sense in doing so.
And note, in particular, that the issue of lust only enters into the picture when we are talking about the deliberate attempt to provoke it. In any case in which someone is not deliberately trying to provoke lust, immodesty only arises from vainglory, or self-indulgence, or imprudence.
The basic principles of modesty of attire are quite simple, actually, and are touched on (organized in a different way) in Calah's discussion:
[1] Modesty and immodesty are matters of character, and thus what one is deliberately doing in wearing them, not matters of what one wears. If we are using 'immodesty' in some sense that does not have to do with personal character, we are not using it to talk about a vice, and thus it is of at most secondary moral importance.
[2] Modesty as a virtue must have two extremes, involving excessive regard for clothes and deficient regard for clothes. If we are talking about some kind of 'modesty' that does not have two extremes, we are not talking about a virtue, and thus it is of at most secondary moral importance.
[3] The seriousness of different kinds of immodesty must be related to the seriousness of the vices they express; and thus the most serious kind of immodesty occurs when people are immodest as a way of expressing the most serious vice. This is vainglory. The temptation that really matters most when it comes to immodesty is the temptation to use clothes as a way of trying to make the situation all about you and how great you are. This is something that can be done with any kind of clothing.
[4] Another person's lust cannot pollute your character; the only way it is relevant to the question at all is if you are deliberately trying to provoke it. Anyone who says otherwise is like those people who think they have a right to shut down anyone's opinion just by insisting that other people could be offended by it; it is one thing to say that people should not deliberately try to be offensive, and another thing entirely that people should let their lives be controlled by people whose capacity to take offense knows no bound. That is forcing everyone to kowtow to vice, and it is necessarily unjust.
[5] Like every other virtue associated with temperance, modesty in attire consists chiefly in love of balance, in regarding levelheadedness as beautiful and acting accordingly, and secondarily in being ashamed to act in a way that is inappropriate to the kind of rational animal we are. It's all about reason and good sense, taking the circumstances you face and living in a way appropriate to them. And that means all the circumstances you face. Yes, other people's opinions are part of those circumstances, but so is the cost of clothing, so is what people usually wear, and more important than all of these is whether it is practical or useful for doing good things. Demanding that other people dress in ways that make it harder for them to do good things is irrational and vicious -- it's a sin against both prudence and justice -- and, ultimately, the primary authority on whether a certain type of clothing is necessary or most useful for the kind of thing being done is the person wearing it. To be sure, they may choose more or less wisely, more or less safely, but it is morally vicious to demand that people only use the safest means. (Such a demand is known as tutiorism or rigorism, and it violates prudence and justice. You are perfectly free to advise what you think is a morally safer course; it is morally wrong, however, to demand that people only follow what you think is the morally safer course, because there may be riskier courses that are nonetheless perfectly fine if done right, and you have no right to attack people for acting prudently merely because they could have acted more prudently.)
So if you
(1) are not deliberately trying to shock and scandalize people by the inappropriateness of your attire;
(2) are not deliberately using your clothing to treat yourself as superior to other people;
(3) don't make clothes a huge part of your life;
(4) try to wear clothes that make sense for what you are doing; and
(5) are not using clothes as a means for making other people do bad things
then, chances are, your clothing is perfectly modest, even if you happen to be wearing nothing but a short grass skirt or form-fitting spandex. Modesty is not a virtue concerned with the value of clothes; it is, like every other virtue associated with temperance, concerned with the value of people, yourself and others, as rational creatures capable of acting with good sense and proportion. And, of course, prudence and justice require that we tailor our assessments of other people's clothing accordingly.
Nuking the Modesty War, Part I: Control Yourself, Not Women
Nuking the Modesty War, Part II: Stop Treating Men Like Pigs
Nuking the Modesty War, Part III: Stop Thingifying People
I've always thought it one of the many signs of the corruption of the modern age that when we think about immodesty in clothing, we start babbling about lust; when our ancestors thought about immodesty in clothing, they worried about vainglory and greed. When Chaucer's Parson, for instance, goes off on an absurd rant about men and women's fashions, what is riling him up is not indecency in our sense but the fact that rich men and women are using their clothes not in a useful or practical way but as a way of treating themselves as superior to ordinary people. While Chaucer is partly making fun of the Parson, he is able to do so largely because it's an exaggerated version of a type of rant everyone would have been familiar with in his day, because immodest dress was associated in everyone's mind with vainglory.
We see this in Aquinas as well, despite the fact that Aquinas has a quite conservative view of the matter. Aquinas notes (ST 2-2.169) that modesty in dress is not a matter of what you wear but of the way you wear it; you are modest in dress precisely to that extent that you wear your clothes moderately. Then he goes on to identify ways in which you could fail to wear your clothes moderately:
(1) By deliberate violation of customary law. In any society there are things that are just taken by people in general to be completely unacceptable to wear under particular circumstances; and if you deliberately disregard this, this is one way of being immodest.
(2.1.1) By excessive attachment to clothes due to the pleasure taken in them that arises from vainglory. This is precisely the case I already mentioned.
(2.1.2) By excessive attachment to sensible things due to the pleasure taken in them that arises from comfort.
(2.1.3) By excessive attention to one's own attire in one's practical reasoning, arising from imprudence.
(2.2.1) By inadequate attention to clothes due to the pleasure of disregarding them that arises from self-indulgence.
(2.2.2) By inadequate attention to attire due to the pleasure of disregarding it that arises from vainglory.
(2.3) By the use of clothes with the deliberate intention of provoking lust. Note, incidentally, that it is the deliberate attempt to provoke the vice of lust, not sexual desire; Aquinas is quite explicit that there are circumstances in which it is entirely reasonable to dress sexually, as long as you still show some sense in doing so.
And note, in particular, that the issue of lust only enters into the picture when we are talking about the deliberate attempt to provoke it. In any case in which someone is not deliberately trying to provoke lust, immodesty only arises from vainglory, or self-indulgence, or imprudence.
The basic principles of modesty of attire are quite simple, actually, and are touched on (organized in a different way) in Calah's discussion:
[1] Modesty and immodesty are matters of character, and thus what one is deliberately doing in wearing them, not matters of what one wears. If we are using 'immodesty' in some sense that does not have to do with personal character, we are not using it to talk about a vice, and thus it is of at most secondary moral importance.
[2] Modesty as a virtue must have two extremes, involving excessive regard for clothes and deficient regard for clothes. If we are talking about some kind of 'modesty' that does not have two extremes, we are not talking about a virtue, and thus it is of at most secondary moral importance.
[3] The seriousness of different kinds of immodesty must be related to the seriousness of the vices they express; and thus the most serious kind of immodesty occurs when people are immodest as a way of expressing the most serious vice. This is vainglory. The temptation that really matters most when it comes to immodesty is the temptation to use clothes as a way of trying to make the situation all about you and how great you are. This is something that can be done with any kind of clothing.
[4] Another person's lust cannot pollute your character; the only way it is relevant to the question at all is if you are deliberately trying to provoke it. Anyone who says otherwise is like those people who think they have a right to shut down anyone's opinion just by insisting that other people could be offended by it; it is one thing to say that people should not deliberately try to be offensive, and another thing entirely that people should let their lives be controlled by people whose capacity to take offense knows no bound. That is forcing everyone to kowtow to vice, and it is necessarily unjust.
[5] Like every other virtue associated with temperance, modesty in attire consists chiefly in love of balance, in regarding levelheadedness as beautiful and acting accordingly, and secondarily in being ashamed to act in a way that is inappropriate to the kind of rational animal we are. It's all about reason and good sense, taking the circumstances you face and living in a way appropriate to them. And that means all the circumstances you face. Yes, other people's opinions are part of those circumstances, but so is the cost of clothing, so is what people usually wear, and more important than all of these is whether it is practical or useful for doing good things. Demanding that other people dress in ways that make it harder for them to do good things is irrational and vicious -- it's a sin against both prudence and justice -- and, ultimately, the primary authority on whether a certain type of clothing is necessary or most useful for the kind of thing being done is the person wearing it. To be sure, they may choose more or less wisely, more or less safely, but it is morally vicious to demand that people only use the safest means. (Such a demand is known as tutiorism or rigorism, and it violates prudence and justice. You are perfectly free to advise what you think is a morally safer course; it is morally wrong, however, to demand that people only follow what you think is the morally safer course, because there may be riskier courses that are nonetheless perfectly fine if done right, and you have no right to attack people for acting prudently merely because they could have acted more prudently.)
So if you
(1) are not deliberately trying to shock and scandalize people by the inappropriateness of your attire;
(2) are not deliberately using your clothing to treat yourself as superior to other people;
(3) don't make clothes a huge part of your life;
(4) try to wear clothes that make sense for what you are doing; and
(5) are not using clothes as a means for making other people do bad things
then, chances are, your clothing is perfectly modest, even if you happen to be wearing nothing but a short grass skirt or form-fitting spandex. Modesty is not a virtue concerned with the value of clothes; it is, like every other virtue associated with temperance, concerned with the value of people, yourself and others, as rational creatures capable of acting with good sense and proportion. And, of course, prudence and justice require that we tailor our assessments of other people's clothing accordingly.
The Rounded Earth, the Rounding Skies
Winter Trees on the Horizon
by Alice Meynell
O delicate! Even in wooded lands
They show the margin of my world,
My own horizon; little bands
Of twigs unveil that edge impearled.
And what is more mine own than this,
My limit, level with mine eyes?
For me precisely do they kiss—
The rounded earth, the rounding skies.
It has my stature, that keen line,
(Let mathematics vouch for it).
The lark’s horizon is not mine,
No, nor his nestlings’ where they sit;
No, nor the child’s. And, when I gain
The hills, I lift it as I rise
Erect; anon, back to the plain
I soothe it with mine equal eyes.
Friday, December 06, 2013
Dignity and Forbearance
You would have to be isolated from the news not to know that Nelson Mandela has died. I don't have a huge amount to add to the lauds, although I think a great many of them are secretly self-congratulatory; one of the things Mandela did very well as a politician was finding ways to let people think they had actually contributed something significant, and those of outside of South Africa have often been all too eager to jump at the idea that it was partly their doing. (I'm not an expert on the matter, by any means, but I am greatly inclined to think that, whatever Western support may have done, the crumbling of the Soviet Union and its client states did far more to tip the balance.)
It does show that in judging historical figures we have to take context and circumstance into account; people forget that Mandela was in prison for being the co-founder and head of a political organization, Umkhonto we Sizwe, inspired by Cuban guerilla warfare and actively engaged in political violence. One could well imagine a historian far in the future, or, for that matter, a random guy on the internet tomorrow, trying to correct the 'myth' of Mandela by pointing out his involvement in such things. But it's easy to see that this would miss an extraordinary amount that needs to be taken into account: Apartheid itself, the fact that Mandela's own involvement in political violence seems to have been quite reluctant, the fact that, while theoretically committed to whatever violence would work and preparing for outright warfare if necessary, in part through Mandela's influence the MK actually focused on sabotage and made considerable efforts to limit deaths; the long endurance in prison for it; more importantly, emergence from prison a leader of extraordinary clarity and power; perhaps as importantly, his patient and careful handling of a transition that could easily have resulted in civil war and his honest willingness to hand over power for the good of everyone rather than, as so many would-be liberators have, holding on to power at any cost. And when it's all taken into account, the man was no more flawed than any other true hero; and heroic he genuinely was.
The New York Times obituary is quite good, conveying a great deal of what was admirable about the man, and his ability to build a genuine moral authority, without shirking the fact that he made many errors, some of them morally serious, both before and after his imprisonment. Some tidbits:
It does show that in judging historical figures we have to take context and circumstance into account; people forget that Mandela was in prison for being the co-founder and head of a political organization, Umkhonto we Sizwe, inspired by Cuban guerilla warfare and actively engaged in political violence. One could well imagine a historian far in the future, or, for that matter, a random guy on the internet tomorrow, trying to correct the 'myth' of Mandela by pointing out his involvement in such things. But it's easy to see that this would miss an extraordinary amount that needs to be taken into account: Apartheid itself, the fact that Mandela's own involvement in political violence seems to have been quite reluctant, the fact that, while theoretically committed to whatever violence would work and preparing for outright warfare if necessary, in part through Mandela's influence the MK actually focused on sabotage and made considerable efforts to limit deaths; the long endurance in prison for it; more importantly, emergence from prison a leader of extraordinary clarity and power; perhaps as importantly, his patient and careful handling of a transition that could easily have resulted in civil war and his honest willingness to hand over power for the good of everyone rather than, as so many would-be liberators have, holding on to power at any cost. And when it's all taken into account, the man was no more flawed than any other true hero; and heroic he genuinely was.
The New York Times obituary is quite good, conveying a great deal of what was admirable about the man, and his ability to build a genuine moral authority, without shirking the fact that he made many errors, some of them morally serious, both before and after his imprisonment. Some tidbits:
Nelson Mandela, who led the emancipation of South Africa from white minority rule and served as his country’s first black president, becoming an international emblem of dignity and forbearance, died Thursday night.***
Mr. Mandela noted with some amusement in his 1994 autobiography, “Long Walk to Freedom,” that this congregation made him the world’s best-known political prisoner without knowing precisely who he was. Probably it was just his impish humor, but he claimed to have been told that when posters went up in London, many young supporters thought Free was his Christian name.***
[Mandela recalling hotheaded student revolutionaries with exasperation:] “When you say, ‘What are you going to do?’ they say, ‘We will attack and destroy them!’ I say: ‘All right, have you analyzed how strong they are, the enemy? Have you compared their strength to your strength?’ They say, ‘No, we will just attack!’ ”***
In interviews published in Mr. Gevisser’s biography, Mr. Mbeki chafed at President Mandela’s ability to rule by charm and stature, with little attention to the mechanics of governing.
***
“Madiba didn’t pay any attention to what the government was doing,” Mr. Mbeki said, using the clan name for his predecessor. “We had to, because somebody had to.”
Truth and Constancy
The question of truth is vital to this reading of Mansfield Park in three important ways. First, there is the pursuit of truth represented by the conversations--both internal and external-- of characters int he novel. There is the truth--or realism--of that representation itself, as manifest by specific narrative techniques (especially with dialogue) of which Austen is an innovator. Finally, there is the larger truth--as effected by a combination of the first two--that conveys itself to the reader. Constancy plays a role in all three expressions of truth. It grounds the right pursuit of truth--enacted by Fanny--whose "hermeneutical" habit and growing clarity of vision contrasts with the inflexible blindness to truth in those around her. In some instances, constancy--in particular its development--also is enacted by Austen's use of narrative techniques; the reverse--the lack of its development--may also be suggested thereby. Finally, from the process of reading and responding to the novel's truth, readers may approximate a kind of constancy that allows them to grow in self-knowledge--discovering truths about themselves that may lead to transformation.
Joyce Kerr Tarpley, Constancy and the Ethics of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, p. 182.
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