en-US Fri, 11 Apr 2025 07:54:53 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Review7467916571 Fri, 11 Apr 2025 07:54:53 -0700 /review/show/7467916571 Alina gave 5 stars to Intimate Ties: Two Novellas (Kindle Edition) by Robert Musil
bookshelves: literature, favorites
The prose is chilling due to, equally, its alien style and topics. The topics, I think, are certain aspects of the mind, which I’ll mention below. Musil’s writing amounts to pushing our attention far out to extreme extents of detail of the mind, or to faraway terrains of the psyche that one hadn’t known existed.

Before going into those topics, one further note on prose. The translator Peter Wortsman offers his introduction to the text, of a sort that is usually placed before the text. In this edition, it is placed only as an afterword. I’m glad it was sequenced like this. It was a struggle to read the books. In this introduction, Wortsman lets us know that these publications were flops, and Musil admitted they were failures. They were failures of not any attempt at writing a story, however.

Musil considered these novellas to be literary experiments, according to Wortsman. I don’t know what he could’ve meant by this, but here is how I can make sense of his style. Musil often launches out from a detail of a scene (e.g., the smirk on a stranger’s face, the warmth of jointly attending to something with someone you love) to a metaphor. It lasts often for just an embedded clause. But in one sentence, where (as usual) numerous details of a scene are named, one encounters numerous different far-out metaphors like this. Embedded clauses take a reader out from what’s literally going on to these scenes to which something only tiny are compared.

This can make it quite difficult to follow what is happening. Some metaphors feel awkward, and many are mixed, even within the same sentence. The effect can be wondrous, however. It is like placing a microscope upon one’s feeling. An overall emotion, like of love or anxiety, is revealed, under Musil’s careful hands, to consist in many currents, going each in their own path and direction. Musil enables the reader to get very close to one’s own heart and mind; the intangible becomes tangible. (I have examples from the text on this below).

I think the fact that Musil’s experiment is a “failure� shouldn’t be viewed as due to his flaws as a writer. Rather, I’m inclined to view this as due to limitations of our human cognition, as readers. We need certainty. We need enough details in a series to be concrete (i.e., literal) in order to be able to intuitively see the flow of events in time, or to be able to trace a character’s motions, of body or mind. Musil violates that. Ideally, we’d have long enough attention spans, or large enough working memories, so that Musil can take us into he places he envisions for us.

Musil’s style isn’t just chilling and alien. It is inspiring. It is a paragon of language use that breaks from everyday patterns. I didn’t even know that language could be used like this. In effect, Musil shows that how we ordinarily use language constrains us in what we can know about ourselves and each other. By using language in his bizarre way, new horizons can be seen.

Okay, thoughts on Musil’s style aside. Of the two stories, the first is relatively more of a narrative in form. I’m fascinated by what happens there. The protagonist Claudine has a dark past, before having met her husband, of compulsively sleeping with strangers. When she goes for a trip and is separated physically from her husband for the first time since their marriage, she all a sudden finds herself in a similar psychic landscape as that of her past. This story left me with various threads needing further tugging. For one, I’m thinking about how Claudine appears to be both radically free but also confused—she is alienated from social interactions in general and from her lust and urges in general. This confusion enables her to not take a certain stable narrative of her life for granted. She has to wrestle with memory and present to herself what she knows to be real. It was interesting to behold all of this, as Musil reveals.

Another thread I’d like to follow is the meaning of sexual desire. We’re told that Claudine finds herself needing to cow down and be taken and abused. This is irresistible. It appears to be part of her response to a lifelong sense of drifting, not having a purpose to lead her. To be taken up like this feels right; it both puts her in what she takes to be her rightful place of being invisible and discardable, but it also makes her powerful. I wonder where such desire comes from, in general, and what they tend to be connected up to, apart from just-so stories that could be offered by evolutionary psychologists. Musil offers many details for provoking thought upon this matter, and he refuses to offer an answer, as is congruous with the reality on the matter.

Let me mention some themes about the mind treated here. Claudine is a portrait of how we can be alienated from our bodily needs and wants, and how the body pushes us around when we find it unintelligible (and undesirable) like this. What we know to be true grows dim. Certain behaviors feel right, and we can react with disgust, fear, or a cry for help. Etc. In the second of the novellas, the protagonist Veronica shows how we can desire evil things, or feel nothing in the face of something hugely important, especially when we’re unselfaware, due to fear of who we might be. This dynamic could be understood in the Freudian terms of being repressed and resentful and people who trigger the thing you’re trying to repress. Musil goes beyond any Freudian picture and leaves matters more chaotic and complicated than that.

I want to read more Musil now, but am also a bit weary. I'd hope that with more time with him, reading becomes less difficult. Here are examples of passages. There are so many to quote. I select these a bit arbitrarily.

“What she now felt was no longer just a vague anxiety, but a sentiment linked to actual people. And yet it was not a fear of them per se, but rather a fear that they might get under her skin, as if while the utterances of these people had engulfed her, they had secretly moved and quietly shaken something in her; it was not a single decipherable feeling, but a grounding in which all her feelings were rooted � as when you sometimes pass through apartments that repel you, but little by little you are gently persuaded by the sense that people could be happy living in such a place, and then suddenly there comes a moment when it surrounds you, as if they are you were one and the same, and you feel hemmed in, closed in on every side, you want to jump, but stand quietly in the middle of it all�

“At that moment it was as if she lived with her husband in the bulb of the world in a frothy jumble of pearls and bubbles and whooshing feather-light little clouds. She closed her eyes and gave herself over entirely to that pleasant illusion.�

“Children and the dead have no soul; but the soul of the living is that element of self that does not let you love, such as you’re so inclined, that stubborn residue that stands in the way of all love � Veronica felt that this one unshakable constant, immune to amorous lures, is the focal point of all feeling, clinging fearfully, a private precinct forever out of reach of the dearly beloved, beckoning from afar; and even if you draw near, it keeps its distance, smiling back, as if waiting for a secret rendezvous. But children and the dead, they are either nothing yet or nothing more, giving us to believe that everything lies ahead or everything lies behind; they are like the hollowed vessels that give shape to dreams. Children and the dead have no soul, no soul to speak of. And animals. Veronica found animals terrifying in the threat of their ugly onslaught, but their piercing pupils dripped with dumb droplets of forgetting.� ]]> Review4927319890 Tue, 08 Apr 2025 02:55:28 -0700 /review/show/4927319890 Alina gave 5 stars to The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos (Paperback) by Anne Carson
bookshelves: literature, favorites
From my third time reading...

I find myself drawn to re-reading this, and I’m not sure for how long this spell will continue over me. The world of the speaker behind these poems is one which I need to revisit. What is that world? It’s of confusion for most of the time. The speaker can’t let go of her love for her husband, while she is acutely aware of how much he is hurting her. This confusion, however, has a trajectory. Its finale is in her realization of her love of beauty. This love is what keeps her bound to her husband. And while she may continue to be bound in some ways, she is now freed in other ways, through this realization. She is in touch now with her place in the world as someone who yearns, seeks, and makes material what she finds in brilliant ways.

I’m not sure why I’m so drawn to this, given that my own life is very different from this. Perhaps it’s just because the language is so damn good. It is incredible to be taken up by the particular expressions Carson uses. Carson’s language is concrete at many points, as a constant anchor to a particular psyche and their life, while also it brings together unexpected images whose juxtapositions enable a depth of understanding and imaginative-virtual experience which is unlike anything to be found in real life.
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From my second time reading...

Upon this second visitation, my love for Carson's writing, and this book-length poem in particular, on deepens. This is an amazing artifact, a testament to how emotional suffering of the most painful, despairing kind can be renewed by our creativity, here particularly the literary art of poetry. The speaker was obsessed with her husband who chronically cheated on her and constantly lied to her; but she couldn't break it off, for she was in so much pain, and couldn't help but believe in his beautiful lies, even though she knew at the same time how these were lies.

The story speaks to how our intentions can be amorphous and complicated; we may care for another while being utterly selfish at the same time. We may trust and be paranoid at the same time. This is why truthfulness in life can be so relative and open-ended; but nevertheless has a hard limit. The speaker of the poem sees that at the end.

As a classicist and philosopher, Carson's brilliance as a poet comes out in finding new foundations for suffering which, in real life, would otherwise be responded to by "oh that's too bad," or "I'm sorry." These foundations she discovers are based in Greek mythology and astonishing insights into the human condition. Put on these foundations, through her creativity writing, this suffering is imbued with meaning, legitimacy, weightiness, and most of all, beauty.

This time around, I was more sensitive to the value or "speech act" that each chapter/sub-poem carried. The poems are nonlinear in time over the course of the relationship between the speaker and her (ex) husband. This is done masterfully; one is put in suspense, and is amazed or shocked when hit with new details of what had happened. The poems also vary regarding how much "plot" they reveal, as opposed to their serving other purposes, like being an expression of the speaker's pain through seemingly involuntary or sometimes repressed/obtuse means; or, like being a self-reflection, or a philosophical musing upon our human condition as at the mercy of beauty. Such variation between the poems were spaced perfectly and leads to much depth, color, and texture to the world of this book.

This time around, I've also lingered in the places of being sparked off by the particular word choice and rhythm of the lines. It is mesmerizing and intoxicating. Just by reading slowly, and sometimes staying with one expression or stanza for some time, Carson's writing can spark off, like fireworks or flashbulb memories, strong feelings and thoughts and yearnings.

A musing about why I've been obsessed with Carson's work, and this book in particular: Reading her work serves as a therapy for deepening my understanding of how desire and the imagination conspire to make for the euphoria of a certain kind of love—but which turns out to be founded on so little, and even fear or self-hatred. And yet Carson's work do not leave off there, as the truth revealed of the human condition. Along the journey, she redeems such experience for how it epitomizes a force key to the good life: the activity of the imagination to make present beauty and the possibility of happiness in what is otherwise an ambiguous, uncertain reality. Without this activity of the imagination, this reality would remain invisible or dull. Reading Carson has been part of my own learning how to tell when my imagination has a hand behind seeming reality and what to do in light of discovering this. Sometimes it is crucial to learn in, and other times we should intervene; and sometimes we should let the delusion and suffering happen, for it may bring us to unforeseeable changes.

Do I have any critical thoughts on this poem? Perhaps there were a few places where metaphors used were cliched or flat-footed. But this happens rarely. Moreover, the fact that it does happen follows from something I appreciate about Carson's writing: it is accessible. It's extraordinary how readable this poem is, while still doing all of the things to you which only good poetry does, like being unsettling, surprising, and thought-provoking.
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From my first time reading...

I want to read all of Carson's work now (picked this up after reading her Autobiography of Red). I haven't read anything quite like hers; she writes in poetry, but it conveys a narrative as concrete, complex, and elaborate as that of a novel. Because it's in poetry, the emotional forcefulness and psychological realism of the narrative is of a category beyond what could ever be achieved by a novel in prose form.

A particularly interesting feature of this work which gives the appearance of autobiography or memoir is that throughout most of it, we feel that the protagonist is tragically, woefully, obsessed with and in effect controlled by her husband. He chronically cheats on her and causes deep suffering, and yet she cannot leave him. She loves and hates him in equal intensities. But by the end, we realize that it's not her husband as an absolutely unique individual person whom she's obsessed with, in love with. Rather, it is beauty that obsesses and controls her. He just happens to embody beauty to her. In this way, the protagonist is more complicated and free than we realize. The love and pursuit of beauty is creative and freeing; it's not the case that this man is controlling her, or that she's slavish to him. It's nevertheless tragic that this particular man who hurts her constantly is so beautiful, and she can't help staying with him. ]]> Review7472062443 Tue, 08 Apr 2025 02:32:48 -0700 /review/show/7472062443 Alina gave 5 stars to Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow (Hardcover) by Ted Hughes
bookshelves: literature
This is what I wish other plain-language-aiming poets I’ve encountered (e.g., Gluck, and various poets I've looked into who are compared to her) could be like. I feel bad about this, given Hughes� atrocious personal life. When encountering the potential dilemmas arising from the greatness of an artwork or philosophical work, on the one hand, and the horribleness of the creator of it, on the other hand, I’ve usually leaned towards still embracing the work. I think this is okay when it comes to much of art and philosophy, assuming that the work is either itself abstract enough as to speak to many experiences which have no connection to the sort of events or aspects of personality which amount to the atrociousness of the creator behind it. Or, as in the case of theoretical philosophy, often a work is about such an abstract subject matter that it doesn’t have implications about practical or ethical matters.

I hope it’s okay to feel this way and to still engage with Hughes’s work. I think it’s okay, as long as we’re honest about how horrible of a person he was. Assuming it’s okay, I can go forward and express what it’s like to read him. I haven’t encountered literature before that discloses such self-loathing and terror at life before. Only certain works of music can do this to me, but in that case, given the non-representational or non-verbal nature of music, it evokes these states of being only in the form of a general feeling or atmosphere. Here, words give rise to these states. Words are concrete. Hughes’s words are harsh and splinter into one’s field of attention. It is painful, and it also gives handle-holds into peering into these states of being without literally being in them.

Much could be said on the meaning of being under this dual state of attention (i.e., to see something real, while it not being your present, living reality). At the minimum, I can say that it gives a place for these states of being to breath, to no longer be suppressed; one no longer has to tread carefully around them with fear. It also offers one the relief of being locked in joint attention with some voice that envelopes you. The speaker of the poems, while one is immersed in reading the poems, is not apparently any particular person, but feels like the presence of someone, whose identity is only that they are here, and they see you—you are under the care and embrace of this abstract someone.

I guess other plain-language-aiming poets don't write like this because they are more subtle, or they are informed by experiences that aren't as horrible as those of Hughes. I'm glad this work exists, one that is as explicit as juvenilia, but is as extraordinary as any good poetry.

Here are some examples of lines.

From “Lovepet�: “Was it an animal was it a bird?/ She made her voice its happy forest./ He brought it out with sugarlump smiles./ Soon it was licking their kisses./ � / They wept they called it back it could have everything/ It stripped out their nerves chewed chewed flavorless/ � / It went far way they could not speak�

From “Robin Song�: “I am the lost child/ Of the wind/ Who goes through me looking for something else/ Who can’t recognize me though I cry./ I am the maker/ Of the world/ That rolls to crush/ And silence my knowledge.�

From “Crow Tyrannosaurus�: “Crow thought ‘Alas/ Alas ought I/ To stop eating/ And try to become the light?�/ But his eye saw a grub. And his head, trasprung,/ stabbed./ And he listened/ And he heard/ Weeping/ Grubs grubs He stabbed he stabbed/ Weeping/ Weeping/ Weeping he walked and stabbed� ]]> Review7468003166 Sun, 06 Apr 2025 15:07:31 -0700 /review/show/7468003166 Alina gave 4 stars to The Use of Photography (Kindle Edition) by Annie Ernaux
bookshelves: literature
I have mixed feelings. The impetus behind the project is beautiful and important. Ernaux had cancer, thought she might die, and found a new lover around this time. Being in love is part of her responding to the need to have vitality. The project leads to certain places, however, which I find dubious. Ernaux and Marie take photographing the scenes surrounding their having sex as amounting to their desire to remember what has happened and, in a sense, to milk every drop of feeling alive out from a particular time of having sex. They sometimes explore philosophical reflections upon the relationships between memory, photographs, and present experience. But they don’t have much to add on this matter than from other writing on it (e.g., thinkers on Proust; writers on the purpose of memorials). Moreover, I couldn’t help but get the feeling that they put too much emphasis on how they did this for philosophical-humanistic reasons, as opposed to augmenting their sex life (which is fine).

It was also a bit off-putting when either writer mentioned certain wars and tragedies going on in the world at the time of their having sex, and how this contributed to the meaning of this act. While this can be beautiful in a certain light, from another light it is implying that one is to be subsumed beneath another, regarding what the authors prioritize in their intentions and actions.

I told my partner about this book, and he thought it was pretty self-indulgent. I don’t know if I’d go that far. His comments have made me think more about the meaning of confessional or memoir-like literature and artwork like this one. Maybe it isn’t self-indulgence as much as the need to exorcize one’s demons, or alleviating one’s fears, (e.g., by telling oneself a certain story; by representing what’s been going on so one can have some distance). This need must be addressed before one can go out into the world and act in ways which are more traditionally understood as altruistic.

Moreover, even if it is just self-indulgent, when the writing is good (as it is from both authors), the outcome is an artwork which can mean a lot to various people. It was at least interesting to read about the erotic from the perspective of a good literary writer and a journalist; usually when this topic comes up in media it’s dealt with in less interesting ways, as in romance novels and the like. In other words, the motive and the effect can come apart. A writer can be self-indulgent for the sake of an act of generosity, perhaps.

I can imagine that I’d be less critical if I had experiences of serious illness. This book could mean a lot for people facing such events in their lives. The best thing I can personally say about this book is that it can inspire one to think about how much we can end up noticing through making art and writing. The cliched thought is truthful: Much of life is invisible, and it requires attention to appear. Moreover, one’s attention may be aided by deliberate projects like Ernaux’s, or by one’s use of language, photography, or other representational media. There is no single effect of that, but it is surely different than simply reminiscing about something. ]]> Review7434233266 Tue, 25 Mar 2025 11:17:07 -0700 /review/show/7434233266 Alina gave 5 stars to Keats's Odes: A Lover's Discourse (Hardcover) by Anahid Nersessian
bookshelves: literature
A friend recommended this as a work that deeply marked her and changed her approach as a literary critic. It came up under the context of our discussing styles in academic writing in our fields (English and philosophy). Nersessian writes quite unusually in her field. I’m left with the impression that literary critics probably in general don’t get very precise, detailed, or deep in their claims, but the unique angle into human nature or the world that they can offer is one which proceeds by getting us to viscerally or deeply feel things, which are related to what often matters most to us, beneath the confusion of the everyday. At least if this were the case, Nersessian makes it explicit, and excels particularly well at these aims. She never pretends to be saying anything complicated or deep, uses visceral and vivid language, and makes her points directly.

Here’s an example of this at the beginning, which is representative of how Nersessian writes at large. She compares Keats’s opening to “Ode to a Nightingale,� the expected “O� of any ode, to “a catcall.� She then proceeds to say that, like a catcall, he poem “hurts� you in an “indivisible� ways; you are made self-conscious of your “condition of being an other, a you and not an I.� I like how unorthodox it is to talk about a relatively old poet in the Western canon as giving “catcalls.�

But I wonder whether this adds very much to the basic, self-evident fact that poems have personae or speakers, and whenever we’re spoken to, we’re not the person who does the speaking. At the least, the value of using a term like “catcall� is that it is extremely everyday or colloquial in character, and so is particularly vivid and concrete. This feeling of concreteness at least could get us, as readers, to pay closer attention and to care about the subject matter at hand. While Nersessian doesn’t deliver new insights into the matter at hand, at least we’re now in the posture to potentially figure out more, with these general truths she’s put under catchy slogans stuck in our heads.

This connects to what I mentioned earlier. Maybe the point of literary criticism isn’t to offer new details or facts about the subject matters it talks about; that’s the job of philosophy, psychology, and other more “scientifically-minded� disciplines of the humanities. So this wouldn’t be a shortcoming on Nersessian’s end. But then, I wonder exactly what the value of literary criticism is, other than the obvious effects it has for certain people (e.g., as an avenue to “nerd out� with others about your favorite books; as a practice to pass down ancient knowledge and preserve the cultural tradition of appreciating great artists in the canon; as offering tools for making sense of works of art you could encounter, like what going to a high school class in English can do). What do I learn here about the human condition and the world, which can’t be offered by engaging with art directly, or by engaging with the disciplines of the humanities which aim at detail and progress?

If I think about it, a literary critic I’m still obsessed with, Anne Carson, provides much that can’t be found elsewhere. This is because she, particularly, has her finger on an important truth about human psychology and the structure of experience, which pertains to the possibilities of experience when something is absent, and how that set of possibilities diverges from that which marks experience when something is present. I think a good philosopher could do what she can, but I like reading her on this issue in particular because she isn’t forced into the technical writing style of academic philosophy. Rather, she can write poetically and vividly.

So maybe the point of the literary critic is that, if they have good philosophical or psychological ideas, they can uniquely talk about them in a more rhetorically engaging way. At least given my personal taste, Nersessian just isn’t as good of a philosopher as Carson, and so while she writes very well, there isn’t as much substance to engage with in her work. This sounds reductive, however. I’d like to talk to people who have better experience with literary criticism on this.

It’s possible that as an outsider to the field, I’m ignorant of the importance of what can appear to me as extremely vague or convoluted language to examine literature. Sometimes outsiders to academic philosophy criticize my field for this, but I see that the technical language we use is essential for eliminating ambiguities and making progress. I’d love to hear a case made for this, and to encounter work of literary criticism that can take me there.

As a whole, Nersessian’s work is a fantastic example of someone who can get we contemporary people hopped up with the prospect of finding ancient wisdom in old works. I want to read more Keats now. I’m just skeptical of whether she tells us anything that new about ourselves or the world at the end of the day. ]]> Review7317215706 Wed, 19 Mar 2025 18:12:50 -0700 /review/show/7317215706 Alina gave 5 stars to The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language (Hardcover) by Mark Forsyth
bookshelves: literature, favorites
I feel like a teenager again. I remember being able to become infatuated with certain artists, where it felt like no matter how many times I listened to their songs, they reliably would give me solace and delight. I haven’t been able to forge such relationships with music, or with art in general these days. Forsyth’s Etymologicon was the first, in a long time, that has provoked infatuation in this way. This book is the gift that keeps on giving.

The entries are magnificent. Forsyth’s humorous style of presenting any material invariably raises one’s spirits and gets laughter going. Moreover, his choice of words of study is deep-cutting and significant; they are suggestive of history and the human condition all alike. Reading this book is as pleasurable as an addictive TV series, but also as fulfilling as a thought-provoking work of philosophy.

Before now, I’ve always belittled the hobby of doing trivia. It has seemed to me that this hobby is wasteful and even perverted: There is a meaningful human experience of learning something new or discovering something, and playing trivia evokes a similitude of this; it has the capacity to make us feel like we’re learning something new, but in fact whatever it is we’re so-called learning is decontextualized and empty. It doesn’t give us anything aside from an artificial feeling of pride in the moment.

Boy, I was wrong. Forsyth at least has given me hundreds of “trivia� facts, which are meaningful, in at least two senses. First, individual facts often serve as windows into some bit of history, psychology, or the society around us. Second, this practice as a whole of peering into the etymology of a word has given me a newfound relationship to language. I can feel the weight of generations of people before me responsible for the words I’m now using and wonder at their ways of seeing the world that are now foreign to me but have been essential for contemporary practice. I can also know that usually, a word I use has siblings, or is one among various which are equally derived from certain other words or roots of them; and I can marvel at beauty or strangeness upon their juxtaposition.

It’s also a delight experience to see the entries move according to a dream-like logic. This is no resource book, in which words can be looked up. One word moves to the next on the basis of that some phenomenon which shaped the history of the former word is of a topic which brings up the relevance of the next word, or which is related to other phenomena which shape the next words. It is playful and uncontrived.

In general, it is inspiring to see a mind at work like Forsyth’s which is so obsessed with something which is usually invisible and assumed to be inconsequential. While etymology remains inconsequential for practical purposes, Forsyth reveals how very consequential it is for our senses of awe and wonder, and our desires for intelligibility and beauty.

Here are some of my favorite entires (and as one can see, my claims above are not hyperbolic):

�Soon was the Anglo-Saxon word for now. It’s just that after a thousand years of people saying ‘I’ll do that soon�, soon has ended up meaning what it does today.�

“There was an old Germanic word for burnt, which was black� old Germanics couldn’t decide between black and white as to which color burning was. Some old Germans said that when things were burning they were bright and shiny, and others said that when things were burnt they turned black. The result was a hopeless monochrome confusion, until everybody got bored and rode off to sack Rome. The English were left holding black, which could mean either pale or dark�

“Another common form of folk etymology happens when people alter the spelling of strange or unfamiliar words so that they appear to make more sense. For example, there’s a drowsy little rodent that the French therefore used to call a dormeuse, which meant she who sleeps. In English we call the same creature a dormouse.�

“A Welsh carpet was a pattern painted, or satined, onto a brick floor; a Welsh diamond is a rock crystal; and a Welsh comb is your fingers. When they had finished abusing the Welsh, the English phrase-makers� believed the French to be dishonest lechers, which is why a French letter is a condom and a French leave is truancy, although here the French have got their own back by calling the same thing filer à l'anglaise�

“This system [a variety of serfdom], abolished by Emperor Josef II in 1848, was called robot� Karel’s [a Czech play writer in 1920] brother� suggested calling them [futuristic servants produced in a factory from biological matter, as the main characters in the play] robots�

“From there [the history of use of bogey-bears to refer to scary things, and eventually burglar alarms bugs] it was one small step for the word bug before it was applied to tiny listening devices... and that’s why James Bond checks his room for bugs, and that’s also why there could actually be an etymological bogeyman hidden beneath your bedâ€� the fifth verse of the 91st Psalm [in a 1535 translation, was rendered] thus: ‘Thou shalt not need to be afraid of any buggers by nights’â€� then, in the mid-seventeenth century, bug mysteriously started to mean insect…â¶Ä�

�Window, which originally a wind-eye, because, though you can look out through it like an eye, in the days before glass the wind could get in� early anatomists thought that the centre of the eye was a solid that appeared to be shaped like an apple, hence the apple of your eye. These days it has an even stranger name. It’s called a pupil� in Latin a little boy was called a pupus and a little girl was called a pupa� when they went to school they became pupils. Now gaze deeply into somebody’s eyes� What do you see? You ought to see a tiny reflection of yourself gazing back. This little version of you seems like a child, and that’s why it’s a pupil.�

“Tattooed javelin-thrower = Britney Spears� Britney was a surname meaning British. Britain comes from prittanoi, which means the tattooed people. Spears is a shortening of spearman.� ]]> ReadStatus9206328652 Wed, 19 Mar 2025 10:48:59 -0700 /review/show/7417106017 Alina is currently reading A Study of Concepts by Christopher Peacocke
]]> Review7250758336 Thu, 13 Mar 2025 23:49:29 -0700 /review/show/7250758336 Alina gave 5 stars to The Self and Self-Knowledge (Hardcover) by Annalisa Coliva
bookshelves: philosophy
There are three clusters of papers in this anthology. The first treats the issue of what the self might be, which is supposedly known in cases we intuitively make sense of in terms of self-knowledge. The second treats responses to Peacocke’s groundbreaking account of transparency. The third is more of a smattering, including Snowden’s take-down of expressivist/neo-Wittgensteinian accounts of self-knowledge, and Bilgrami’s survey into the ethical character of self-knowledge.

Let me summarize the papers I found most interesting.

The introductory essay by Coliva was helpful, but I also worry certain of her ways of taxonomizing positions on self-knowledge are misleading. Coliva lumps Shoemaker’s and Wright’s accounts together as both following under a “constitutive� approach to understanding self-knowledge. But their two accounts are quite different. Wright (although I should read more of him) appears to think that when we know our beliefs, for example, this higher-order awareness partially constitutes the first-order belief in a sense that goes beyond mere conceptual entailment relations. It’s almost a sort of causal sense of constitution, related to the notions of partially creating or re-shaping something there. In contrast, Shoemaker’s account, from my understanding, centers on the conceptual entailment sense of the notion of constitution.

Coliva rightly points out that an issue that constitutive accounts face is how to explain the intuition that the first- and second-order beliefs can exist separately. She thinks that Peacocke’s and Moran’s accounts both address this by foregrounding how a first-order belief provides you reason to self-ascribe it. I found this interesting; I’ve always thought Moran’s account is very different from Peacocke’s, but it does seem the two are unified with regards to the general-level claim that a self-ascription (i.e., second-order belief) can be made for reasons which are not identical to the first-order belief itself. The first-order belief, for Moran, I think, provides you reason for figuring out what you really believe, where the endpoint of this “theoretical deliberation� is a self-ascription of a certain belief; and so the reasons found in this process are given to you by both the original first-order belief and by various things that you bring forth in your deliberative activity. In contrast, for Peacocke, it is just the occurrence of the judgment, under which the first-order is manifest, itself which provides reason for you to make a mental transition into a second-order judgment.

In “Conscious Events and Self-Ascriptions: Comments on Heal and O’Brien,� Peacocke addresses the challenges Heal and O’Brien raise to his account (which can be located in his paper, not found in this anthology, “Conscious attitudes and the occupation of attention�). To summarize briefly on that: Peacocke argues for his position on first-person knowledge of belief that I sketched out above. Key to his argument is his assumption that his view of how observational concepts figure into perception and judgment alike (which follows from his variety of conceptual role semantics) can serve as a model which neatly extends to the case of the concept of belief. For example, it should not be all that controversial to think that we possess some discrete concept “red� which can be instantiated in red color properties in perceptual experience, as well as in our judgments about our perceptual experience, which mentions these properties. What “red� means tends not to significantly vary, when we think it is instantiated, across various experiences and judgments.

Heal thinks that there are many counterexamples to Peacocke’s proposed rule that whenever you consciously have a certain mental attitude (with a certain content) and also have the concept of that attitude, you’ll be able to rationally transition (without engaging in inference) to the judgment that you have that attitude with that content. These counterexamples would be located in the neighborhood of emotions. For example, Heal points to how a man could fear authority figures, consciously have this fear (e.g., notice his sweating and trembling around such figures), and yet fail to be able to self-ascribe this fear.

Peacocke thinks these are not counterexamples. The heart of his argument is to appeal to a distinction between experiencing conscious manifestations of an emotion, on the one hand, and to experience that emotion consciously itself, on the other hand. If the man in Heal’s example consciously experienced his fear (as opposed to only its manifestations, e.g., certain physiological symptoms), then the antecedent of Peacocke’s proposed rule would be satisfied, and yield the correct prediction, in effect, that the consequent holds (e.g., the man can now self-ascribe his fear).

I find this response puzzling. Circularity objections to Byrne’s account (found in his book Self-Knowledge and Transparency) come to mind here. It seems that all Peacocke is really saying is that once you’ve already formed a judgment about your emotion, then you can then move on and simply say out loud what you’ve judged. Peacocke’s account hides this implication at its core because he believes he has tools to resist it. Namely, he has a theory of conceptual role semantics on which a given concept can be instantiated in perceptual experience and in judgment alike. In effect, a perceptual experience can include certain conceptual content (loosely speaking; more precisely, that content would be systematically linked to conceptual content which is associated with a reasoning system) which is akin to that which is found in judgment. So on this picture, you could be said to consciously experience your fear, without forming the judgment yet that you’re afraid.

I can’t do justice here to an intuition I have regarding whether this conceptual role semantics works for concepts like fear (or any concept that does not amount to an observational or logical predicate, even). I’m working on that. Assuming that this intuition can amount to a solid position, then Peacocke’s account here might be revealed to in effect require that for the antecedent of his rule to be fulfilled, one has already made a judgment about one’s fear, so that the conditional would look like a tautology. To expand on this thought, I’d like to do some more thinking on what’s distinctive of so-called concepts of fear, beauty, forgiveness, and the like which makes the phenomena we track by use of these terms significantly different than the phenomena we track by use of observational and logical predicates. The phenomena of the former category seem to be partially constituted by our subjective experience itself, which is responsive to our volition—or at least in a certain qualified sense which still would not hold of observational and logical phenomena.

In “How to think about phenomenal self-knowledge,� Snowdon addresses accounts like Wright’s and Bar-On’s, which are inspired by a thought in The Philosophical Investigations concerning that when we speak of what we know about our beliefs and desires, the force of our speech does not match up well to that of assertions or declarations. Rather, this should be understood as an “avowal,� an expressive act, which can have an aim such as to show your feeling of conviction to others, or to indicate that you’re self-aware of your potential fallibility, that it’s a belief in particular. Moreover, supposedly self-ascriptions of belief and desire do not involve any identification of yourself; the mention of the first-person in such ascriptions is supposed to based in a certain mode of thought itself, as opposed to any cognitive movement from locating an object (your own personage) to identifying this object in a certain way (as yourself).

Snowdon points out that the very notion of “avowal,� as a type of speech act is technical. It’s unclear how it should be defined. It doesn’t occur so frequently in everyday language. It doesn’t look like there is such a category we in fact track which we always regard as authoritative and non-inferential. Moreover, a thinker like Wright assumes that there are two categories of avowals, phenomenal and attitudinal ones, and his arguments treat those. Wright has not addressed the possibility that there are further relevant categories, which could be understood in terms of avowals, and which are not subject to his arguments. Snowdon’s key argument proceeds by his showing that there are many counterexamples to Wright’s claim that avowals arise spontaneously and without identification. Often, in order to know what’s going down in your experience (i.e., the purported case of phenomenal avowals), we need to uptake something which is beyond the occurrence of the experience itself (so avowals aren’t boundless). For example, when a subject encounters a picture of 12 spots and is asked how many spots they believe are there, the subject can’t determine this without counting. If the picture had only 3 spots instead, the subject would then be able to give expression to their belief without reliance on this additional bit of cognizing. When we fail to uptake this information external to our experience, we end up self-ascribing something which is overtly false; avowals aren’t incorrigible.

This paper was incisive and compelling. It raises an issue for me, however, that it can be unclear to say what’s “contained� in a given perceptual experience vs. is contributed by cognition. This is because “perceptual experience� can be ambiguous; it could sometimes be used roughly co-extensively with “contribution to subjective experience based in strictly your sensory organs,� but other times rather with “what appears to you independently of your occurrent volition or will, something which feels automatic.� Under the second sense of perceptual experience, it seems that many subtle or implicit cognitions go on in you, as an experience unfolds, and these integrally contribute to what you can later recollect from your experience. (Compare to the debate over “cognitive penetration,� which sometimes seems hopeless and senseless�)

Maybe Wright is right to think that these sorts of contributions are not rational or inferentially based in a certain sense; and what you end up reporting on will accurately capture what you were actually experiencing. Once you reach out for the further means, such as counting, as in Snowdon’s example, maybe this should be rendered as a matter of your transforming what you’re experiencing, so that when you report on a certain number, this will be accurate; and when you fail to count and report in a different way, that would also be accurate, relative to a different experience prior to being transformed by your act of counting. I’d like to think about these issues more.

There were more chapters I liked, but I'm running out of space... ]]> Review6683881962 Thu, 13 Mar 2025 22:34:18 -0700 /review/show/6683881962 Alina gave 5 stars to A Lover's Discourse: Fragments (Paperback) by Roland Barthes
bookshelves: literature
Many entries are insightful and delightful. They are familiar and new, giving voice to what we’ve experienced only implicitly and indeterminately before. Others entries, however, feel like overbearing, attempts to aggrandize everyday and obvious feelings by framing them under non-typical, sometimes technical vocabulary. As a whole, it’s interesting to see various types of experiences that are usually dealt with in literature by poets and creative writers to be instead dealt here by a quasi-philosophical voice.

It’s interesting to think about in what way this is philosophy. There is no argument, but pure assertion. There is faith that by referencing various voices from elsewhere (from Plato to Barthes� personal friends—and even to fictional characters, like Goethe’s Werther), what they have said, decontextualized from any justification they might’ve had in their original contexts, is trustworthy. I guess this practice is well-formed if the aim of the text is to show to us where our personal intuitions might find echos in history and culture. This in turn might serve as fodder for understanding where one’s personal biases might come from; or, it could be used for other purposes, like to feel an intimacy with others across space and time.

This is not the aim that I’m familiar with in reading philosophical texts. It’s sort of nice. I’m more used to poetry and fiction appearing to have this aim or at least serving its corresponding function in my life. I’m not sure about the overall value of having quasi-academic/philosophical writing geared towards this same aim. As mentioned above, it’s pretty hit-or-miss of whether an entry taps into what one knows and deepens one’s understanding of that. Poetry and fiction is less high-variance with regards to this, given that it’s not constrained to trying to sound academic.

Reading through the text makes one aware of how when a person is obsessed with something, so much significance can arise from very little fact or evidence. Moreover, if humans in general tend to be obsessed with this very thing, the culture and history this can lead to a remarkable burgeoning of this significance, already tended to by an individual. It's interesting to think of what treatments like Barthes on romantic love could look like for other things that match this description (e.g., war, patriotism to some group identity, nature and its senseless cruelty, nature and its beauty, etc.)

Barthes� practice is not as nice, however, if his aim is to provide resources for readers to double-down or lean into certain what most people would accept as selfish, delusional, or hedonistic feelings/thoughts. It can be easier to self-pity or self-aggrandize when one believes that various great thinkers in history have cared about the same—and particularly when, as Barthes does, these thinkers� descriptions of these delusional/hedonistic feelings are decontextualized from any potential broader lenses that these thinkers might’ve had upon them.

Dissatisfactions aside, here are some quote from my favorite entries.

From “Adorable!�: “[This expression serves] to recognize—and to practice—tautology. The adorable is what is adorable. Or again, I adore you because you are adorable, I love you because I love you� I intoxicate myself upon its affirmation� the explosion of the Nietzschean yes�

From “Waiting�: “A mandarin fell in love with a courtesan. ‘I shall be yours,� she told him, ‘when you have spent a hundred nights waiting for me, sitting on a stool, in my garden, beneath my window.� But on the ninety-ninth night, the mandarin stood up, put his stool under his arm, and went away.�

From “Tutti Systematic�: “Werther wants to be pigeonholed�. Wants a place which is already taken—Albert’s. He wants to enter into a system (“pigeonholed� in Italian, is translated as sistemato).�

From “When my finger accidentally…â¶Ä�: “Accidentally, Werther’s finger touches Charlotte’sâ€� Werther might be engrossed by the meaning of these accidents; he might concentrate physically on these slight zones of contact and delight in this fragment of inert finger or foo, fetishtically, without concern for the response (like God—as the etymology of the world tells us—the Fetish does not reply. But in fact Werther is not perverse, he is in love: he creates meaning, always and everywhere, out of nothingâ€�

From “Images�: “I see myself walking away alone, shoulders bowed, down the empty street. I convert my exclusion into an image� A romantic painting shows a heap of icy debris� no man, no object inhabits this desolate space; but for this very reason, provided I am suffering an amorous sadness, this void requires that I find myself into it� ‘I’m cold,� the lover says, ‘let’s go back�; but there is no road, no way, the boat is wrecked. There is a coldness particular to the lover, the chilliness of the child (or of any young animal) that needs maternal warmth�

From “I-love-you�: “I-love-you has no usages. Like a child’s word, it enters into no social constraint; it can be a sublime solemn, trivial word, it can be an erotic, pornographic word. It is a socially irresponsible word.� ]]> ReadStatus9149069423 Wed, 05 Mar 2025 03:39:00 -0800 /review/show/7377224805 Alina is currently reading Thought, Reference, and Experience: Themes from the Philosophy of Gareth Evans by José Luis Bermúdez
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