What Modesty Forbids

I’m sure every reader has his/her way of working her/his way through a book or paper with the help of a pen, underlining and making notes in the margin. The ”notes in the margin”, for me, has settled on a quite restricted number of expressions. There’s ”qb”, of course, for ”question begging”, there is the exclamation mark (which I hardly ever use otherwise) for remarkable statements, there are shorthands for missing premisses, spurious reasonings. and so on. There is the occasional ”good point”, when something strikes me as being just that. And the ”Exactly”, when someone makes a good point with which I agree. Finally, the ”Exactly. Damn it”, when the point is good, I agree, and it is so essential to my own argument that I curse the fact that someone else got to publish it first. (These things tend to happen when your views are true and interesting.)

This happened to me constantly while reading Leonard D Katz’ absolutely superb dissertation ”Hedonism as metaphysics of mind and value” (and yes, my title is a bit of a hommage). In fact, I might as well have put a sticker with ”Exactly. Damn it” on the cover. (His practically book-length on pleasure in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is simply amazing, without doubt the best piece of philosophical writing there is on the subject, and the fact that things still get written about pleasure without reference to either of those two texts is nothing short of a scandal. (Stop it David, you are getting all worked up and excited, and that’s a shame).)

And now it happened again, in the work of Sharon A Hewitt. The most striking resemblance of my view and hers is our claim that goodness and badness are basically phenomenal properties: the experiences of pleasure and displeasure. ”Feeling good” is, in fact precisely that: having that feeling which goodness consists in. I would like to praise her work, because it is really quite brilliant, but it seems to me that modesty forbids it. We have not been in contact while working on our respective dissertations, so either there is a common source (and Katz’ work might very well be it. That, or C.I. Lewis’ ”An analysis of knowledge and valuation”), or we have some sort of snail-telegraph thing going.

Stop reading, start writing

My first all too serious philosophical essay was on Heidegger (well, actually, I did a number on the ”positionality” concept in the work of Sartre earlier still, but it would take an insane amount of scholarly obsession for anyone to ever dig that up). The nicest thing said about was that it is ”not as incomprehensible as these things usually are”. The literature I discussed, I found at the University Library, actually going through a number of philosophy journals. I had a computer at the time, which was just barely hooked up to the internet, but didn’t use it for literature searches, just for writing and the occasional email. I spent a lot of time thinking about the subject of my essay, and used a very limited amount of sources.

A year or so later, while working on a different essay, I discovered JSTOR, and for about a month and a half, the printer didn’t get a rest. It suddenly dawned on me that everything interesting had been written about, at length, from almost every perspective, and the goal to find a theoretical position that was not currently occupied, and then to occupy it, suddenly struck me as much more difficult than I’d imagined. I spent the next few years reading more, too much probably, and thinking and writing less.

I used to do all my best thinking during walks and while running (or derogatorily: ”jogging”). Usually in very dull environments, not to distract from the thinking. Then I got an iPod, and started to listen to lectures, podcasts and audiobooks during those walks and runnings. (iTunes university has some great stuff, the podcasts from Nature, and from TED and the RSA are excellent. BBC 4’s ”thinking allowed” and ”in our time” just have me in stitches). And instead of thinking about what I’ve just heard, I tended to listen to another lecture, podcast or audiobook. Similarly with papers, even books. Before I start working on this chapter, I argued, I just need to read this paper, or that book. One wouldn’t like to be caught out ignorant, now, would one? No, one would not.

The all too great availability of other people’s writing and thinking made me quite heavy on the consumer side of science and philosophy, and much less of a producer. It is, of course, a great thing to learn, and to listen, but in order to become a philosopher, it is necessary to start doing it for yourself. To actually not care, for a bit, whether someone has written that same thing before, and been more well read while doing so.

My dissertation took longer than it should have, and I know people who have been, and still are, in that state where they just can’t seem to finish their texts. Partly, I believe, for this reason. They are excellent, well-read consumers and thoughtful, accomplished critics, but seems almost to have forgotten how to actually do philosophy. (The dominance of ”critical” philosophy among published articles is a testament that this tendency is very common indeed). The kind of second-order thinking were you are constantly reflecting on how what you are writing relates to what other people have written tends to stand in the way of confident, genuinely original and interesting work. At some point, you just have to get out of reading mode, and enter writing mode.

Bored by Happiness?

I write occasionally on this blog called ”the Happiness Blog” (in swedish), which is mostly about psychological, behavioral and political strategies to increase happiness. It’s a fairly honourable pursuit, and the research it is based on is fascinating both in its robust results and in the large areas of it that are still very much up for discussion.

Recently, however, I’ve noticed a lot of reactions to this research that is, well, bored by the whole thing. This is not too surprising, the new wave of books that made it a trend culminated, I’d say, in 2005, and it was bound to get old sooner or later. This autumn will see a surge of books on the subject written in swedish, so we might expect even more of these reactions. The stuff is still highly relevant, of course, eternally so, but there is a bit of a PR problem here. We need to move on from the basics, perhaps even construe some disagreements about different happiness-researchers so that the reaction against a certain view on how happiness should be promoted turns into an argument for an alternative view. (People do this in literary criticism All The Time.)

A big problem, (as I’ve noticed in the mixed reception of my own vain attempts for media attention), is that the criticism vastly underestimate the complexity of the happiness researchers claims. While I’m actually quite pleased that books with some scientific credentials is budding in on the self-help market, it also opens up for poorly researched self-help books to dress up as science. While happiness-reserachers, often believe that even poorly reasoned self-help books might do more benefit than harm, its important to keep a certain distance. At least if we want the coverage, and the discussion, to become more nuanced and the full complexity of the research be allowed to surface.

Confession

In one of David Lodge’s campus novels (”as opposed to what?” I hear you say. ”His social-realistic stories set in the rural south? They’re all campus novels”. Fair point) we come across the parlour game ”Humiliation” . Each participiant writes down the name of a book he or she hasn’t read. The winner, in a purely technical sense, is the participant whose choosen book has been read by the largest number of participiants (Hint: writing down ”the Da Vinci Code” doesn’t work half as often as you might think. It neither wins you the game, nor endears you to your friends). The name of the game, I take it, is fairly self-explanatory. In the novel (”Nice work”, it might have been. Or ”Small world”), a professor of english literature, desperate to win, owns up to not having read ”Hamlet” and is subsequently fired from his position.

Anyway, I’m just about to loose my winning entry for this game. I’m finally reading ”Three men in a boat”. The fact that I haven’t read it already is not so much humiliating, perhaps, as inexplicable. Not only is it the hands down, drop dead funniest book I’ve ever read, it is also, arguably, the source of everything that have been funny every since. Literary slap-stick at its best, and a grand festival of non-sequiturs. It is also an excellent display of that celebrated, scorned and recently hotly debated comic device: the cutaway joke. Done well, as it is in ”three men”, it doesn’t bring the story to a screetching halt, or it does, but you don’t mind. The point is that what’s beside the point (or beside the plot, anyway), just is the point.