Charles Fried, "Sonnet LXV and the 'Black Ink' of the Framer's Intention," in Interpreting Law and Literature: A Hermeneutic Reader (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), p. 45.
Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 90-91.
Charles Fried is a former Solicitor General of the United States and a distinguished Professor of Law at Harvard University.
Professor Fried is also a wonderful and accessible writer whose articles and books are worth reading even if you disagree with him on many issues as I do.
Mr. Fried is not only a fine lawyer, but also philosophically adept, often making use of Kantian and Rawlsian insights in his best work. ("John Rawls and Justice.")
I think that Professor Fried should be listed with John Rawls and Robert Nozick, as a philosopher, and with Ronald Dworkin (our best philosopher of law at the moment) and Richard A. Posner, as one of the handful of legal/political thinkers whose work will last and have an impact on future generations of lawyers and scholars.
I am confident that Roberto Mangabeira Unger (a Brazilian scholar teaching at Harvard Law School as I write this essay's first draft) and Michael Perry will also be included on that short list, perhaps Lloyd Weinreb should also be mentioned to say nothing of the Brits H.L.A. Hart and John Finnis as well as Joseph Raz.
Mr. Fried is the person that (I hope) a Republican president would appoint to the Supreme Court.
Professors Charles Ogletree and Lawrence Tribe are among my suggested "possible" Democratic nominees for the next vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court. I also would not mind Susan Estrich or New York's Mark Greene on the Court so that I could observe the fireworks in future exchanges between either of them and Justice Scalia -- or Neil Gorsuch these days. I suppose Elena Kagan will do after all.
I am delighted that the Honorable Sonia Sotomayor was nominated by President Obama for the U.S. Supreme Court. Every judge brings his or her identity to the task of deciding cases. This is certainly true of Chief Justice John Roberts:
"In every major case since he became the nation's seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. [Stuart Rabner?] Even more than Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism [sic.] during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values of the contemporary Republican party."
Jeffrey Toobin, "No More Mr. Nice Guy: The Supreme Court's Stealth Hard-Liner," in The New Yorker, May 25, 2009, at p. 42. ("Law and Literature" and "Law and Morals.")
Considering that Judge Sotomayor did as well or better at Princeton University (summa cum laude) and Yale Law School (Law Journal) and has more experience on the bench before coming to the Court than all of the other current members of the U.S. Supreme Court, I wonder why Ms. Sotomayor's intellect and writing skills are questioned all of a sudden? Ethnicity, perhaps?
I can relate to the experience of Justice Sotomayor upon being nominated. Suddenly, mysteriously, at crucial moments in life one's writing is deemed to be suspect and one is described as "intellectually inferior" to colleagues who once required our assistance to survive law school courses.
Neil Gorsuch has recently been subjected to similar treatment. ("Is truth dead?")
No wonder New Jersey's legal morons assumed that they were, or are, "smarter" than me.
My ethnicity still makes my intellect, such as it is, unacceptable in the Garden State. Weird. Too independent for you, Stuart? I think so. ("Civility" and "Sybil R. Moses and Conduct Unbecoming to the Judiciary in New Jersey.")
Some "identities" have been excluded from the upper reaches of power in America and they must now be a part of our Constitutional conversation.
The goal should be "balance," both on the court and in terms of the equipoise achieved among values in our Constitutional architecture: "Judging Sonia Sotomayor," (Editorial) The New York Times, Sunday Opinion, May 31, 2009, p. 7. ("It is time to elevate the discussion to where it belongs: the Constitution and the role of the judiciary.")
I have been discussing problems of interpretation in aesthetics and morals, in the exploration of the self and in adjudication. Earlier I commented on Justice Brennan's essay examining the nature of Constitutional hermeneutics. I now wish to place that essay in "dialogue" -- as they say in graduate schools -- with Professor Fried's beautiful article found in the same volume. ("Ronald Dworkin Says 'The Law Works Itself Pure.'")
Mr. Fried is concerned with the possibility of rule-following and "successful" communication both in reading Shakespeare's poetry and in American Constitutional interpretation.
The essay by Professor Fried is a reaction to a decade or more of sometimes heated debate concerning the possibility of law as a process of "neutral" decision-making in America (recall Louis Henkin's confident and oh-so dated talk of "neutral principles"), together with recent allegations that American law can offer no more than token justice.
It certainly seems depressingly futile to expect legal justice today. After Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo "American Law" (in capital letters) has been dismissed as a "sham" masking the reality of oppression. Law was said to be incoherent, there was much public "trashing" (Mark Kelman, Duncan Kennedy) of legal decisions, even a feeling that legal methods were rendered obsolete in a scientific age.
The CLS-style "trashing" from the eighties now seems like a quaint compliment to a generation that views law as all about power, hypocritical, often more honored in the breach than in the observance. Torture is condemned universally, for example, even as it is indulged in, secretly, by most nations following America's lead.
Critical Legal Studies (CLS) pronounced the U.S. legal process to be a "fraud" lacking coherence or legitimacy, reflective of the power structure in society and responsive, primarily, to money.
I write these words after correcting "errors" inserted in one of my essays for (perhaps) the fiftieth time -- "errors" inserted with the cooperation of legal officials willingly participating in a criminal conspiracy to violate civil rights who nevertheless presume to judge my ethics. ("Law and Ethics in the Soprano State.")
Today is one of those days when I am inclined to agree with the cynics. However, it is on such occasions that we must be willing to affirm our faith in law -- as a hope at least -- if not always a reality everywhere.
Despair is an attitude that I fall prey to on occasion.
Despair is lethal to all efforts at reform. I must struggle against despair. It is just too easy to say that it is all bullshit and hopeless. It is also dispiriting and plays into the hands of the cynics and frauds in places like Trenton, New Jersey.
One must fight to persuade judges and politicians to do what they should be willing to do, without persuasion, which is to abide by the Constitution.
I admit that, in New Jersey, we can not expect much from what remains of the legal system.
We must try -- even in the Garden State -- to govern our lives with respect for neutral and just legal principles and rules as well as flexible standards of justice as embodied in the U.S. Constitution.
American legal ethics in the aftermath of the Bush/Cheney years is a grotesque misnomer and an insult to humanity unless the torture controversy is dealt with (openly and freely) not only in a U.S. Senate report but by lawyers in public discussions: Compare Neil A. Lewis, "Official Defends Signing Interrogation Memos," in The New York Times, April 29, 2009, at p. A12 with "State-Secrets Privilege Tamed," (Editorial) in The New York Times, April 30, 2009, at p. A26.
Authorization of "crimes against humanity" by Stuart Rabner-like legal mediocrities (such as Jay S. Bybee, U.S. Circuit Court Judge) is covered-up and excused by invoking the much-abused "State-Secrets" priviledge that allows government to stonewall in order to shield its lies: Scott Shane, "Cheney is Linked to Concealment of C.I.A. Project," in The New York Times, July 12, 2009, at p. A1. (America's former Vice President Cheney may have INSTRUCTED C.I.A. officers to "mislead" -- or "lie" -- to congress and the courts. Did you do the same Mr. Rabner?)
Did Mr. Rabner lie to the U.S. Justice Department concerning my matters? ("Have you no shame Mr. Rabner?")
The disgraceful protected mendacity among judges and organized crime's presence in the judiciary of New Jersey is what American law has often become. Is this New Jersey's legal ethics Mr. Rabner? ("New Jersey's Office of Attorney Ethics" and "New Jersey's 'Ethical' Legal System.")
For a sense of what I believe American law can and should be, once again, see: "Manifesto for the Unfinished American Revolution."
I am afraid that the title to my essay celebrating American freedoms was altered by hackers. I have made the necessary corrections. Much of this public criminality by N.J. persons may be the result of sheer ignorance more than stupidity. Sam Dillon, "Many Nations Passing U.S., In Education, Experts Say," in The New York Times, March 10, 2010, at p. A21. ("Nihilists in Disneyworld.")
"Deconstructionists" and others still question the distinction between high and low culture by finding Bugs Bunny cartoons and Shakespeare's works equally worthy of scholarly attention although (one hopes!) for different reasons. ("America's Nursery School Campus.")
Often these theorists find all texts, including the Constitution, self-contradictory and self-undermining.
"It's all nonsense," they say, in the university cafeteria with a weary sigh. Shaking his head, Mr. Fried responds:
"My work as a scholar and now as a practitioner suggests to me that respect for the rule of law has been somewhat abraded by a generation or more of skepticism about the discipline and definiteness of law. The attitude is abroad that rules and principles simply cannot control concrete cases at all, that they thus cannot be applied in adjudication, and indeed that they are not worth seeking to establish in the first place."
Professor Fried sets out to ...
" ... confront directly the notion that legal rules and doctrines cannot control particular cases or even coerce our judgment, and that such rules are a sham, merely invoked after the fact to justify results reached on other grounds."
This leads to some disturbing thoughts expressed by American legal cynics:
"Words mean whatever we want them to mean," some Humpty-Dumpty-like legal officials say. It is all relative. Law is about power or politics, the critics insist, which is (sadly) very true in some dark corners of the U.S. legal landscape. ("John Finnis and Ethical Cognitivism.")
But is legitimacy in adjudication even a possible goal?
Along with Professor Fried, I think legitimacy or correctness is or can be, achieved sometimes. I want to believe in law. ("Roberto Unger's Revolutionary Legal Theory.")
Let us begin with the Bard:
Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea,
But sad mortality o'ersways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?
O! how shall summer's honey breath hold out
Against the wrackful siege of batt'ring days,
When rocks impregnable are not so stout,
Nor gates of steel so strong, but Time decays?
O fearful meditation! where, alack,
Shall Time's best jewel from Time's chest lie hid?
or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back?
Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?
O! none, unless this miracle have might,
That in black ink my love may still shine bright.
What does this poem mean?
Shakespeare contrasts things that are very strong and seemingly timeless with what appears fragile and ephemeral, black marks on white paper, words.
Mere words are sometimes all that word-intoxicated men and women have to offer to one another in their efforts to confront and understand the mysteries of love or evil and death.
Words seemingly provide little resistance to the ravages of time or to powerful rulers. It is through his words that the poet writing this famous Sonnet will deposit his love and the image of his beloved on the printed page for posterity. ("The Soldier and the Ballerina.")
Do these words, after all, really provide the greatest resistance against the ravages of time?
Notice that there is language in this Sonnet drawn from lawyers' jargon "beauty's plea" or "action" (suit or claim) is no stronger than a "flower."
Shakespeare's ease with the language and "artificial reason" (Lord Coke) of the law can be disconcerting:
Where did Shakespeare go to law school? Middle Temple? Inns of Court with "Rumpole of the Bailey"? ("God is Texting Me!")
Shakespeare insists to his lover that his account of beauty and love -- this verse -- will survive the passage of time, "conveying" (an apt word!) to future generations the beauty of Shakespeare's mortal lover (that is, how great the person looked) and the intensity of the poet's passion.
It is through the mystery of language, then, that the "villain time" is once again defeated, as villains should be.
The Constitution is also a kind of Sonnet or a gift in words to posterity. Is it a loving gift, I wonder? I believe that it is. It is a gift that is only meaningful, however, if we accept or share in the wager on this capacity of language to transmit, across the "vales of karma" (Norman Mailer), meaning and truth.
I think that we should accept this dangerous wager. At least, on some days, I am willing to try to make the system work. Other days, I think that it is hopeless, but that we must struggle for justice no matter what the cost and however improbable it is that we will succeed in achieving justice.
The image of a flower is powerful, for we are reminded of the timelessness and endurance of that which, apparently, is fragile and evanescent.
The Buddha's holding of a single flower as the totality of his teaching on one occasion was a transformation of the flower into a text. The flower "is." You must "be." End of sermon. ("Shakespeare's Black Prince.")
The message of the Christian scriptures is to turn the other cheek, to love your enemy, and it was the teaching of a man born to insignificance, in worldly terms, to a life of poverty, ignorance and labor. Nevertheless, there has been no more powerful message -- however you may feel about it today -- communicated from one generation to the next in stories that were written down, eventually, in words able to "signify" -- words that "worked" even in translation and over great distances of space and time by "narrating" the Christian story. That story is also a kind of "flower" that will not wilt, remaining always fresh and beautiful. ("Jacques Derrida's Philosophy as Jazz.")
As we approach the holidays this may be a good point to bear in mind.
I am reminded also of Elaine Scarry's lovely essay On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 90-91:
"Beauty is, then, a compact, or contract between the beautiful being (a person or thing) and the perceiver. ..."
No amount of deconstruction or skepticism seems to have limited the power of Biblical stories, as literature and myth, to transmit beauty and meaning from antiquity to today's readers. In fact, the scriptures may also be read as a book of laws. They are the gift of ancient legislators to us as judges and subjects. All of this is accomplished "now" with "black ink."
Like the Bible and U.S. Constitution, Shakespeare's Sonnet has a transcendent as well as literal meaning (or meanings) that is (are) made self-evident in the act of reading:
" ... respect for human intelligence requires that we attempt to understand that meaning rather than try to make it up."
We are led by the hand to an easy conclusion:
"What is this poem about? It is, I submit, about writing. More generally, it is about words: the miracle that can make what is even most fragile and evanescent shine brightly through time."
When we come to interpret the provisions of our Constitution we begin with a recognition of all that endures the passage of time in that document even as we apply its principles to our latest contexts and disputes:
"Without the ability to fix and transmit the intention of the framers [in language] -- and we are all framers -- across the void of time and between persons, we are powerless to create and innovate at all."
Recognizing the imperfections of language and persons does not defeat this claim. You have said nothing about my principles by pointing out my failures and flaws:
"The real issue is what we make of this acknowledgment that our language, like our reason and will, is fallen and imperfect. Do we give up, or do we make the effort to understand and interpret in good faith, assuming the good faith and competence both of our language and of our interlocutors? ..."
This leads Professor Fried to his best insight:
"The possibility of understanding rules and texts means that law need not be just a matter of power. The miracle that has might is thus not just a transmission of fleeting sentiments, but the might to constrain with words -- that is, with reasons. This is what law is: a constraint not of force, but of reasons -- the reasons that one man [or woman] can offer to another for his [or her] ... judgments and ... actions, the reasons that one age offers another for its judgments and actions."
In the aftermath of the Nuremberg Trials the debate concerning the validity of the administration of laws became more stark and brutal.
Law embodies the choice (or fragile hope) of imperfect human reason against violence or oppression. Recently, violence has been winning this eternal battle. The achievements on the side of reason and ethics are slight, endangered, seemingly negligible when set against car bombs and airplanes crashing into buildings, or N.J.'s protected computer crimes and censorship along with organized crime and incompetent courts.
There are no alternatives to reason, however, if we are to live civilized lives, no other option but this effort to bring the persons responsible for wrongdoing -- especially when they are hidden behind judicial robes and titles of office -- to a face-to-face confrontation with their victims by forcing upon powerful and corrupt "actors" the acknowledgment of their crimes and the consequences of their evil. ("New Jersey's 'Ethical' Legal System" and "Law and Ethics in the Soprano State.")
Faith in law is trust in civilization as opposed to violence. No secrecy. No torture. No censorship. It is a confidence in the capacity of law, as language, to constrain and guide our actions, to direct us to rightful ways of dealing with others.
Most of all laws may instruct us in the ways to repair the moral fabric of our lives after the experience of evil.
The greatest growth in international human rights law and U.S. Constitutional jurisprudence occurred after the Holocaust.
Perhaps American Constitutional law will take a quantum leap forward after the atrocities of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. ("Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture" and "What is it like to be tortured?" and, soon, "What is it like to be raped?")
It is possible that the current debate about torture in America will result in more humane legislation, together with a new commitment to affirming the dignity and worth of persons as well as the categorical rejection of torture and rape (or theft from victims) in our legal system.
This is a cause worth fighting for. I plan to do just that. There can be no reconciliation or peace, however, without truth.
I am aware of the cynical arguments about law being the plaything of the rich, about the stupidity of judges and the corruption in our institutions.
I cannot explain away the suffering of millions of persons exploited and violated in this society and/or throughout the world. I am one of them. I have spent several hours today battling against hackers destroying my writings to the indifference of the authorities in one American jurisdiction. ("How Censorship Works in America" and "Censorship and Cruelty in New Jersey.")
I cling to the hope that words can and do succeed in making communication a reality over time often governing the decisions of judges and legislators who act in good faith.
With all of its flaws there is no alternative to law in a free society.
Our responsibility, therefore, becomes one of contributing to the success of the legal system rather than denigrating or trivializing it, without offering something better in its place, and we make that contribution best when we insist that errors be corrected and justice be done in a timely fashion.
As a person who was raised in N.J. and is concerned about the legal system in that unfortunate jurisdiction the spectacle of criminal censorship to which you are witnesses is sad and frightening while the decline in the court system is much worse and seems to be spreading to other jurisdictions.
As Shakespeare left us with images of the beauty he saw in faces he loved so the framers of the American Constitution have captured forever in its majestic words a representation of that city on a hill that America may yet become through law.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Roger Scruton's "Angel Infancy" and Alex Comfort's "I."
All quotations attributed to Roger Scruton are derived from the works listed below:
Scruton's literary manner is that of a patient, amused university professor, while the reader is placed in the role of a student of middling abilities who brings a fresh earnestness and devotion to the subject.
When reading Scruton's books I have the uneasy sense that I have arrived a few minutes late for my tutorial.
There is a serious point being made by Scruton in this quoted paragraph which should be taken to heart. Philosophy is a necessity. Philosophy is not a luxury. ("Why philosophy is for everybody.")
Scruton is an unrepentant Tory and former adviser to Mrs. Thatcher. This makes him a pariah among philosophers in his native Britain. Worse, Scruton defends and has engaged in "fox hunting" and other forms of "aristocratic amusement. "
Fox hunting is "the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable" according to Oscar Wilde. Hence, Professor Scruton (he teaches at Boston University) is officially "politically incorrect." This is an excellent reason to read his books.
I recommend -- although we disagree on a great deal -- Scruton's book concerning the philosophy of sex.
Philosophy is one of the subjects tested in this examination as in most European countries. This inclusion of philosophy in the curriculum is something which is inconceivable in the U.S., where most university graduates have not taken a single course in philosophy during their entire academic careers.
This is like having Einstein do your physics homework, and receiving a "D" for his efforts. Only in philosophy does this story not surprise me at all. Real philosophy is what happens when you leave school. Philosophy is an engagement with the world, not a flight from it. I say the same of religion.
Artistic beauty becomes the locus of our rationalizing and of compensation in an unjust world until Marx comes along with a promise of revolution.
In commenting on Derrida's Specters of Marx Professor Eagleton paraphrased the comment of an actress "enjoying" intercourse with her Bishop: "His Grace was a long time coming."
Perhaps much the same may be said of the "workers' paradise."
This may be fair enough for now as a tentative definition.
The etymology of the word "aesthetics" has to do with appealing to (or perceived by) "the senses." Yet art is meaningful not only in terms of instrumental goals served by it, again, but "for itself," because of its appeal to "reason" or "transcendent value."
The meaning of a work of art -- like your meaning -- is in the world but not of the world.
Does the concept of "reason" include emotional insight?
We will need to supplement Kant with Hegel as well as Bradley if we are to answer this question. ("'Inception': A Movie Review.")
This encounter is to receive an artist's communication or message that is not reducible to the empirical object alone. We are reminded by great art of our spiritual natures. I think there is an analogy to the sexual act which becomes love-making (eros). Love-making is possible for same-sex or heterosexual couples depending on what persons feel for one another. ("'The Reader': A Movie Review" and, again, "'Inception': A Movie Review.")
A film that deconstructs cinema and itself is the Harold Pinter/Elia Kazan The Last Tycoon.
Slipstream stars Anthony Hopkins in an exploration of this theme through analogizing identity in cinema to personal or psychological identity in life.
There is no movie without an audience. Furthermore, in the best films audience members are, mysteriously, included in the cast on screen. I feel myself to be a part of some movies in an eerie way because the director intends the film to be about all of us. "Rosebud ..." ("'The French Lieutenant's Woman': An Essay Review.")
These areas of human encounter -- mysticism and aesthetics -- lead us from the material world and the solitary self to spiritual reality and a kind of community. Accordingly, the aesthetic impulse has a cognitive function even in the sciences (or law) although it is distinct from other cognitive activities:
This blending of fact and value leads to a new epistemology equally compatible with postmodernist and Modernist aesthetic theory. Essential to science is --
Courtly romances were concerned with this "space" created by the poet's adoration of a "beauty" (associated with a distant lady) glimpsed only after being felt, intuitively, and described allegorically. It is to the scientist that nature "reveals" her beauty, according to the Platonist "naturalists" of the Renaissance who ushered in the scientific revolution. ("For Floria Tosca -- With Love and Squalor.")
It is only to this "idealized" lady who calls forth Eros that the artist-poet of courtly romances may reveal his beauty of soul through his song:
Lay bare his mind and speak his perfect will,
Showing the secret places of the heart."
Please see also my short story, "As You Will ..." then Shakruh Husain, The Virago Book of Witches (London: Virago, 1993) and Judith Johnson, "Women and Vampires: Nightmare or Utopia," in The Kenyon Review, Vol. 5, No. I, 1993, pp. 72-80.
Finally, on the aesthetics of mythology/eros concerning women I direct the reader to Marina Warner's Six Myths of Our Time: Little Angels, Little Monsters, Beautiful Beasts, and More (New York: Vintage, 1994), pp. 3-25.
What is left for such "haters" of beauty? Money? Sex as distinct from love-making? Why choose ugliness, wallowing in shit, denials of love? ("Is Humanism Still Possible?" and "'This is totally amazing!' -- Donald J. Trump.")
In very rare instances of great passionate love these childhood memories and acute vulnerabilities may be shared with another person. All art is derived from this very vulnerable territory of the unconscious. The great text to cite on this topic is Wuthering Heights. "I come to you naked and alone ..." ("A Little Romance" and "Little Manhattan.")
This is the realization of Romanticism's promise, a promise made (usually) to victims of tragedy and trauma and never to the victimizers.
Iris Murdoch shares this insight. Beauty directs us towards a transcendence of our particularities and flawed natures to something greater and communal, goodness and beauty, exactly like love, or (for believers) God generate this liberating experience. ("Arthur Schopenhauer's Metaphysics of Art" and "Martha Nussbaum, Iris Murdoch, and the Philosophy of Love.")
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy (New York: Penguin, 1994), pp. 438-457, 341-355.
Roger Scruton, The Philosopher on Dover Beach (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990), pp. 98-125.
Other titles by Roger Scruton that may be consulted and referred to in this discussion:
Roger Scruton, The Aesthetic Understanding (New York & London: Methuen, 1983), pp. 14-31.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy: From Descartes to Wittgenstein (New York & London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 213-225.
Roger Scruton, An Intelligent Person's Guide to Philosophy (New York & London: Penguin, 1996), pp. 141-153.
Comparisons:
Alex Comfort, I and That: Notes on the Biology of Religion (New York: Crown Publishers, 1979), entirety.
C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958).
C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964).
George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outline of Aesthetic Theory (New York: Charles Scribner & Sons, 1896), pp. 11-31.
Elizabeth Schellekens, Aesthetics & Morality (London & New York: Continuum, 2007). http://www.continuumbooks.com/
George Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 51-111.
Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), pp. 196-234.
Roger Scruton is a philosopher whose books are fun to read. His prose is accessible, although he is not interested in denying or avoiding the difficulties of the subject nor will he allow you to get away with escaping the hard work that philosophy always demands of the student and thinker. The subtext of his books is that you will have to work hard at understanding the ideas that he is presenting, summarizing and criticizing for your benefit, but that it is always worthwhile to do so.
"The collapse of English studies into [postmodernist chaos] is not, in my view, the cause but the consequence of philosophy's inertia. If literary critics now seem unable to appreciate the difference between genuine reasoning and empty sophistry, it is partly because philosophy, which is the true guardian of critical thinking, has long ago, withdrawn itself from their concerns. When the agenda of philosophy is so narrow and specialized that only a trained philosopher can understand it, is it then surprising that those disciplines which -- whether they know it or not -- depend upon philosophy for their anchor, should have slipped away helplessly into the night?"
This observation should be applied to law and legal reasoning which depends on a sound grasp of logic.
Scruton's literary manner is that of a patient, amused university professor, while the reader is placed in the role of a student of middling abilities who brings a fresh earnestness and devotion to the subject.
When reading Scruton's books I have the uneasy sense that I have arrived a few minutes late for my tutorial.
There is a serious point being made by Scruton in this quoted paragraph which should be taken to heart. Philosophy is a necessity. Philosophy is not a luxury. ("Why philosophy is for everybody.")
We need to know not only the core principles of our society, but also their philosophical foundations. We must be able to defend both. If we cannot defend our core values, rationally, our views and values will be lightly held. They will easily crumble under pressure.
Scruton is an unrepentant Tory and former adviser to Mrs. Thatcher. This makes him a pariah among philosophers in his native Britain. Worse, Scruton defends and has engaged in "fox hunting" and other forms of "aristocratic amusement. "
Fox hunting is "the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable" according to Oscar Wilde. Hence, Professor Scruton (he teaches at Boston University) is officially "politically incorrect." This is an excellent reason to read his books.
I recommend -- although we disagree on a great deal -- Scruton's book concerning the philosophy of sex.
As a result of his political incorrectness I respect and admire Scruton much more, even as I often disagree with his political views and tend to side with his socialist critics on the merits of controversies. It is impossible not to respect and admire Scruton's independence and sincerity, or his great competence as a philosopher.
It is said that Scruton was asked to submit an essay under a young friend's name for evaluation as part of the young man's "A-level" examinations. This is like an SAT examination in secondary level academic subjects which is required of all students pursuing higher education in Britain.
Philosophy is one of the subjects tested in this examination as in most European countries. This inclusion of philosophy in the curriculum is something which is inconceivable in the U.S., where most university graduates have not taken a single course in philosophy during their entire academic careers.
Scruton's essay received a grade of "D" or barely passing.
This is like having Einstein do your physics homework, and receiving a "D" for his efforts. Only in philosophy does this story not surprise me at all. Real philosophy is what happens when you leave school. Philosophy is an engagement with the world, not a flight from it. I say the same of religion.
The subject of art's true nature and importance recurs in Scruton's writings as it does in our lives. Although discussions of art's importance and functions in life were common among ancient Greeks -- as were discussions on most subjects for that matter -- "aesthetics" (the philosophy of art) as a field of philosophical inquiry was born only in the eighteenth century with the writings of Baumgarten and, most importantly, Kant.
Terry Eagleton is eloquent on the reasons for this development and on the ways in which art comes to replace religion in connecting middle class "sensibilities" with the grim politics of imperialism and the economics of the industrial revolution.
Artistic beauty becomes the locus of our rationalizing and of compensation in an unjust world until Marx comes along with a promise of revolution.
The merits of that Marxist promise of revolution must be left for another day. Marx saw the instrumental importance of art and also that art might become (like religion) a form of resistance to injustice.
In commenting on Derrida's Specters of Marx Professor Eagleton paraphrased the comment of an actress "enjoying" intercourse with her Bishop: "His Grace was a long time coming."
Perhaps much the same may be said of the "workers' paradise."
Attempts to say exactly "What is art?" have never been entirely successful because the experience of art is crucial to appreciating its nature as with religion. There are things which simply cannot be known by way of second-hand descriptions. Love-making may be one example. I also recall a lecturer's question in a course on British empiricism: "How do you know when your foot is on fire?"
There is such a thing as immediate awareness or "sense-data." For what it is worth, Scruton tells us that: "... art is the practice of ministering to aesthetic interest, by producing objects that are worthy of it."
This may be fair enough for now as a tentative definition.
Aesthetic experience is subjective and yet seems to point towards or gesture at something objective. Hence, Kant's discussion of the "antinomy of taste": We know art to be significant and yet it has no purpose beyond itself. The point of a work of art is for it to be experienced as a work of art, in itself and for ourselves, never for an ulterior purpose. ("Arthur Schopenhauer's Metaphysics of Art.")
We appreciate art as a phenomenon, an object in the material world, to be perceived through the senses.
The etymology of the word "aesthetics" has to do with appealing to (or perceived by) "the senses." Yet art is meaningful not only in terms of instrumental goals served by it, again, but "for itself," because of its appeal to "reason" or "transcendent value."
The meaning of a work of art -- like your meaning -- is in the world but not of the world.
Does the concept of "reason" include emotional insight?
We will need to supplement Kant with Hegel as well as Bradley if we are to answer this question. ("'Inception': A Movie Review.")
The art object, like us, has a dual nature. Recall my discussion of the kaballistic concept of "Pierced Vessels." The mystical-aesthetic object is physical and yet its meaning is transcendental. To perceive beauty in "communion" with a great work of art is to be "in the moment" with an object that is material as the observer simultaneously undergoes an apprehension of meaning or "epiphany" that is transcendent.
This encounter is to receive an artist's communication or message that is not reducible to the empirical object alone. We are reminded by great art of our spiritual natures. I think there is an analogy to the sexual act which becomes love-making (eros). Love-making is possible for same-sex or heterosexual couples depending on what persons feel for one another. ("'The Reader': A Movie Review" and, again, "'Inception': A Movie Review.")
What is a movie? Only film or celluloid? Or something "seen" or experienced as a movie?
A film that deconstructs cinema and itself is the Harold Pinter/Elia Kazan The Last Tycoon.
Slipstream stars Anthony Hopkins in an exploration of this theme through analogizing identity in cinema to personal or psychological identity in life.
There is no movie without an audience. Furthermore, in the best films audience members are, mysteriously, included in the cast on screen. I feel myself to be a part of some movies in an eerie way because the director intends the film to be about all of us. "Rosebud ..." ("'The French Lieutenant's Woman': An Essay Review.")
"For each person the crucial awakening comes in his own time and in response to his own particular object. The [aesthetic] experience nevertheless has something in common with initiation. It is a kind of grace, and once it has come, there is neither going back nor the desire for it. Beauty may be experienced not only in seeing a painting or listening to a symphony, but in a glimpse of a beloved face."
The language of aesthetic experience opens on to both religious mysticism and romance.
These areas of human encounter -- mysticism and aesthetics -- lead us from the material world and the solitary self to spiritual reality and a kind of community. Accordingly, the aesthetic impulse has a cognitive function even in the sciences (or law) although it is distinct from other cognitive activities:
" ... The homuncular indiosyncrasy, if one can call it that, [the metaphysics of presence or Cartesian "I"] has been its Godot -- the constant present dramatic persona who never in fact appears. Kant, by a prodigious effort, manages to drag it into the wings [noumenal reality] but never quite on stage. What strikes us now in reading [Kant's] remarks on the paralogisms of transcendental psychology is not only how much he contributed to the elbow room of mathematical physics by recognizing time and space as 'structures,' but how enormously the universe of discourse has changed."
Notice that this is a recognition of our debt to Kant offered by a scientist, physician, psychologist and expert on human religious/aesthetic experience. Kant's subjective turn makes Einstein possible by providing the intellectual possibilities for a "relative" epistemology that still allows for objective and universal truth in the metaphysics of science -- truth defined by criteria of elegance or beauty. If you follow through on this line of thinking you will be led to Jacques Derrida (from one direction) and Roger Scruton (from the other direction) then to Steven Hawking and Brian Greene. Commonality of interest and sources would horrify Derrida and Scruton who find themselves, as it were, in bed together:
"The change has been in the direction of reinstating what our ancestors called natural philosophy [science:] its components have been the immense success of scientific objectivism and the extension of this, as a simple necessity of the process of getting on with science, to the mental apparatus involved in doing science at all. [Phenomenology-Hermeneutics] We have to make sense of homuncular vision and its effects on empirical observation in order to get on with empirical observation. [transcedental ego?] The point which strikes us today about formal philosophy is not that it asked the wrong questions -- it asked nearly all the right ones at different times and under different guises -- but simply that if we take a different paradigm, the practical comprehension of observation in physics and the practical comprehension of observation in neurology, 'how' questions rather than 'why' questions, we are forced to erect empirical techniques of treating the material, and when we do so the Maginot Lines [created] by the immense philosophical efforts of one period and then frontally assaulted by the next, are found to have been simply outflanked."
Unless we have been travelling in a circle?
This blending of fact and value leads to a new epistemology equally compatible with postmodernist and Modernist aesthetic theory. Essential to science is --
"-- Tolerance of ambiguity, routine use of laws and hypothesis as approximations, and a total disinterest in absolutes except as pitons to which climbing ropes are now standard intellectual equipment not for 'doing philosophy' but for 'doing science' with such practical aims as building a fusion reaction or treating dementias."
This is to speak of an aesthetic impulse in the human sciences that abandons the quest for certainty (epistemology), without giving up on truth as a goal or hope (ontology, metaphysics), nor belief in an objective and independent external reality. Paradoxically, truth has something to do with elegance, beauty is important to knowledge systems and truth. Error (like evil) results in a kind of hideousness.
The truest understanding of another person may be the most beautiful or elegant explanation of the evidence, not the most demeaning or ugliest interpretation of the "facts." ("Stuart Hampshire and Iris Murdoch on Freedom of Mind.")
Courtly romances were concerned with this "space" created by the poet's adoration of a "beauty" (associated with a distant lady) glimpsed only after being felt, intuitively, and described allegorically. It is to the scientist that nature "reveals" her beauty, according to the Platonist "naturalists" of the Renaissance who ushered in the scientific revolution. ("For Floria Tosca -- With Love and Squalor.")
It is only to this "idealized" lady who calls forth Eros that the artist-poet of courtly romances may reveal his beauty of soul through his song:
"To whom he may entrust his complete self,
Lay bare his mind and speak his perfect will,
Showing the secret places of the heart."
C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), at p. 103. (Quoting Guillome de Lorris, "The Romance of the Rose" and see Shadowlands.)
Please see also my short story, "As You Will ..." then Shakruh Husain, The Virago Book of Witches (London: Virago, 1993) and Judith Johnson, "Women and Vampires: Nightmare or Utopia," in The Kenyon Review, Vol. 5, No. I, 1993, pp. 72-80.
Finally, on the aesthetics of mythology/eros concerning women I direct the reader to Marina Warner's Six Myths of Our Time: Little Angels, Little Monsters, Beautiful Beasts, and More (New York: Vintage, 1994), pp. 3-25.
Many of my adversaries in debate hate the idea of beauty and the value of goodness. They detest the very idea of genius. I cannot imagine how they live their lives under such constrained conditions, eliminating beauty, goodness, and truth.
What is left for such "haters" of beauty? Money? Sex as distinct from love-making? Why choose ugliness, wallowing in shit, denials of love? ("Is Humanism Still Possible?" and "'This is totally amazing!' -- Donald J. Trump.")
" ... The formulation of the epistemological importance of I-Ness [the transcendental ego] has in fact been left to physics, in which techniques for developing a counterintuitive model of 'reality' [religion, art] have made it unavoidable -- physicists such as Mach and Heisenberg make no bones about the consistency of objective phenomena. ... "
Alex Comfort, I and That: Notes on the Biology of Religion (New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1979), pp. 14-15. ("Guerilla Aesthetics and the Lobotomizing of the American Mind.")
Scruton is covering some similar territory in aligning aesthetic and spiritual needs with the possibilities of human cognition. Plug in Amit Goswami right here:
"Aesthetic experience is the core of high culture. It is extremely hard to describe the relation between a high culture and the common culture from which it grows. High culture involves new levels of understanding, not all of which are available to every member of society."
I think that such understanding can be available to many more people:
"It has its roots in religious experience, and it may sometimes have (as in my example) religious experience as its object. But it also has a life of its own, and can grow away from its origins, as the art of our civilization has grown away from the Christian Church which first inspired it. At the same time, when a high culture detaches itself in this way, it preserves the memory [a key word] of a religious sentiment: a core experience of membership in which God was once revealed. High culture is a meditation on its own 'angel infancy,' and that is why I shall suggest, we value it so highly."
In speaking of "angel infancy" and "memory" Scruton strikes the right note. For play in childhood is also a disinterested activity which is its own reward. Children are not only great philosophers, they are also wonderful scientists and artists. Childhood is a territory of remembered wholeness and a place of comfort. It is the homeland that we have left on our life's journeys which has not left us. Thus, we carry within us this (sometimes quite painful) memory of our "angel selves."
In very rare instances of great passionate love these childhood memories and acute vulnerabilities may be shared with another person. All art is derived from this very vulnerable territory of the unconscious. The great text to cite on this topic is Wuthering Heights. "I come to you naked and alone ..." ("A Little Romance" and "Little Manhattan.")
In science or religion and in the apprehension of beauty, specifically, through aesthetic encounters -- most importantly in loving and being loved by another human being -- we experience the "homecoming of the soul." The return of the soul to childhood bliss, peacefulness, meaning and goodness in a world from which we are no longer alienated. ("Shakespeare's Black Prince.")
This is the realization of Romanticism's promise, a promise made (usually) to victims of tragedy and trauma and never to the victimizers.
Perhaps the experience of evil is the exact opposite of this sense of "welcoming" acceptance and joy. I compare the experience of evil to being dipped in a barrel of shit -- as when I encounter new vandalisms of my works each morning or new obstacles to accessing my writings -- and liberation from evil is a kind of stroll in a perfumed garden. Scruton comments:
"If every activity is a means to an end, then no activity has intrinsic value. The world is then deprived of its SENSE. If, however, there are activities that are engaged in for their own sake, the world is restored to us, and we to it. For of these activities, we do not ask what they are FOR, they are sufficient in themselves. [Philosophy? Art? Marriage? Love-making?] Play is one of them; and its association with childhood reminds us of the essential innocence and exhiliration that attends such disinterested activities. If work becomes play -- so that the worker is fulfilled in his work, regardless of what results from it -- then work ceases to be drudgery, becoming the 'restoration of man to himself.' [Think of an actor, male or female, "playing" a role on stage.] Those last words are Marx's, and contain the core of his [post-revolutionary] theory of 'unalienated labor' -- a theory which derives from Kant, via Schiller and Hegel." ('''Blade Runner 2045': A Movie Review" then "'The French Lieutenant's Woman': A Movie Review" and "'The English Patient': A Movie Review.")
Beauty is a powerful reminder of something outside of us that is real and worthy of concern. Beauty -- including moral beauty -- compels what Simone Weil describes as the subject's "attention." ("'The Reader': A Movie Review.")
Iris Murdoch shares this insight. Beauty directs us towards a transcendence of our particularities and flawed natures to something greater and communal, goodness and beauty, exactly like love, or (for believers) God generate this liberating experience. ("Arthur Schopenhauer's Metaphysics of Art" and "Martha Nussbaum, Iris Murdoch, and the Philosophy of Love.")
The communal-aesthetic space provided by genuine art is a magical "Neverland." It is the place where we find lost loves, deepest bliss, together with our truest and most innocent selves, even in horrible, exquisite pain. Perhaps especially in moments of suffering and frailty as demonstrated by the aesthetic and spiritual power of the single image/object still at the center of our civilization: a crucifix. This is what Professor Nussbaum calls: "love's knowledge." I like to speak of this enchanted territory as the "Forest of Arden." It is the place where we -- she and I -- must meet ... because we have no other. ("Why Philosophy is for Everybody.")
"The questions brought to our attention by examining the philosophical relation between Aesthetics and Morality are as pressing as they are wide-ranging in their application. As we shall see ... the relation under scrutiny is a changing and flexible one -- in some respects the two disciplines are very close, but not so in others. Indeed, if there is one overall lesson to be drawn from this study, it is that in many respects the provision of a neat, catch-all theory is unlikely ever to emerge, or at least not in a way that renders the many problems we shall encounter during our journey obsolete. For one of the sources of richness of this area of investigation is precisely the resistance to overly blunt theorizing. By their natures, the spheres of aesthetic and moral experience are open-ended, and characterized by their ability to absorb new aspects of life as it is lived. It is perhaps unsurprisingly, therefore, that this open-ended character should find its way into the philosophy of the subject." (Schellenkens, p. 10.)
Ronald Dworkin's Jurisprudence of Interpretation.
Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977).
Ronald Dworkin, A Matter of Principle (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985).
Ronald Dworkin, Law's Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986).
Stephen Guest, Ronald Dworkin (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991).
Ronald Dworkin is probably America's most important philosopher of law.
I discovered Dworkin's essays in The New York Review of Books, as an undergraduate, when I was not particularly interested in law, but only concerned about controversial political and social issues. It is impossible not to notice Dworkin's beautiful literary style. His prose is graceful, cool and relaxed. Dworkin's scholarly work conveys a sense of ease with the materials of the law and classic philosophical sources revealing a leisurely Oxbridge "High Table" manner.
I guessed (correctly) that Dworkin smokes a pipe, attended Harvard and Oxford Universities. I also discovered that he practiced law as an associate at Sullivan and Cromwell -- the ultimate elite law firm -- after a clerkship with Judge Learned Hand (Hercules?). Hence, Professor Dworkin and I live in different legal worlds. In another time Professor Dworkin would have made a fine character in a novel by Henry James or Edith Wharton. As it is, he appears to have escaped from a story by Gore Vidal or Louis Auchincloss. Perhaps we should call him: "The Rector of NYU Law School." (I highly recommend The Rector of Justin and A Writer's Capital by Louis Auchincloss.)
"Hercules" is the name given by Dworkin to his hypothetical judge in the famous essay "Hard Cases."
In that essay Dworkin sets forth a theory of adjudication by focusing on the judicial intellect as principle- rather than policy-based, concerned with feretting out the underlying moral-jurisprudential principles within legal traditions and practices in construing fact patterns as well as statutory language.
I first thought that Dworkin was English or British. However, Dworkin's substantive views are very American, especially his healthy respect for a powerful judicial role in a Constitutional system endowed with some version of the doctrine of "judicial review." For a fascinating development of a similar concept in China, see Jim Yardley, "A Judge Tests China's Courts, Making History," in The New York Times, November 28, 2005, at pp. A1-A14. (Sadly, the attempt ended in failure.)
Dworkin's literary talent adds to the pleasure of reading his work. No one reads anything (voluntarily) unless the experience is pleasurable. Among Dworkin's philosophical sources are John Rawls and the Kantian tradition, also Hume and the British empiricists, together with America's twentieth century legal realists. I have always wondered whether or to what extent Dworkin has read F.H. Bradley.
Dworkin was born in 1931. World War II, the Holocaust, and Nuremberg Trials must be childhood recollections for him. This is not, in my judgment, insignificant to the development of his mature theory of law. Dworkin's jurisprudential work begins as a reaction to legal positivism in the form of H.L.A. Hart's jurisprudence of rules.
Positivism is a view of law as entirely distinct from morals. What the law "is" (fact) should be separated from what the law "ought" to be (value). The essence of law is a "command" adopted in the prescribed manner in a given society, a command with the right "pedigree" that carries a "sanction." Compare H.L.A. Hart, The Concept of Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), pp. 181-208 with John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), pp. 351-371.
Positivism is the "hard headed" and unsentimental view of law usually traced to materialists and empiricists such as Thomas Hobbes or Oliver Wendell Holmes (who combines Positivism with American "Legal Realism"). In our time major legal thinkers -- Hans Kelsen and Richard Posner -- may also be described as Positivists and realists as well as pragmatists.
Positivism is the view of law favored by "real men" and all would-be Hemingway heros regardless of gender that only happens to be wrong, but is otherwise very attractive because of its simplicity.
Dworkin refers to this understanding of law as the "plain fact" or "conventionalist" view of law. (Compare "Roberto Unger's Revolutionary Legal Theory" with "Richard A. Posner on Voluntary Actions and Criminal Responsibility.")
Dworkin's discussion with Professor Hart developed over decades even as genuine friendship and respect between the two men also blossomed. One senses growing mutual regard in their published exchanges over many years. Professor Lon Fuller's debate with Mr. Hart, published in volume 71 of the Harvard Law Review, if I remember correctly, set the stage for Dworkin's entry into the conversation.
It should not be forgotten that the revival of interest in natural law thinking (the view of law as an activity which is inseparable from morality) emerged under the shadow of the trials of Nazi lawyers and judges who enforced the laws of the Third Reich. The Nazi lawyers were certainly self-professed "real men." All of the allegedly ex-Nazis explained that "it was nothing personal," but merely a matter of performing their roles or doing their jobs, "applying" or "following" the laws, dispassionately and professionally, in a "neutral" and "impersonal" manner.
Eichman was proud of his official "impersonality." If there is an apt description for Eichman, then it must be "impersonal" or even "inhuman" in his lack of affect or moral wareness. (See "Hannah Arendt, Adolf Eichman, and 'The Banality of Evil" and "'The Reader': A Movie Review.")
The sense that something vital was missing from the dominant view of law is a motive for Fuller's reservations about Positivism. Fuller's theory is often described as "methodological natural law thinking."
This suspicion of legal power is a key influence under the surface smoothness of Dworkin's theorizing. Dworkin and Fuller are both rich in imaginative examples and superb controversialists. They are among my favorite American "jurisprudes."
After Professor Fuller's death, I think that Mr. Dworkin has been America's foremost legal theorist. See Lon Fuller, The Morality of Law (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), pp. 187-242.
Dworkin has destroyed adversaries in debate, in my opinion, whether they have come from the Left (Fish, CLS people, among whom I may be listed) or the Right (Posner, Law and Economics people). Dworkin's view of law as essentially an interpretive enterprise which is nonetheless objective and capable of yielding correct or right answers has led him to understand adjudication as necessarily involving political and moral components with the proviso that these terms are used in very specific ways by Dworkin: 1) "political" does not mean partisan; and 2) "moral" does not mean allowing a judge to impose his or her "values" on litigants.
Given the limitations of an Internet discussion I will focus my comments on a single essay entitled "Law as Interpretation," in A Matter of Principle (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 146.
Unlike positivists who regard propositions of law as "descriptive" statements or traditional natural law theorists who see them as "evaluative" statements, Dworkin views such propositions as "interpretive" claims:
"They are interpretive of legal history, which combines elements of both description and evaluation but is different from both." (A Matter of Principle, p. 147.)
Laws are written or communicated in language. Legal analysis is concerned to discern the meaning of statutes and cases, the authoritative materials and practices of the law, in light of their "purposes and the goals of a legal system as a whole."
Literature is also an interpretive and creative activity in which we are concerned to understand the meaning of communication in language, that is, to share meanings by means of words. The importation into American legal academia of European phenomenological-hermeneutic debate and scholarship dates from the late eighties. Sanford Levinson & Steven Mailoux, eds., Interpreting Law and Literature: A Hermeneutic Reader (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988).
Dworkin argues for his "aesthetic hypothesis" in literary criticism:
"... an interpretation of a piece of literature attempts to show which way of reading (or speaking or directing or acting) the text reveals it as the best work of art. Different theories or schools or traditions of interpretation disagree on this hypothesis, because they assume significantly different normative theories about what literature is and what it is for and about what makes one work of literature better than another." (Ibid., at p. 149.)
Among the constraints in this effort is the idea of "integrity" in a work of art, also "unity" and "integration" in light of the objectives of the art-work.
Actors, for example, are like judges in law courts because actors (without changing a text) create new interpretations of classical or written roles, while remaining respectful of the integrity of the text they absorb and "enact." In many cultures, actors are called "interpreters." This leads Dworkin to a very rich theory of interpretation:
"Interpretation becomes a concept of which different theories are competing conceptions. (It follows that there is no radical difference but only a difference in the level of abstraction between offering a theory of interpretation and offering an interpretation of a particular work of art.) ... There is no longer a flat distinction between interpretation, conceived as offering the real meaning of a work of art, and criticism, conceived as evaluating its success or importance. ... Evaluative beliefs about art figure in both of these judgments." (Ibid., at p. 153.)
In discussing the effects of the idea of "authorial intention" on this strong conception of interpretation Dworkin provides an amusing discussion of the changing opinions of John Fowles regarding his novel The French Lieutenant's Woman. (Ibid., at p. 156.) His point is to illustrate the idea that an author's best-made plans may conflict with the logical development of a plot or natural evolution of a character that he or she has created. The same may be true for an actor playing a role on stage or film. Perhaps much the same may be said of the creation of any "rich" text and all attempts to limit options in reading that work.
What would the framers of the Constitution make of our difficulties today with the doctrine of "equal protection"? What advice would they give us?
Perhaps a single word: "Interpret."
As we are staring intently at Dworkin's left hand (his discussion of literature), he has made the coin of meaning appear in his right hand (by turning legal analysis into a form of interpretation):
"I want to use literary interpretation as a model for the central method of legal analysis, and I therefore need to show how even this distinction between artist and critic might be eroded in certain circumstances. Suppose that a group of novelists is engaged for a particular project and that they draw lots to determine the order of play. The lowest number writes the opening chapter in a novel, which he or she then sends to the next number, who adds a chapter, with the understanding that he is adding a chapter to that novel rather than beginning a new one, and then sends the new chapter to the next number, and so on." (Ibid., at p. 158.)
The common law tradition of judge-made law is a sort of communal enterprise. Judges inherit a tradition of more or less well-formulated principles. The American Constitutional tradition, similarly, involves sharing in a "community" of interpretation and commentary in which the evolution of legal materials is never final or definitive (but always "unfinished"). And yet, some readings are clearly better than others in terms of the ways in which they "fit" the tradition of interpretation. Our job as inheritors of a civilization and Republic is to "finish" both, to make our Republic and civilization "better." We make our legal civilization or culture more complete or better by enhancing our options or freedom. ("Manifesto for the Unfinished American Revolution.")
I find it useful, sometimes, to think of the Western philosophical tradition as a project involving thinkers, over centuries, writing a communal novel or chronicle of the progress (has there been some?) of human understanding. Our intellectual "epic" may be traced from Periclean Athens to a kind of Hegelian culmination under the enlightened administration of our "scholarly" Presidents George W. Bush and now Donald J. Trump.
Well, perhaps "progress" is the wrong word in this context.
President Obama brought us fleeting hope of a new "Age of Enlightenment" on the banks of the Potomac. Regrettably, the fleeting hope has now fled.
America's so-called "cinematic discourse" may be brought under this umbrella. There is a vocabulary of images and styles inherited by today's film-makers, who may wish to comment upon and criticize the form that they love in order to reinvent it all the "time."
If a movie is anything that you experience as a movie, now, then film direction and genius in acting may be about enhancing and not diminishing your freedom of choice as an audience member.
Do you like or hate Prince Hamlet? After directing a film of the play in which he "enacted" the central character, Mr. Branagh may say, truthfully: "I know no more than you do about that guy in Elsinore." ("'Inception': A Movie Review.")
We must be able to say both what the tradition "is" -- describing it factually -- while determining the direction in which it should go and what it means, evaluatively, describing its goals. ("John Finnis and Ethical Cognitivism.")
The boundary between fact and value is blurred in this process.
Analogously, an actor must understand Shakespeare's text, while making it his or her own, in order to play one of the great parts. Applying this insight to adjudication Dworkin says:
"Deciding hard cases at law is rather like this strange literary exercise. The similarity is most evident when judges consider and decide common law cases; that is, when no statute figures centrally in the legal issue, and the argument turns on which rules or principles of law 'underlie' the related decisions of other judges in the past. ... Each judge must regard himself, in deciding the new case before him, as a partner in a complex chain enterprise of which these innumerable decisions, structures, conventions, and practices are the history; it is his [or her] job to continue that history into the future through what he does on the day. He [or she] must interpret what has gone before because he has a responsibility to advance the enterprise in hand rather than strike out in some direction of his own." (Ibid., at p. 159.)
There is both a dynamic feature of this judge-centered understanding of the legal task as well as respect for the culture of legal analysis and the interpretive "community" in which this process takes place. The mission of enhancing the human worth of law is shared by lawyers and judges, working over long periods of time, clarifying and sharpening the values essential to the legal order, reasoning together, inviting a partnership with other political players in the system to achieve the dual task to which democracies are committed -- reconciling freedom with justice in order to maximize both values, making citizens more free and no less equal.
This dual objective cannot be achieved without a guarantee of due process and equal protection of the laws for all persons in society. ("John Rawls and Justice.")
What I have been able to say here is only a hint of the wealth to be found in Dworkin's books. If you have any interest at all in legal and political or moral theory Ronald Dworkin's philosophy is essential reading. Fortunately, it is also a pleasure to study his books.
Read Ronald Dworkin's writings. In fact, "interpret" them.
Ronald Dworkin, A Matter of Principle (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985).
Ronald Dworkin, Law's Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986).
Stephen Guest, Ronald Dworkin (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991).
Ronald Dworkin is probably America's most important philosopher of law.
I discovered Dworkin's essays in The New York Review of Books, as an undergraduate, when I was not particularly interested in law, but only concerned about controversial political and social issues. It is impossible not to notice Dworkin's beautiful literary style. His prose is graceful, cool and relaxed. Dworkin's scholarly work conveys a sense of ease with the materials of the law and classic philosophical sources revealing a leisurely Oxbridge "High Table" manner.
I guessed (correctly) that Dworkin smokes a pipe, attended Harvard and Oxford Universities. I also discovered that he practiced law as an associate at Sullivan and Cromwell -- the ultimate elite law firm -- after a clerkship with Judge Learned Hand (Hercules?). Hence, Professor Dworkin and I live in different legal worlds. In another time Professor Dworkin would have made a fine character in a novel by Henry James or Edith Wharton. As it is, he appears to have escaped from a story by Gore Vidal or Louis Auchincloss. Perhaps we should call him: "The Rector of NYU Law School." (I highly recommend The Rector of Justin and A Writer's Capital by Louis Auchincloss.)
"Hercules" is the name given by Dworkin to his hypothetical judge in the famous essay "Hard Cases."
In that essay Dworkin sets forth a theory of adjudication by focusing on the judicial intellect as principle- rather than policy-based, concerned with feretting out the underlying moral-jurisprudential principles within legal traditions and practices in construing fact patterns as well as statutory language.
I first thought that Dworkin was English or British. However, Dworkin's substantive views are very American, especially his healthy respect for a powerful judicial role in a Constitutional system endowed with some version of the doctrine of "judicial review." For a fascinating development of a similar concept in China, see Jim Yardley, "A Judge Tests China's Courts, Making History," in The New York Times, November 28, 2005, at pp. A1-A14. (Sadly, the attempt ended in failure.)
Dworkin's literary talent adds to the pleasure of reading his work. No one reads anything (voluntarily) unless the experience is pleasurable. Among Dworkin's philosophical sources are John Rawls and the Kantian tradition, also Hume and the British empiricists, together with America's twentieth century legal realists. I have always wondered whether or to what extent Dworkin has read F.H. Bradley.
Dworkin was born in 1931. World War II, the Holocaust, and Nuremberg Trials must be childhood recollections for him. This is not, in my judgment, insignificant to the development of his mature theory of law. Dworkin's jurisprudential work begins as a reaction to legal positivism in the form of H.L.A. Hart's jurisprudence of rules.
Positivism is a view of law as entirely distinct from morals. What the law "is" (fact) should be separated from what the law "ought" to be (value). The essence of law is a "command" adopted in the prescribed manner in a given society, a command with the right "pedigree" that carries a "sanction." Compare H.L.A. Hart, The Concept of Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), pp. 181-208 with John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), pp. 351-371.
Positivism is the "hard headed" and unsentimental view of law usually traced to materialists and empiricists such as Thomas Hobbes or Oliver Wendell Holmes (who combines Positivism with American "Legal Realism"). In our time major legal thinkers -- Hans Kelsen and Richard Posner -- may also be described as Positivists and realists as well as pragmatists.
Positivism is the view of law favored by "real men" and all would-be Hemingway heros regardless of gender that only happens to be wrong, but is otherwise very attractive because of its simplicity.
Dworkin refers to this understanding of law as the "plain fact" or "conventionalist" view of law. (Compare "Roberto Unger's Revolutionary Legal Theory" with "Richard A. Posner on Voluntary Actions and Criminal Responsibility.")
Dworkin's discussion with Professor Hart developed over decades even as genuine friendship and respect between the two men also blossomed. One senses growing mutual regard in their published exchanges over many years. Professor Lon Fuller's debate with Mr. Hart, published in volume 71 of the Harvard Law Review, if I remember correctly, set the stage for Dworkin's entry into the conversation.
It should not be forgotten that the revival of interest in natural law thinking (the view of law as an activity which is inseparable from morality) emerged under the shadow of the trials of Nazi lawyers and judges who enforced the laws of the Third Reich. The Nazi lawyers were certainly self-professed "real men." All of the allegedly ex-Nazis explained that "it was nothing personal," but merely a matter of performing their roles or doing their jobs, "applying" or "following" the laws, dispassionately and professionally, in a "neutral" and "impersonal" manner.
Eichman was proud of his official "impersonality." If there is an apt description for Eichman, then it must be "impersonal" or even "inhuman" in his lack of affect or moral wareness. (See "Hannah Arendt, Adolf Eichman, and 'The Banality of Evil" and "'The Reader': A Movie Review.")
The sense that something vital was missing from the dominant view of law is a motive for Fuller's reservations about Positivism. Fuller's theory is often described as "methodological natural law thinking."
This suspicion of legal power is a key influence under the surface smoothness of Dworkin's theorizing. Dworkin and Fuller are both rich in imaginative examples and superb controversialists. They are among my favorite American "jurisprudes."
After Professor Fuller's death, I think that Mr. Dworkin has been America's foremost legal theorist. See Lon Fuller, The Morality of Law (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), pp. 187-242.
Dworkin has destroyed adversaries in debate, in my opinion, whether they have come from the Left (Fish, CLS people, among whom I may be listed) or the Right (Posner, Law and Economics people). Dworkin's view of law as essentially an interpretive enterprise which is nonetheless objective and capable of yielding correct or right answers has led him to understand adjudication as necessarily involving political and moral components with the proviso that these terms are used in very specific ways by Dworkin: 1) "political" does not mean partisan; and 2) "moral" does not mean allowing a judge to impose his or her "values" on litigants.
Given the limitations of an Internet discussion I will focus my comments on a single essay entitled "Law as Interpretation," in A Matter of Principle (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 146.
Unlike positivists who regard propositions of law as "descriptive" statements or traditional natural law theorists who see them as "evaluative" statements, Dworkin views such propositions as "interpretive" claims:
"They are interpretive of legal history, which combines elements of both description and evaluation but is different from both." (A Matter of Principle, p. 147.)
Laws are written or communicated in language. Legal analysis is concerned to discern the meaning of statutes and cases, the authoritative materials and practices of the law, in light of their "purposes and the goals of a legal system as a whole."
Literature is also an interpretive and creative activity in which we are concerned to understand the meaning of communication in language, that is, to share meanings by means of words. The importation into American legal academia of European phenomenological-hermeneutic debate and scholarship dates from the late eighties. Sanford Levinson & Steven Mailoux, eds., Interpreting Law and Literature: A Hermeneutic Reader (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988).
Dworkin argues for his "aesthetic hypothesis" in literary criticism:
"... an interpretation of a piece of literature attempts to show which way of reading (or speaking or directing or acting) the text reveals it as the best work of art. Different theories or schools or traditions of interpretation disagree on this hypothesis, because they assume significantly different normative theories about what literature is and what it is for and about what makes one work of literature better than another." (Ibid., at p. 149.)
Among the constraints in this effort is the idea of "integrity" in a work of art, also "unity" and "integration" in light of the objectives of the art-work.
Actors, for example, are like judges in law courts because actors (without changing a text) create new interpretations of classical or written roles, while remaining respectful of the integrity of the text they absorb and "enact." In many cultures, actors are called "interpreters." This leads Dworkin to a very rich theory of interpretation:
"Interpretation becomes a concept of which different theories are competing conceptions. (It follows that there is no radical difference but only a difference in the level of abstraction between offering a theory of interpretation and offering an interpretation of a particular work of art.) ... There is no longer a flat distinction between interpretation, conceived as offering the real meaning of a work of art, and criticism, conceived as evaluating its success or importance. ... Evaluative beliefs about art figure in both of these judgments." (Ibid., at p. 153.)
In discussing the effects of the idea of "authorial intention" on this strong conception of interpretation Dworkin provides an amusing discussion of the changing opinions of John Fowles regarding his novel The French Lieutenant's Woman. (Ibid., at p. 156.) His point is to illustrate the idea that an author's best-made plans may conflict with the logical development of a plot or natural evolution of a character that he or she has created. The same may be true for an actor playing a role on stage or film. Perhaps much the same may be said of the creation of any "rich" text and all attempts to limit options in reading that work.
What would the framers of the Constitution make of our difficulties today with the doctrine of "equal protection"? What advice would they give us?
Perhaps a single word: "Interpret."
As we are staring intently at Dworkin's left hand (his discussion of literature), he has made the coin of meaning appear in his right hand (by turning legal analysis into a form of interpretation):
"I want to use literary interpretation as a model for the central method of legal analysis, and I therefore need to show how even this distinction between artist and critic might be eroded in certain circumstances. Suppose that a group of novelists is engaged for a particular project and that they draw lots to determine the order of play. The lowest number writes the opening chapter in a novel, which he or she then sends to the next number, who adds a chapter, with the understanding that he is adding a chapter to that novel rather than beginning a new one, and then sends the new chapter to the next number, and so on." (Ibid., at p. 158.)
The common law tradition of judge-made law is a sort of communal enterprise. Judges inherit a tradition of more or less well-formulated principles. The American Constitutional tradition, similarly, involves sharing in a "community" of interpretation and commentary in which the evolution of legal materials is never final or definitive (but always "unfinished"). And yet, some readings are clearly better than others in terms of the ways in which they "fit" the tradition of interpretation. Our job as inheritors of a civilization and Republic is to "finish" both, to make our Republic and civilization "better." We make our legal civilization or culture more complete or better by enhancing our options or freedom. ("Manifesto for the Unfinished American Revolution.")
I find it useful, sometimes, to think of the Western philosophical tradition as a project involving thinkers, over centuries, writing a communal novel or chronicle of the progress (has there been some?) of human understanding. Our intellectual "epic" may be traced from Periclean Athens to a kind of Hegelian culmination under the enlightened administration of our "scholarly" Presidents George W. Bush and now Donald J. Trump.
Well, perhaps "progress" is the wrong word in this context.
President Obama brought us fleeting hope of a new "Age of Enlightenment" on the banks of the Potomac. Regrettably, the fleeting hope has now fled.
America's so-called "cinematic discourse" may be brought under this umbrella. There is a vocabulary of images and styles inherited by today's film-makers, who may wish to comment upon and criticize the form that they love in order to reinvent it all the "time."
If a movie is anything that you experience as a movie, now, then film direction and genius in acting may be about enhancing and not diminishing your freedom of choice as an audience member.
Do you like or hate Prince Hamlet? After directing a film of the play in which he "enacted" the central character, Mr. Branagh may say, truthfully: "I know no more than you do about that guy in Elsinore." ("'Inception': A Movie Review.")
We must be able to say both what the tradition "is" -- describing it factually -- while determining the direction in which it should go and what it means, evaluatively, describing its goals. ("John Finnis and Ethical Cognitivism.")
The boundary between fact and value is blurred in this process.
Analogously, an actor must understand Shakespeare's text, while making it his or her own, in order to play one of the great parts. Applying this insight to adjudication Dworkin says:
"Deciding hard cases at law is rather like this strange literary exercise. The similarity is most evident when judges consider and decide common law cases; that is, when no statute figures centrally in the legal issue, and the argument turns on which rules or principles of law 'underlie' the related decisions of other judges in the past. ... Each judge must regard himself, in deciding the new case before him, as a partner in a complex chain enterprise of which these innumerable decisions, structures, conventions, and practices are the history; it is his [or her] job to continue that history into the future through what he does on the day. He [or she] must interpret what has gone before because he has a responsibility to advance the enterprise in hand rather than strike out in some direction of his own." (Ibid., at p. 159.)
There is both a dynamic feature of this judge-centered understanding of the legal task as well as respect for the culture of legal analysis and the interpretive "community" in which this process takes place. The mission of enhancing the human worth of law is shared by lawyers and judges, working over long periods of time, clarifying and sharpening the values essential to the legal order, reasoning together, inviting a partnership with other political players in the system to achieve the dual task to which democracies are committed -- reconciling freedom with justice in order to maximize both values, making citizens more free and no less equal.
This dual objective cannot be achieved without a guarantee of due process and equal protection of the laws for all persons in society. ("John Rawls and Justice.")
What I have been able to say here is only a hint of the wealth to be found in Dworkin's books. If you have any interest at all in legal and political or moral theory Ronald Dworkin's philosophy is essential reading. Fortunately, it is also a pleasure to study his books.
Read Ronald Dworkin's writings. In fact, "interpret" them.
Sunday, April 26, 2009
"Invasion": A Movie Review.
March 25, 2010 at 4:39 P.M. I was shocked to discover hacker-inserted "errors" in this essay. I think I got all of them. Is anyone law-abiding in New Jersey's government? Pamela ("Paula") Dow, I do not envy you.
September 16, 2009 at 12:15 P.M. "Errors" were inserted, again, in this essay. I have now corrected them.
Bold script and italics are available again -- for a while. If only I were able to use images I would be a much happier man. MSN groups has closed. The Internet may "close" at any time. I will continue to write for as long as possible.
I. Two Tickets for "Invasion" and a Discount on the "Super-Combo" with Twizzlers.
This latest remake of a classic sci-fi movie, based on Jack Finney's 1950s novel, Invasion of the Body Snatchers is smart and scary enough. Yes, I read that book. I've seen all earlier versions of this movie. There are lots of ideas in this work -- as indeed, there were plenty of ideas in the original film. The heroic physician in the original movie is, of course, a man -- Kevin McCarthy, brother of the great Mary McCarthy, with a standard-issue beautiful girlfriend from the fifties in a padded bra and sweater: "Oh, Miles ... What will we do?"
Those were the good old days. During the entire original movie this beautiful woman ran and fought the aliens in high heels and without getting her make-up or hairstyle messed up. That is a neat trick. Women in the fifties were amazing at keeping it all together without appearing to do much. Sci-fi and horror are genres where American writers are allowed to explore ideas, including heavy philosophical ideas. (An "error" was inserted in this sentence since my last review of this essay.)
Among my favorite writers in these pop genres are: Richard Matheson, Robert Bloch, Steven King, William Gibson, Connie Willis. Ms. Kidman's starring role in the philosophically sophisticated Stepford Wives (Ira Levin's novel inspired it) suggests that she likes both ideas and scary movies. So do I. Let me spare you the suspense, this is a good movie and potentially the movie to see if you want to get lucky on your second or third date with that special gal this summer. The man writing these words purchased the videotape of The Mummy, mostly so I can hear Rachel Weisz say: " ... Bembridge scholars believe ..." The mummy is still alive!
Invasion is several movies in one: First, you've got your basic date movie, inviting you to get all "He-Man" on her and protect your damsel in make-believe-distress (women are good at that "rescue me" stuff); second, there's a political text placed on screen with subtle messages about utopias and a defense of imperfect liberal democracies against the alternatives; third, there is a feminist text (what else is new these days), suggesting that men older than twelve are not to be trusted. Luckily, I fall into the trustworthy category -- psychologically, if not chronologically. Fourth, there is a cinematic exploration of psychological theory illustrated and dramatized by what is unfolding on screen.
The viewer is invited to read the film-narrative in various ways, depending on which of the different psychologists invoked by the script one wishes to follow: Freud, Jung (Kidman's character is a Jungian-feminist, Dr. June Singer meets Doris Day in a push-up bra), Adler, Lacan, Laing or Foucault. There is also a metaphysical and epistemological problematic placed on screen concerning "other minds," alterity puzzles, solipsistic dilemmas straight out of Gilbert Ryle to David Chalmers, even a theological question or two. A novel to read this summer is My Zombie Valentine.
You can just go on the cinematic roller coaster ride or you can get all heavy afterwards. It's up to you. I will say something about the major thematic areas and performances by leading actors: Daniel Craig (without a padded bra) is the love interest. Jeremy Northam is the sinister "ex-husband." Women love movies with sinister "ex-husbands." Kidman is very good; the men are adequate; and the child actor is great. I will discuss the plot without giving away too much; then I discuss the psychological theories alluded to in the dialogue (the attack on the fantasy of medicating our troubles away in America is right on the money); next, the psychological possibilities of the text are explored. Are we sharing a collective dream state or psychosis in Bush's America? The dangers associated with loss of authenticity are also explored. See the classic dystopian novel, Yevgeny Zamyatin's We (New York: Avon, 1972).
This leads to political issues concerning conformity and security versus freedom, which are now so timely. From Nietzsche we move to Alfred Adler on "power-struggles" and the threat of terrorists among us. The film ponders the dangers of utopia from Plato to Thomas More, then Marx, also the metaphysics of zombies and subjects, together with our epistemological worries. There are collective psychotic episodes, perhaps, afflicting entire societies. Nazi Germany and others come to mind. I will not take the obvious cheap shot at the Bush Administration. No need.
Jonathan Little's recent massive novel The Kindly Ones, has been poorly reviewed in America because the general fund of cultural knowledge -- even among ostensibly educated Americans -- has diminished substantially. Based on what I have read, in addition to the Greeks, one will need quite a few other sources to do justice to that text: Goethe, Nietzsche, Mann, Huysman, Gide, Michelet, Summers, Shakespeare, as well as numerous psychiatrists and psychologists -- especially, Freud, Jung, Adler and Foucault.
The novel by Mr. Little seems to explore the Western concept of evil from the Greek daimon, to witchcraft and demonology in Christian thought, to slavery and other forms of dehumanization in which Jews featured prominently. Indeed, some of the events in the novel might have been lifted from accounts of the practices of witches. Many witches and demonic worshippers were actually women "guilty" of providing midwife services and being Jewish.
What does Nicole Kidman's character really know in this movie? What do you really know in the absence of confirmation? What is confirmation without meaningful "others"? What happens to ethics or selfhood in a solipsistic nightmare? Kidman's character shoots "people" without too much remorse, why? What happens to identity under extreme stress? What is the significance of the scene in which Nicole Kidman shows a zombie-pod-person "cop" her identification? Doesn't every other pod person also have an i.d.? Don't you have one? The flip side of "adjustment" is "alienation"? Pick your poison. See Richard Schacht, Alienation (New York: Anchor-Doubleday, 1971), pp. 123-153 ("Erich Fromm and Karen Horney").
If asked: "Who are you?" Do you need to check your driver's license to answer that question? Who or what is a "person" in this movie? What is it that makes you who you are? Your driver's license? How does Nicole Kidman know who isn't a person? What is "social autism"? What are the aliens missing? Is the missing ingredient of personhood what was absent from that guy or gal on your last date who discussed electrical circuits for hours? Maybe it was the guy who chatted about philosophy and movies, gulp! I hope not. If an original person meets his or her identical pod-person double, how would you decide which one is the "real" person? Both? Are the guards and torturers in Abu Ghraib "pod-people"? It would be better if they were not human beings. Unfortunately, such torturers are all-too recognizably human.
Ask that special woman in your life whether you may examine her identification. Tell her you're concerned about alien invaders and wish to inspect her body, very carefully, for alien spors. It is my duty to offer this full service to any attractive woman attending this film. Now that the femi-Nazis are upset, we can begin with a famous Nietzsche quote:
"The most universal sign of the modern age: man has lost dignity in his own eyes to an incredible extent. For a long time the center and tragic hero of existence in general; then at least intent on proving himself closely related to the decisive and essentially valuable side of existence -- like all metaphysicians who wish to cling to the dignity of man, with their faith that moral values are cardinal values. Those who have abandoned God cling that much more firmly to the faith in morality."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, Bk. I: sec. 18 (New York: Vintage, 1968), p. 16.
Notice that Nietzsche does not consider that morality and God may be words pointing to the same human experience. And most important:
"... we approach the age of the Last Man. No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same, whoever feels different gets voluntarily into a madhouse. ..."
The Portable Nietzsche (1954), p. 130.
Are these cinematic pod-people the beings Nietzsche described as: "Men without chests"? Have they finally arrived? Do they shop at K-Mart? Do they live in Ridgewood, New Jersey? Francis Fukuyama makes use of this text in a crucial chapter of his excellent (if uneven and mistaken) book, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992), pp. 287-313. The following section was highlighted when I first read these pages years ago. Let us begin with a helpful insight ...
"... from the correct psychological observation that successful action in life proceeds from a sense of self worth, and if people are deprived of it, this belief in their worthlessness will become a self-fulfilling prophecy."
Imagine, a psychologist or torturer who is the epitome of evil, capable of inducing such feelings of worthlessness in persons for a small fee. I know such people. How are you doing in Clifton, Diana Lisa Riccioli? Paramus?
"Its startling premise, one that is both Kantian and Christian (even if its promoters are unaware of their own intellectual roots), is that everybody is a human being -- and not to be swallowed up in the collectivity -- and therefore possesses a certain dignity. Kant, in the Christian tradition, would have said that all human beings are equally able to decide whether to live by the moral law or not." (p. 302.)
To be deprived of that autonomy, even for "your own good" or for the sake of so-called contentment, adjustment, social goals or some such thing is an unmitigated evil. It is the psychobabble nightmare captured on screen in this movie. Hegel and the young Marx add a notion of voluntary community and social good to the ideal state, without the loss of autonomy or basic humanistic values in civil society. Jefferson and Rousseau might be mentioned also as defenders of communitarian values for free subjects.
This communitarianism is different from the totalitarian states created in the twentieth century by Fascists and State Communists (the latter often misreading the later Marx), where autonomy becomes a category of guilt. Totalitarianism is satirized in this movie which hints at where we are heading in a time and place when all higher emotions, cultivation of feelings through fine art and romance, are denigrated and trivialized as worthless or elitist. "Adjust!" Dr. Phil says, while urging you to join a gym.
The love angle is reduced to secondary status in this latest version of the movie (big mistake) in order to ensure the feminist heroine's compliance with politically correct panaceas. Not necessary, folks. We know she's independent. Let Ms. Kidman get her grove on with Mr. Craig. She'll even take less money if you throw in a love scene or two. Mr. Craig feels the same way. The audience wants these people to care about each other and to struggle together.
America recognizes and balances these competing values by providing for freedom with equality under a government (until recently) of limited powers. Even psychobabblers who wish to make you "happy," "good," or "well-adjusted" used to be required to comply with due process protections, never acting secretly or in violation of privacy and other fundamental rights. New Jersey, of course, has been turned over to the pod-people for years. They tried to give it back, but we said "nothing doing." It's all yours. No wonder they try to destroy my writings. How's it going "David"? Are you still the "Jewish Mengele" Terry Tuchin?
"Security" is a word that excuses many sins, for would-be totalitarians, but they should wonder how secure we ought to be from those who wish to make us secure? Hitler made the trains run on time, there was very little crime, few terrorist incidents disturbed the peace in Nazi Germany. Few of us think of 1930s Germany as paradise on earth.
II. What's the story?
Nicole Kidman is a shrink (significantly, we see a paperback of Jung's treatise on analytical psychology as the movie opens), a single mom with a boy whose "contagious" charm nearly steals the movie. Males are acceptable until age twelve in feminist utopias -- thereafter, they are used for sex and discarded, as indeed males are used and discarded by Manhattan women and many insects.
Ms. Kidman's receptionist is African-American attesting to our heroine's social conscience and hipness. Patients are mostly women complaining of men. The thoughtless males are nearly all overweight in this movie. Something for gentlemen to ponder before joining a gym and refusing to adjust. Women love rebels. Bad boys, rough guys -- especially if they are extremely wealthy. In fact, extremely wealthy men are generally quite popular with women, even when they are slightly pudgy or nerdy.
Kidman's ex-husband, Jeremy Northam, is a government functionary in the "lying and crime comitting business" -- a typical New Jersey lawyer, in other words, stationed in D.C. -- who is sent to a site where a shuttle-like aircraft crashed on returning to earth. He is contaminated by an alien life-force that takes over organisms, like cells forming a single entity, depriving persons of subjectivity and all passion. This is something America is attempting to achieve with the television program, "America's Next Super-Model." (Yes, H.G. Wells' "War of the Worlds" and the Orson Wells' radio phenomenon are hinted at and emulated in this movie.)
Persons quickly become robotic or zombie-like, vomitting into drinks or the skin of others to contaminate them, absorbing them into the great unity. AIDS anxiety mingles with fear of terrorists. Daniel Craig is a doctor who accepts a kind of sample of the alien tissue and turns it over to his friend in a lab. Another African-American is seen, briefly, proving that film-makers know such people exist and are sometimes even scientists in America. This is more than can be said for Latinos in this movie.
Kidman's ex- is contaminated and insists on seeing their son. Audiences know the danger the boy is in. Not only may he be taken-over by the pod-people, but he could be lured into going to law school. I shudder with undiluted horror at such a terrible prospect for any child. Law schools are where normal Americans are turned into servants of the evil aliens and pod-people. This is especially likely for anyone who attends Yale Law School and specializes in corporate taxation or entertainment law.
Illness as metaphor serves to hint at the dangers of totalitarianism. Whatever ideological justification is offered for the loss of conscience or autonomy in a crowd worshipping power, the result can only be evil. Nazism, Stalinism are obvious examples of the political plague of our times. Devil worship, Mr. Little, as a political analogy? Albert Camus is one source for this horror. Also, the link between human autonomy and genuine intellectual or cultural achievement -- a necessary entanglement of genius and the risk of evil -- is made clear.
Anthony Burgess explores this idea (can we control crime without becoming criminals?) in many of his novels, especially A Clockwork Orange. Fear of terrorism may serve to demand the loss of self with equally horrible results -- results like what I have experienced in the form of censorship, insults, denigration and other kinds of permanent harm. This essay has been vandalized so many times that I no longer know how often I have been forced to make the same corrections to the indifference of the authorities sworn to protect my Constitutional rights. This is what America has become -- either a contradiction or a lie.
Paranoia and deep psychosis or just reality sets in as Kidman's character begins to see zombies everywhere. ("Behaviorism is Evil" and "Psychological Torture in the American Legal System.")
One of the most deeply harmful psychological experiences is betrayal. Treachery at the hands of close friends or relatives is the trademark of totalitarianism characterizing the worst excesses of McCarthyism. Family-members and friends informing against one another, pressured to corrupt and betray personal relationships are made complicit in evil. Worse, is the secret mutual informing within professions and academia during the Communist witch hunts -- even today in some terrible places -- that contaminates the life-prospects for everyone within those communities.
When no one can be trusted, all relationships are suspect. All identity-conferring and -confirming relationships are shattered, so the psyche is shattered. All ethical foundations are destroyed. Read Hegel on Stillichkeit. Great stress is added to the mix, attacks on self-esteem (ex-husbands are good at that). Professional destruction at Kidman's office completes the ingredients of psychological assassination through stress and strain. It helps in the destruction of a human psyche for the victim to feel outrage at injustice, especially towards others, coupled with powerlessness thanks to corrupt or ineffective institutions.
At a dinner party, stand-ins for Freud (Russian diplomat) and Jung-Klein-Lacan-Foucault (Kidman) argue over the human capacity for violence and civilization. ("Errors" have been inserted once more in this essay and corrected, again, by me.) Freud argues that civilization is a thin-veneer over animal evil; Kidman expresses reservations from a feminist perspective, echoing her guru Carl Jung:
"Civilized life today demands concentrated, directed conscious functioning, and this entails the risk of a considerable dissociation from the unconscious. The further we are able to remove ourselves from the unconscious through directed functioning, the more readily a proverbial counterposition can build up in the unconscious, and when this breaks out it may have [VERY] disagreeable consequences." Abu Ghraib? 9/11? Iraq? West Bank? Gaza?
The Portable Carl Jung (New York: Penguin, 1971), p. 276. ("The Wanderer and His Shadow.")
That's why it is good to go to movies! Notice the excellent introduction to Jung's writings by Joseph Campbell at pp. vi-xxxii, which I have read several times lately. Notice also that Jung's unconscious, personal and collective, is very different from Freud's idea of the id. Both German thinkers are rooted in German idealistic and other traditions of thought, including Romanticism. Any person lacking all knowledge of this philosophical literature will not be able to appreciate the richness in the insights of either Freud or Jung, or most of the classical psychological thinkers for that matter. Whatever else they were, Freud and Jung were contributors to Western philosophy.
It is important to remember that both Freud and Jung were great admirers of the poetry of Friedrich Holderlin, for example, Hegel's classmate and early friend. (I would write more on this issue, but I'd only provide hackers and New Jersey's legal whores with opportunities for more destruction of my text.) My favorite of the philosophically-adept Freudians is Jonathan Lear, who (sensibly) returns Freud to his philosophical sources -- not only the Greeks, also Schopenhauer and the Sturm und Drag poets. ("'The Reader': A Movie Review.")
In desperation, civilization vanishes and so does morality, we are told, but is this true? I doubt it. Kidman's shrink is willing to die for her child and refuses to shoot Mr. Craig above the knee, especially avoiding the groin area, which she clearly cherishes. Freud again. Something survives even the greatest trauma, some essential dignity and autonomy, capacity for love, that refuses absorption into a passifying false collectivity as opposed to true community, which must always be chosen. The pod-people have no freedom and morality is non-existent. True, everything is peaceful, but it is the peace of the grave because individuality is gone even if there is plenty of adjustment.
Anything is better than this death-in-life, unwilling absorption into inauthenticity in the New Jersey-like shopping mall horror of sameness offered by the aliens. Absolute loss of affect among mall-dwellers is to be avoided at all costs, even if such a loss results in material "success" or acceptance. Ms. Kidman cannot "go along to get along." Hence, she must fight for herself and her child, also for her lover, to remain free and human. This very fighting is what all torturers seek to destroy. The human capacity to struggle for life (love) is the essence of humanity. Total adjustment is death for some of us. Nearly all of the zombies bear a suspicious resemblance to Stuart Rabner. Patrick Swayze, shortly before succumbing to a fatal illness, said that "winning in life is not giving up." I agree. ("Friedrich Nietzsche on Self-Realization.")
These thoughts are nicely summed up by Jose Ortega y Gasset -- a philosopher much admired by Sartre, who anticipated many themes in French thought. Ortega is "one of those Latinos" who, I was assured, "can not be smart enough to be a philosopher" -- "... a Spanish existentialist who, unlike Sartre, was also a cultural and political conservative: 'the stone is given its existence: it need not fight for what it is ... Man has to make his own existence at every single moment.' ('Man the technician') The image of a 'fight' is never very far from the existentialist mind ... "
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy (New York: Penguin, 1994), p. 309 and Jose Ortega y Gasset, What is Philosophy? (New York: W.W. Norton, 1960), pp. 34-35.
The viewer is invited to come to his or her own conclusions. Was this all a dream? A psychotic episode? A kind of metanoia for the Kidman character through a Jungian mythic landscape. Is the movie warning of the loss of authenticity in a failed marriage and anxiety about forthcoming feminist independence on the part of non-zombie-like women? Too much empirical evidence suggests otherwise: Mr. Craig's final appearance at breakfast indicates that there are some things a feminist gal-pal will not give up. I know what it's like to want and miss someone important in your life. I can relate to Ms. Kidman's adventure. Real marriage is always a success. So is every passionate and loving relationship in our lives -- there will be very few people that really matter for any of us. Equally essential is commitment to shared struggle on behalf of those we love and the community in which we live. Marriage. Conversation. I will never stop loving those few people who matter in my life.
One more "error" inserted by the Trenton "pod-persons" and corrected.
III. Journey Into the Subconscious.
An offstage presence in this movie is R.D. Laing, whose cautions concerning the dangerous loss of spiritual life, anomie, falsehood and doubts about normality are more timely today than ever before:
"Laing argued, in effect, that the violence we do to ourselves -- or that is done to us -- in the process of normalization is reflected, among other things, in the loss of the numinous as a dimension of normal human experience. Interpersonal and collective violence is but one more symptom of the same underlying malaise. Much as he lamented the loss of the numinous, however, Laing was not advocating a return to a repressive, theocratic society, nor to a religious creed based on a dogmatic interpretation of scripture. In fact, like Jung, Laing was apt to disparage religious belief AS A POOR AND INAUTHENTIC SUBSTITUTE FOR RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE." (emphasis added)
Daniel Burston, The Crucible of Experience: R.D. Laing and the Crisis of Psychotherapy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 107-108. See the pulp classic Herbert D. Castle, The Reassembled Man (Conn.: Fawcett, 1964). (Another "error" inserted and corrected.)
All of us are in danger of becoming pod-persons through the loss or abandonment of authenticity in exchange for worldly success. It is the Eichman condition that we must fear more than death. In all genuine spiritual experiences or mystical insights and in passionate love-making (which is both religious experience and illumination), we retain selfhood and humanity. We forget the erotic component in mystical experience and devotion. A sexual act between any two adults can be a form of prayer. L. William Countryman, Love Human and Divine (Harrisbourg: Morehouse, 2005), p. 24; and Robert A. Johnson's, We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), pp. 119-187 ("How Tristan Found Iseult of the White Hands and How Love and Death Were Finally Mixed").
There are forces in contemporary America seeking to deprive us of such experiences for the sake of making us more controllable, with fully predictable responses to advertising and politics, conditioned and molded "for our own good" from childhood into docile subjects, "slaves of power." (Michel Foucault)
Some persons will refuse all conditioning -- even at the cost of death -- in order to hold on to basic freedoms, accepting exquisite pain as the cost of the passion made possible only by freedom. According to Sigmund Freud:
"Another technique for fending off suffering is the employment of the displacements of libido which our mental apparatus permits of and through which its function gains so much in flexibility."
Freud's assumptions concerning "suffering" and its role in human life are bizarre at times, as is Freud's constant equating of the psyche with an "apparatus." Why does Freud avoid an examination of mystical reflections on the nature and meaning of suffering, the "blessedness of affliction"? I doubt that Freud understood, say, someone like St. John of the Cross. Carl Jung realizes the importance of this religious literature finding meaning in suffering, insisting that Freud displayed a strange blindness in this matter. I agree with Jung. Back to Freud:
"The task here is that of shifting the intellectual aims in such a way that they cannot come up against frustration from the external world."
Imagine anyone calling him- or herself a "therapist" deliberately inducing frustrations -- like criminal destruction or alteration of written work -- and what Freud would think of such a person. Think of a human monster capable of deliberate destruction of coping mechanisms that allow persons to recover from trauma and learn from suffering because he or she finds the torments of victims "interesting." Worse is someone delighting in destroying life-saving relationships and causing people pain in order to "learn from them." (See "What is it like to be tortured?" and "Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture.")
March 25, 2010 at 4:27 P.M. Numerous "errors" were inserted in essays, including this one today. Many of them previously corrected. I will try to correct all inserted "errors," again. Telephone call from 415-438-5195 at 4:21 P.M., more "errors" and such calls are expected. ("What is it like to be tortured?" and "Roberto Unger's Revolutionary Legal Theory.")
One of the most chilling depictions of evil in literature is the portrait of a seemingly mild, polite, psychoanalyst orchestrating the destruction of several lives with Iago-like delight ("men should be what they seem ...") in Patrick McGrath's Asylum (New York: Vintage Books, 1997). I am told that the film starring the lovely, sadly departed Natasha Richardson, is a bravura performance by Ian McKellen. Attacks on my writings have been especially intense this week. For the "Whatever" generation, I suggest reading and viewing Neil Labute's The Shape of Things. (Adam: "Jesus, next youre going to tell me the handkerchief with the strawberries on it is missing.")
"In this sublimation the instinct lends its assistance. [Notice Freud's undefended assumptions concerning the anti-social nature of instincts.] One gains the most if one can sufficiently heighten the yield of pleasure from the sources of physical and intellectual work. When that is so, fate can do little against one."
Civilization and Its Discontents (New York & London: W.W. Norton, 1961), p. 29.
Here is Carl Jung's rejoinder. I promise to cut down on quotes after this:
"Modern man has lost all the metaphysical certainties of his medieval brother, and set up in their place the idea of material security, general welfare and humanitarianism. But anyone who has still managed to preserve these ideals unshaken must have been injected with a more than ordinary dose of optimism. Even security has gone by the board, for modern man has begun to see that every step forward in material progress steadily increases the threat of a still more stupendous catastrophe. The imagination shrinks in terror from such a picture. What are we to think when the great cities today are perfecting defense measures against gas attacks, and even practise them in dress rehearsals? It can only mean that these attacks have already been planned and provided for ... Let man but accumulate sufficient engines of destruction" -- or psychological torture techniques? -- "and the devil within him will soon be unable to resist putting them to their fated use."
Here is Jung's famous point about loss of self in groups, crowds, by way of a metaphor hinting at the dangers resulting from "adjusting" to society at the cost of one's spiritual resources:
"It is well known that fire-arms go off if only enough of them are together."
The Portable Jung, p. 465.
I suggest that you bear these thoughts in mind when reading Mr. Little's novel. If you wish to see the infinite human capacity for evil, all you have to do is to license and make anonymous the infliction of pain on helpless others. Most people you know will eagerly volunteeer to destroy the lives of their neighbors and derive pleasure from doing so. Take another look at the Nietzsche quote I offered in opening this essay. This entire nightmare might have been Campbell's "hero's journey" leading to a return to the day world of satisfactory creative work, a happy relationship, smiling child and meaning. Such a realization, however, requires that one missing person at the breakfast table and, naturally, the final destruction of the evil aliens or their return to New Jersey where they will not be noticed.
IV. Why the U.S. Constitution is (or was?) Great.
Mr. Craig's character summarizes the utopian ambition that has haunted the Western political imagination since antiquity. From Plato to Marx, the dream of an "organic" political community with a single mission and identity ("as one") has caused wars and suffering, even as it has generated great art and much emancipatory zeal that has led to useful reforms. You are welcome to point to whatever society you wish to demonize. For Miami's Cubanoids, that will be Castro's carceral society. No doubt, for others, we are the political nightmare. We are the carceral society. You decide. Some of the idealism of all utopians is part of America's experiment in self-government. U.S. utopianism is tempered by a mountain of salt when it comes to the moral possibilities of human nature. See generally, Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, 2 Volumes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966).
Jefferson, Madison, Jay, all of the framers read enormous amounts by today's standards. However, they were also lawyers and merchants immersed in worldly affairs, not cloistered academics. They were well aware of politics and the messy business of governance in what is laughingly called "the real world" -- that is, Philadelphia. Lawyers were defined by Marcus Tulius Cicero, my favorite of the great Romans who had a wonderful legal mind, "as philosophers in the marketplace."
Standing in the forum in Rome -- where all the great trials of the Republic were heard -- as the sun was setting and whispering Cicero's denunciations of Marc Anthony is something that I will never forget. I was a young lawyer then, actually believing in something called, "Law." I thought that Americans enjoyed freedom of speech. Who knew? Any more letters that New Jersey officials wish to remove from these copyright-protected essays? Any more attacks on other essays today? "Errors" to be inserted once more?
Access to my e-mails is still blocked. Utopianism is difficult to sustain in markets, or cities, where self-interest and shrewd calculation are the order of the day. Few lawyers are starry-eyed idealists. Some may be practical or cynical idealists with a hard-won sense of the tragic, together with a healthy skepticism about ideology and yet still hopeful about making things better. Read the novels of Scott Turow. I knew a judge who liked to say: "Let us grant your application and see what tomorrow will bring." Meaning, we can always revise any order. Sua sponte, Stuart?
There is a danger in America that, under exigent circumstances, we will be tempted to abandon hard won and carefully preserved protections of individual rights that are vital to personal dignity. A "War Against Terrorism" is always in danger of becoming a war that makes us terrorists. Without that inviolable dignity, the individual becomes a pod-person. Even in a highly secure and insulated community, where all immigrants are expelled and all of us are monitored 24 hours a day, subject to secret questioning under hypnosis, urine samples taken, blood monitored, to guard against terrorists and all dangers to our "utopia," we will neither be absolutely secure nor without a yearning for freedom. We will only become slaves. I am sure that "therapeutic rape" will not make us safer. Perhaps electronic monitoring devices inserted into the rectum of every American will make Mr. Cheney feel safer? This would be a good time to insert more "errors."
Government cannot "fix" people's opinions or determine their values when they have committed no crimes. Government must never act secretly on people's lives. Take a good luck at the photo of New Jersey Chief Justice Stuart Rabner and ask yourself whether you would like to be that guy, even for one day, or to spend a few hours chatting with him about changes in the tax laws. I bet Stuart is quite a ladies' man. I would not be surprised if Stuart Rabner was taken over by the aliens years ago, but no one noticed -- including Stuart. A calculator and pocket protector will make a lovely gift for the holidays, as far as Stuart Rabner is concerned.
Revisions to this essay were lost as a result of hackers' destructive efforts moments ago. This essay and my access to the Internet today have been interfered with by hackers from New Jersey's governmental sewers. Such things are part of my daily writing experience. I wonder whether we can chat with Stuart about that someday. For now, like Stuart, we must "demur."
Even if we are told with whom and when love is allowed, human nature will result in conflict. Evil will rear its ugly head in the form of the controllers of this utopia. Absolute security is not possible, as I say, but dictatorship sure is. These days oppressors wear white coats or blue suits in America. However, oppressors is what they are. All that's missing is the swastikas. In New Jersey, they even have the swastikas -- obtained with Stuart Rabner's assistance, no doubt, for a small fee. What have you become, Stuart? "Successful?" (A number of swastikas were cut into a field near Trenton, not far from the state Supreme Court's chambers.)
Nobody can tell you who to love or what to believe or say, nor whether you are "allowed" to say something. The American Constitution recognizes these facts and sets in place a political-conceptual structure for grownups. Citizens should make their own moral and spiritual decisions, expressing themselves freely. Government exists for your benefit and not (what a shocking idea!) for the benefit of those who govern. New Jersey has yet to hear of this. ("Wadda-ya talkin about? Geez! You must be one of dem Commies!")
Fundamental rights may not be violated for "your own good" since this is to deprive you of your humanity. You cannot be forced to join the pod-persons. All psychobabblers are pod-persons. I wonder how they "feel" about that? Perhaps they have difficulties "relating"? Adjust, Terry Tuchin.
Every American is free and equal to every other member of society before the law. This includes the president of the country or the head of product development at IBM. In practice, these principles are often breached or violated, sometimes for years and with impunity. I have heard New Jersey lawyers and judges laugh at such statements. However, this is the worldly ideal and political commitment of American society: Every person has natural rights to fundamental dignity, freedom and equality; government is your servant, not vice versa; law constrains power to protect you; courts must never act surreptitiously. Judges and courtrooms are there for you, you don't live and work for judges' benefit. The U.S. Constitution -- like "community policing" -- works everywhere, provided that people are willing to fight for it, every day. I will not surrender my freedom. I am not a slave. I am not a laboratory animal. I consent to nothing emanating from New Jersey government.
Here are some questions for Iraquis and all others: How much do you want to be free? How badly do you want a society where equality is not purchased at the cost of living in a concentration camp? Do you wish to live in fear of government? Or would you prefer to have government officials worry about pleasing you? This is a question not only for Americans, but for Brits, Cubans, Chinese, Russians and everybody else. Thomas Jefferson chose the latter option. Freedom with equal dignity. Me too. No wonder these thoughts are considered "subversive" and "unethical" in New Jersey. Is the NSA reading my blogs?
Cuba? Miami? No bosses. No men on white horses. Freedom with equality. If you want to understand America, the Constitution is the place to start. Americans are not going to give up their freedoms without a fight. The danger is that today's loss of autonomy or threats to freedom may be so subtle and invisible that people may not see them or will confuse loss of freedom with an impossible "security." There ain't no such security. After a hundred days in office, it is already clear that America's first African-American president is on his way to being one of our great leaders because he has understood these principles at a visceral level. President Obama is a man centered in his history and political as well as Constitutional tradition. This is greatness: "We will not abandon our principles because of expediency." (Barak Obama.)
Now let us hold Mr. Obama to that promise. Any more cybercrime today? ("'For America to Lead Again': A Speech for President Barak Obama.")
We must fight terrorism abroad without succumbing to terrorism in our own hearts. The Bill of Rights is always needed and must be fought for, on a daily basis -- as many are doing right now -- not only in Iraq, but as journalists criticizing the war. That's another reason why I correct these "errors" dozens of times, no matter how much it hurts me. However painful and frustrating it may be to persist in this struggle, opening my wounds each morning, I will continue to do so. Our rights must not be abandoned in some government clerk's office in triplicate copies. Right, Anne Milgram? Political correctness, Patriot Acts, anything that involves loss of these freedoms is to be rejected or you can kiss your humanity goodbye. We are not "objects" to be conditioned or acted upon. We will not be slaves in exchange for a judgeship or cash in envelopes in New Jersey.
I still find this view of Constitutional government for a FREE PEOPLE compelling and true. We want no strong men or women ruling over us in the United States of America. Whoever made this movie agrees. You don't torture people. You don't suppress or destroy the expressions of others. Those who wish to call me "naive" or "childish" are welcome to do so. I sometimes believe that I am naive about America's promise, which has become only a distant and increasingly unreal hope for many people. I am unwilling to give up my love for the American Constitution and the tradition of interpretation of that document. There is no better charter of government anywhere. Why have we been so willing to throw it away? Mr. Cheney, history will not be kind to you. The "dark side" is not where we should ever go.
I will pass on another planned discussion of consciousness issues. This review is too long already. A fine and idea-filled script adds to the "pleasures of this text." (Derrida.) Pacing is just right for summer attention spans. A little more passion from the leads wouldn't hurt. Any adventure where human love is celebrated will have that much more power for audiences in a time when romance is desired by men and women, but outlawed by the Femi-Nazi thought police as suspiciously "masculine" or traditional behavior. Love for a child is acceptable to the femi-Nazis, but anything that compromises a woman's commitment to the cause of liberation from all things masculine (or the very idea of men) is to be fought against. This idiocy in life -- especially in summer movies! -- only makes people unhappy. If she plays her cards right, my companion on a movie date may always get lucky at the end of the evening -- or even in the theater. ("Is he being ironic, again?")
We desire and need each other -- as lovers -- men and women, equally, or any two adults. Everything follows from this reality. To deny it is madness. We don't need Freud to know that much. An Oscar nomination for the boy actor in this movie -- no, not Mr. Craig -- would be appropriate. "The name is Bond, James Bond" -- Mr. Craig is alleged to have said to the young woman working as an assistant during the shooting of this film. Evidently, it worked. It always does. I have practiced, for hours, my James Bond look and accent, based on Sean Connery's interpretation: "Miss Moneypenny, I presume?" A review of "images of masculinity" in the James Bond films is forthcoming. See Invasion.
September 16, 2009 at 12:15 P.M. "Errors" were inserted, again, in this essay. I have now corrected them.
Bold script and italics are available again -- for a while. If only I were able to use images I would be a much happier man. MSN groups has closed. The Internet may "close" at any time. I will continue to write for as long as possible.
I. Two Tickets for "Invasion" and a Discount on the "Super-Combo" with Twizzlers.
This latest remake of a classic sci-fi movie, based on Jack Finney's 1950s novel, Invasion of the Body Snatchers is smart and scary enough. Yes, I read that book. I've seen all earlier versions of this movie. There are lots of ideas in this work -- as indeed, there were plenty of ideas in the original film. The heroic physician in the original movie is, of course, a man -- Kevin McCarthy, brother of the great Mary McCarthy, with a standard-issue beautiful girlfriend from the fifties in a padded bra and sweater: "Oh, Miles ... What will we do?"
Those were the good old days. During the entire original movie this beautiful woman ran and fought the aliens in high heels and without getting her make-up or hairstyle messed up. That is a neat trick. Women in the fifties were amazing at keeping it all together without appearing to do much. Sci-fi and horror are genres where American writers are allowed to explore ideas, including heavy philosophical ideas. (An "error" was inserted in this sentence since my last review of this essay.)
Among my favorite writers in these pop genres are: Richard Matheson, Robert Bloch, Steven King, William Gibson, Connie Willis. Ms. Kidman's starring role in the philosophically sophisticated Stepford Wives (Ira Levin's novel inspired it) suggests that she likes both ideas and scary movies. So do I. Let me spare you the suspense, this is a good movie and potentially the movie to see if you want to get lucky on your second or third date with that special gal this summer. The man writing these words purchased the videotape of The Mummy, mostly so I can hear Rachel Weisz say: " ... Bembridge scholars believe ..." The mummy is still alive!
Invasion is several movies in one: First, you've got your basic date movie, inviting you to get all "He-Man" on her and protect your damsel in make-believe-distress (women are good at that "rescue me" stuff); second, there's a political text placed on screen with subtle messages about utopias and a defense of imperfect liberal democracies against the alternatives; third, there is a feminist text (what else is new these days), suggesting that men older than twelve are not to be trusted. Luckily, I fall into the trustworthy category -- psychologically, if not chronologically. Fourth, there is a cinematic exploration of psychological theory illustrated and dramatized by what is unfolding on screen.
The viewer is invited to read the film-narrative in various ways, depending on which of the different psychologists invoked by the script one wishes to follow: Freud, Jung (Kidman's character is a Jungian-feminist, Dr. June Singer meets Doris Day in a push-up bra), Adler, Lacan, Laing or Foucault. There is also a metaphysical and epistemological problematic placed on screen concerning "other minds," alterity puzzles, solipsistic dilemmas straight out of Gilbert Ryle to David Chalmers, even a theological question or two. A novel to read this summer is My Zombie Valentine.
You can just go on the cinematic roller coaster ride or you can get all heavy afterwards. It's up to you. I will say something about the major thematic areas and performances by leading actors: Daniel Craig (without a padded bra) is the love interest. Jeremy Northam is the sinister "ex-husband." Women love movies with sinister "ex-husbands." Kidman is very good; the men are adequate; and the child actor is great. I will discuss the plot without giving away too much; then I discuss the psychological theories alluded to in the dialogue (the attack on the fantasy of medicating our troubles away in America is right on the money); next, the psychological possibilities of the text are explored. Are we sharing a collective dream state or psychosis in Bush's America? The dangers associated with loss of authenticity are also explored. See the classic dystopian novel, Yevgeny Zamyatin's We (New York: Avon, 1972).
This leads to political issues concerning conformity and security versus freedom, which are now so timely. From Nietzsche we move to Alfred Adler on "power-struggles" and the threat of terrorists among us. The film ponders the dangers of utopia from Plato to Thomas More, then Marx, also the metaphysics of zombies and subjects, together with our epistemological worries. There are collective psychotic episodes, perhaps, afflicting entire societies. Nazi Germany and others come to mind. I will not take the obvious cheap shot at the Bush Administration. No need.
Jonathan Little's recent massive novel The Kindly Ones, has been poorly reviewed in America because the general fund of cultural knowledge -- even among ostensibly educated Americans -- has diminished substantially. Based on what I have read, in addition to the Greeks, one will need quite a few other sources to do justice to that text: Goethe, Nietzsche, Mann, Huysman, Gide, Michelet, Summers, Shakespeare, as well as numerous psychiatrists and psychologists -- especially, Freud, Jung, Adler and Foucault.
The novel by Mr. Little seems to explore the Western concept of evil from the Greek daimon, to witchcraft and demonology in Christian thought, to slavery and other forms of dehumanization in which Jews featured prominently. Indeed, some of the events in the novel might have been lifted from accounts of the practices of witches. Many witches and demonic worshippers were actually women "guilty" of providing midwife services and being Jewish.
What does Nicole Kidman's character really know in this movie? What do you really know in the absence of confirmation? What is confirmation without meaningful "others"? What happens to ethics or selfhood in a solipsistic nightmare? Kidman's character shoots "people" without too much remorse, why? What happens to identity under extreme stress? What is the significance of the scene in which Nicole Kidman shows a zombie-pod-person "cop" her identification? Doesn't every other pod person also have an i.d.? Don't you have one? The flip side of "adjustment" is "alienation"? Pick your poison. See Richard Schacht, Alienation (New York: Anchor-Doubleday, 1971), pp. 123-153 ("Erich Fromm and Karen Horney").
If asked: "Who are you?" Do you need to check your driver's license to answer that question? Who or what is a "person" in this movie? What is it that makes you who you are? Your driver's license? How does Nicole Kidman know who isn't a person? What is "social autism"? What are the aliens missing? Is the missing ingredient of personhood what was absent from that guy or gal on your last date who discussed electrical circuits for hours? Maybe it was the guy who chatted about philosophy and movies, gulp! I hope not. If an original person meets his or her identical pod-person double, how would you decide which one is the "real" person? Both? Are the guards and torturers in Abu Ghraib "pod-people"? It would be better if they were not human beings. Unfortunately, such torturers are all-too recognizably human.
Ask that special woman in your life whether you may examine her identification. Tell her you're concerned about alien invaders and wish to inspect her body, very carefully, for alien spors. It is my duty to offer this full service to any attractive woman attending this film. Now that the femi-Nazis are upset, we can begin with a famous Nietzsche quote:
"The most universal sign of the modern age: man has lost dignity in his own eyes to an incredible extent. For a long time the center and tragic hero of existence in general; then at least intent on proving himself closely related to the decisive and essentially valuable side of existence -- like all metaphysicians who wish to cling to the dignity of man, with their faith that moral values are cardinal values. Those who have abandoned God cling that much more firmly to the faith in morality."
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, Bk. I: sec. 18 (New York: Vintage, 1968), p. 16.
Notice that Nietzsche does not consider that morality and God may be words pointing to the same human experience. And most important:
"... we approach the age of the Last Man. No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same, whoever feels different gets voluntarily into a madhouse. ..."
The Portable Nietzsche (1954), p. 130.
Are these cinematic pod-people the beings Nietzsche described as: "Men without chests"? Have they finally arrived? Do they shop at K-Mart? Do they live in Ridgewood, New Jersey? Francis Fukuyama makes use of this text in a crucial chapter of his excellent (if uneven and mistaken) book, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992), pp. 287-313. The following section was highlighted when I first read these pages years ago. Let us begin with a helpful insight ...
"... from the correct psychological observation that successful action in life proceeds from a sense of self worth, and if people are deprived of it, this belief in their worthlessness will become a self-fulfilling prophecy."
Imagine, a psychologist or torturer who is the epitome of evil, capable of inducing such feelings of worthlessness in persons for a small fee. I know such people. How are you doing in Clifton, Diana Lisa Riccioli? Paramus?
"Its startling premise, one that is both Kantian and Christian (even if its promoters are unaware of their own intellectual roots), is that everybody is a human being -- and not to be swallowed up in the collectivity -- and therefore possesses a certain dignity. Kant, in the Christian tradition, would have said that all human beings are equally able to decide whether to live by the moral law or not." (p. 302.)
To be deprived of that autonomy, even for "your own good" or for the sake of so-called contentment, adjustment, social goals or some such thing is an unmitigated evil. It is the psychobabble nightmare captured on screen in this movie. Hegel and the young Marx add a notion of voluntary community and social good to the ideal state, without the loss of autonomy or basic humanistic values in civil society. Jefferson and Rousseau might be mentioned also as defenders of communitarian values for free subjects.
This communitarianism is different from the totalitarian states created in the twentieth century by Fascists and State Communists (the latter often misreading the later Marx), where autonomy becomes a category of guilt. Totalitarianism is satirized in this movie which hints at where we are heading in a time and place when all higher emotions, cultivation of feelings through fine art and romance, are denigrated and trivialized as worthless or elitist. "Adjust!" Dr. Phil says, while urging you to join a gym.
The love angle is reduced to secondary status in this latest version of the movie (big mistake) in order to ensure the feminist heroine's compliance with politically correct panaceas. Not necessary, folks. We know she's independent. Let Ms. Kidman get her grove on with Mr. Craig. She'll even take less money if you throw in a love scene or two. Mr. Craig feels the same way. The audience wants these people to care about each other and to struggle together.
America recognizes and balances these competing values by providing for freedom with equality under a government (until recently) of limited powers. Even psychobabblers who wish to make you "happy," "good," or "well-adjusted" used to be required to comply with due process protections, never acting secretly or in violation of privacy and other fundamental rights. New Jersey, of course, has been turned over to the pod-people for years. They tried to give it back, but we said "nothing doing." It's all yours. No wonder they try to destroy my writings. How's it going "David"? Are you still the "Jewish Mengele" Terry Tuchin?
"Security" is a word that excuses many sins, for would-be totalitarians, but they should wonder how secure we ought to be from those who wish to make us secure? Hitler made the trains run on time, there was very little crime, few terrorist incidents disturbed the peace in Nazi Germany. Few of us think of 1930s Germany as paradise on earth.
II. What's the story?
Nicole Kidman is a shrink (significantly, we see a paperback of Jung's treatise on analytical psychology as the movie opens), a single mom with a boy whose "contagious" charm nearly steals the movie. Males are acceptable until age twelve in feminist utopias -- thereafter, they are used for sex and discarded, as indeed males are used and discarded by Manhattan women and many insects.
Ms. Kidman's receptionist is African-American attesting to our heroine's social conscience and hipness. Patients are mostly women complaining of men. The thoughtless males are nearly all overweight in this movie. Something for gentlemen to ponder before joining a gym and refusing to adjust. Women love rebels. Bad boys, rough guys -- especially if they are extremely wealthy. In fact, extremely wealthy men are generally quite popular with women, even when they are slightly pudgy or nerdy.
Kidman's ex-husband, Jeremy Northam, is a government functionary in the "lying and crime comitting business" -- a typical New Jersey lawyer, in other words, stationed in D.C. -- who is sent to a site where a shuttle-like aircraft crashed on returning to earth. He is contaminated by an alien life-force that takes over organisms, like cells forming a single entity, depriving persons of subjectivity and all passion. This is something America is attempting to achieve with the television program, "America's Next Super-Model." (Yes, H.G. Wells' "War of the Worlds" and the Orson Wells' radio phenomenon are hinted at and emulated in this movie.)
Persons quickly become robotic or zombie-like, vomitting into drinks or the skin of others to contaminate them, absorbing them into the great unity. AIDS anxiety mingles with fear of terrorists. Daniel Craig is a doctor who accepts a kind of sample of the alien tissue and turns it over to his friend in a lab. Another African-American is seen, briefly, proving that film-makers know such people exist and are sometimes even scientists in America. This is more than can be said for Latinos in this movie.
Kidman's ex- is contaminated and insists on seeing their son. Audiences know the danger the boy is in. Not only may he be taken-over by the pod-people, but he could be lured into going to law school. I shudder with undiluted horror at such a terrible prospect for any child. Law schools are where normal Americans are turned into servants of the evil aliens and pod-people. This is especially likely for anyone who attends Yale Law School and specializes in corporate taxation or entertainment law.
Illness as metaphor serves to hint at the dangers of totalitarianism. Whatever ideological justification is offered for the loss of conscience or autonomy in a crowd worshipping power, the result can only be evil. Nazism, Stalinism are obvious examples of the political plague of our times. Devil worship, Mr. Little, as a political analogy? Albert Camus is one source for this horror. Also, the link between human autonomy and genuine intellectual or cultural achievement -- a necessary entanglement of genius and the risk of evil -- is made clear.
Anthony Burgess explores this idea (can we control crime without becoming criminals?) in many of his novels, especially A Clockwork Orange. Fear of terrorism may serve to demand the loss of self with equally horrible results -- results like what I have experienced in the form of censorship, insults, denigration and other kinds of permanent harm. This essay has been vandalized so many times that I no longer know how often I have been forced to make the same corrections to the indifference of the authorities sworn to protect my Constitutional rights. This is what America has become -- either a contradiction or a lie.
Paranoia and deep psychosis or just reality sets in as Kidman's character begins to see zombies everywhere. ("Behaviorism is Evil" and "Psychological Torture in the American Legal System.")
One of the most deeply harmful psychological experiences is betrayal. Treachery at the hands of close friends or relatives is the trademark of totalitarianism characterizing the worst excesses of McCarthyism. Family-members and friends informing against one another, pressured to corrupt and betray personal relationships are made complicit in evil. Worse, is the secret mutual informing within professions and academia during the Communist witch hunts -- even today in some terrible places -- that contaminates the life-prospects for everyone within those communities.
When no one can be trusted, all relationships are suspect. All identity-conferring and -confirming relationships are shattered, so the psyche is shattered. All ethical foundations are destroyed. Read Hegel on Stillichkeit. Great stress is added to the mix, attacks on self-esteem (ex-husbands are good at that). Professional destruction at Kidman's office completes the ingredients of psychological assassination through stress and strain. It helps in the destruction of a human psyche for the victim to feel outrage at injustice, especially towards others, coupled with powerlessness thanks to corrupt or ineffective institutions.
At a dinner party, stand-ins for Freud (Russian diplomat) and Jung-Klein-Lacan-Foucault (Kidman) argue over the human capacity for violence and civilization. ("Errors" have been inserted once more in this essay and corrected, again, by me.) Freud argues that civilization is a thin-veneer over animal evil; Kidman expresses reservations from a feminist perspective, echoing her guru Carl Jung:
"Civilized life today demands concentrated, directed conscious functioning, and this entails the risk of a considerable dissociation from the unconscious. The further we are able to remove ourselves from the unconscious through directed functioning, the more readily a proverbial counterposition can build up in the unconscious, and when this breaks out it may have [VERY] disagreeable consequences." Abu Ghraib? 9/11? Iraq? West Bank? Gaza?
The Portable Carl Jung (New York: Penguin, 1971), p. 276. ("The Wanderer and His Shadow.")
That's why it is good to go to movies! Notice the excellent introduction to Jung's writings by Joseph Campbell at pp. vi-xxxii, which I have read several times lately. Notice also that Jung's unconscious, personal and collective, is very different from Freud's idea of the id. Both German thinkers are rooted in German idealistic and other traditions of thought, including Romanticism. Any person lacking all knowledge of this philosophical literature will not be able to appreciate the richness in the insights of either Freud or Jung, or most of the classical psychological thinkers for that matter. Whatever else they were, Freud and Jung were contributors to Western philosophy.
It is important to remember that both Freud and Jung were great admirers of the poetry of Friedrich Holderlin, for example, Hegel's classmate and early friend. (I would write more on this issue, but I'd only provide hackers and New Jersey's legal whores with opportunities for more destruction of my text.) My favorite of the philosophically-adept Freudians is Jonathan Lear, who (sensibly) returns Freud to his philosophical sources -- not only the Greeks, also Schopenhauer and the Sturm und Drag poets. ("'The Reader': A Movie Review.")
In desperation, civilization vanishes and so does morality, we are told, but is this true? I doubt it. Kidman's shrink is willing to die for her child and refuses to shoot Mr. Craig above the knee, especially avoiding the groin area, which she clearly cherishes. Freud again. Something survives even the greatest trauma, some essential dignity and autonomy, capacity for love, that refuses absorption into a passifying false collectivity as opposed to true community, which must always be chosen. The pod-people have no freedom and morality is non-existent. True, everything is peaceful, but it is the peace of the grave because individuality is gone even if there is plenty of adjustment.
Anything is better than this death-in-life, unwilling absorption into inauthenticity in the New Jersey-like shopping mall horror of sameness offered by the aliens. Absolute loss of affect among mall-dwellers is to be avoided at all costs, even if such a loss results in material "success" or acceptance. Ms. Kidman cannot "go along to get along." Hence, she must fight for herself and her child, also for her lover, to remain free and human. This very fighting is what all torturers seek to destroy. The human capacity to struggle for life (love) is the essence of humanity. Total adjustment is death for some of us. Nearly all of the zombies bear a suspicious resemblance to Stuart Rabner. Patrick Swayze, shortly before succumbing to a fatal illness, said that "winning in life is not giving up." I agree. ("Friedrich Nietzsche on Self-Realization.")
These thoughts are nicely summed up by Jose Ortega y Gasset -- a philosopher much admired by Sartre, who anticipated many themes in French thought. Ortega is "one of those Latinos" who, I was assured, "can not be smart enough to be a philosopher" -- "... a Spanish existentialist who, unlike Sartre, was also a cultural and political conservative: 'the stone is given its existence: it need not fight for what it is ... Man has to make his own existence at every single moment.' ('Man the technician') The image of a 'fight' is never very far from the existentialist mind ... "
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy (New York: Penguin, 1994), p. 309 and Jose Ortega y Gasset, What is Philosophy? (New York: W.W. Norton, 1960), pp. 34-35.
The viewer is invited to come to his or her own conclusions. Was this all a dream? A psychotic episode? A kind of metanoia for the Kidman character through a Jungian mythic landscape. Is the movie warning of the loss of authenticity in a failed marriage and anxiety about forthcoming feminist independence on the part of non-zombie-like women? Too much empirical evidence suggests otherwise: Mr. Craig's final appearance at breakfast indicates that there are some things a feminist gal-pal will not give up. I know what it's like to want and miss someone important in your life. I can relate to Ms. Kidman's adventure. Real marriage is always a success. So is every passionate and loving relationship in our lives -- there will be very few people that really matter for any of us. Equally essential is commitment to shared struggle on behalf of those we love and the community in which we live. Marriage. Conversation. I will never stop loving those few people who matter in my life.
One more "error" inserted by the Trenton "pod-persons" and corrected.
III. Journey Into the Subconscious.
An offstage presence in this movie is R.D. Laing, whose cautions concerning the dangerous loss of spiritual life, anomie, falsehood and doubts about normality are more timely today than ever before:
"Laing argued, in effect, that the violence we do to ourselves -- or that is done to us -- in the process of normalization is reflected, among other things, in the loss of the numinous as a dimension of normal human experience. Interpersonal and collective violence is but one more symptom of the same underlying malaise. Much as he lamented the loss of the numinous, however, Laing was not advocating a return to a repressive, theocratic society, nor to a religious creed based on a dogmatic interpretation of scripture. In fact, like Jung, Laing was apt to disparage religious belief AS A POOR AND INAUTHENTIC SUBSTITUTE FOR RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE." (emphasis added)
Daniel Burston, The Crucible of Experience: R.D. Laing and the Crisis of Psychotherapy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 107-108. See the pulp classic Herbert D. Castle, The Reassembled Man (Conn.: Fawcett, 1964). (Another "error" inserted and corrected.)
All of us are in danger of becoming pod-persons through the loss or abandonment of authenticity in exchange for worldly success. It is the Eichman condition that we must fear more than death. In all genuine spiritual experiences or mystical insights and in passionate love-making (which is both religious experience and illumination), we retain selfhood and humanity. We forget the erotic component in mystical experience and devotion. A sexual act between any two adults can be a form of prayer. L. William Countryman, Love Human and Divine (Harrisbourg: Morehouse, 2005), p. 24; and Robert A. Johnson's, We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), pp. 119-187 ("How Tristan Found Iseult of the White Hands and How Love and Death Were Finally Mixed").
There are forces in contemporary America seeking to deprive us of such experiences for the sake of making us more controllable, with fully predictable responses to advertising and politics, conditioned and molded "for our own good" from childhood into docile subjects, "slaves of power." (Michel Foucault)
Some persons will refuse all conditioning -- even at the cost of death -- in order to hold on to basic freedoms, accepting exquisite pain as the cost of the passion made possible only by freedom. According to Sigmund Freud:
"Another technique for fending off suffering is the employment of the displacements of libido which our mental apparatus permits of and through which its function gains so much in flexibility."
Freud's assumptions concerning "suffering" and its role in human life are bizarre at times, as is Freud's constant equating of the psyche with an "apparatus." Why does Freud avoid an examination of mystical reflections on the nature and meaning of suffering, the "blessedness of affliction"? I doubt that Freud understood, say, someone like St. John of the Cross. Carl Jung realizes the importance of this religious literature finding meaning in suffering, insisting that Freud displayed a strange blindness in this matter. I agree with Jung. Back to Freud:
"The task here is that of shifting the intellectual aims in such a way that they cannot come up against frustration from the external world."
Imagine anyone calling him- or herself a "therapist" deliberately inducing frustrations -- like criminal destruction or alteration of written work -- and what Freud would think of such a person. Think of a human monster capable of deliberate destruction of coping mechanisms that allow persons to recover from trauma and learn from suffering because he or she finds the torments of victims "interesting." Worse is someone delighting in destroying life-saving relationships and causing people pain in order to "learn from them." (See "What is it like to be tortured?" and "Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture.")
March 25, 2010 at 4:27 P.M. Numerous "errors" were inserted in essays, including this one today. Many of them previously corrected. I will try to correct all inserted "errors," again. Telephone call from 415-438-5195 at 4:21 P.M., more "errors" and such calls are expected. ("What is it like to be tortured?" and "Roberto Unger's Revolutionary Legal Theory.")
One of the most chilling depictions of evil in literature is the portrait of a seemingly mild, polite, psychoanalyst orchestrating the destruction of several lives with Iago-like delight ("men should be what they seem ...") in Patrick McGrath's Asylum (New York: Vintage Books, 1997). I am told that the film starring the lovely, sadly departed Natasha Richardson, is a bravura performance by Ian McKellen. Attacks on my writings have been especially intense this week. For the "Whatever" generation, I suggest reading and viewing Neil Labute's The Shape of Things. (Adam: "Jesus, next youre going to tell me the handkerchief with the strawberries on it is missing.")
"In this sublimation the instinct lends its assistance. [Notice Freud's undefended assumptions concerning the anti-social nature of instincts.] One gains the most if one can sufficiently heighten the yield of pleasure from the sources of physical and intellectual work. When that is so, fate can do little against one."
Civilization and Its Discontents (New York & London: W.W. Norton, 1961), p. 29.
Here is Carl Jung's rejoinder. I promise to cut down on quotes after this:
"Modern man has lost all the metaphysical certainties of his medieval brother, and set up in their place the idea of material security, general welfare and humanitarianism. But anyone who has still managed to preserve these ideals unshaken must have been injected with a more than ordinary dose of optimism. Even security has gone by the board, for modern man has begun to see that every step forward in material progress steadily increases the threat of a still more stupendous catastrophe. The imagination shrinks in terror from such a picture. What are we to think when the great cities today are perfecting defense measures against gas attacks, and even practise them in dress rehearsals? It can only mean that these attacks have already been planned and provided for ... Let man but accumulate sufficient engines of destruction" -- or psychological torture techniques? -- "and the devil within him will soon be unable to resist putting them to their fated use."
Here is Jung's famous point about loss of self in groups, crowds, by way of a metaphor hinting at the dangers resulting from "adjusting" to society at the cost of one's spiritual resources:
"It is well known that fire-arms go off if only enough of them are together."
The Portable Jung, p. 465.
I suggest that you bear these thoughts in mind when reading Mr. Little's novel. If you wish to see the infinite human capacity for evil, all you have to do is to license and make anonymous the infliction of pain on helpless others. Most people you know will eagerly volunteeer to destroy the lives of their neighbors and derive pleasure from doing so. Take another look at the Nietzsche quote I offered in opening this essay. This entire nightmare might have been Campbell's "hero's journey" leading to a return to the day world of satisfactory creative work, a happy relationship, smiling child and meaning. Such a realization, however, requires that one missing person at the breakfast table and, naturally, the final destruction of the evil aliens or their return to New Jersey where they will not be noticed.
IV. Why the U.S. Constitution is (or was?) Great.
Mr. Craig's character summarizes the utopian ambition that has haunted the Western political imagination since antiquity. From Plato to Marx, the dream of an "organic" political community with a single mission and identity ("as one") has caused wars and suffering, even as it has generated great art and much emancipatory zeal that has led to useful reforms. You are welcome to point to whatever society you wish to demonize. For Miami's Cubanoids, that will be Castro's carceral society. No doubt, for others, we are the political nightmare. We are the carceral society. You decide. Some of the idealism of all utopians is part of America's experiment in self-government. U.S. utopianism is tempered by a mountain of salt when it comes to the moral possibilities of human nature. See generally, Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, 2 Volumes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966).
Jefferson, Madison, Jay, all of the framers read enormous amounts by today's standards. However, they were also lawyers and merchants immersed in worldly affairs, not cloistered academics. They were well aware of politics and the messy business of governance in what is laughingly called "the real world" -- that is, Philadelphia. Lawyers were defined by Marcus Tulius Cicero, my favorite of the great Romans who had a wonderful legal mind, "as philosophers in the marketplace."
Standing in the forum in Rome -- where all the great trials of the Republic were heard -- as the sun was setting and whispering Cicero's denunciations of Marc Anthony is something that I will never forget. I was a young lawyer then, actually believing in something called, "Law." I thought that Americans enjoyed freedom of speech. Who knew? Any more letters that New Jersey officials wish to remove from these copyright-protected essays? Any more attacks on other essays today? "Errors" to be inserted once more?
Access to my e-mails is still blocked. Utopianism is difficult to sustain in markets, or cities, where self-interest and shrewd calculation are the order of the day. Few lawyers are starry-eyed idealists. Some may be practical or cynical idealists with a hard-won sense of the tragic, together with a healthy skepticism about ideology and yet still hopeful about making things better. Read the novels of Scott Turow. I knew a judge who liked to say: "Let us grant your application and see what tomorrow will bring." Meaning, we can always revise any order. Sua sponte, Stuart?
There is a danger in America that, under exigent circumstances, we will be tempted to abandon hard won and carefully preserved protections of individual rights that are vital to personal dignity. A "War Against Terrorism" is always in danger of becoming a war that makes us terrorists. Without that inviolable dignity, the individual becomes a pod-person. Even in a highly secure and insulated community, where all immigrants are expelled and all of us are monitored 24 hours a day, subject to secret questioning under hypnosis, urine samples taken, blood monitored, to guard against terrorists and all dangers to our "utopia," we will neither be absolutely secure nor without a yearning for freedom. We will only become slaves. I am sure that "therapeutic rape" will not make us safer. Perhaps electronic monitoring devices inserted into the rectum of every American will make Mr. Cheney feel safer? This would be a good time to insert more "errors."
Government cannot "fix" people's opinions or determine their values when they have committed no crimes. Government must never act secretly on people's lives. Take a good luck at the photo of New Jersey Chief Justice Stuart Rabner and ask yourself whether you would like to be that guy, even for one day, or to spend a few hours chatting with him about changes in the tax laws. I bet Stuart is quite a ladies' man. I would not be surprised if Stuart Rabner was taken over by the aliens years ago, but no one noticed -- including Stuart. A calculator and pocket protector will make a lovely gift for the holidays, as far as Stuart Rabner is concerned.
Revisions to this essay were lost as a result of hackers' destructive efforts moments ago. This essay and my access to the Internet today have been interfered with by hackers from New Jersey's governmental sewers. Such things are part of my daily writing experience. I wonder whether we can chat with Stuart about that someday. For now, like Stuart, we must "demur."
Even if we are told with whom and when love is allowed, human nature will result in conflict. Evil will rear its ugly head in the form of the controllers of this utopia. Absolute security is not possible, as I say, but dictatorship sure is. These days oppressors wear white coats or blue suits in America. However, oppressors is what they are. All that's missing is the swastikas. In New Jersey, they even have the swastikas -- obtained with Stuart Rabner's assistance, no doubt, for a small fee. What have you become, Stuart? "Successful?" (A number of swastikas were cut into a field near Trenton, not far from the state Supreme Court's chambers.)
Nobody can tell you who to love or what to believe or say, nor whether you are "allowed" to say something. The American Constitution recognizes these facts and sets in place a political-conceptual structure for grownups. Citizens should make their own moral and spiritual decisions, expressing themselves freely. Government exists for your benefit and not (what a shocking idea!) for the benefit of those who govern. New Jersey has yet to hear of this. ("Wadda-ya talkin about? Geez! You must be one of dem Commies!")
Fundamental rights may not be violated for "your own good" since this is to deprive you of your humanity. You cannot be forced to join the pod-persons. All psychobabblers are pod-persons. I wonder how they "feel" about that? Perhaps they have difficulties "relating"? Adjust, Terry Tuchin.
Every American is free and equal to every other member of society before the law. This includes the president of the country or the head of product development at IBM. In practice, these principles are often breached or violated, sometimes for years and with impunity. I have heard New Jersey lawyers and judges laugh at such statements. However, this is the worldly ideal and political commitment of American society: Every person has natural rights to fundamental dignity, freedom and equality; government is your servant, not vice versa; law constrains power to protect you; courts must never act surreptitiously. Judges and courtrooms are there for you, you don't live and work for judges' benefit. The U.S. Constitution -- like "community policing" -- works everywhere, provided that people are willing to fight for it, every day. I will not surrender my freedom. I am not a slave. I am not a laboratory animal. I consent to nothing emanating from New Jersey government.
Here are some questions for Iraquis and all others: How much do you want to be free? How badly do you want a society where equality is not purchased at the cost of living in a concentration camp? Do you wish to live in fear of government? Or would you prefer to have government officials worry about pleasing you? This is a question not only for Americans, but for Brits, Cubans, Chinese, Russians and everybody else. Thomas Jefferson chose the latter option. Freedom with equal dignity. Me too. No wonder these thoughts are considered "subversive" and "unethical" in New Jersey. Is the NSA reading my blogs?
Cuba? Miami? No bosses. No men on white horses. Freedom with equality. If you want to understand America, the Constitution is the place to start. Americans are not going to give up their freedoms without a fight. The danger is that today's loss of autonomy or threats to freedom may be so subtle and invisible that people may not see them or will confuse loss of freedom with an impossible "security." There ain't no such security. After a hundred days in office, it is already clear that America's first African-American president is on his way to being one of our great leaders because he has understood these principles at a visceral level. President Obama is a man centered in his history and political as well as Constitutional tradition. This is greatness: "We will not abandon our principles because of expediency." (Barak Obama.)
Now let us hold Mr. Obama to that promise. Any more cybercrime today? ("'For America to Lead Again': A Speech for President Barak Obama.")
We must fight terrorism abroad without succumbing to terrorism in our own hearts. The Bill of Rights is always needed and must be fought for, on a daily basis -- as many are doing right now -- not only in Iraq, but as journalists criticizing the war. That's another reason why I correct these "errors" dozens of times, no matter how much it hurts me. However painful and frustrating it may be to persist in this struggle, opening my wounds each morning, I will continue to do so. Our rights must not be abandoned in some government clerk's office in triplicate copies. Right, Anne Milgram? Political correctness, Patriot Acts, anything that involves loss of these freedoms is to be rejected or you can kiss your humanity goodbye. We are not "objects" to be conditioned or acted upon. We will not be slaves in exchange for a judgeship or cash in envelopes in New Jersey.
I still find this view of Constitutional government for a FREE PEOPLE compelling and true. We want no strong men or women ruling over us in the United States of America. Whoever made this movie agrees. You don't torture people. You don't suppress or destroy the expressions of others. Those who wish to call me "naive" or "childish" are welcome to do so. I sometimes believe that I am naive about America's promise, which has become only a distant and increasingly unreal hope for many people. I am unwilling to give up my love for the American Constitution and the tradition of interpretation of that document. There is no better charter of government anywhere. Why have we been so willing to throw it away? Mr. Cheney, history will not be kind to you. The "dark side" is not where we should ever go.
I will pass on another planned discussion of consciousness issues. This review is too long already. A fine and idea-filled script adds to the "pleasures of this text." (Derrida.) Pacing is just right for summer attention spans. A little more passion from the leads wouldn't hurt. Any adventure where human love is celebrated will have that much more power for audiences in a time when romance is desired by men and women, but outlawed by the Femi-Nazi thought police as suspiciously "masculine" or traditional behavior. Love for a child is acceptable to the femi-Nazis, but anything that compromises a woman's commitment to the cause of liberation from all things masculine (or the very idea of men) is to be fought against. This idiocy in life -- especially in summer movies! -- only makes people unhappy. If she plays her cards right, my companion on a movie date may always get lucky at the end of the evening -- or even in the theater. ("Is he being ironic, again?")
We desire and need each other -- as lovers -- men and women, equally, or any two adults. Everything follows from this reality. To deny it is madness. We don't need Freud to know that much. An Oscar nomination for the boy actor in this movie -- no, not Mr. Craig -- would be appropriate. "The name is Bond, James Bond" -- Mr. Craig is alleged to have said to the young woman working as an assistant during the shooting of this film. Evidently, it worked. It always does. I have practiced, for hours, my James Bond look and accent, based on Sean Connery's interpretation: "Miss Moneypenny, I presume?" A review of "images of masculinity" in the James Bond films is forthcoming. See Invasion.
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