My Confusion

Purposiveness: The quality or fact of being purposive.

Purposive: 1. Characterized by being adapted to some purpose or end; serving or tending to serve some purpose in the constitution of things. 2. Acting or performed with conscious purpose or design.

Kant says, “Beauty is an object’s form of purposiveness insofar as it is perceived in the object without the presentation of a purpose.”

So here’s the question: How can something, an art object for instance, have purposiveness but have no purpose? Does it mean that art is imbued with some kind of intent but it still has no particular practical function? I know I’m a little slow to the draw sometimes, but this is downright perplexing to me.

Help me out people. I know you’re reading so tell me what the deal is yo.

My Thoughts On Plato

DISCLAIMER: As usual, if you are not interested in Plato, I wouldn’t bother reading this post, it is probably really, really boring.

Believe it or not, I had my first encounter with Plato’s Republic today. I am doing a Ph.D. in English so you’d think I’d have read it; but until now I have successfully avoided it. It is interesting — but really problematic. Here’s the deal, if you’re at all interested:

Republic Books II, III, and X are dialogues all about how to properly educate the future rulers, or guardians, of the hypothetical ideal society they (Socrates and his buds) are constructing. These books are of particular interest to literary studies because they are about poetry and art, as acts of representation, and their role in this ideal society.

According to Plato’s Socrates, the education system should be comprised of “exercise for the body and cultural studies for the mind” (49). [As an aside, I'm not talking about Plato's opinion or Socrates' opinion -- it is all spoken by Plato's textual representation of Socrates; a clever way of disavowing responsibility for the opinions put forth]. In the dialogue, they agree that cultural studies should come first, as children are told stories from the beginnings of their lives. What is made clear right from the get-go here is that there is a strong moral imperative to censor poetry and stories for children, as these representations shape their view of the world; and, according to Plato’s Socrates, once a world view or ethical code is impressed upon a child, it cannot be changed. Though poetry may be allegorical, children do not have the capacity to tell the difference between something that is allegorical and something that is not; thus, it is important to shield them from the possibility of corruption by censoring poetry (and other art) that is not “true” and morally good. I put true in quotation marks there because I think that Plato’s notion of truth and morality is rather more ambiguous than he would like it to be. More on that later.

So, what he argues is, ultimately, that “a very great deal of importance should be place on ensuring that the first stories [children] hear are best adapted for their moral improvement” (51). From there he is challenged to define what the boundaries of poetry should be. It is unquestionable that the state’s rulers will decide what can be written and what cannot; but how do the rulers make those decisions? It is here that Plato’s Socrates makes his appeal to a universal morality.

First, he takes issue with the idea that gods be represented as all-powerful and responsible for everything. After all, god is good, and hence cannot be responsible for any bad in the world. Gods should not be represented as performing actions out of ill will, as they often are in the epics of his time. It is okay for gods to punish in poetry, but only if it can be shown that those on the receiving end were deserving of punishment, and only as long as the audience does not see those people suffering as a result of their punishment. He also takes issue with gods being represented as shape-shifters. If gods are perfect (as, for him, they undoubtedly are), then they could only change their form for the worse; and any being who is intrinsically good would not even consider changing for the worse. So not only should they not be represented as such in poetry, but women should also refrain from telling their children stories of gods taking on disguises and spying on them in order to encourage good behaviour. Plato’s Socrates claims that if gods are allowed to be represented as such by poets — as shape-shifters, trouble-makers, or fallible beings who act out of vengeance or emotion or trickery — then the future guardians of the Republic would not grow up as religious people, nor would they strive for godliness themselves.

Not only should poets not create unfavourable representations of the gods, but they should also not represent Hades in a negative light, for that instills a fear of death in children and when they grow up to be soldiers they will not have the courage to die in battle if necessary. The logical following from this is that poets should not represent mourning either, for mourning for the loss of someone else implies that their death is not a happy and courageous moment. There is a strong suggestion here that mourning and sadness is also a weakness; that it is not manly or desirable to indulge in emotions. He even goes so far as to say that representations of laughter are equally bad because they encourage laughter in their audience, and laughter is too emotional. Of paramount importance is that poetry not represent indulgence in any bodily pleasures either, including food, drink, and sex. If these things are mentioned in poetry it should only be to show a hero refusing temptation. These criteria don’t only apply to representations of the gods, but also of human heroes and regular people. So Plato’s Republic is a truly ascetic state, rooted in detached rationality.

When a child is raised with only images of beauty and goodness, then they will inevitably become rational and reasonable. They would learn to love only beautiful things and be necessarily offended by badness or ugliness.

What the dialogue comes to in Book X is that poetry (and all types of artistic representation) is “two generations away from reality” (70) — God creates the true thing, the human manufacturer makes a copy of it, and the artist is only representing the copy. And in addition, representations are always representations of the appearance of things and not things as they actually are. This logic of course relies on the theory of the Idea or the Form: that, of each thing, there is an innate Form or Idea, a type, and all singular manifestations of that type are copies of how the individual creator interprets the Form or Idea. For example, there is the Idea of a table — and there are all the tables that ever were. No individual table contains the complete essence of table-ness. And the artist who paints a table is only representing his own perception of how a particular table looked from a particular angle, through the distortion of his own position. It is a copy of a copy. The audience is the final link in the artistic chain and, by their own perceptions, they further distort the image. So, in the end, there is no truth.

By this logic, poetic representation is merely a form of trickery that plays on our perceptions’ propensity to distort things. His conclusions are such: “a representer knows nothing of value about the things he represents; representation is a kind of game, and shouldn’t be taken seriously; and those who compose tragedies in iambic and epic verse are, without exception, outstanding examples of representers” (74-5). The only way around this problem is the use of reason and rationality — rational thinking, like for instance measuring and counting, cannot be fooled by distorted perceptions.

Not only does poetry provide false representation, but it engages that part of a person who is vulnerable to wrong thinking by moving them to emotion and irrationality. Because of these dangers then, poetry must be banned from the Republic in order to protect the future guardians and provide them a proper moral upbringing. All that Plato’s Socrates would allow would be “hymns to the gods and eulogies of virtuous men. If you admit the entertaining Muse of lyric and epic poetry, then instead of law and the shared acceptance of reason as the best guide, the kinds of your community will be pleasure and pain” (79). What is at stake in this decision is nothing less than the morality of men and the stability of the state.

There are a few things at issue here. First of all, these decisions are all made by the state’s rulers. He even claims that, though poets lie, and lying is tantamount to committing a crime against the state, it is necessary for the rulers to lie to the people to maintain order and peace. This is a truly terrifying totalitarian state. Who places boundaries on the rulers? No one. They are not even subject to the same morality as everyone else as it is deemed okay for them to take whatever liberties necessary to maintain peace and order, otherwise known as control and power. It is the ongoing state of exception in which all kinds of atrocities are permissable if rulers perceive a threat to their state, which inevitably means a threat to their own power.

Second major issue: This all depends on a universal idea of moral goodness. But where is this morality coming from for Plato? It is clear that he refers to the morals laid out by God — but what are those morals? Is there agreement on them at this particular historical moment? I wasn’t around in Greece a few millennia ago, but I seriously doubt it. If there were agreement, these sorts of writings and reflections would have been unnecessary. Or at the very least, Plato’s Socrates wouldn’t find it necessary for rulers to lie to their people to maintain order, for the people and rulers would already agree on the principles of conduct.

At the conclusion of Book X, he says that what is at stake is “whether one becomes a good or a bad person, and consequently has the calibre not to be distracted by prestige, wealth, political power, or even poetry from applying oneself to morality and whatever else goodness involves” (80). I suppose that, in Plato’s Republic, if people are brought up in the way he suggests, they wouldn’t be vulnerable to those things that make the terrible totalitarian ruler. But I imagine that once those people experienced the power that comes with the state of exception, they may not be so impermeable to corruption.

Incidentally, part of my need to summarize the basics here is to make sure that I actually get the basics… So if you are familiar with Plato, and you think I’m missing something, please tell me!

More on Ethics

Note: this is a continuation of a post from three days ago.

I had an interesting class on ethics yesterday and it occurred to me that I often use the words morals and ethics interchangeably though they are not exactly the same thing. Not that I didn’t know there’s a slight difference, but I suppose it didn’t occur to me the ramifications of not distinguishing between them. So first I will lay it out here: ethics is the study of morals, the field of morals, it is used to describe the morals by which a person lives. Ethical, as an adjective, is often used interchangeably with moral, but it can also simply describe the act of adhering to a moral code, whichever code that may be. By that definition, what is ethical for one person could be unethical for another. But the adjective ethical could also be universal and unbiased in that it simply describes the act of assuming a position in the world or in a situation.

It may seem that we have some universal morals — like, for example, it is immoral to kill a person. But what if that person is the Buddha? Apparently, if you meet the Buddha in the street you are supposed to kill him, to liberate him from this last life so he can become fully realized. So for Buddhists the act of killing someone is, in that particular case, morally right, even though it is wrong in every other case. Say you come across a mother drowning her child and you stop her. But what if that child was the Buddha? This means you have actually done the child a disservice. Not to say you shouldn’t save the child — you absolutely should. But the point is that we need to consider all possible outcomes and be aware that what we think is just could also be unjust in some way. Again, not to say we shouldn’t do it, but we should at least know that we are making a choice that can never be a fully right, fully decisive choice.

This is the argument put forth by Derrida in Specters of Marx. For him, the ethical is a way of positioning yourself and the only truly unjust act is one that we believe, nay – know, to be completely just. Acting ethically is constantly trying to improve the situations we find ourselves in while also being aware that our actions could make things worse. I like Derrida’s view of ethics. It encourages us to act in the best ways possible, but to also maintain an open mind so that we don’t forget about the various others we risk treating unjustly by accident.

Back to Margaret Somervile. Last night, in her third lecture, she said that she opposes same-sex marriage because it denies the child his or her given right to have (and be emotionally connected to) a biological mother and father. This coming from the woman who said two days earlier that a “shared ethics” would respect all human life, human dignity, and the human spirit. By denying gay people the right to marry and have families, she feels we would be treating the children justly. But she fails to acknowledge that we would then be denying gay people their right to live as they choose, to have their dignity, to embrace the shared values of their community — in short, we would be denying them a proper place in the world and in the law. How is that just if justice is as she defines it? It really brought home Derrida’s point to me — that there is always another other who risks being treated unjustly, even when we feel our actions are just.

It seems to me, after three days of listening, that Margaret Somervile is a conservative who believes that a return to an idealized Christian morality is the only way we can save ourselves. And that’s fine, she has as much right to feel that as I have the right to feel otherwise — but it can’t be the basis of a “shared ethics” in a global context.

A Shared Ethics?

I just spent the past hour listening to CBC Radio’s Ideas. This week they are running the 2006 Massey Lectures, a series of lectures delivered across the country last year by Margaret Somerville titled “The Ethical Imagination.” Her project is to outline a “shared ethics for an interdependent world.”

I have spent the past hour squirming in my seat, coming up with a “but what about…” every 10 seconds in my head. My discomfort came right at the beginning when she started talking about the “human philosophico-spiritual heritage” that exists in opposition to science, making clear of course that by “spiritual” she meant religious. She presents the phrase “the secular sacred” as a way of making it seem she is not talking about religion – but she verifies over and over again throughout that she is in fact talking about religion. She even says that we need to develop a new “shared ethics” since we can no longer rely on a shared religion for moral support in this new global world.

Was there ever a point when we could rely on a shared religion for a universal ethical code?

Part of my being on guard here no doubt comes from having (coincidentally) just read Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer. “Homo sacer” is “sacred man.” Agamben traces the history of the idea of life as sacred to show that the origin of “sacred man” is inextricably linked to the idea of sovereign power. In ancient times, the man legally labeled “sacred” was a criminal — he was the man who was banished, placed outside the law, protected from ritual or state killings but whose straight murder was not considered homicide. He was called sacred because he belonged already to the underworld. “Sacred man” is an originary site of political power, being that he represents the primary instance of power operating outside the law, or power creating a state of exception. Ultimately Agamben argues that the “sacredness” of life and the totalitarian state were born out of the same moment and they rely on each other for their existence. This is my abridged version of Homo Sacer, but hopefully it is enough to explain why Margaret Somervile’s mention of the “sacred” element of humanity made me immediately skeptical.

Maybe I am unnecessarily skeptical – negative even – but anyone who uses the phrase “mosaic of sharing” is suspect in my books.

So in her vision of “shared ethics,” we would all adhere to the following three rules: respect all life, respect human dignity, and respect the human spirit. That sounds nice but let’s speak in practical terms here. I’m all for respecting life — but how exactly do you define “human dignity” or “the human spirit”? Isn’t it plain to see that everyone has a different perspective on what is dignified, honest, and valuable? She says we need to figure out where all of our values overlap and eliminate everything that falls in the grey area in between. But really, isn’t just about anything justifiable to someone out there? And who are these someones whose values we need to acknowledge — are we talking governments or individuals here? She actually tried to argue that ethics and morality are not social constructs, but that they are natural elements of humanity. And that one, I just plain don’t buy.

Of course she pre-empted people like me being in the audience. When she says we must appeal to the “innate moral element in humans” she immediately qualifies it by adding that, though some of us may not believe morality is a natural given, we’re better off believing in it than not. Again, that’s nice, but entirely unrealistic.

Not to mention, doesn’t our current world crisis result so much from globalization? So why then are we looking for a global ethics? Shouldn’t we be moving towards localization instead? That’s just my bias — and I suppose that’s my idealism too. Somervile has a global idealism and I remain nostalgic for a more local community-based existence.

My biggest criticism of Agamben was that he spent 199 pages talking about the failings of our political system and our lack of ethics and 1 page talking about how we could change it. And that 1 page was of course completely vague. But I sincerely hope that Ms. Somervile’s “shared ethics” is not the best solution we can come up with.

The lectures will continue each night for the rest of the week and she will be talking about imagination, literature, poetry, art, etc, and how those things can contribute to constructing a “shared ethics.” She may win me over yet — but it will be a difficult task.

If you are still reading this, well, thanks for indulging me. This is all very half-baked and reactionary and I’ll probably wake up tomorrow morning with a new perspective on the whole thing. But hopefully someone out there also heard the show or has some thoughts about ethics and global politics cause I am in the mood for a debate!