Ciceronian Review

My Copy Is Better Copy

The Whitney is presenting a fairly large show of work by Sherry Levine, a retrospective, reviewed in today's Wall Street Journal.  Ms. Levine's work is found in many museums and sells for very large sums.  She has become quite wealthy over the years. She is famous for her work on issues of appropriation and commodification.  She took photos of 21 of Walker Evans works, arranged them in a grid on a wall and enclosed them with a frame.  So she had a 22nd so to speak.  Or, a bronzed urinal after Duchamp.  The review is scathing about the work, and I have, or more accurately, happily, agree.  The ideas of her work are very thin indeed.  It is quite dificult to take seriously purported commentary on commodification that is itself just commodification of someone else's work.  And sold for high prices.  (One should form A Sherry Levine Production, LLC and then sell photos of Sherry Levine photos.  Be a bit weird for her to object.) 

There are a number of problems with the project (so to speak).  First among them is that it is entirely insular and precious.  There is no significant challenge to notions of originality, for example, in the work because it merely replicates the claim of originality -- her copying is original.  Well, hardly.  It is not even an original idea, having been explored pretty thoroughly in the first half of the 20th century, although for much less remuneration.  Second, it requires so much explanation to have any value that the objects themselves are of no consequence.  And then one is back to the dull ideas being enacted.  And third it is built out of intellectual and empirical mistakes. 

Or I am old and crabby, which may well be.

Birthday

Today is the anniversary of the bird of Flann O'Brien a rather funny and unhappy man.  In fact, one of the great modernist writers.  For an appreciation, this post is a start.

Scary Clams

If this sign is reliable, the clams in Washington are like the mythically armed bear. 

Weak Fingers

Suskind's book on policy disputes within the Obama administration has garnered mixed, but overall positive reviews.  Economics of Contempt suggests the book has been given something of a pass, perhaps by reviewers who do not understand the topic.  The excerpts noted by EC are more than disturbing -- if they are not misquotations then Susskind (and his editor) have feeble grasp of the basic economics.  Suskind conflates equity holders with secured creditors.  They rather different categories, with very different risks.  The quotes may (or may not) be selective, but the effect is still devastating.  The book is a mistake.

The Economics of Contempt blog is good.  I have forgotten how I came to it, but dorecommend it.

Interviews

I started Volume I of the Paris Review Interviews over the weekend.  I read the first four, Dorothy Parker, Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, and Truman Capote.  Each had an interesting way of talking, distinctive.  A little surprise because interviews by journalists tend to be flat -- the words change but not the tone or language.  These are not that.  It should not have surprised because I subscribe to the Paris Review and have been reading the interviews for awhile.  Still, these were all interviews from the early days of the journal.  Parker's interview sounded like her, by which I mean sounded like the woman whose stories I've read.  Same with Capote -- and also reminded me I have not read much of his work, and brought to mind a reading on the radio of a portion of The Grass Harp which was moving.  Hemingway's interview was kind of strange for me.  I have not read a biography of him or much criticism, and a long time since I read the novels.  The interview seemed quite formal, and of its time.  It reminded my of essays by James Wright or James Dickey -- talk of truth and courage and the like; dated and a little foreign.  Maybe it is just the pastness of the language, way of talking about the work that led me to think it foreign.  Eliot's interview was, as promised, funny.  I am going to reread the Four Quartets.  I wonder if I have a recording of  Murder int he Cathedral?  What a peculiar kid I was -- it was one of the records I bought as a teenager, along with Jethro Tull. 

End of History

Rawls' lectures must have been quite interesting and fun to attend.  I found the book interesting reading.  (I liked WIggins' Twelve Lectures more.)  I wish it had changed more of my views, or any.  I suppose I have not read carefully enough.  Nevertheless, I still do not see that Kant offers a sensible account of morality or political theory, nor Hegel.  Kant's philosophy still seems to be a kind of mysticism.  I suppose a big part of my difficulty is with the talk of pure reason and the like, and the unyielding commitment to human beings as distinct from the remainder of the world.  It would work for the religious, but it is not consistent with seeing the world as we live in it.  One could, I suppose, just stick the two ways of thinking together,  a sort of intellectual sandwich.  But where is the link, the peanut butter as it were?  In Kant, one just has a kind of ipse dixit that there are two ways of thinking and they somehow fit together.  But no real explanation.  In the context of morality, there is no route from the pure practical reason to this world.  The Categorical Imperative does not get anywhere because it is not about events or acts at all.  There is overt rejection of reason within causation.  Well, I am repeating myself.  What I want to say is the lectures are worth reading and provocative.  Ever so important for me to say.

I think next I will go through Parfit's book.  (Like many, I have a PDF of a draft; unlike many I am not reading hundreds of pages on a computer screen so I have never read the draft.)  One thing I am anxious (interested? curious?) about is how Parfit connects his account of identity and personhood to his moral theory.  After that, I think I will re-read some Mackie.     

Strauss-Kahn

It appears to me that the Manhattan DA has some problem prosecuting sex crimes. Earlier in the year they lost the prosecution of the policemen who used a woman too drunk to walk (but able to consent?).  Now, we get prosecutors dancing about in a fit over issues that are peripheral to the case.  Victim's dealings with immigration are not relevant to whether she was raped.  I don't see why that sort of thing would get in at trial.  I am having difficulty seeing what it was even a topic of conversation between the prosecutors and the victim.  There is physical evidence.  There is plenty for a prosecution.  But, prosecutors seem to have a hard time when the defense has resources to match.  It all reflects very poorly on the Manhattan DA and his underlings.  They have a pretty poor attitude and the treatment of the victim reeks of pique, not professionalism.

More on the Geat Pissant

I am most of the way through the section on Kant in Rawls' Lectures.  I have at last found a portion I agree with -- the practical necessity of belief in freedom.  Of course, that is not really what Kant would say and I don't think any Kantian would agree with the way I think about freedom in this context, but there is some common ground at long last.  I don't buy the pure practical reason talk, but there is a common conclusion.  In order to make sense of how people act, and how they conceive of themselves as acting, one has to assume some sort of freedom of will, and more robust than Hume would allow.  I have to work under the assumption that reasons and reasoning have some sort of efficacious powers.  In thinking about what to do, it does seem that one has to think that one can act on reason or reasons.  Even if there is some full causal determinism, one still thinks about choices, seeks to persuade, and so on, all of which are built on the idea that there is a free moral agent in attendance. Even this thinking about the thinking seems to me to suggest a commitment to freedom, as a practical matter.  I don't have to think that it is part of the full explanation of the world, or that there is some non-causal aspect to the world we live in.  So it is a practical necessity.  I also do not think it true.

Working through the longish lectures on Kant left me thinking that a great deal of Kant's philosophy is built around and of metaphor, rather abstract but still metaphor.  I still do not see quite what an end in itself is supposed to be or what it could mean in practice to treat others as ends in themselves, or, frankly, most o the rest of the stuff.  It alternates between a constricted world of all duty and a world without any moral content (because no duties can be specified).  It is a bit bothersome -- these are very smart folk and I still think they are blowing smoke and wiggling fingers, not more.

Wrong Rule

A case handed down by the Utah Court of Appeals today illustrates the oddity of Utah la won summary judgment.  It is interesting that the Court gets the relevant standards wrong, although it is quite understandable because the Utah law is a bit off kilter on this.

In Fischer v. Davidhizar, the Court of Appeals (2011 UT App 270) in footnote 7 observes that:

The trial court then stated that even if it were to grant the motion to amend,
Davidhizar still could not prevail at trial because he could not prove his fraud claims by
clear and convincing evidence. The trial court’s statement is curious because the court
had previously denied OMC’s motion for summary judgment on Davidhizar’s fraud
claims, presumably because there were significant factual disputes surrounding
Davidhizar’s fraud claims, which would warrant a trial to allow the fact finder to
determine which of the competing version of events to believe. See infra ¶¶ 14‐15.

Then at ¶¶14-15 you get a pretty standard recitation of the burdens on summary judgment and the rule that it may be granted where as a matter of law the moving party wins on the undisputed facts.  What is odd here is that the Appellate Court has moved the goals a bit.  For summary judgment, any disputed issue of material fact will do to defeat the motion.  Any dispute.  It is not a reasonable person or finder of fact standard in any form (i.e., the standard is not that a reasonable trier of fact could infer...).  So summary judgment in Utah is harder to get than either dismissal or summary judgment in federal court.  In fact, it is higher hurdle than a motion for directed verdict in Utah.  This is an effect of the requirement, as interpreted by Utah courts, that there not be any weighing credibility at the summary judgment stage, and the failure of the Court of Appeals and Supreme Court to say anything useful about a failure to prove every element at summary judgment. 

A motion for directed verdict should be granted “if the evidence [is] such that reasonable men could not arrive at a different conclusion.” Anderson v. Gribble, 513 P.2d 432, 434 (Utah 1973).  That is a higher standard than the summary judgment standard.  Which means the trial court was right, and that denial of a motion for summary judgment is not relevant to whether leave to amend should have been granted under the circumstances. 

Secrets of NIMH

For Kant, morally good action conforms to the good will, and is done, on balance, out of regard for duty, i.e., whatever other motivations may exist, the agent finds the motive of duty sufficient for action (and, I presume, sufficient to overcome countervailing motivations should they arise).  Duty gets identified through application of the categorical imperative procedure, which involves, inter alia, specification of the conditions in which the action will occur.  (And some completely ad hoc generalization of factual conditions, but some other time.)  So, for any given act or course of conduct, how does one tell if it is morally good?  By assumption (and one hopes nto at all controversial as observation of human conduct), action may have multiple motivations or be the result of a multitude of desires and preferences.  Most are irrelevant to the moral quality of the action, which is dependant on whether the act was done with a regard for duty.  In other words, all acts are the same from the outside or observation.  Moral qualities are entirely private to the agent (and God I would venture).  Kant was a Christian believer and seems not to have had serious doubts about the existence of the Christian God.  Anyway, his arguments about good will and the like presuppose God.  Back to the point -- the ethics is quite private, it is entirely internal.  There does not look to be any route to judgment of conduct by human beings. 

I find that a telling deficiency.  Fatal.  It appears that the Kantian ethics cannot guide conduct because it has no public form or content.  (Yes, I think Searle is right that Kant was a solopsist.) 

I remember teaching this material by keeping the focus on the argument that the regard for duty only needed to be sufficient to motivate action as a hypothetical.  One did not need to act against one's desires and inclination.  Where they aligned with duty, the agent was a happy actor.  That seems to me still the proper way of presenting the material.  And the material is still wrong.