That which we find words for is something already dead in our hearts. There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking.

Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

Nowadays, one cannot write like Shakespeare. There is no reason why one cannot write as well as Shakespeare (with immense luck and super-Herculean effort), but to write in a style remotely comparable to Shakespeare’s would be considered hopelessly old-fashioned. In itself, there is nothing odd in this, for the least we expect of artists is that they create something new. [Read more →]

The difficulty of arguing for an objective morality is not necessarily an argument against the validity of such a pursuit, since moral anti-realism, in its different forms, is also difficult to argue for. Furthermore, there is a sense in which we feel quite strongly, more so than we do for our taste in music, say, that morality is objective, and that one can be wrong about it. This feeling is almost as strong as the conviction that the chair exists, despite there being no inarguable philosophical argument in its favour.

But it must be confessed that the nature of moral objectivity, if it is not just an illusion, is very different from the fact of Newton’s laws or of 2 and 2 equalling 4. I would instead argue for what I call an evolutionary moral pragmatism, which aims to render the metaethical question of objectivity and subjectivity irrelevant, and strives rather to find the objectively best morality under certain conditions and based on certain premisses which are taken to be reasonable and easily agreed upon, in the same way that the objectively best medical operation is one which most effectively cures the given ailment, regardless of one’s eccentric taste for a different kind of success.  There is nothing in medicine that can impel a doctor to undertake an operation correctly other than the possibility of losing his job, an outcome which medicine itself cannot render undesirable. [Read more →]

It is difficult, even for those of us with limited attention spans, to bring ourselves apart from the developments in Egypt and the region at large. Nearly all of us are impressed with a great and palpable sense that history is moving in seismic shifts even as we watch. This sense is compounded by the speculation we all indulged in, a little more than a week ago, as to whether other countries in the Middle East would follow Tunisia’s example. To be sure, the self-immolation of Mohammed Bouazizi, as well as the subsequent toppling of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, was more likely than most things to set off such massive demonstrations elsewhere, but most of us tend to quietly believe that history never progresses quite at the rate we would have it move if we were the deities of such things, and that the best realistic outcome was a few minor demonstrations scattered over the region, followed by the usual arrests. [Read more →]

Be forewarned. The following contains spoilers.

The other day I finished Blood Meridian. How exactly I came to it I’m not entirely sure. Partly it must have been having seen No Country for Old Men a little while ago; partly it must have been Harold Bloom’s enthusiastic recommendation. The more I read about it before touching the thing itself, the clearer it became that the central focus and attraction of the book would be the judge, and so indeed it turned out. The first time we meet him, at a revival meeting, he announces to a crowd that the preacher at the pulpit is a fraud, and that he had been run out of Fort Smith Arkansas for having congress with a goat, and that he was also wanted for violating children. So far, the judge is merely interesting, and we wonder a little about him and how he came to know these things. But then the crowd begin to ask him questions, to which he answers only negatively.

Judge, how did you come to have the goods on that no-account?

Goods? said the judge.

When was you in Fort Smith?

Fort Smith?

Where did you know him to know all that stuff on him?

You mean the Reverend Green?

Yessir. I reckon you was in Fort Smith fore ye come but here.

I was never in Fort Smith in my life. Doubt that he was.

They looked from one to the other.

Well where was it you run up on him?

I never laid eyes on the man before today. Never even heard of him.

He raised his glass and drank.

There was a strange silence in the room. The men looked like mud effigies. Finally someone began to laugh. Then another. Soon they were all laughing together. Someone bought the judge a drink.

Now we are fascinated. [Read more →]

There’s an entertaining video on Fora.tv of Jay-Z’s appearance at the New York Public Library. He was with Cornel West, a philosopher, civil rights activist and Princeton professor, as well as Paul Holdengräber, the director of the event. Entertaining it was, but it was also rather strange and a tad annoying, the latter two properties being intimately tied. The whole show was soaked in a weird over-reverence for Jay-Z. This was weird in part because over-reverence is never deserved, even though it must have been somewhat difficult to avoid a reverential stance, given that Jay-Z was there to promote Decoded, a book in which he analyses the lyrics of his songs. [Read more →]