Taking Sides: the TLS v. the LRB

I have known people who talked as though you needed the correct 'philosophy' to act in the correct way politically.

I have always thought this was misguided.

Making the same point from a different angle, I don't entirely see that political action need be the end result or objective in a discussion of consequentialism, deontology and moral intuition - sorting these things out can be its own reward, in the same way that, say, aesthetic enjoyment doesn't have to be determined by its political efficiency.

Got very little out of that particular essay tho, and the soviet/nazi equivalence immediatley made me wary.

Spoilers: Nagel isn't going to pull any moral facts out of the bag. He does sketch an example where the right philosophical basis might produce a beneficial political outcome but yeah it's pretty thin gruel, philosophy is a fun game to play if you like that kind of thing but a) as mark suggests it's not exactly in a position to change the world and ii) even if all politicians were giants of moral reasoning, reason is still the slave of the passions and 'tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.

even if all politicians were giants of moral reasoning, reason is still the slave of the passions and 'tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger

Somewhat skeptical of the idea that moral philosophy needs to value reason over "the passions", think you'll find wildly differing povs on that within the discipline.

of course, there are wildly differing povs on everything in philosophy! i don't know if i'm valuing reason over 'the passions', the idea is that passions (or values) - some of them anyway - are immune to reasoning.

maybe this should go in the philosophy thread

Making the same point from a different angle, I don't entirely see that political action need be the end result or objective in a discussion of consequentialism, deontology and moral intuition - sorting these things out can be its own reward, in the same way that, say, aesthetic enjoyment doesn't have to be determined by its political efficiency.

Well said!

In the latest issue I enjoyed a review on histories of 'female husbands'.Trans histories from the 19th century and it's positioning to today's discourses on gender politics. Really informative and interesting.

Less enjoyable was the article on Kracauer. I usually can read a lot of film reviews but he doesn't sound like something I'd enjoy though maybe it's the writer of the piece. It was really laughable how dismissive he was of Pauline Kael's review of one of his books. The quote he pulled was the best bit of writing in the whole piece! So his dismissal of her was weak. Stuart Jeffries wrote a book on The Frankfurt School so it's clearly a career.

i fear i greatly enjoyed that --besides the frankfurt school book -- jeffries is best known for a book called "mrs slocumbe's pussy": suck on that ted

the krakauer crit collection i read many years back is not terrible but kael is basically right, yes

completed the nagel and tbh very unimpressed: the dominant mode is passive voice non-citation ("[such-and-such] is widely considered a kind of moral evolution"), with no attempt to locate who exactly it is that's doing the considering (or even who "in general"); this extended to distinct obfuscatory vagueness when it comes to the "evolution" of (as an example to allow a move towards generalisation which is of course anything but) "property rights"; handwaving away *all* actual political history ancient and recent of the imposition and any fight-back against individual property rights ; the assumption of as establishment of the "correct kind of thinking" as what? a final-resort priestcraft so set apart from any distorting material interest that their analysis functions as a deeper and wiser exploration of such questions?

daniel and pinefox high-fived on this:

I don't entirely see that political action need be the end result or objective in a discussion of consequentialism, deontology and moral intuition - sorting these things out can be its own reward, in the same way that, say, aesthetic enjoyment doesn't have to be determined by its political efficiency

my argument i suppose is that what's going on is that this "sorting out" (for its own reward) is in effect the shifting of an active and very real political interest into the shadows, as if it's off the table and playing no role in the disntinctions and weightings when it really really really isnt?

to return it to just one live and a concrete issue (where there has been "evolution" and yet not at all enough evolution): can people be property? i'm guessing nagel would assert -- or anyway accept -- that the answer toda is "widely considered" to be no.

but in practice ppl were property were, and not so long ago: what is the "property rights" solution or resolution or restitution? as a matter of historical fact, the state of haiti was still playing france a vast compensation debt for the freeing of the slaves in 1804 until 1947. reason: the loss of "poperty" had to be paid for. but if france never had the right to treat ppl as property, hasn't the debt always run the other way? the former slaves are owed restitution fo the loss of themselves as their own property? (the idea that every indivudal "owns themself" being the somewhat perverse-sounding kludge in property-rights langage to deal with the edge case that was also a world-historically dominant case, viz the existence of the slave trade blah blah)

to me it feels like every single sentence of nagel's essay is contorted into the way of speaking that he nagel opts for so as to occlude this large shaping fact in any arguments about the evolution of the property right as a modern moral fact ("fact"), to prevent it from even slightly grazing your (or indeed his) attention (even when he mentions john locke lol: viz a key philosopher in the western canon who explicitly addressed slavery and explicitly came down on the side now "widely considered" incorrect)

tldr: i have no idea where this this longwinded explication of a minor wobble in the relative fashionabilities of deontology and consequentialism over [unspecificied recent period] is intended to take us, if not towards similar erasures of history

adding: yes of course the specific slice of history i've opted to grab at will be contested! that's what history is for! isn't it also what "moral philosophy" and "philosophy of mind" are for? apparently not in nagel's hands :(

Penman on The Beatles was reliably readable and off though I got the feeling he was better off covering Eve Babitz (though Lucie Elven was excellent on it) in the same issue.

I think the comparison with The Stones didn't fit because Elvis is there, in terms of reach/impact, "shifting the earth off its axis" as well (though that's just me going "kill the Rolling Stones" again). Yoko is someone I'd rather read a whole piece on tbh. The bit on her felt tacked on and unsatisfying and I don't think it's enough to acknowledge that she was badly treated because of sexism and racism. Watered down was a low.

xp

i literally pitched them a big yoko piece before xmas and got back a (very nice) rejection letter saying "looks good but no can do we have some stuff on the way that will likely overlap a bit too much" >:(

:-(

I hope you can get it published somewhere else.

This hardly overlaps, there is something that will have a chunky mention of Adorno or Benjamin every few months.

yes i must try and re-pitch it somewhere (and aim high)

Maybe some of those sites that seem to specialize in "longreads," like---I don't know much about them, but---4Columns, or Medium, which recently fired its staff writers and supposedly will depend on readers' submissions (although I also read that the publisher changes his mind a lot)

i'm mostly a tariq ali sceptic when it comes to his head-on politics but his side-piece interests are often useful and engaging: anyway i enjoyed his review of the new edition of maxime rodinson's 1961 life of mohammad, even if rerally all it boils down to is a handful of not-entirely linked items he's been burning to slip into some semi-relevant piece for ages

(the section on don quixote is the most suggestive, if also the most incomplete: that an underlying and overlooked theme in cervantes book is the expulision of the jews and the moors from spain, considered by some -- TA doesn't even advert to this -- the founding moment of the west's turn towards blood-based racial category in re social structure)

(lol that TA instead takes a moment to digress into a scholar-slapping of one of harold bloom's terrible intros to an item from the "western canon" -- i love early bloom and even mid and very weird bloom, viz the book on angels, but late and comfy bloom is indeed lazy and dreadful)

basically it was "notes towards something i, tariq ali, will never complete" (and if i did the head-on politics wd swamp the more fascinating stuff)

move that " to the end for the true sense of this^^^ post to reveal itself

Yeah I found the section on Quixote in that review really great but it then descended into fragmented commentaries.

Also noted 3x reviews from the NYRB classics publisher in the same issue.

LRB 20.5.2021: I must admit that I wearied of this issue and left some things unread. I'll give it away without really attempting them.

Of those I actually attempted:

Nicholas Penny on stone was too dense and specialised for me to follow.

Peter Perdue on China, I rather skipped through.

Duncan Campbell on the decline of courts and court reporting: better, compact, informative, poignant.

Keith Thomas on Enlightenment: rather standard, but informative.

Michael Wood on NOMADLAND: brief.

Lauren Oyler: I saw that this contained a bit of flawed writing that an editor could have improved. Otherwise I found the article hard to follow and gave up.

Emma Hogan on modernist lesbians: much better, giving us a lot of facts. The challenges to the author's view are left to the end and very brief; I'd like to hear more on them.

Susannah Clapp on bags: bad.

August Kleinzahler on Robert Creeley's letters: seems to repeat a pattern in which these celebrated poets are tiresome, offensive, drunken boors. Dreadful - what's good is that the article doesn't gloss this, is critical of Creeley, says that the letters are bad and dull. That's refreshing.

Timothy Brennan's letters-page riposte to his reviewer, on Said, is as interesting as anything else in the issue.

But maybe I'm becoming a poor reader of the LRB.

LRB 3.6.2021.

Thomas Nagel on morality: now I've actually read this, I have to agree with Mark S that it says very little. It's not that I want it to give me political positions, but I'd like it to say *something*!

3 current political articles in a row: all basically quite good.

Chris Lintott on ETs and SETI: good.

Now on the vast Joanne O'Leary Emily Dickinson. She seems to get more extensive and frequent LRB coverage than comparable figures.

"i have no idea where this this longwinded explication of a minor wobble in the relative fashionabilities of deontology and consequentialism over [unspecificied recent period] is intended to take us"

well said by Mark S.

I read it as basically a summary of the current state of a well-known debate in the Anglophonic philosophical tradition and a defense of the deontological side against certain consequentialist arguments. I think the intention is to convince the reader of the merit of the deontological side. I can understand if one finds this a waste of time, but at least you can't fault Nagel for not giving fair warning. He lays out his intentions at the beginning of the piece: "I will proceed on the assumption that it makes sense to try to discover what is really right and wrong, and that moral intuitions provide prima facie evidence in this inquiry." If that sounds corny or old-fashioned to you, or hopelessly naive, then you probably won't like the rest of the piece!

can't say i'm particularly thrilled to have the moral intuitions of philosophy professors offered as prima facie evidence for anything

Then don't read the piece!

Excuse me this is the thread where we complain about lrb articles

It sounds reasonable to say "we should proceed from moral intuitions".

But the article is making a critique of these, asking what their logic is, how they stand up to other models of morality.

... Which then makes it strange that it ends by saying "My intuition is that moral intuitions are good". This seems to beg the question, or to make the preceding investigation redundant.

it's a very long windy route to "as you were, non-philosophers!" and it does none of the work to wind anything discovered in the detail of the discussion back into any practical example where the various models might tug at one another (including the not-uninteresting edge case the piece opens with: a minor but arguably urgent wartime tactic undermined by a man who insists on telling the truth to the enemy)

I must concur.

as o.nate says it is mostly abt challenging kneekerk consequentialism, and it takes the tack that the alternative (moral intutions) may seem odd currently, before (perhaps) showing that they aren't a framework we can so easily ditch

BUT it's not at all explored why they became unfashionable and what kinds of societies deliver a lean towards one or the other, and in general what kinds of situations -- the opening example aside -- will likely deliver a tension that seems to demand thinking the issue through in a less pressured and time-limited context? (by extrapolation: war! in which case say more about this maybe?)

but i am merely reproducing my long-ago learned beef against philosophy: that in moral and/or political contexts it's a practice and a tradition that carefully strips out everything that's relevant to anyone having to make a choice, in order to convert it into a question where only philosophers can guide us

^ Might be interesting to read the piece in the latest LRB that tackles Simone Weil (someone who is probably v hard to write about) with that in mind

ps i have not finished the adam shatz review of the edward said biography but can i just in passing applaud and endorse this drive-by judgment: asked… to review a book by Jean baudrillard, he declined, saying baudrillard's ideas are "all sort of like little burps"

I enjoyed the said one just enough that I'm currently reading Orientalism

And pleased to find in many respects a v dissimilar book than I thought. I had read "key passages" through assignments etc but somehow missed the point of the book really which is more humane and arguably grounded in moral intuition than I had realised, to go off track for a bit

yes it's good and fascinating and (based on dim memory tbf, i last read it properly in the 1980s probably) very much not what it seems to be in the heads of some ppl who angrily & approvingly cite it but have apparently not carefully read it

A nice (or grim) enough digression in the latest LRB: Erin Maglaque's review of the world of early scholarship in Medieval Europe, one in which he sees (in his own precarious situation as an academic) the undervaluing of the people who make knowledge. Liked also the writing on the stresses of global history in Helen Pfieifer's review of a book on the Ottoman Empire as she makes her way through the twitter controversy the book generated.

Tony Wood's discussion of two books on Cuba felt like a thorough dissection of the struggles Cuba has faced, especially in the last couple of decades, bringing the situation right up to COVID and the present. Very interesting discussion on medicine (their export of doctors to many places), their development of a covid vaccine, their bordering on the illiberal in regards to gay marriage (outlawed then perhaps room for liberation) and artistic expression. Adewale Maja-Pierce on Kagame's regime also excellent, with a very dark conclusion, drawing on decades worth of journalistic knowledge and coverage of the region.

REVIEWS ARE NOW BATTLEFIELDS

the patrick o'brian piece is good fun (not least bcz it suddenly involves noxious nincompoop nikolai tolstoy in a more benign role than commonly)

Some news.

Those of you who are subscribers to the @LRB -- and are weird enough to cast your eye down the masthead -- will have noticed an addition. I’m delighted to be joining the paper as a contributing editor. And what a list of names that is. pic.twitter.com/JbiCvzsLlb

— James B (@piercepenniless) July 8, 2021

me gradually whittling away at the degrees of separation on the (perhaps weak) assumption that ppl who know me or of me will be more not less willing to commission me lol

but i am merely reproducing my long-ago learned beef against philosophy: that in moral and/or political contexts it's a practice and a tradition that carefully strips out everything that's relevant to anyone having to make a choice, in order to convert it into a question where only philosophers can guide us

Sorry for late response, but I think the defense of philosophy's role in these topics would be that it doesn't intend to settle any particular practical or political issue, but rather to try and establish some ground rules for how we can fruitfully and profitably talk about these issues. So if we made an analogy to the legal system, the question of what the right thing to do in a particular situation would be is like a case being tried before a judge. The philosopher wouldn't be the judge in this example, but rather the person drafting the constitution that would determine how the legislature would decide on the laws that the judge would then apply to decide the case. So we're a few meta-levels above deciding specific cases (although specific cases are still brought up just as a learning tool to illustrate different abstract concepts).

nice to see a letter in the LRB from none other than ishmael reed, who i find it strangely hard to imagine is an enthusiastic regular reader lol (happy to be proven wrong of course)

this is in an otherwise rather tetchily nitpicky and/or trivial letters page i felt, or maybe i'm just in a sour mood today

Only read the piece on Shankar so far. The quote from Shankar on the deeper uniqueness of the Indian classical tradition as opposed to Jazz or other types of music it was lazily compared to was quite interesting. How it didn't stop him from collaborating with Western musicians and doing more to take his music to the West, plus his family background, make for a really enjoyable piece.

At last I'm ready to leave behind LRB 3.3.2021.

I was about to report on what else was particularly worthy of remark in it, but - actually nothing much was.

I wrote 3.3.2021. I meant 3.6.2021.

LRB 1.7.2021.

Tom Stevenson on the British Army since 9/11: devastating. Stevenson seems a recent arrival in the LRB's pages. He's brutally sound here: as knowledgable as his judgment is unforgiving.

Peter Howarth on Christina Rossetti: disappointing. PH is one of the best writers on poetry I know, but this gets bogged down in tedium of C19 Christianity and says little about the poems.

Stephen Sedley on legal history: quite strong, giving the sense that 'the common law' is a good thing and ought to be stronger as against statute law. I'm still not really sure what the common law is, though.

Ferdinand Mount on threats to UK farming: I think I'm tiring of the hypocritical bleating of this veteran Thatcherite.

The piece in 15.7.21 about wind turbines is very good but it seems to make a couple of promises and only deliver on one of them. About halfway through there's this:

At this point it would be fair to ask: why shouldn’t CS Wind act this way? Shouldn’t the Vietnamese have jobs too? Should Vietnam not be allowed to export manufactured goods to richer countries, as richer countries export manufactured goods to them? Sure, it’s a shame for the workers of Campbeltown; but at least the disadvantaged people of Vietnam, who suffered decades of war and the inept imposition of a Soviet-style command economy by the war’s victors, are now enjoying the fruits of a boom. Well, yes. But also very much no.

It's not clear whether that 'yes but no' refers to the actual questions posed about fairness or the following sentence about the benefit for Vietnam workers, either way he does follow up on both the problems of non-international labour movements, and the flipside of that supposed benefit. Earlier on though there's this:

There’s something more unsettling involved too: an inspiring, utopian, internationalist movement to save humanity from climate emergency comes across a once inspiring, once utopian, once internationalist movement to save humanity from capitalist exploitation, and walks on by.

and I can't figure out what he's referring to, apart from one unexpanded and unsubstantiated aside about an international labour movement from 'long ago' and, rather obscurely, 'the Communist University of Labourers of the East, which operated in Moscow in the 1920s and 1930s'.

Good to see Gary Younge in the latest LRB.

Not read the piece but it's the one I'll be reading first.

Halfway through LRB 1.7.2021.

I notice that Peter Howarth is now an assistant curate; no wonder about the Christian detail.

Toril Moi on Simone Weil.
Rupert Beale on Covid, again. Unsure I managed to follow this. They keep changing the name for the illness, or variant, or whatever it is.
Deborah Friedell on Ethel Rosenberg.
Emily LaBarge on Nina Hamnett.
Erin Maglaque on Renaissance books: quite poor, when they have better people who can do this.
Andrew O'Hagan on David Storey: some self-righteous cobblers needlessly aligning him with the working man, but actually by AO'H's standards this isn't bad.
Mike Jay on Poe and science: remarkable how far hoaxes could go in the C19.

Tony Wood on Cuba ought to be topical. He is now a lecturer at Princeton; unsure if nepotism had anything to do with that. Well, TW's writing is substantial and expert in its own right, so maybe not.

The piece on Nagorno-Katabakh (17/06) is really good though it's the usual parade of conflict along religious and partocular historical and geographical lines. V interesting use of drones that seem to have had a role on bringing the fighting to an end. For now.

From 15/07 Fitzpatrick is usually good and reliable on an aspect or other of Soviet history. This time it's perfume that gets the treatment!

Colin Burrow is fine enough on Empson though if the LRB produced a bad piece on him then maybe it would be time to shut it down. Same for Newham on Dante.

James Meek on green capitalism is really good at looking at one example of one company, off-shoring and onshoring of Labour and goods, and how that intersects in decarbonisation. The conclusion you draw is how little climate change is taken seriously, though you know it, but this adds meat to the bone.

the empson piece is fine -- lightweight whirl thru the practice and the weaknesses -- until we get to this bit: i knew abt his hatred of derrida (probably from an earlier LRB piece tbh) but all we get as explanation of the hositlity is (to me) garbled or evasive at best: "The principled reason for his hostility to structuralism and post-structuralism was his conviction that the meaning of words is both social and personal: words mean what they mean because this person is using this word in this way to or about this other person, and because this word has this particular history which may or may not complicate how this particular person uses it."

the sentence after the colon probably does function as a critique of a hardcore structuralism (which barely existed in lit crit outside the analysis typres of folktale)* but the force of the "post" in "post-structuralism" is of disavowal -- insofar as post-structuralism defines a coherent school at all (it doesn't), these were ppl who'd STOPPED being structuralists and thought structuralism wasn't enough. so they happily elaborated a variety of critiques

i'm pretty tempted to argue that empson disliked derrida bcz they were actually coming from an extremely similar place -- not identical, sure, but that closeness is where the most venomous crackles often arise. there's nothing in the passage from "words mean" onwards which derrida doesn't also believe and (in my opinion anyway) insistently argue. all that stuff abt the free play of the signifier? they were both relentlessly playful -- and playa hate playa lol

(i have no idea of derrida's thoughts on empson: had he encountered him likely very generous, since he was an exorbitantly generous critic)

*ok yes barthes behaved for a season as if he were a rigorous structuralist, bcz as a rigour it jemmied open some useful ideas for him — S/Z is great! luckily no one else fllowed him down that road -- but once these ideas were opened he simply moved on (and is now almost always gathered into the "post-structuralist" category)