Whose Deadline is it Anyway?

It follows almost tautologically from the preeminence of a two-party system that practically everyone in the country will feel that everything worthy and good is constantly being threatened by a large, evil political group with a scary amount of power (or by two of them if you happen to be independent).

What can you do? You study power, trying to understand how people who are so obviously wrong can have so much influence. You learn how their power works, so you can get inside it and take it apart. Not surprisingly, it turns out to have nothing to do with rational, disciplined inquiry and debate. So to fight back, you've got to play their game. You can't reason away a massive political faction. So what can you do?

Dan Przygoda's new short film Deadline takes on this overwhelming political dynamic in the cinematic language of suspense thrillers. Quick cuts and nervous zooming and panning (a la 24) charge the everyday scenario of a political talk show with an air of suspense. We discover that a power struggle deeper than the conventional guest vs. host dynamic is playing out under the surface.

Caveat: if you tend to favor conservative positions (even if you don't identify yourself as a Republican), the first half of this film may come across as rather tendentious. It did to me. I think it's a weakness of the film that Przygoda has given his own politics a more earnest voice without giving them better arguments. (I would think that, wouldn't I?) But one has to admit that the conservative talk show host is barely even a caricature of O'Reilly or Hannity, and it's worth seeing how the development of the character of the guest casts his political remarks in an ironic light.

I'm discussing details of the plot below, so if you want to watch the movie before you read on, you can do so for free at deadlinemovie.com. (I don't normally do "spoiler warnings," but part of the fun of this film is the way it exploits the toolbox of suspense dramas, so I'll keep it suspenseful!)

The obvious reason for the title Deadline is that it's about an ultimatum, a decision that talk show host Ted Warner (Robert Newman) has to make by the end of the program: renounce his career, or let his wife and son die. But he's not the only one making a decision under pressure. Despite the expression of firm resolve that James McCartney (James Arden) wears from the opening scene, he seems at times not to have made up his mind that his cold, desperate scheme is the only way. He seems to think that he can actually reason with Warner. Maybe he will not need to follow through on his plan. Maybe he really can just talk, vote, and hope. He speaks as though he isn't just talking to a character on a TV program, not a person who can listen and be persuaded.

At the same time, his reference to bombing abortion clinics exposes the moral incoherence of his own strategy: he's considering crossing the same kind of line between politics and war (even if he pretends that his hands are clean because he is terrorizing without shedding any blood). So Ted Warner isn't listening to James, and he is not even listening to himself. And the segment is ending, and of course nothing is really happening, and James senses that it's time to play his hand or lose the game.

Maybe Deadline is an analogy for the way our public ethical and social conversations are vexed by the demands of the election cycle. If the most important thing is winning the next battle against the other side, we'll start to act like it's a war: if not by setting off bombs and issuing death threats, then by shutting down the pathways of good faith that make actual conversation and even conversion possible.

The Obscurity of Benefit as the Proper Context for the Question of Wealth

image © Marie-Lan Nguyen
Wikimedia Commons
This post is part of a series on
Plato's Republic. It can stand
alone, but is intended to
continue the line of
thinking summarized here.

Last week, I said that in order to see the substance of Socrates's argument in opposition to Cephalus (and so to see the difference from the contentious sophists and debaters from whom Socrates is to be distinguished), we would have to ask how Cephalus's unstated opinions about justice obstruct his view of the benefit of wealth. We should expect that it would be easier for Cephalus not to see benefit itself than to make a miscalculation about money.

In fact, if we follow up on Socrates's refutation as it is developed in the ensuing conversation with Cephalus's son, Polemarchus (not to mention Thrasymachus, we do find that benefit, especially with regard to the possibility of being mistaken about it, is a crucial turning point in the question about justice. According to Polemarchus, the hard cases of justice in which it supersedes the determinations of legal property are governed by the principle that "friends owe it to their friends to do good for them, never harm," and that justice "gives benefits to friends and does harm to enemies." So you would not give a deposited weapon back to an enraged friend because you know it would not benefit him but harm him to have it.

I just can't think about the
idea of the good when you
look at me that way.

But what is benefit? And who is a friend? Depending on the answers to these questions, justice could be marvelous and powerful or completely superfluous. We already want to benefit our friends; that's contained in our considering them friends. But justice must add something to the natural state of affairs, or everyone will be just except for a few fantastically twisted souls. (As Seth Benardete points out in Socrates's Second Sailing, this superfluousness of the just intention is what moves Socrates to construe Polemarchus's justice as an art — a method of application of the intention which we all in fact already have.) So the problem becomes one of identifying what it is that justice could know about friendship and benefit that we don't know just by wanting to benefit our friends.

Socrates's refutation of Cephalus does not turn explicitly on the question of benefit, but it does make clear that Cephalus cannot have seen the benefit of money, precisely in its relation to the idea of benefit, if he thinks that it facilitates justice by way of paying what is owed. For it equally facilitates injustice, if paying what is owed is sometimes unjust.

Thus the obstruction in Cephalus's view of the benefit of wealth is his own presumption of knowledge. He does not see benefit because he does not look for it in a place of darkness — in the field of his ignorance. Socratic wisdom is famously knowledge of ignorance. Here we see that this knowledge is a positive power, that orients the knower in the direction of what he would learn. To get the benefit of Cephalus's report, Socrates needs to place it in the light of something obscure. Benefit itself needs to be seen as something that somehow hides itself.

continued

What's in it for Socrates?

image © Marie-Lan Nguyen
Wikimedia Commons
This post is part of a series on
Plato's Republic. It can stand
alone, but is intended to
continue the line of
thinking summarized here.

What kind of conversation are Cephalus and Socrates sharing at the beginning of Plato's Republic? Are they intently pursuing an abstract point of intellectual interest to both? Or just shooting the shit on a very high level?

The conversation features an oath (329a1), two references to poets (329b-c, 331a), and several fine distinctions (329b, 329e, 330b, and of course 331b-c) — all signs that something fairly serious is happening. On the other hand, the conversation strays rapidly from one theme to another: old age; wealth; inheritance and money-making; the afterlife; and finally justice. People who are taking a theme seriously do not usually so easily abandon it.

Also, Socrates and Cephalus clearly do not play equal parts in the conversation. Socrates poses questions and Cephalus answers. The questions leading up to the refutation are basically of a personal nature: they ask about Cephalus's experience of old age, the basis of his ease, the source of his wealth, and his experience of the usefulness of that wealth. This pattern more nearly resembles an interview than either a casual conversation or a joint investigation of a theme.

The common presumption about Socratic interviews is that they are aimed at a demonstration of the interlocutor's ignorance on a theme he thinks he knows about, and that he poses as a learner only out of irony. However, Cephalus never presents himself as an authority on justice, and the interview with him centers at first around themes with which we can presume Cephalus is intimately familiar: wealth and extreme old age, two things of which Socrates has no experience.

So it is best to assume that, at least in the present case, Socrates genuinely thinks he can learn something from his interlocutor, especially as he reports his own motivations as though this were the case, not only in his speeches to Cephalus but also in the narration accompanying it. ("I admired him for saying that," Socrates says in the narration, "and I wanted him to tell me more, so I urged him on" (329d-e).) Later, he indicates that he thinks Cephalus among all the wealthy is especially likely to see the truth about money because he does not love it too much (330b-c).

The final question before the refutation, then, seems to indicate precisely what Socrates thinks he might be able to learn from Cephalus: what money is good for. Whatever else we may say about him, we must admit that he occupies a unique position for seeing the answer to this question, because he neither lacks experience of wealth nor suffers the distortion which besets most of those who do have such experience. Even if he does not have knowledge (in the sense of being able to give an account) of the answer, at the very least his report will be useful, even indispensable, for those who wish to give thought to this question, and whatever he says will have to be remembered even if it is somehow refuted.

Now if what is to be gained from Cephalus's speech at 330d-331b is a reliable perspective on the usefulness of wealth, then anything which might skew this perspective or throw it out of frame has to be dealt with before Socrates can learn from it. It may be Socrates's greatest virtue is that he can see clearly when someone who would gladly teach is unable to do so without the assistance of his student. If the way in which the youths in the Republic treat Socrates is due to his example, we may say that he has even taught this art to the younger generation.

The question, then, is what obstructions does Socrates see in Cephalus's presentation, and how does this warrant the sudden shift of emphasis from wealth to justice?

continued

Ashok Karra invites us to rethink the fear of death. Is constant expectation of the exhaustion of time even compatible with a good life, let alone the basis of one? The site of this rethinking is Emily Dickinson's "Each Second is the last:"

Each second is the last
Perhaps, recalls the Man
Just measuring unconsciousness
The Sea and Spar between.

To fail within a Chance -
How terribler a thing
Than perish from the Chance's list
Before the Perishing!

About the opening line Ashok observes, "But something is dubious about the proposition in merely articulating it: it was recalled after a second had passed." In the time it takes to summon up a generalization that can tell us about the present moment, the moment passes. Perhaps instead of "merely articulating" the proposition as such the Man should have gone further--and this is not to say that he should have also applied the generalization to the new present moment (since this, too, makes the moment disappear), but rather that the difference between generalization and application should have been surmounted.

Doesn't one fear what can be present? But the fearful perhaps is already past when the proposition reaches it.

Confined to all of it

Pseudonoma has some very good questions in response to yesterday's contextualization of the Wittgensteinian mantra, "The limits of my language are the limits of my world." You may recall that I referred this statement back to the opening statement of the work in which it appears: "The world is all that is the case." Here's part of Pseudonoma's response:

How can a whole be MERELY that which divides into parts? Are we not somehow obliged to account for this prior unity as such? And if, at bottom, propositions are (or even merely signify ---feel free to clarify which--) "what is the case, that is, parts of the world", then what are we to call that "language" which refers to the world and which would otherwise SEEM identical in form to the proposition? Or in other words, how are we to define a proposition if the assertion "The world is not something 'about which' propositions are formed" is not a proposition. And finally, what accounts for its SEMBLANCE as a proposition?

Pseudonoma's confinement of our discussion of Wittgenstein is pretty generous: the point to which he would limit us is the same point to which the Tractatus itself and (by the addition of a sign of negation) Wittgenstein's whole career were confined. In addressing Pseudonoma's questions, I will give myself free range over Wittgenstein's writings which do nothing but clarify and develop the statement that "The world is all that is the case."

I beg you to have patience with this statement, the clear truth of which lies in its eventual renunciation (and now I begin to wonder why Pseudonoma takes it to be 'obvious' that the dialectic of Plato is to be preferred here to that of Hegel). And I do wish this "eventual" to be taken seriously as belonging to the renunciation. The Tractatus tries to renounce the statement ahead of time and this is its most serious error.

Following up on Pseudonoma's "definition" of space, Sebastian has declared the conversation on space both over and not over. I do not know whether my contribution will fit in the space afforded by the interval between these two possibilities, nor whether I will even be able to produce this contribution, but let me just get my foot in the door with an aphorism, and may it come to me how I may amplify it tomorrow:

Space is the grant by which logic, not to say first becomes logical, but rather makes this "first" which belongs inalienably to its logicality into a gift.

Re: Anscombe, G.E.M., 1959, An Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus, London: Hutchinson., ch. 7 "Wittgenstein, Frege and Ramsey"

A tentative new feature on philosophy ktl: quick notes, trying to describe what I think about whatever I read today.

The thesis, more or less, is that the appearance of universals in language is due to the fact that actual relations have to be represented with a meager supply of spatial relations of words. That something is on top of another thing could be represented easily with pictures, but the pictorial relation is referred to rather than shown in words. Result, there appears to be a universal concept "being on top of." Objects relate to each other, not to the relations which relate them. Because it is by their power of so relating that they are objects at all, the concepts are a function of the being of the objects.

I'm not convinced that Wittgenstein "dissolved" the problem of universals in the Tractatus. Anscombe probably doesn't either, but it's hard to tell. At any rate, she doesn't make anything of the fact that importing universals into objects as "properties" doesn't eliminate them. I think the virtue of this procedure, if its pretense to erasure can be erased, is that it returns the universals to their starting point.

Not sure what I mean by that except that I get an exciting sense of recollection when I think of universals as an illusory residue and transpose them into the unprotected, unguided sheer manifold of being of things.

I have yet to find a way to answer the challenge posed last month by City in Speech, to say what space is. I have several anxieties which obstruct my attempting any answer to that question. However, in the next day or two I will have something to say at least in the way of destroying those anxieties.

Results of a Conversation

[Update (1/27/10): I'm prefixing the actual result up at the top for those of you who do not want to read the tedious transcript: The question of whether and in what way a man can be the same as God is the same question as whether poetic inspiration can be the same as divine inspiration, provided that the hypothesis was correct that poetic inspiration is being inspired by one's own spirit.]

A couple friends came over today to talk. Rolf was wondering how poetic inspiration stands in relation to divine inspiration. I'm often wondering this myself, so I was glad to talk about it. At some point Rainscape hypothesized that in poetic inspiration one is inpsired by one's own spirit. Then, by way of a digression on the manner of communication involved in divine inspiration (dictation, planting an idea in the intellect, or what), we got to talking about how much the inspired author should be said to contribute, and after some time concluded that it would depend on the extent to which it would be true to say that he was like a god or the same as God--taking it for granted that there must be some upper limit to such a saying, but not knowing just where to put it.

Here's how we left it, tying it all together. The question of whether and in what way a man can be the same as God is the same question as whether poetic inspiration can be the same as divine inspiration, provided that the hypothesis was correct that poetic inspiration is being inspired by one's own spirit.