The drifter and the academician (17)


“What?”
“Aristophanes thought philosophy was a kind of joke.”
“You cannot be serious.”
“Why be serious about a joke?”
“You cannot be serious.”
“At one level ‘yes’ and at one level ‘no.’ Aristophanes knew that philosophy restated things into what they were not. So he wrote the play about a guy who goes to Socrates to show him how to prove his debts were not debts and that he did not have to pay them.”
“I remember that.”
“That is what philosophers do. They say that this(whatever ‘this' is ) is what it is in virtue of that, that being what this is not.”
“This is too simple.”
“Yes, it's quite simple. It is just what you did with morals. You insisted on assuming something about them that had nothing to do with them. When you quit thinking theoretically about them, they work just fine. That is the part of what you do that is a joke.”
“Do not see it.”
“Well, you have been taught a lot of bad habits. And your livelihood consists of confusing people with the lectures and papers of those habits. Maybe you should learn to write code.”
“Hmm.”

The drifter and the academician (16)

“But you are not providing a general answer.”
“No; you don’t need one.”
“Well, I wonder how one should construe your position.”
“I don’t have a position to construe.”
“Yes, it is a kind of …”
“It is not a kind of anything. But I do like Aristophanes’ Clouds.”

The drifter and the academician (15)


“Suppose I go, in your terms, wrong?”
“I don’t have any terms, but to answer you: you’ll find out some way or other to deal with it.”
“But how do I defend myself if I do?”
“You won’t need to. You’ll need to apologize or something along those lines.”
“How do I know what to do?”
“Use your judgment. Tell ‘em what you thought, what you were trying to do. See how it plays.”
“Do not see it.”
“You will. You’ll learn a lot when you enter life.”
“Suppose we don’t agree that a particular case is evil.”
“Then we don’t.”
“I don’t get it.”
“You’re the guy who thought it was all right to kick the little kid in the face; I was the guy who did not.”
“Wait a minute. Are you deriving a rule for me?”
“No. Just stating a fact.”
“Is the fact a rule?”
“No, it’s just one case.”
“What about what it implies about me; what have you buried there?”
“Nothing at all; there could come an exactly similar case in which you change your mind.”
“But what if I don’t change my mind and you repeat the same account of me?”
“Repetition can be emphatic.”

The drifter and the academician (14)


“Look; you just have the case. You have a little kid and a big kid. You know them both. You know the big kid has a temper and does not like the little kid. And so the big kid kicks the little kid in the chops. And you know it is time for correction.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it in a lot of cases.”
“But how do I know I’m right when I step in?”
“How would you know if you had a rule? You’d still have to apply it. The application of the rule is not written on its face. ”
“This is crazy.”
“No. It’s life without philosophy. Philosophy is what is crazy.”

The drifter and the academician (13)


“It is philosophy that has messed you all up, man.”
“How?”
“By making you look for assumptions where you do not need any.”
“How?”
“You assume that you need an assumption to make a moral judgment. But you do not.”
“Do not see it.”
“Philosophy created the need and tried to fill it. It did that for centuries with various moral theories. But the theories are always circular.”
“For my edification, why?”
“Because theory begs the question as to what morals are. As soon as it attempts to ground morals, theory restates morals in its own terms, which terms are not what it started with. So it blinds itself to the case where it started. It always sees it as an example of itself. It asserts, if you will, a kind of conceptual identity between it and the case, when it just had the case to start with. So it inflates the case.”
“Hmm.”
“But then it gave up on doing that and offered what you offer instead, i.e., a vicious absence of theory that appears to allow most anything. So now it begs the question that there are no morals.”
“How am I supposed to look at this case of kicking the two year old?”
“Look at it, don’t ask ‘how?’”
“Do not see it.”
“Find the evil of the case in the case.”
“How?”

The drifter and the academician (12)


“Do not see it.”
“Sure you do. I was talking about a funeral I went to. I was talking about the evil that my friend’s life ended in. You said you did not worry about evil. So then I asked you if you knew what it was. And you answered that you were not sure what I meant.”
“So??”
“So this entire conversation has consisted of your avoiding having to say what evil is. You avoid it by converting examples into something abstract, so you never have to answer my original question. But I’m not letting you get away with it. So you keep saying “do not see it.”
“Let me say something other than ‘do not see it’.”
“Ok. But you do not see it.”
“No.”
“If I say I had a bad day because of a flat tire that put me behind schedule for every appointment, and I had to spend the whole day catching up, it makes perfect sense until you ask me to define ‘bad day’ in terms of my description. But all I’m doing is describing a bad day, not defining one. It’s the philosophical attempt to define it, or give it a first principle, or deny that one can do either, that makes the mess.”
“I agree that the assertion of the definition or first principle makes a mess. But how does the denial make the mess?”
“Because your denial changes your view of the case. You think I did not really have a bad day because there is no first principle of one. But I had one, and I told you how bad it was. I don’t have to assume a first principle in order to tell you this.”
“Hmm.”
“Now you can disagree by saying that your day was worse than mine; if, e.g., you got shut down by the Feds and hauled off to jail, then I might have to say that on balance you had the bad day, and I did not. But there is nothing philosophical going on in this discourse. There is just a comparison. And even if I give you the superlative, to wit, that you had the worst day possible, I am still not waxing philosophical. Because I offer no theory of the superlative. I just used one.”
“You can’t be serious.”

The drifter and the academician (11)

“I just don’t get what your about.”
“Look. Do I have to assume what it is for a cat to be on a mat in order to say that there is a cat on the mat?”
“That’s different.”
“No. You can raise skeptical questions about the cat, indefinitely, if you are captious enough, all the way to whether it is stuffed or a hologram, or whether it has the proper DNA. And some questions I’m certain I’ve never thought of.”
“What?”
“Sure, if you thought it were backward or biblical to acknowledge the presence of a cat, you could run a similar game, for longer than I could talk. The cat could become the proverbial cow in the living room.”
“So you think saying something is evil or bad is as easy as saying something is a cat.”
“Well, I don’t know about that, but it looks as though we can say both, without assumptions.”
“But suppose I say that the cat is something perceived and evil is something judged.”
“Ok.”
“So I can say that the judgment is mediate, while the perception is immediate, or something along those lines.”
“Ok.”
“So the judgment builds upon what is immediate. And so all of this that you’re saying about evil is wrong, because you’re confusing the mediate with the immediate.”
“I’ll be good-goddamned. You’re going to run a kind of sense data theory on me.”
“It’s not my position, but it takes care of your little party. I think I’ll be going, Mr. Lariat, while you perpend.”
“You’ll never resist the temptation to stay in business, I can see that. You’ll sell those philosophical snow cones forever. It’s an endless summer for you. And you’ll play those cheap jingles over and over again from your tie dyed, colored ice cream bus with the crackling Jensens.”
“Now that that little piece of prattling poesy is over, we can end this.”
“But it’s still summer. And you’ve a way before your neck is red as mine.”
“What?”
“Suppose I don’t say it.”
“What?”
“That the cat is something perceived and evil is something judged.”
“What?”
“I don’t have to say it. I don’t have to offer a distinction between judgment and perception like that one to discuss what we’ve talked about so far. I can say that you’re offering a theory that has nothing to do with the fact that we can say both without assumptions, to wit, that a cat is on the mat and a man or situation is bad or evil.”
“What?”
“Remember. You may introduce all the abstractions you like, but they have nothing to do with the subject. So I can reject them.”

The drifter and the academician (10)

“Whether it is an evil man, a bad day, a thieving scoundrel, etc., you do not need an assumption to take note.”
“How do you tell?”
“Even with birds you don’t have to have a field guide. You may just know the bird. From youth.”
“But to prove you know the bird, you might need the guide and a skilled birder to verify what you know.”
“Yes, in a case where we are documenting sightings. But not in all cases.”
”But you’d be able to do that in any case.”
“In the case in which I am not able to document, when one lands on my bathroom window sill and I am otherwise occupied?”
“Well, in principle, you’d be able to do it.”
“Really. Without book or birder? How? The use of ‘in principle’ means nothing here. Here it’s a question whether, among other things, I could have had my book and birder before the bird flew away.”
“But a question of principle underlies that one.”
“How so?”
“The question of the possibility of your being able to do that in any case.”
“But I just showed you a case where I could not.”
“But that is a different sense of ‘could.’”
“You mean a sense that allows you the shadow of a Platonic ‘could’ any time you like?”
“No. I am not a Platonist.”
“Good. For there is no need to make the distinction that you’re trying to make here. It has no point, however the situation turns out. It settles nothing about the case. It just allows you to take your eye off it. Here the case is a case in which I know the bird, but I cannot get a book and birder to prove it. And that is that. The new sense of ‘could’ makes no difference to the case.”
“You mean I am not allowed to introduce abstract possibilities here, because you say so?”
“No, you can introduce them all you want. But you’ll continue to get off the subject.”

The drifter and the academician (9)

“Look, you have an issue in philosophy, the way you do it, of an assumption of evil in two ways.”
“Which ways?”
“In the first way, you don’t acknowledge that there is such a thing as evil to begin with. In this way, you challenge every view of a particular case as though it required an assumption. You, in essence, accuse your opponent who says ‘that’s bad’ of begging the question, as you tried to do with me. You tried to get me to say that in principle, kicking a child in the face was wrong. Then you came up with counterexamples, e.g., with customs, excuses, mitigations, etc.”
“Which is the other way?”
“In the second way, obviously, you also have to do the same if you are offering a positive, as opposed to a negative, moral theory. The second way, which is that of the positive moral theory, or the ‘in principle case”, is what your denying.”
“Yes...”
“But you deny it with the same wrong tactic of making an assumption, independent of the case at hand.”
“How?”
“You assume that you have to have an assumption to say something is evil.”
“But what else is there to do?”
“There is nothing to do philosophically; that is why you should not be in business.”
“What is there to do?”
“Lots of things like saying you had a bad day and why. There is just no theory of ‘why’.”
“And again, why should I not go to theory?”
“Because it takes your eye off a case which does not need the presence, or absence, of theory to be understood.”
“Do not see it.”

The drifter and the academician (8)

“How do I do that without some assumption as to what evil is?”
“Well, one thing you have to be able to do is to talk about things without packing assumptions into them.”
“So then I cannot talk about a ‘case’ of evil, because this assumes it is a case.”
“No that begs the question. For the purposes of our discussion it is a case, whether evil or not, and if we don’t agree on it in particular, we may shift until we come up with an agreement as to what the case is. If we cannot come up with one, then you and I will disagree. If so, we will differ there. But we will not disagree because you introduce a principle that makes us disagree. We will disagree as to the case.”
“But that appears to be what has happened between us already. We disagree.”
“No. You have made it such that we disagree, in principle, by introducing a principle. I have introduced none. And I am doing just fine without one.”
“I cannot agree with what makes no sense.”
“I cannot either. If you and I make different moral judgments, we make them about a case. For example, even if you and I have the same principle we can apply it differently. It would be in our application of it that we differ.”
“And if we have different principles?”
“It still comes down to seeing how to apply them, which we have not seen in your situation, since you say you don’t worry about evil at all.”
“You’re making me bury an assumption in this.”

The drifter and the academician (7)

“What do you mean?”
“Your way of thinking rules out my saying that a man is evil to the core. Because, like a scholastic, for you, per se marks off a distinction, say primo modo or secundo modo. I’ve secretly always yearned for a valet by the latter name.”
“But how can you have a case of evil without assuming it is such a case?”
“YOU ASSUME that that is the only way you can have such a case.”
“Wait a minute.”
“You’ve made the assumption. I have not. Following someone like Husserl, I am purporting, let’s say, to do things in a presuppositionless fashion.”
“How?”
“You have made the assumption that my offering the case is offering, in some way, a kind of rule. It is not. It is an offering of a case merely.”
“I don’t agree with this at all.”
“But that is what you have done. You asked, ‘But how can you have a case of evil without assuming it is such a case?’”
“So…?”
“Your use of ‘how’ shows that you assume, with no proof, that it cannot be otherwise.”
“What cannot be otherwise?”
“That I have to assume something is evil for it to be evil.”
“Well, you need something upon which to base this judgment of evil.”
“Yes, the case. You look at the case. I don’t have to have a rule to have a case. ”

The drifter and the academician (6)

“Ok. But I was not proposing the case as a rule.”
“What do you mean?”
“I did not propose the rule that if you kicked the child, you have done an evil. But you construed my simple account of the case as though it were a rule, i.e., something normative. Then you raised exceptions to the case as though it were a rule. That way you avoid talking about any evil in the case.”
“What are you saying?”
“I proposed a case, which could have been a school yard act, in which a bigger kid kicks a little kid in the face.”
“Well, you did not say that.”
“No, because it could have been a case in which a mean old man did the same in the supermarket.”
“Yes...?”
“Or a drunk did the same at the beach.”
“So…?”
“So no matter what I might have said, you would have begun raising exceptions. Even though I was not talking about a rule. I was talking about the case where somebody did a bad thing: kick a little kid in the face.”
“But there is no such case of a bad thing per se.”
“I won’t argue with per se because you will assign philosophical baggage to it. What I will say is this: There is no such case only if you are looking at my account of the case as though it were a rule.”

The drifter and the academician (5)


“If you take this view, why did we go through the whole litany, from excuses to mitigations to customs to seizures?”
“What? It was just a set of possibilities that needed to be raised.”
“Why would we go from excuses to mitigations to customs to seizures, if there were not something to excuse or mitigate or explain with a custom, etc?”
“Don’t follow.”
“Sure; you went round and round looking for exceptions, but to do that you had to assume that there was something wrong with what you were making an exception for.”
“But you proposed the case of kicking the child. I followed your plain man’s formality. So I found the exceptions.”
“Exceptions to the case? All I did was mention a case. Then you provided reasons for not seeing the case as evil.”
“Yes.”
“Which seems to imply that if you had not been able to provide reasons, it would have been a case of evil.”
“Well, I just used the conventions the plain man would use in order to show that he really cannot use them very well. At points they seemed sufficient here to stop you, so I used them.”
“But now that they appear not to have stopped me, you declare them meaningless anyway.”
“Yes. You assume that I have assumed something by using them.”
“Yes, evil.”
“So, I’ll deny them and say that, at the level that we are talking, i.e., beyond your formality, they are useless, since I can always think of an exception to the case.”
“Ok. I see.”
“You have to stipulate that there are not any exceptions, and right there is the point where you assume the evil.”
“So you mean here that what I say is somehow incomplete, as an account of the case as evil, since I have to complete my account by stipulation?”
“Yes.”
“And that stipulation occurs when I say that there are not the exceptions you raise, nor any others.”
“Yes; it’s the ‘nor any others’ where you beg the question and get circular.”
“So that is what you mean by exceptions to the case. They are exceptions to saying, of the case, that it is evil, which I have to close off by stipulation.”
“Yes.”
“So the quasi-Austinian line, the litany of things we went through, are just conventions for you and ground nothing, for we’ve shifted past them.”
“Yes. I suffered a bit through Austin.”

The drifter and the academician (4)


“So there is no case that you face in which you face undefined evil.”
“Right.”
“And since you don’t believe in defining it, for that would make it normative or arbitrary in some way, there is no evil.”
“Yes, in essence.”
“So real cases of people doing things, like kicking kids in the face, if you will, stand independent of judgment.”
“If you will.”

The drifter and the academician (3)


“Well, I just do not like calling something evil. I don’t see that it does any job other than sound quite backward and biblical.”
“What job should it do?”
“I don’t think there is a job it can do other than indicate a certain judgment of your making.”
“Suppose that is the only job it does.”
“It seems pointless to go around doing that.”
“So is it in the judgment that something is evil that the problem lies?”
“For me to say that it is evil, I need to see that it is. I can’t see that what you have said about the case, on its face, makes it evil.”
“Is there anything that could make it evil? What would you suggest that I say, so that we can move forward?”
“Without assuming some theory, I don’t see how you go on.”
“In other words, unless I define it as evil, it is not.”
“Yes, in essence.”
“Let me ask you something.”
“Ok…”
“Did you ever do something wrong, just because it was wrong?”
“Hmm?”
“Did you ever kick somebody in the ass, just because he and his ass were there?”
“I don’t recall.”
“Damn. You might be a saint.”
“No, I don’t believe in evil. There is no function here for it. You’re forcing me to bring in a normative ethic, which is a false move.”

The drifter and the academician (2)

“So we can agree that kicking the two year old is evil?”
“Not sure.”
“Is there another way to look at it?”
“Well, you could have kicked the child accidentally.”
“Ok. So why don’t we rule out any excuses or mitigations?”
“Ok.”
“Now what?”
“What about local custom?”
“Make it right here, on campus, in front of this building.”
“Suppose I’m a foreign tourist?”
“Suppose you’re a red-blooded American.”
“Suppose I had a seizure?”
“I thought we had eliminated excuses.”
“Well, that is not a typical excuse.”
“Rule out atypical ones also.”
“Suppose the two year old has a bomb wired through his facial muscles and kicking him will destroy that wiring and save hundreds of people.”
“Suppose nothing of the sort.”

The drifter and the academician (1)

“Do you know what evil is?”
”Not sure what you mean.”
“If I kick a two year-old kid in the face, is that evil?”
“Maybe; if you look at it in some particular way.”
“What way?”
“A way that makes it evil.”
“I’m looking at it that way. What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing, possibly.”

Another Save the Tale from the Teller:

At this point a philosophical conversation erupts. It does not have to. It is, from the point of view of the story line, largely irrelevant. It should be since philosophy is irrelevant and has been since it began some 2500 years ago. But some people like to do it, and Straight(Leland, Nunk) steps into one with Donovan, who appears to enjoy saying things quite flatly. Straight might have more easily said “I’m very happy for you” and gone about his visit with Rick. But something just happened with a few deep swallows of that first cold one.

Irony does not work:

“Terrible waste of time, funerals.”
“Well, they generally mark the end of time for people.”

Partial and polite agreement does not:

“True. But they all tend to do the same tedious things. Invoke some power, even if it’s ‘life.’”
“Yes.”
“Then they celebrate or mourn or otherwise carry on. Insufferable; never go to them.”
“Yes to the first. But I usually go to them, if someone wants me to.”
"Hmm."

Nor even does an appeal to the horrific:

“This one is the fruit of some terrible evil, it is really palpable still, even though both parties are dead. We buried one today, and we’ll bury the other tomorrow. We’re just drinking these beers for nerve tonic and to get a break with Rick.”
“I don’t worry about evil, so I don’t need a break from it.”

Well, what the hell?

The delivery (28)

“Shit, there’s Donovan. Wonder what he’s doing here?”
“Hello, Richard.”
“Hello Gregory.”
“Who are these colleagues?”
“An old friend of mine, Leland, and his nephew, Stet.”
“Where do you teach?”
“Don’t.”
“What do you do?”
“Ranch.”
“How curious.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Here for a funeral.”
“Terrible waste of time, funerals.”
“Well, they generally mark the end of time for people.”
“True. But they all tend to do the same tedious things. Invoke some power, even if it’s ‘life.’”
“Yes.”
“Then they celebrate or mourn or otherwise carry on. Insufferable; never go to them.”
“Yes to the first. But I usually go to them, if someone wants me to.”
“Hmm.”
“This one is the fruit of some terrible evil; it is really palpable still, even though both parties are dead. We buried one today, and we’ll bury the other tomorrow. We’re just drinking these beers for nerve tonic and to get a break with Rick.”
“I don’t worry about evil, so I don’t need a break from it.”

The delivery (27)

“This funeral we’ve been to. It’s got gloom all through it.”
“Whose was it?”
“You remember the artist, Redford?”
“Yes.”
“His funeral with his and my friends; it was tough for all of us.”
“Him; how did you all get mixed up with a bunch of gays?”
“Well, I got mixed up with Ray Don; you remember we used to play together.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, he came out, and I just couldn’t tell him to fuck off. So we stayed friends over the years. Then I got in some trouble with the law, and Ray and his unorthodox group saved my ass. But that is another story.”
“Incredible. Then he did the same for Stet, huh? ”
“Yeah, incredible. So I knew Red through Ray; then I came to know Red’s aunt. One thing leads to another with people.”
“Doesn’t lead to much except arguments in philosophy.”
“No it doesn’t; if you don’t make the same tread marks, you’re just not worthy of the same track.”
“Wittgenstein cleared a lot of that up for me.”
“He sure took the edge off it for me, too.”

The delivery (26)

“I’m going up to my office. My wife’s off in Italy on an art tour. It’s summer. Why don’t we get a few cold ones? We got a great lounge up there with a cooler full of them.”
“Sounds ok to me.”
“It will be like old times. The profession has changed. It’s really sorry today. They don’t flip coasters like Ryle and Quine used to do.”
“We got a piece of that joke back at the old school.”
“What?”
“Stet quit UT.”
“Why?”
“I was doing ok, until I ran into a professor that made my life kind of rotten. I thought I’d take a little time off. Got a really bad taste of academics, this last semester.”
“Male on male sexual harassment, Rick. Not cool. Stet’s being kind.”
“How did that happen? Were you in Grosskase’s lectures?”
“Yes.”
“Oh; no wonder. He’s apparently the worst.”
“Remember Ray Don?”
“Yeah, now that you mention him.”
“He’s a lawyer here in town. He had to come in to rescue Stet out of the jailhouse.”
“I got in a fight, sir, with some guys that my grader set me up with, since I did not see things his way, as it were.”
“I’m afraid to make inquiries these days down there.”
“Leave it under your hat. Rick. It’s done.”

The delivery (25)

“Good Lord. I know that guy.”
“Him?”
“Yeah, the one with the book in his hand.”
“Who is he?”
“He was a fellow in Ethics at UT, years ago.”
“Leland. Is that you?”
“Yeah, Rick. It’s been over thirty years.”
“What the hell are you doing sitting under these trees?”
“Waitin’ for the dark. Been to a funeral.”
“Who is this?”
“My nephew, Stet.”
“Pleased to meet you.”
“What are you doing here, away from UT?”
“Oh, they hired me a few years ago. I’m doing some lectures on Kant and utilitarianism and such.”
“Well, we ran into evil, face to face, today, Rick.”
“What?”
“We buried the first half today. We are burying the second half tomorrow.”
“You were always too poetic, Leland.”
“Yeah, I'll go with that.”