NOTES
Please note that some of the links referenced in this work are no longer active.
INTRODUCTION: ATTENTION AS A CULTURAL PROBLEM
1 . See Megan Garber, “Advertising That’s Squirted into Your Nose on Your Morning Commute,” The Atlantic Cities blog, July 27, 2012; and Nate Berg, “Bus Riders and Invasive Advertising,” ibid., July 30, 2012.
2 . This point has been made very nicely by Damon Young in his book Distraction: A Philosopher’s Guide to Being Free (Melbourne, Australia: Melbourne University Publishing, 2008).
3 . The Onion , May 30, 2013.
4 . This is least true of France, I believe. In the Anglo-American universe, the French are lampooned for their regulatory zeal. But they have a robust sense of the common good, and are sensitive to the small but important ways in which the fabric of everyday life can be degraded if they are not vigilant in defending it.
5 . A similar argument has been made by Jaron Lanier in his book Who Owns the Future? (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013). He argues that digital networks that make information appear to be “free” have had the effect of making it harder for people to be compensated for their talents. We become laborers who cheerfully contribute to the value of the network (consider the staggering array of talent on display on YouTube), but that value accrues to whoever owns the network. Our desire for recognition from other people makes us post our best efforts online, and it is the ideologists of “free” who become billionaires while promoting the spirit of sharing.
6 . Iris Murdoch, “On God and Good,” in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature (New York: Penguin, 1999), 347.
7 . “When driving conditions and time on task were controlled for, the impairments associated with using a cell phone while driving can be as profound as those associated with driving while drunk.” This is the conclusion of D. L. Strayer, F. A. Drews, and D. J. Crouch in “A Comparison of the Cell Phone Driver and the Drunk Driver,” Human Factors 48, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 381–91.
8 . Ira E. Hyman, Jr., S. Matthew Boss, Breanne M. Wise, Kira E. McKenzie, and Jenna M. Caggiano, “Did You See the Unicycling Clown? Inattentional Blindness While Walking and Talking on a Cell Phone,” Applied Cognitive Psychology 24, no. 5 (July 2010): 597–607.
9 . Frank A. Drews, Monisha Pasupathi, and David L. Strayer, “Passenger and Cell Phone Conversations in Simulated Driving,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied 14, no. 4 (2008).
10 . Walter Mischel and E. B. Ebbesen, “Attention in Delay of Gratification,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 16 (October 1970).
11 . See The End of Overeating (New York: Rodale Press, 2009), by David Kessler, former commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
12 . Arthur M. Glenberg, “What Memory Is For,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 20 (1997): 10.
13 . Merlin W. Donald, “Human Cognitive Evolution: What We Were, What We Are Becoming,” Social Research 60 (1993): 143–70.
14 . See my article “The Limits of Neuro-Talk,” in Scientific and Philosophical Perspectives in Neuroethics , ed. James Giordano and Bert Gordijn (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), originally published in The New Atlantis , Winter 2008, and still available at www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-limits-of-neuro-talk .
1. THE JIG, THE NUDGE, AND LOCAL ECOLOGY
1 . David Kirsh, “The Intelligent Use of Space,” Artificial Intelligence 73, nos. 1–2 (1995): 35–36.
2 . Andy Clark, Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again (Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books, 1997), 180.
3 . Nelson Cowan, “The Magical Mystery Four: How Is Working Memory Capacity Limited, and Why?” Current Directions in Psychological Science 19, no. 1 (February 2010): 51–57.
4 . This has far-reaching anthropological implications, which Andy Clark and Michael Wheeler explore in “Culture, Embodiment and Genes: Unraveling the Triple Helix,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 363, no. 1509 (2008): 3563–75. On the evolutionary time scale, we have inherited certain genetic endowments and limitations, but these are massively underdetermining of the resources that individuals bring to the adaptive problems they face. Culture—the particulars of our inherited linguistic, social, and material equipment—establishes the setting for childhood development and all subsequent learning. In the course of that learning our brains undergo both fine-grained and structural changes that are hugely consequential: changes that depend on our experiences . There are, then, three time scales that matter for the question of how we come to be what we are: Darwinian evolution, the history of a civilization, and the life course of an individual. This is perhaps obvious, once stated. But it puts limits, which would seem to be fatal, on the explanatory power of evolutionary psychology—that is, on the attempt to explain human behavior as the product of adaptive pressures we faced on the savannahs in the Pleistocene epoch.
5 . Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).
6 . And, who knows, maybe this is to be preferred. The Protestant is a somewhat cramped human type. One might prefer to spend the evening with someone nudged into saving money (enough so he can pay for the meal), but who doesn’t have the deeply internalized ethic of thrift, which easily shades into miserliness.
7 . This point has been made by Joseph Heath and Joel Anderson in their article “Procrastination and the Extended Will,” in Chrisoula Andreou and Mark White (eds.), The Thief of Time: Philosophical Essays on Procrastination (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
2. EMBODIED PERCEPTION
1 . See, for example, P. Bach-y-Rita and S. W. Kercel, “Sensory Substitution and the Human-Machine Interface,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7, no. 12 (2003).
2 . My treatment of the tree is indebted to Søren Overgaard, Husserl and Heidegger on Being in the World (New York: Springer, 2004).
3 . Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes, “My field of perception is constantly filled with a play of colours, noises and fleeting tactile sensations which I cannot relate precisely to the context of my clearly perceived world, yet which I nonetheless immediately ‘place’ in the world, without ever confusing them with my daydreams … If the reality of my perception were based solely on the intrinsic coherence of ‘representations,’ it ought to be forever hesitant…, being wrapped up in my conjectures on probabilities. I ought to be ceaselessly taking apart misleading syntheses, and reinstating in reality stray phenomena which I had excluded in the first place. But this does not happen.” Phenomenology of Perception , trans. Colin Smith (New York: Routledge, 2002), xi.
4 . Alva Noë, Action in Perception (Boston: MIT Press, 2004), 1. Further, the way we grasp the world depends on the particulars of each sensual mode (vision, hearing, touch, smell) and the way of exploring the world that corresponds to each of these, giving rise to different patterns of “sensorimotor contingency,” as Noë and J. Kevin O’Regan put it in “A Sensorimotor Account of Vision and Visual Consciousness,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24, no. 5 (October 2001): 939–73. Thus, for example, a person born blind who was given vision late in life by the removal of cataracts expressed surprise that a circular coin turned about in the hand becomes thin and oblong when viewed on edge. He was also unfamiliar with the fact that distant objects appear smaller. Imagine how bizarre and disorienting this new visual experience must be for such a person. In exploring something with one’s hands, how far one’s hands are from one’s trunk doesn’t change one’s perception of the size of the object being explored, and the “diskness” of a coin, for example, is invariant throughout the exploration. This invariant diskness is apparent by vision too (despite appearances, as it were) for a sighted person, but that is because such a person learned as a baby how a disk presents itself via reflected light from different angles, and this knowledge has become second nature.
To suddenly establish a connection between the eyes and brain is merely to begin the long process of learning to see. And indeed, those who are given sight (in this bare sensual sense) after growing up blind report seeing nothing but blobs of light at first. Learning to see means mastering the pattern of sensorimotor contingencies by which reflected light maps, in a necessary and lawlike way, onto the physical objects that we encounter. These are “contingencies” because they hold only for animals like us who have two front-facing eyes. A duck has eyes that face to each side, so there is a different pattern by which its visual stimulation corresponds to our (shared) physical reality. Mastering these patterns, which we do as infants, depends on the ability to move around, just as the fingers must move around to perceive by touch. Only by exploratory action is one able to “extract invariants” from the scene, as James J. Gibson puts it.
5 . James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979). One of the appealing things about Gibson’s book is that it is fertile with suggestions about cognition that invite the reader to draw larger points, which Gibson himself refrains from making. When he writes that the “underlying invariant structure” emerges from the “changing perspective structure” (197), for example, one can’t help but draw an analogy between visual perception and something like “insight.” If self-motion is necessary to apprehend the world, this fits with our common intuition that wisdom is impossible without biography, that is, a self that moves or changes through time and thereby “gains perspective.”
6 . It follows that standard laboratory techniques of studying visual perception by putting someone in a headrest, having them look through an aperture, and then exposing them briefly to a two-dimensional picture in a darkened room, is to study only a very specialized case of vision, one that rarely occurs in everyday life and does not exploit the capacities we have developed as embodied creatures, both on the evolutionary time scale and developmentally. The proper technique would consist of providing optical information rather than imposing optical stimulation, as Gibson puts it.
7 . Lawrence Shapiro, Embodied Cognition (New York: Routledge, 2011), 28.
8 . As to the revolutionary status of Gibson: this is a convenient fiction, which I will go along with when it suits my immediate argumentative purposes. The current field of “ecological psychology” that takes Gibson as its inspiration may just as well be read as a working out of suggestions offered by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Alfred Shutz, and Martin Heidegger—that is, by the school of phenomenology that formed about a century ago. The literature on embodied/embedded/grounded/extended cognition; ecological psychology; the move toward “enactivism”—in these literatures, one hardly ever sees references to the phenomenological writers, yet the most fruitful lines of argument emerging from them appear to be (largely surreptitious) borrowings from this philosophical tradition.
9 . M. McBeath, D. Shaffer, and M. Kaiser, “How Baseball Outfielders Determine Where to Run to Catch Fly Balls,” Science 268 (1995): 569–73, as cited by Andy Clark, Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011), 16.
10 . Clark, Supersizing the Mind , 35.
12 . Gibson, The Ecological Approach , 128.
13 . This way of life may be “predatory or preyed upon, terrestrial or aquatic, crawling or walking, flying or nonflying, and arboreal or ground-living” (ibid., 7). Unlike the proverbial brain in a jar, an embodied observer has interests , because it is capable of acting and being acted upon by objects in the world. Daniel Dennett makes the following argument for interestedness (and hence embodiment) as a precondition for the development of consciousness. The simplest animals recoil from harm and approach what is good: food and opportunities to reproduce. These aversion and attraction behaviors enact the primordial categories of good and bad, and serve to guard against the dissolution of the boundary between self and nonself, i.e., death. The immune system enacts this principle at a mechanical level, where the distinction good/bad (for me ) is encoded in an array of antibodies that react to molecules with particular shapes. If a creature is not able to move (some plants can turn, but cannot move their location), then the good/bad distinction hardly seems worth making. What would be the practical import of it? Such a creature simply has to take whatever impinges upon it. We can surmise further that such a creature would also have no use for consciousness, rooted in a distinction between self and nonself. According to this line of thought, the birth of subjectivity in animals is intimately bound up with a particular kind of embodiment: the kind that enables self-motion.
14 . Noë, Action in Perception , 106.
16 . Adrian Cussins, “Experience, Thought and Activity,” in Y. Gunther, ed., Essays on Nonconceptual Content (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).
17 . Here Clark (Supersizing the Mind , 45) is reporting the experiments of S. T. Boysen, G. Bernston, M. Hannon, and J. Cacioppo, “Quantity-based Inference and Symbolic Representation in Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes ),” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes 22 (1996): 76–86.
18 . Benedikt von Hebenstreit has studied vision and reactions in traffic. As Bernt Spiegel recounts it, von Hebenstreit conceptualizes three separate reaction circuits, corresponding to different parts of the brain: first, a reflexive circuit where “the processing of an external stimulus occurs in the spinal cord, on an extremely short pathway and thus very quickly, such as when one reflexively closes an eyelid or pulls away from sudden pain. These are inborn behaviors.” The next “higher” level is the “subcortical reaction circuit,” where those action programs that have been acquired but long since automated (such as riding a bicycle) run. The third and highest level is the cortical reaction circuit, in which “a stimulus has to not only be perceived but also interpreted to determine its meaning before an action is initiated in response—for example, when a child’s ball rolls across the road in front of your car and you brake” (Bernt Spiegel, The Upper Half of the Motorcycle: On the Unity of Rider and Machine [Center Conway, NH: Whitehorse Press, 2010], 51). I believe the example of the ball rolling across the street is ideal here, as this is a relatively rare occurrence, and does indeed require an interpretive effort to respond appropriately. But I think the appearance of a red light, for example, does not fit this last category. You don’t really perceive it as a mere sign, requiring interpretation. Rather, the inhibition it stimulates is more immediate and visceral, because traffic lights are part of the normal routine of driving that we have been habituated to. If I am correct about this, it should be revealed by reaction time studies. We expect a green light to turn yellow, and then red, so our attention is never fully absent from traffic lights while driving, and the appropriate motor responses are primed—in a way that they are not for balls rolling across the road.
19 . See Joseph K. Schear, ed., Mind, Reason, and Being-in-the-World: The McDowell-Dreyfus Debate (London: Routledge, 2013); and the back-and-forth between Dreyfus and McDowell in Inquiry 50, no. 4 (2007).
20 . Spiegel, The Upper Half of the Motorcycle , 73. Spiegel’s work was translated by Meredith Hassall from the original German Die obere Hälfte des Motorrads: Uber die Einheit von Fahrer und Maschine (Stuttgart: Heinrich Vogel Verlag, 1998).
21 . An experienced motorcyclist is a bit like the gangster who is so cynical about human beings that he is never taken by a nasty surprise. His moral posture is adaptive, given his line of work—it lets him relax. He doesn’t have to peer intently through the fog of other people’s possible motivations and try to predict their behavior; instead he watches their hands. He is loose, preemptive, and ruthless.
22 . Clark, Supersizing the Mind , 48.
23 . This piano example is from D. Sudnow, Ways of the Hand: A Rewritten Account , as quoted by J. Sutton, “Batting, Habit and Memory: The Embodied Mind and the Nature of Skill,” as quoted in turn by Clark, Supersizing the Mind , 237 n. 4.
3. VIRTUAL REALITY AS MORAL IDEAL
1 . Thomas de Zengotita, Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You Live in It (New York: Bloomsbury, 2005).
2 . In the opening scene of “Minnie’s Mouseke-Calendar,” the wind has blown away the pages of Minnie’s day planner, which is quite distressing for her. The agenda that the young viewer is asked to identify with is that of the various institutions she is shuttled among in the course of her week; staying geared into the bureaucratic organization of time requires a coordinated calendar.
3 . The first two quotes are from Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals , ed. and trans. Allen W. Wood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 58–59, which corresponds to Ak 4: 440–41 in the canonical German edition. The last quote is from Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals , trans. H. J. Paton (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 108–109 = Ak 4: 441.
4 . Indeed, the pleasure of demoting man from his special place seems to have supplied much of the psychic energy of early modern thought. Then as now, an enlightener is someone with the courage to live without illusion, face the truth of our condition, etc. It is a curiously self-aggrandizing form of humility.
5 . Famously, Kant takes the golden rule—Do unto others as you would have them do unto you—and radicalizes it. One’s own circumstances should not enter into one’s deliberations; that would amount to special pleading. One must act in such a way that one could with good conscience distill the principle of one’s action and turn it into universally binding legislation. It is central to Kant’s moral doctrine that one should regard oneself and others as representatives of the generic category “rational beings,” which may turn out to include Martians.
Kant is after a general theory of morality, based on pure a priori reasoning—like arithmetic. That two plus two equals four is a fact that is impervious to experience; it will never have to be modified. In rejecting “accidental circumstances” and “the special constitution of human nature” as too parochial a basis for moral reasoning, Kant provides the clearest point of contrast to the idea of the situated self that animates this book.
6 . Consider this passage in the Groundwork : “Even if it should happen that … this will should wholly lack power to accomplish its purpose, if with its greatest efforts it should yet achieve nothing, and there should remain only the good will (not, to be sure, a mere wish, but the summoning of all means in our power), then, like a jewel, it would still shine by its own light, as a thing which has its whole value in itself. Its usefulness or fruitlessness can neither add nor take away anything from this value” (Groundwork , trans. Paton, 62 = Ak 4: 394). Here Kant is saying the will can be pure, i.e., autonomous, even if impotent. But there would seem to be a closer affinity between purity and impotence than this “even if” formulation suggests. Purity is achieved by the same device of abstraction that guarantees impotence.
4. ATTENTION AND DESIGN
1 . Eric Dumbaugh as quoted by Emily Anthes in “Street Smarts: Why White-Knuckle Roads Are a Driver’s Safest Bet,” Psychology Today , November/December 2010, 42.
2 . This is the finding of Donald L. Fisher and Alexander Pollatsek in “Novice Driver Crashes: Failure to Divide Attention or Failure to Recognize Risks,” in Attention: From Theory to Practice , ed. Arthur F. Kramer, Douglas A. Wiegmann, and Alex Kirlik (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007), 149–50.
3 . The automotive psychologist Bernt Spiegel did experiments in which he had subjects walk along a ten-centimeter-wide black strip on the floor. The task was ridiculously easy, and seemed pointless to the subjects. But then it was revealed that the strip was actually a beam, which could be raised up off the floor. At a height of three or four centimeters, walking on the beam was still easy, but subjects concentrated on the placement of their feet. With the beam raised to the height of a chair, their gaze became fixed on the tiny area immediately in front of their feet, their arms spread out to the sides. At a height of four and a half meters, “there was now a physical tension that bordered on cramping.” Bernt Spiegel, The Upper Half of the Motorcycle: On the Unity of Rider and Machine (Center Conway, NH: Whitehorse Press, 2010), 79.
4 . Anthes, “Street Smarts,” 42.
5 . Arthur M. Glenberg, “What Memory Is For,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 20 (1997): 3.
6 . In the field of signal processing, two signals are said to be time-locked if they share a common or absolute clock. One way to think about this is that the common clock guarantees that any hysteresis in one signal, indeed any departure from pure periodicity, is uniquely tied to the history of the other signal.
7 . Andy Clark, Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011), 17.
8 . Paul Dourish, Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 102, as cited by Clark, Supersizing the Mind , 9–10.
9 . A beautiful example of engineering that exploits our capacity for embodied cognition is the tactile flight suit. Fighter pilots face the problem of knowing which way is down, given the extreme g-forces their planes are capable of generating; they sometimes fly straight into the ground. The military developed a suit that indicates the direction of “down” with vibrations on the pilot’s body. For helicopter pilots, one of the more challenging tasks is to keep the craft hovering in a stationary spot, especially if there are gusty winds. For them, the military has been developing a vest that emits a puff of air, which induces a tingling sensation, on the left side of the pilot’s torso if the helicopter is rolling to the left, in the front if it is tilting forward, and so forth. Because the pilot is engaged in a goal-directed activity, these sensations become aversive, so he naturally moves his body in the opposite direction, away from the puffs. These natural reactions are used, in turn, to control the helicopter. Apparently the suit accomplishes a fairly effective integration of the helicopter with the pilot’s body, such that he can fly blindfolded. He is no longer aware of the puffs of air, but rather of the pitch and roll of the helicopter. This is another case where a piece of equipment becomes transparent, and does so because there is a closed loop between action and perception, such that bodily motions affect sensory input, just as they do when we run to catch a fly ball.
Exclusive reliance on the visual display of information tends to produce information overload, and accordingly in environments where it really matters, there is growing interest in “multimodal interfaces” that make use of a variety of senses. In the intensely choreographed environment of a carrier flight deck, for example, visual and auditory attention are both severely taxed by the demands of communication and coordination, and so there too we find efforts to introduce the tactile presentation of information.
See Nadine Sarter, “Multiple-Resource Theory as a Basis for Multimodal Interface Design: Success Stories, Qualifications, and Research Needs,” in Attention: From Theory to Practice , ed. Kramer, Wiegmann, and Kirlik, 188.
10 . If you have ever listened to the NPR show Car Talk and heard people mimicking the sounds their cars make when they are misbehaving in some way, then you have some idea of the role played by sound in our ongoing monitoring of our cars, which we become aware of only when there is a new sound, indicating a problem.
11 . Then again, it is said that we live at the end of history, so maybe we needn’t fret about any of this. “In the future” (as Conan O’Brien used to say), we will be ferried around by Google’s self-driving cars, wearing Google Glass goggles and who knows what all. The goggles will give us something exciting to watch, like Grand Theft Auto , and we will be given a steering wheel that shakes realistically as we execute brilliant evasive maneuvers. We will make vroom vroom sounds with our mouths to preserve that “sense of involvement,” and arrive at our destination in a mood of triumph. We should have noted earlier that the passive kitten on the carousel has an enviable inner life.
12 . Alfred Schutz and Thomas Luckmann, The Structures of the Lifeworld , trans. Richard M. Zaner and H. Tristam Engelhardt, Jr. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 36–37.
5. AUTISM AS A DESIGN PRINCIPLE: GAMBLING
1 . Natasha Dow Schüll, Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 171.
2 . Mitzuko Ito, “Mobilizing Fun in the Production and Consumption of Children’s Software,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 597 (2005), as cited by Schüll, Addiction by Design , 172.
3 . Schüll, Addiction by Design , 174.
7 . Caitlin Zaloom, “The Derivative World,” The Hedgehog Review 12, no. 2 (Summer 2010): 20–27.
8 . Schüll, Addiction by Design , 8.
15 . In the Phaedo , Plato’s Socrates repeatedly says that philosophy is the practice of dying. I’m not sure how to take this. The fact that the hemlock is waiting just outside the door as he says it is probably relevant. But according to this strange motto, the gambling addict appears as the ultimate philosopher. He is moving beyond things that seem good—for him, as an individual—straight to the ultimate dissolution that is the end point of all organic life.
16 . Schüll, Addiction by Design , 15.
17 . And even in this narrow economic realm, we routinely fail to ask Qui bono? —Who benefits?—and refer instead to what is good or bad for “the economy” in the aggregate.
INTERLUDE: A BRIEF HISTORY OF FREEDOM
1 . I owe this formulation of Locke’s theological argument to Matt Feeney, personal communication.
2 . Ibid. Perhaps an example—a digression on recent political history—can illustrate the abstract nature of the ideal of freedom established in the Lockean exercise, and the effects this ideal can have when unleashed on the world without regard for the particulars of an already established cultural setting.
Political self-determination is an inspiring concept. So inspiring is it, and so resonant with our own self-image as Americans, that we eagerly recommend democratic forms to peoples with no history of such institutions, whose hearts and minds have not been habituated to self-government. Sometimes this recommending is done with the force of arms.
If Edmund Burke were alive today, we could guess at how he would regard the occupation of and civil war unleashed in Iraq by a cell of democratic vanguardists in the Bush administration. Burke’s pessimistic take on the French Revolution stemmed from his view that the French had imported the doctrines of English political liberty and set them down in an alien place. England had a centuries-long experience of the practice of liberty. It is a practice that requires skills, certain psychological dispositions, and a body of social knowledge that is mostly tacit. Political ideals take root in some soil that has been deposited over a long period, in some shared form of ethical life that provides for trust, and for the mutual intelligibility of citizens’ actions and utterances. Absent such a context, Burke suggests, ideals are abstract and easily turn into their opposites. The Declaration of the Rights of Man becomes the Terror.
From our vantage a couple of centuries later, Burke’s misgivings seem misplaced in the case of France. Iraq seems a better case for his argument, most importantly because democratic forms were imposed by an invading power.
Through their enthusiasm for other peoples’ liberty that they expressed in the lead-up to the Iraq war, Republicans gave themselves over to a kind of self-regarding identity politics: we are not “appeasers.” (The ghost of Neville Chamberlain was frequently invoked.) The main thing, for the vanguardist, is to savor the clarity of your own resoluteness in the service of freedom. The neocons may have wanted to be like Churchill, and to inspire those of military age to emulate the “greatest generation,” but from our current vantage, the unseriousness with which they projected these psychic needs onto the world stage makes them look more like the radical-chic campus existentialists of the sixties.
Implicit in the project of evangelizing political self-determination is the whole anthropology of autonomy: a decisionistic exalting of the will, a corollary disregard of formation and character (we are free to create ourselves anew at each moment), and a privileging of maxims and ideals over practice. Recall the mood of Western journalists who triumphally disseminated photos of Iraqi women in burkas, each holding up an ink-stained finger to indicate that she had voted . That is, she had checked a box on a piece of paper, which pieces of paper were then collected by various mob bosses, for what purpose it is difficult to imagine, beyond the obvious one of stroking foreign observers by the mere act of collecting them. If I remember correctly, these photos adhered to a certain formula: a close-in shot of the smiling woman, somewhat abstracted from her surroundings by a shallow depth of focus. They were pictures of individuals , seemed to be the message, and this was very gratifying for us. It was a portrait of the liberal subject, fully realized in a flash through an act of political self-determination. We knew it was such an act because certain procedures were observed. Maxims and ideals are more easily formalized than social practices are, but the resulting forms often turn out to be empty and fragile. Such would be Burke’s critique of Bush, that idealist.
3 . Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 169.
4 . John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding , ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1975), 101.
5 . The term “self-responsibility” I have taken from Charles Taylor, who writes, “I have borrowed the term ‘self-responsibility’ from Husserl to describe something that Locke shares with Descartes (to whom Husserl applied the term) and which touches on the essential opposition to authority of modern disengaged reason” (Sources of the Self , 167).
6 . Plato’s Socrates had of course emphasized getting free of mere opinion and convention in order to arrive at the truth. But in principle one could be aided in this by some wise authority (in the parable of the cave there is a mysterious stranger who turns one around from the images projected on the wall by the poets, and leads one up to the sun). The point is to grasp an order that is independent of ourselves, and how you get to this point is not the important thing. The important thing is to turn one’s attention from ephemeral, material things, and from mere images, to the unchanging Forms—from one set of external objects to another set of external objects. Once again, it is Charles Taylor who has clarified this contrast between ancient and modern thought on the question of where truth is to be found.
7 . What he said, more precisely, was “verum et factum convertuntur” : the true and the made are convertible.
8 . Martin Heidegger, “Modern Science, Metaphysics, and Mathematics,” in Basic Writings (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1977), 267–68.
9 . There is an obvious strangeness here: from a beginning point that is radically self-enclosed (Descartes’s “I think”), our task is to arrive at “a view from nowhere” (to use the philosopher Thomas Nagel’s apt phrase) in which there remains no trace of the knower himself.
6. ON BEING LED OUT
1 . Iris Murdoch, “The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts,” in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature (New York: Penguin, 1999), 373.
2 . Descartes, Discourse on the Method for Rightly Conducting One’s Understanding and for Seeking Truth in the Sciences , trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980), 8 = p. 15 of the standard Œuvres de Descartes , ed. Adam and Tannery.
3 . Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: ‘What Is Enlightenment?’” in Kant: Political Writings , ed. Hans S. Reis, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 54.
4 . In his later years, Emerson seems to have been a bit taken aback by the cultural effects of the very individualism he had been recommending. As against “the social existence which all shared,” there “was now separation. Every one for himself; driven to find all his resources, hopes, rewards, society, and deity within himself.” “There is an universal resistance to ties and ligaments once supposed essential to civil society. The new race is stiff, heady and rebellious; they are fanatics in freedom; they hate tolls, taxes, turnpikes, banks, hierarchies, governors, yea, almost laws.” The last bit of this sketch sounds like today’s Tea Party. Emerson as quoted by Wilfred M. McClay, The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 55.
5 . The quotes from Walt Whitman are from Leaves of Grass as quoted by McClay, The Masterless , 61. The quote from Norman Mailer is from “The White Negro,” as quoted by McClay, 271.
6 . McClay, The Masterless , 271–72.
7 . Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 53.
8 . Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 20.
9 . Polanyi, Personal Knowledge , 53.
10 . Habit plays an important role. William James wrote, “As we become permanent drunkards by so many separate drinks, so we become … authorities and experts in the practical and scientific spheres, by so many acts and hours of work.” According to James, the power of judging is built up silently “between all the details of [one’s] business” (James, “Habit,” Principles of Psychology , vol. 1, reprinted in The Heart of William James , ed. Robert Richardson [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012], 114). As the glassmaker knows when to fuse two molten pieces together, and cannot say exactly how, so the scientist has a sense of what line of inquiry is likely to be fruitful when he is faced with a novel problem.
11 . Polanyi, Personal Knowledge , 53.
7. ENCOUNTERING THINGS WITH OTHER PEOPLE
1 . Heidegger writes, “Strictly speaking there ‘is’ no such thing as a useful thing. There always belongs to the being of useful things a totality of useful things in which this useful thing can be what it is. A useful thing is essentially ‘something in order to…’ The structure of ‘in order to’ contains a reference of something to something else … [U]seful things always are in terms of their belonging to other useful things: writing materials, pen, ink, paper, desk blotter, table, lamp, furniture, windows, door, room. These ‘things’ never show themselves initially by themselves, in order then to fill out a room as a sum of real things … A totality of useful things is always already discovered before the individual useful thing.” Martin Heidegger, Being and Time , trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), 64.
2 . Hubert Dreyfus gives the example of chopsticks as part of an equipmental whole in Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991).
3 . Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception , trans. Colin Smith (New York: Routledge, 2002), 36.
4 . Alfred Schutz and Thomas Luckmann write, “The acquisition of knowledge is the sedimentation of current experiences in [already existing] meaning-structures, according to relevance and typicality. These in turn have a role in the determination of current situations and the explication of current experiences. That means, among other things, that no element of knowledge can be traced to any sort of ‘primordial experience.’ In analyzing the process of sedimentation which led to the development of the stock of knowledge, we always encounter prior experiences in which an already determined, albeit minimal, stock of knowledge must be conjoined.” Alfred Schutz and Thomas Luckmann, The Structures of the Lifeworld , trans. Richard M. Zaner and H. Tristam Engelhardt, Jr. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 119.
5 . In a lecture course in Freiburg in 1923, Heidegger put it like this: “seeing arises out of and on the basis of a being-oriented regarding the objects, an already-being-familiar with these beings. Being-familiar with them is for the most part the sedimented result of having heard about them and having learned something about them.” Martin Heidegger, Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity , trans. John van Buren (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1999), 58–59.
6 . The developmental account I offer here closely follows Jane Heal’s in “Joint Attention and Understanding the Mind,” in Joint Attention: Communication and Other Minds , ed. Naomi Eilan, Christopher Hoerl, Teresa McCormack, and Johannes Roessler (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2005), 38–39. The chronology is ambiguous as presented in this paper; in Eilan (cited in n. 8 below), gaze-following and gaze-checking are said to emerge only in the second year.
8 . Naomi Eilan, “Joint Attention, Communication, and Mind,” in Joint Attention , ed. Eilan et al.
9 . Naomi Eilan writes that “Declarative pointings are not produced by chimpanzees, nor, usually, by autistic children. In both cases, moreover, researchers have strong intuitions that joint attention, in the sense of mutual awareness, is lacking.” Ibid., 15–16. But see also D. Leavens and T. Racine, “Joint Attention in Apes and Humans: Are Humans Unique?,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 16 (2009).
10 . Heal, “Joint Attention,” 39.
11 . Axel Seemann, “Introduction,” in Joint Attention: New Developments in Psychology, Philosophy of Mind, and Social Neuroscience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 2.
12 . This is the position of the growing school of “interactionism” that straddles social psychology and cognitive psychology. In coordinated action, there is “a ‘meeting’ of minds rather than an endless ascription of higher-order mental states,” as Mattia Gallotti and Chris D. Frith put it in “Social Cognition in the We-Mode,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 17, no. 4 (April 2013): 164.
13 . Eilan, “Joint Attention,” 2.
14 . See Gary L. Wells, “Eyewitness Identification: Systemic Reforms,” Wisconsin Law Review , 2006, 615–43.
15 . There are subtleties here. Descartes is talking about beliefs, which is one class of what contemporary analytical philosophy calls propositional attitudes. The point I have been making in this chapter (and in “Embodied Perception”) is mostly about nonpropositional mental content: our grasp of sensorimotor contingencies; the phenomenological priority of social facts over sensual ones; the salience of equipmental norms as against bare physical affordances. But I believe these points about our prearticulate mental life go a long way toward showing why the ideal of epistemic individualism, which is offered in the domain of articulate propositional attitudes such as beliefs, is an impossible one. One can’t build such attitudes for oneself, from the ground up (as Descartes tries to do) because there is so much social determination of our mental contents prior to articulate propositions.
8. ACHIEVING INDIVIDUALITY
1 . Robert B. Pippin, Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 173.
2 . Kant had tried to square freedom with adherence to universal norms by conceiving autonomy to lie in the moment when you choose to act according to those norms, which you have apprehended through reason. This emphasis on the rational will’s moment of choice probably laid the ground for French existentialism, which jettisoned the bit about rational norms, leaving the subject to make a groundless choice. Indeed, to see and accept the groundlessness of the choice is the mark of courage or probity. A person’s value judgments are not tied onto the world, they do not apprehend anything, so the idea of “doing the right thing” loses its force. In fact, that idea amounts to a failure to grasp one’s radical responsibility for oneself. Value judgments are pure flashings forth of the personal will, and the main thing is to hold them sincerely.
The valor of the choosing will is thought to derive from the fact that its choice is so significant . Should I go off to fight with the resistance or stay and take care of my dying mother? (This is Sartre’s famous example.) Both “values” are said to rest on a radical choice. But, as Charles Taylor argues, this situation is felt as a dilemma only because the competing claims on the young man are not created by radical choice. “If they were[,] the grievous nature of the predicament would dissolve, for that would mean that the young man could do away with the dilemma at any moment by simply declaring one of the rival claims as dead and inoperative. Indeed, if serious moral claims were created by radical choice, the young man could have a grievous dilemma about whether to go and get an ice cream cone, and then again he could decide not to.” Charles Taylor, “What Is Human Agency?” in Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers 1 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
3 . But note that even in a “free market,” my customer and I do not come to the exchange on a footing of equality; I have superior information. This asymmetry tempts me to be dishonest. Only to the extent I resist this temptation can I take the customer’s payment of the full bill as validation of the claim I have made for myself. Even if I am completely honest, however, this satisfaction is of a lower order than, or at any rate different from, that which I would receive from another mechanic who recognizes the work as being well done.
4 . Matt Feeney, personal communication.
9. THE CULTURE OF PERFORMANCE
1 . Alain Ehrenberg, The Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010), 4.
3 . See Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character and The Culture of the New Capitalism .
4 . Pew Charitable Trusts, “Economic Mobility Project Fact Sheet: Does America Promote Mobility As Well As Other Nations?,” available at www.pewstates.org/research/reports/does-america-promote-mobility-as-well-as-other-nations-85899380321 . See also Joseph E. Stiglitz, “Equal Opportunity, Our National Myth,” The New York Times , February 16, 2013, available at http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/16/equal-opportunity-our-national-myth . The quote about Americans’ faith in the meritocracy is from Howard Steven Friedman, “The American Myth of Social Mobility,” The Huffington Post , July 16, 2012, available at www.huffingtonpost.com/howard-steven-friedman/class-mobility_b_1676931.html .
5 . Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America , trans. Henry Reeve (New York: Colonial Press, 1899), 2: 104–106, as quoted by Wilfred M. McClay, The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 43–44.
6 . After the financial crisis of 2008 that inaugurated the Great Recession, the Tea Party arose. One way to read this is that we quickly inoculated ourselves against the conclusions that threatened to be drawn from the crisis—the revelation of fundamental antagonisms in the economy—by doubling down on the very individualism that had obscured such developments from our sight. Consider the right’s response to President Obama’s “You didn’t build that” speech. Obama was addressing a certain myopic egotism that we all fall into sometimes. He pointed out that if you are successful, you probably received some help along the way—from a teacher who took an interest in you, for example. Any business that thrives depends on a background of public investments (roads, police) that make it all possible, but which are easy to take for granted. I took the president to be saying, “You didn’t build that !” It seemed a fairly commonsensical reminder that there is something called the common good. But this gets called socialism. It is the “risk-takers” who generate all prosperity, ex nihilo. Never mind that Romney built his own fortune risking other people’s money and livelihoods. And this brings up an important point. However legitimate the role of venture capital, leveraged buyouts, and financial services in society, these activities are very different from small business, and the Republican Party of 2012 seemed to take as one of its most important tasks the clouding of this difference, so as to be able to attach the moral valor of the entrepreneur to enterprises that primarily capture wealth. The right’s schema of “makers versus takers” is perhaps apt enough, if taken in a way that is politically opposite to how it is used on Fox News. The utility of this phrase on the right in the 2012 election depended on reviving the 1980s figure of the welfare queen, who had more or less disappeared from our political imagination—and political reality—with welfare reform under Clinton. She and her paltry food stamps are back, because she is indispensable to the rhetorical job Republicans have set themselves, namely, distracting attention from the more massive, structural (and indeed state-enabled) transfers of wealth that are passed under cover of “free market principles.”
7 . This way of redescribing our experience, from a brain perspective that stands outside experience, is closely allied to the popular image of artificial intelligence. If the human being is fully describable in material terms, the thought goes, we should be able to replicate a person’s consciousness in any physical system that is sufficiently rich and stable to capture all the neurological connections that constitute it. The irony of this kind of materialism is that it treats the human being not as material, but as pure form: an information system, the decisive features of which float free of any particular material instantiation. Either a synapse fires or it doesn’t, and like any binary machine state this can be represented as a zero or a one. What is important is the logical relations between parts of the system. The argument has been made that artificial intelligence is a Kantian project: it seeks to establish the a priori conditions for the possibility of knowledge, in strictly universal terms that would apply to “all rational beings” whatsoever, whether they happen to be human, electronic, or an abacus made out of empty beer cans. Reductive materialism in the human sciences usually takes itself to be the hardheaded opposite of idealism, but is better understood as a species of idealism. The material objects it is concerned with are abstractions, conceived as logical units isolated from the contingencies that affect any actual, embodied being, or indeed any actual machine. Warren McCulloch was one of the group of thinkers who launched the research program of cybernetics. According to Jean-Pierre Dupuy, McCulloch referred insistently to Kant in his writings, and sought to establish “a physical basis for synthetic a priori judgments.” The Kantian character of AI was asserted by Joël Proust in “L’intelligence artificielle comme philosophie,” Le Debat , no. 47 (Nov.–Dec. 1987). I have relied on Dupuy’s account of Proust’s argument in his outstanding book The Mechanization of the Mind: On the Origins of Cognitive Science , trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 93.
10. THE EROTICS OF ATTENTION
2 . To be sure, generous imaginings are not the same as beliefs; one can actively entertain them without putting money on them, as it were, and this is probably a good thing to try to do as a corrective to our tendency to regard others as obstacles to our will, especially in the kind of mute encounters Wallace describes, where one has no idea what others’ backstory might be.
3 . Iris Murdoch, “On God and Good,” in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature (New York: Penguin, 1999), 345.
5 . Thus Adam Seligman and his coauthors have argued in Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008). The example of spousal ritual I give here is taken from a lecture delivered by Seligman at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture on November 18, 2009.
6 . William James, “The Gospel of Relaxation,” in The Heart of William James , ed. Robert Richardson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 132, emphasis added. In this popular essay James is giving practical advice that is based on the James-Lange theory of emotions, according to which feeling tends to follow action.
8 . Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 177.
11. THE FLATTENING
1 . David Brooks, “If It Feels Right,” The New York Times , September 12, 2011.
2 . This point is made by Talbot Brewer in The Retrieval of Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
3 . I owe the argument of this paragraph, and some of the language, to conversations and email exchanges with William Hasselberger and Talbot Brewer. They, in turn, report that they have been informed by Cora Diamond, “‘We Are Perpetually Moralists’: Iris Murdoch, Fact, and Value,” in Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness , ed. Maria Antonaccio and William Schweiker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
5 . Kant’s insistence on universality of aesthetic judgment demands that we “avoid the illusion arising from subjective and personal conditions which could easily be taken for objective, an illusion that would exert a prejudicial influence on [one’s] judgment.” Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment , trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1952), sect. 40, 151–52, as quoted by Adam Adatto Sandel in his excellent book The Place of Prejudice: A Case for Reasoning Within the World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 49. These “subjective and personal conditions” arise from your situation—from your own biography, as someone who has been formed in some historically contingent local context that you didn’t really choose. Maybe you grew up listening to Southern California hard-core punk in the 1980s because that’s what your friends were into. Anything parochial like that is a source of prejudice to be rooted out, according to Kant.
6 . Kant, Critique of Judgment , sect. 40, 151.
7 . Sophia Rosenfeld writes that “in Kant’s telling, in judging aesthetic matters we become unusually aware of our links to others.” Aesthetic judgment holds forth the potential for “agreement founded on affective identification with the other.” Common Sense: A Political History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). I find this version of Kant attractive, but hard to square with Kant’s insistence that we refer ourselves to a generic “everyone” for a check on our own aesthetic response; that strikes me as at odds with any actual experience of aesthetic communion with others.
9 . Søren Kierkegaard, The Present Age: On the Death of Rebellion , trans. Alexander Dru (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), 33–34. This essay was originally published in 1846.
12 . Wilfred McClay, “The Family that Shoulds Together,” The Hedgehog Review , Fall 2013, 25–26.
13 . Let us pause to consider how the inequalities that are rife in American society relate to the kind of differentiation that Kierkegaard defends. One problem with our big disparities of wealth is that (as Aristotle said in the Politics ) plutocrats always think that superiority in this one dimension (wealth) is an indication of superiority in every dimension, and therefore a title to rule. In our time, we call this assumption “meritocracy.” (Mitt Romney was certain he was “the smartest guy in the room” because he was the richest guy in the room.) Because this pretense is so patently false, I think it makes us suspicious of all kinds of hierarchy as having some kind of bad faith at its origin. (But note our ready recognition of athletic excellence; we are not cynical about sports.) This is a stance that flatters our egalitarian self-satisfaction, and probably contributes to the flattening that Kierkegaard laments.
14 . Kierkegaard, The Present Age , 16–17, emphasis added.
12. THE STATISTICAL SELF
1 . Sarah E. Igo, The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
2 . H. R. Markus and S. Kitayama, “Culture and the Self: Implications for Cognition, Emotion, and Motivation,” Psychological Review 98 (1991): 224–53. The Japanese and other Asian peoples are more likely to give concrete, role-specific descriptions of themselves in particular settings, such as being at home or at work, while Americans describe themselves with “more psychological trait or attribute characterizations (‘I am optimistic,’ and ‘I am friendly’)” (ibid., 233).
3 . Igo, The Averaged American , 285.
5 . Kinsey also shined a bright light on the prevalence of marital infidelity. He probably hoped this would encourage a more humane and lenient standard of marriage, but I suspect it had the effect of helping to destroy any space for privacy within marriage, as though spouses should not have anything to hide from each other. It seems plausible to trace a connection between the social scientific revelation that your spouse, if he or she is representative, is likely fooling around on you, and the fact that the divorce rate shot up in the third quarter of the century. Monogamy had been a thin yet socially necessary pretense; it was exploded in the name of sincerity and replaced with a deeper, more demanding sexual moralism of “honesty” that has turned out to be unlivable for many people.
6 . This is the same university where, during one stretch, nearly every other student at the library seemed to be reading a book entitled How to Think Like a CEO. One shouldn’t allow oneself to be dismayed by such things. The university’s mission of “preparing students for life” may actually require uneducating them, so they will be better adjusted. If they read this book instead of Shakespeare, they won’t feel oppressed by the impoverished language they are expected to use at work. And if they can identify with the CEO, they will be less likely to feel themselves in an antagonistic relation to those who manage the appropriation of their surplus labor value on behalf of Chinese shareholders.
13. THE ORGAN MAKERS’ SHOP
1 . I imagine the appeal of this image may have something to do with the fact that it allows the venture capitalists who hang around Silicon Valley to view themselves in a certain cultural role, as midwives to the new. This is like being a patron of the avant-garde: quite apart from any profit that may come, one has the sense of being in touch with the most important experiments under way, the most radical possibilities. This is an exceptional position to be in at a cocktail party.
2 . “When viewing the Riverside Church console for the first time, Monsieur put his hand to his head and said, ‘Mon Dieu!,’ while all Madame could say was ‘Oo la la!’” From the recollections of John Tyrrell, former president of the Aeolian-Skinner Organ Company, http://aeolian-skinner.110mb.com .
3 . My site visits to Taylor and Boody were in 2007 and 2008. The conversations I report here are based on recordings I made during those visits.
4 . According to Florensky, post-Renaissance Catholicism entailed “the distortion of the whole of spiritual life … And the essential sonic expression of this Catholicism is the organ sound.” Noting that Renaissance oil painting developed and flourished alongside the art of building pipe organs and composing music for them, he finds in these “two material causes arising from the same metaphysical root.” In particular, “The very consistency of oil paint has an obvious affinity with the oily-syrupy sound of the organ; and the flatness and liquidity of oil colors inwardly connects them to the sonic liquidities of the organ. Both the colors and the sounds are wholly of earth and flesh.” Pavel Florensky, Iconostasis , trans. Donald Sheehan (Oakwood Publishing, 1996), 100–102. Consider a more recent parallel: the early critics of rock and roll saw in it a threat to civilization. And of course, they were right. In a sense they held the music in higher regard—took it more seriously—than the appreciative rock critics of later decades who grew up with the music and lived within its horizon. In the same way, this hostile reaction to the organ as a work of the flesh perhaps serves as a clarifying counterweight to any too-easy appreciation of the organ as something innocuously “spiritual.”
5 . As quoted in Lawrence Phelps, “A Short History of the Organ Revival,” Church Music 67 (1967).
6 . In a letter to Joseph S. Whiteford, president of the Aeolian-Skinner Organ Company, dated March 27, 1960, Albert Schweitzer writes, “The sound of today’s organs is in grave danger, because the architects do not provide the location for them where their tonal effect would be best, and because much sound-absorbing material is being used in churches nowadays, which swallows the sound and destroys the magnificent resonance which stone gives to the sound of the organ.” Charles Callahan, ed., Aeolian-Skinner Remembered: A History in Letters (n.p.: Randall M. Egan, 1996).
7 . Lawrence I. Phelps, “Trends in North American Organ Building,” delivered at the International Organ Festival, St. Albans, June 28, 1969, and published in Music: The AGO & RCCO Magazine , May 1970. See also Phelps’s article “A Short History of the Organ Revival,” Church Music 67 (1967).
8 . We can now see that there may have been a historical error in the complaint of the Orthodox theologian about the sound of the organ (note 4 above). Florensky associates the hated sound with the Baroque period of organ music, but the actual sonic qualities he was reacting to may well have been those of a later epoch, produced by the Romantic orchestral organ that was prevalent in Florensky’s time, before the Baroque revival (it would be interesting to know what particular organs he was reacting to). His description of the organ as “slow, submerged,” “flat and liquid,” and “oily-syrupy” is practically identical to how organ builders themselves describe the sound of the Romantic orchestral organ, and it was in reaction against this sound that they set out to recover the principles of Baroque organ making, resulting in a sound that is much harder, crisper, and clearer. The irony is that the recovery of clean voicing in organs was made possible by the examination of organs dating from the period Florensky identifies as the problem, in his determination to identify Renaissance humanism as the source of all decadence.
9 . In a letter to Henry Willis, dated February 16, 1949, the organ builder Ernest Skinner writes, “The way pneumatic leather (sumac) is tanned now, it is only good for about 18 years.” Charles Callahan, ed., The American Classic Organ: A History in Letters (Organ Historical Society, 1990), 281.
10 . George A. Audsley, The Art of Organ-Building , vol. 2 (New York: Dover, 1988), 623–24.
11 . This polemical opposition was set up quite self-consciously by early modern thinkers such as Bacon, Hobbes, and Machiavelli. The “relief of man’s estate” through scientific progress required freeing men’s minds from the darkness of “the schools.”
EPILOGUE: RECLAIMING THE REAL