345. "Bang Gang" Insouciance

What Stephen Holden finds remarkable about this movie showing teenagers doing group sex is its "shrugging attitude."  I notice that "Bang Gang" is French and I can see the shrug.  How many times in Paris, witnessing another incomprehensible street scene, have I seen the shoulders go up.  C'est la mani. Here, I suppose, C'est la jeunesse.

Our world leaders in insouciance they are, and I turn to them gratefully, especially when in doubt about my cool.  Should I show curiosity about that man in high heels?  Ah, there at the corner table, les épaules going up.  I'm as grateful as I was in Milan, seeing a gentiluomo cutting his spaghetti.

The opposite of "insouciance" would be "souciance" I suppose, but we don't have the word.  I could have used it when I tried to think of people opposite to the gang-bang shruggers.  Certainly my father would qualify.  I remember his being asked once to serve as a chaperone for a high-school weenie-roast.  My mother said he spent the whole evening chasing kids out of the woods and back to the campfire.  He was souciant.

It's a coinage to be pleased with.  You know it fills a gap in your vocabulary when you keep finding new fits for it.  I think of the boyfriend of the babysitter who thought my dad could be a chaperone.  He failed to use a condom (on some other weenie-roast, I suppose) and got her pregnant.  He was under-souciant.  Then he got souciant in their search for the baby after she, in her period of disgrace and despair, had given it up for birth-adoption, and they were finally married.  Then the long period you'd have to call "post-insouciance."  Not a shrug anywhere, even among observers.

The more you observe the world the more sockets you find the word fitting into.  WCTU people standing watch at saloon doors were super-souciant.  LGBT people detecting micro-aggressions are hyper-souciant.  Those fearing the uncool of super- or hyper-  become crypto-.  Contemporary professors with a weakness for Victorian values — or Platonic love, or Doric discipline — have to be crypto-souciant.

There was nothing crypto about my father, chasing couples out of the woods, and there is nothing crypto about my other opposite to the French shruggers, NYT columnist David Brooks, telling his readers to start talking as if people had souls.

That's a cry in another ballpark.  Maybe in another age.  Yet what's on the field is the same.  Say you're at a post-movie table in Cannes and the person next to you, Brooks, says, "You know, if public life were truly infused with the sense that people have souls, we would comfortably tell [young people] that sex is a fusion of loving souls and not just a physical act" (NYT 6-7-16).  What are your shoulders doing?  Where are the épaules of those around you?  What about Holden, whose cool in front of the sex scenes was itself pretty Gallic?  Can you even form a picture?

One thing our sense of incongruity shows is that Holden must be right in calling the insouciance of the movie's group-sex treatment "distinctively contemporary."  A few years ago in France the souciance of existentialists kept shoulders down.  "You are what you choose, and every choice counts."  So choose carefully.  You're constructing your essence. 

In the contemporary world, then, Sartre becomes one of the voices from the conservative past, where relations with Christians become more congenial.  If Sartre and Brooks, silenced at the table, meet in the washroom they'll make perfect sense to each other.   "The soul can be elevated and degraded at every second, even when you’re alone not hurting anybody," says Brooks.  "I hear existence constructing essence," says Sartre. "I'm with you."

Treating life as a series of choices, and seeing a choice in every moment, with nothing lost, is about as deeply souciant as you can get.  You're down there with St. Augustine ("Take care of your body as if you were going to live forever; take care of your soul as if you were going to die tomorrow") and the saints who saw the crisis in every moment.  Not to mention the followers of Socrates, whose entire business was care of the soul.

Those are pretty heavy hitters, and if we can stay in the same ballpark I think they will win.  The thought momentarily cheers me, a longtime souciance fan, but then I think of what victory here might mean.  The end of insouciance?  Will I like that?

"Well," comes the voice of Socrates, "do you like the New York Times?  Would you like to remove the Arts section from it?  It's full of insouciance.  Hardly any in the Editorial section.  Will you be a one-section man?  Is that the good life?"

Oi, he's got me.  The very pieces that inspired this blog post, Holden's and Brooks's, appeared in the same issue!  Giving me pleasure, keeping me alive.  Giving me as good a life as I'm capable of.

224. Error Philosophy

 

 

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Error philosophy is what a teacher of English Composition develops after he discovers that truth philosophy is no use to him.  Aspiring truth philosophers, graduate students, ask, "How does one reach the highest truth?"  Compelled error philosophers (graduate students forced to teach freshmen) ask, "How does one climb out of the deepest error?"

You want an example of the deepest error?  There's one in the latest (11-21-13) New York Review.  Mark Lilla, writing about the response of postwar German youth to their parents' conformism, observes that "when left-wing radicalism was at its violent peak in the 1970s the following false syllogism became common wisdom: Nazi crimes were made possible by blind obedience to orders and social convention; therefore anyone who still obeys rules and follows convention is complicit with Nazism, while anyone who rebels against them strikes a retrospective blow against Hitler" (page 36).

Here's another example.  Albert Camus, in The Myth of Sisyphus, finds that reason is "impotent" in the face of a "meaningless" universe.  He concludes that reason is impotent in the face of anything in the universe.  It's all or nothing.   (Je veux que tout me soit expliqué ou rien.)   We recognize the common wisdom of the agonized adolescent.

I call that mistake in syllogistic reasoning deep error not because it's down disturbing the theoretical fundament but because it's so hard to dig out.  It's down there in human nature, deep in human nature.  Something in our genome (or in what fallen Adam passed on to us) says to German youth, "If a thing is bad everything associated with it is bad.  If you're good you'll believe this." 

In America we sometimes fix, or locate, this error in freshman nature, but that's wrong.  Graduate students, when the political fight gets warm enough, can commit as many informal fallacies as anybody.  "Be logical," I heard a cool one say to a warm one in 1974.  "Logical?" said the warm one.  "Nixon was logical."

What makes it so hard to dig this error out is that students, the best students, want to be deep.  They arrive shallow, or thinking themselves shallow, Midwest shallow, and the sooner they get deep the better.  They don't know what's deep but they think profs know.  "So who do the profs here think is deep?" It's not always Plato or Wittgenstein or Nietzsche or John Rawls.  In the 1960s in English departments it was Albert Camus, as evidenced by the number of profs who repeated his fallacies.

Have we forgotten?  "Reason and language, man's tools for discovering the meaning of his existence and describing his world, are useless."  The absurdist credo, repeated again and again in commentary on books like Catch-22.  (The above is in Frederick Kiley and Walter McDonald, A 'Catch-22' Casebook, p. 255)  Repeating the old, deep, elementary errors.

In a semester you don't have time to dig these errors out.  You just chip away at them.  With the absurdist credo, for example, you would try to get the writer to recognize the equivocation (one of the informal fallacies) in the word "meaning."  Most of the time "meaning" means "signification" (as "means" does right there!) but some of the time it means "purpose."   "I mean to be a 'saint,' meaning one canonized by the church."  There are both meanings, properly distinguished, in the same sentence.

But look at that professor's statement of the absurdist credo: "Reason and language, man's tools for discovering the meaning of his existence and describing his world, are useless."  Does Jean Kennard's word "meaning" mean "signification" or "purpose"?  If it means "signification" then "of his existence" makes no sense but "describing his world" does; if it means "purpose" then it's the other way round.  The writer has "reason and language," willy-nilly, doing both, giving him (and Jerry Rubin, and Abbie Hoffman, and about a hundred thousand Yippies) a false syllogism that looks like a deep European justification for the trashing of reason.

It would be easier to blame stupid Americans if the equivocation hadn't started with all-or-nothing Camus.  "Look, Reason, if you can't show me the purpose of my existence don't come around trying to explain the street outside."  (Note:  If British philosophers weren't so reluctant to get personal they'd have had Camus' case analyzed in an instant: he's been deprived of God, the traditional giver of meaning (purpose) to man's existence, and is having a hard time getting used to it.  When he matures in his atheism he will, as Bertrand Russell and A. J. Ayer — those old hands at Godlessness — can tell him, be less excited and more careful.)

The patron error philosopher is Florence Nightingale, who, though she had a hard time saying just what a hospital was or should be, knew one thing about it: that it shouldn't be a place that spreads disease.  That's starting at the small end.  And from that start she went a long way.  If there had been a Jean-Paul Sartre in her day, or teachers in awe of Jean-Paul Sartre, or any awe in her of such teachers, she'd have never gotten on the road.  "Before there can be any truth whatsoever there must be an absolute truth" (Existentialism, p. 43).  Awesome.

From the point of view of an English Composition teacher a European philosopher, then and now, is a regular Typhoid Mary, spreading writing disease from ward to ward.  Forget about philosophy, I say.  That's upstairs.  This is low level: making sense.  With meaningful words.  If you don't know what I'm talking about read Post #209, on the infected Hannah Arendt, whose prose was hailed (then and recently, in their memorial issue) by New York Review editors, themselves looking a little green around the gills.

So what philosophy will you get when you send students, aspirants, up to it sick?  A lot of French and German postwar philosophy, that's what you'll get.  Don't be surprised if there's an Anglophone quarantine.

What will surprise you is not that the quarantine was broken but that the breakthrough came in English departments, the very departments where disciples of Nightingale struggled, carrying lamps through the night.  I wish I could explain it.  I was there.  But it's the biggest mystery of my 42-year career, how we could pound away on the principles of good writing in one room and then walk across the hall and teach (and write respectful articles about) authors who contradicted those principles right and left, not only in their writing but in their theory, their philosophy.  Go figure.

4. Who Knows What "Existential" Means?

In all the uses of the word "existential" I have found in the New York Times in the last fifty years, there's only one I'm sure I understand, Yossi Klein Halevi's reference to the "existential threat" Israel sees coming from its Arab enemies. They want to end its existence. Perfectly clear. The one furthest from my understanding is probably Christopher Lehmann-Haupt's reference to the "existential rage" of contemporary women. I understand rage but what's existential? In between those two are, God help me, existential challenges, struggles, crises, bafflements, loathings, doubts, anxieties, themes, predicaments, puzzles, and paradoxes. When I add in a search of the New York Review I've got existential needs, searchings, raptures, significances, journeys, realities, gambles, alternatives, complexities, and failures. Nothing is clear.

Maybe, friend, that's because you've failed to take the first Wikipedian step, disambiguation. "Existential" can refer either to the Israeli problem or to the universal human problem conceived in the philosophy called Existentialism. Study of that philosophy would make a lot of those words clear. I have done that and I will, if you'll excuse me, tell you what an "existential challenge" is. It's the challenge in this question: "Do you see yourself making your next choice as a creature whose essence, determined by God and eternally fixed in that creature's heavenly existence as a soul, is to use his reason to choose what's right, or do you see yourself making your choice as a creature who, with no God to determine it, has no essence, but must himself determine what he is through the choices of right and wrong he makes in his earthly existence?" That's "existential" in Jean-Paul Sartre's version of the philosophy. The word tells you that you alone, as you exist right now, in a universe without God, determine what you are.

I'm afraid you've lost touch with what's happened to the word. I can see that yes, to understand some of those meanings I'll have to do some study, and I can see how at the end of my study I will probably understand "existential anxiety" (decisions like that would certainly worry me) and "existential crisis" (could be a big choice) and "struggle" (it will always be hard) and "doubt" (I'll seldom be sure I'm right), but what does that do for me when I have Walter Kaufman telling me (NYR, 10-14-10) that certain art objects confer an "existential significance on history." Can history cease to exist? Does it make agonized choices?

All right, I'll admit that some uses now are a little odd.

A little? Do you know that, according to the Times and the New York Review, there are now existential consumers, outcasts, clowns, loners, sorcerers, tourists, air pockets, martyrs, and orgasms? There's even an existential insurance policy, and it's not life insurance.

Where's that? Oh yes, Annie Murphy Paul, in the Times last month: "For a preschool girl, a Cinderella dress is nothing less than an existential insurance policy, a crinolined bulwark to fortify a still-shaky sense of identity." There you've got to use your imagination a little. The policy is existential because it helps meet the challenge in Sartre's question, "Who are you going to be?" The dress says, for a still uncertain girl, "I am going to be a woman."

OK, by extension an "existential crisis" is an identity crisis. But what is an "existential fantasy" and how can there be "existential loathing" and what in the world is an "existential rapture"?

I have to say that I don't know. But since words both have meanings and send off signals there are always going to be some people who use them for the signals. I think that's what's being done with those words. Many words that come from philosophy will simply signal "deep."

Ah yes, those orgasms are going to be deep. But I don't find other philosophers' words in the Times index signaling "deep" about so many ordinary things. Why this one?

I think the other ones mainly signal impersonal logical and linguistic analysis. Something hard to do and far from life. "Existential" signals a personal stand on big issues, like the existence of God. It isn't easy but it's close to life.

And particularly close to the cool life in Paris cafes. Signaled with just one word. How many lazy students did we have after the war playing Sartre in Midwestern beer joints? Plumage in the mating dance, that's all "existential" added.

I'll admit that, but it's not Sartre's fault, and it says little about existentialism. Every attractive contribution in philosophy gets played for a while in that game. You could probably hear "categorical imperative" thrown around just as often in Heidelberg. But that's just froth in the mug. There can be good beer underneath.

And how will I ever know that it's there, and good? Has to be by impersonal analysis, ignoring all the signals. If you're a follower of Socrates you blow away froth. I hate getting my nose in it.

You can blow it away, but you know what? You're going to lose a lot of the fun. You'll miss the sport in "existential diminuendo" (man, those violins were really sawing during the existential crisis) and "existential menopause" (for a guy caught between youthful ambition and elderly failure) and in seeing Robinson Crusoe as "a hero of French logic gone to existential seed." You'll never enjoy watching a pitcher like Mark Fidrych as "an existential experience" or take Reinhold Messner's climbing a mountain, looking for "the world's highest therapy couch," to be an example of "existential consumerism." You'll be missing a lot.