9. "Making war on his own people."

Gadhafi the monster, like his fellow monster Saddam Hussein, is "making war on his own people." That's bad. But if you're putting down a rebellion who else are you going to make war on? There's nobody else. That's who Abraham Lincoln made war on. The angels Satan talked into trying to take over Heaven were God's own people. They're all in the same category.

So if you're making a list of things to hold against Muammar Gadhafi you shouldn't put this on it?

Not if you want your items to have the most force. Call a bad guy a name that applies equally to good guys and you haven't hit him very hard. It's a missed punch that exposes you. You're a slap puncher.

How should Gadhafi be punched?

With words that refer to his particular faults. So that a reader or listener can go down your list and say, "Yeah, he really did this and it's really bad." Executing without trial, denying of civil rights, policing secretly — a dictator is going to present you with a ton of bad stuff. Hit him with it, right in the kidneys. Why throw fluff?

But if a reader or listener doesn't know it's fluff, and can't tell a slap puncher from a solid puncher, it doesn't matter. The writer scores. Not every reader is going to go down the list examining items the way you picture readers doing. The payoff is in the crowd, not in the ring.

I stand corrected. I shouldn't question slaps without asking who the writer's or speaker's audience is and what he wants them to do. If he wants them to back a war on the dictator, and they're not examiners, he just slaps away. If they're examiners he zeroes in.

And if he needs a coalition?

I guess he throws in enough slaps to gain more from the first group than he loses from the second. Tough calculation, though, because it's hard to know how successful the teachers of examination have been.

8. "Discrimination," Rational and Irrational.

Can I rationally discriminate against green people?

No, friend, because your word "against" shows that you are singling them out just because they are green, and not for any purpose. That's not rational, that's sentimental, done for emotional satisfaction. Hitler's killing of the Jews was, in that sense, sentimental. If he'd been rational he'd have preserved them, since their loss weakened, on the whole, his war effort. Some of them might have helped him build an atom bomb.

So if I single green people out for a purpose, like reducing the chances of explosion on my airplane, I discriminate rationally.

Yes. And what has caused you to worry about this is the ambiguity in the word "discriminate." It means both "distinguish" and "distinguish with prejudice." While the former uses reason vitally, the latter abandons it. You judge before you have relevant knowledge. That's prejudgment, or prejudice.

So if I have studied previous explosions on airplanes and know that a high percentage have been caused by green people, and have studied their faith and know that there are stronger justifications of martyrdom in it than in other faiths, and find that this bears on their behavior, my discrimination is rational. I can then, after I have done everything I can within time and money constraints to avoid offense, support airport profiling, something I have not supported in the actions that gave it a bad name, policemen stopping drivers just because they were black people.

Absolutely. It's rational to distinguish a religion from others and connect the behavior of its adherents (though of course not all of its adherents) to the teachings in it. Only an irrational person would say that there's no connection between teachings and behavior.

So it will be rational for me to do the same thing I did with green people when I look at blue people.

It would be irrational not to.

Very well, I see that a man nominated to be an adviser to our President is blue. I examine the blue religion and see that a central belief in it, one that distinguishes it from other religions, is that a higher power, God, gave its adherents the land some of them are now contesting for. I know that claims to be backed in a contest by a higher power make such contests very hard to adjudicate and dangerous to friends who may be appealed to for support. I look at the evidence and calculate the probabilities of danger to myself and my country — just as I did with the green person in the airport — and decide to ask my congressman to back the other nominee. That meets all the standards of rationality, doesn't it?

I'd hesitate to say so until I knew how thoroughly you looked at the evidence. You may have concluded too quickly that the nominee shares his fellow blues' belief in the gift of land. In that case I'd have to call your request to your congressman irrational. You judged to soon. The word for that is "prejudice."

How close does a look at evidence have to be before it ceases to be irrational and becomes rational? How thoroughly did I look at the green person? With us mortals, rationality consists in calculating probability on the basis of what you can learn in the time given you. With so much at stake I don't need to find more than a very slight probability that the blue will be swayed, but all I have, really, are labels: "Academic," "Liberal," "Scholar," and the like. The only one that distinguishes him from the other nominee is "Unbelieving Blue." I check the evidence and find very little difference between believing blues and unbelieving blues in support of settlements on the land. I let that label sway me. Is that a "prejudice"?

No, it's not, it's a "judice." Rational. But if those unbelieving blues quit supporting the believers then your judgment-tipping evidence changes. If your judgment doesn't change with it then it's no longer rational. But remember, "rational" doesn't mean "good" or "wise." Those words apply to the choice of ends. "Rational" applies only to the choice of means to ends. You can be called good, and even wise, while you do something irrational.

7. "Absurd." Deep Trouble.

1942 when Albert Camus called the universe absurd, meaning unreasonable. His call made no sense. People and arguments can be unreasonable, but there's no way the universe can be unreasonable. It just is.

The harm appeared when people who accepted Camus' statement started to make deductions from it. "If the universe is absurd then it's foolish to approach it rationally. Logic is useless." Logic, though, could have shown them (if their dismissal hadn't already deprived them of it) that by what they had said there was only one possible universe in which a rational approach was foolish: a universe where everything was equally absurd. In other universes, including those most packed with absurdities, you'd have to discriminate among them, and only reason could do that. You'd be wise to use it.

With some people, though, the harm was fixed as soon as the deduction about logic was made. They were deprived of the instrument by which they could test their belief. Their absurdism was self-validating, hedged against any threat.

Seeing a mind abused by a mistake in philosophy is always a caution to us, but when the abused mind inhabits a classroom we teachers feel downright alarm. Here the abuse reduces our ability to lead students through the logical consequences of a belief, an ability vital to the Socratic teacher. The existentialist-abused minds of the sixties and seventies threatened to take away his calling.

If that threat had materialized we'd have to rank misuse of "absurd" among the most harmful in history. It didn't materialize, though. It couldn't. The value of logic was too evident in the daily world. Very few things could be gained there without probable inference and an implicit if-then chain of reasoning.

So how could those abused minds keep going back to existentialism for more abuse? Was the barrier to logical testing so high they couldn't see over it? Or were the signals from the word "absurd" just so strong they overpowered any impulse to examine its meaning?

I'm inclined to think it was the latter. Though all words from a philosophy signal "deep," "absurd" signaled "Parisian deep." Consider the era. As Tony Judt points out in trying to explain the world's tolerance of Sartre's long support of Stalinism, every signal from Paris in those early postwar years got a boost from its place of origin. Romantic, sophisticated, daring, classy. See that in a lover and sure you'll put up with some abuse.

The affair did come to an end, though. The New York Times and The New York Review in the last thirty years either ignore absurdism or condescend to it, as they do to existentialism. Does this mean that misuse of "absurd" did no long-term harm?

It's very hard to know, but I see it in the minds of those who were students in the later postwar years, the ones who took logic and even mathematics to be a social construction, or took logic to be a male, European construction, rather than a codification of reasoning standards.

I suppose there are always going to be students coming out of humanities classes needing to be told that, no, logic is not humanly warm and creative, it only tests what the warm, creative imagination has come up with in the way of propositions. And I'm sure there are always going to be retired professors like me unhappy with what their replacements are teaching. And I'm sure they'll be quick to connect it with the evils they fought in their own time. What I'm most sure of, though, is that the human mind won't quit making connections, and that mine keeps making this one between what I heard from students in the nineties and what their teachers heard in the sixties.

I'm obliged to ask if it could have been different? If Camus had started things off with proper expressions might there have been in the eighties and nineties a greater respect for logic? What expressions could he have used?

Not "irrational universe." That has the same defect as "absurd universe." Not "meaningless universe." That would have gotten him tangled in the old ambiguity, "meaning" as "significance" and "meaning" as "purpose." Though he did occasionally use both words, neither is an advance on "absurd." No, the appropriate expression, the expression that would fit everything else he was saying, and would make sense to us, is "indifferent universe." There's no sign in the universe of care for human beings.

Why didn't he say "indifferent universe"? Was it that that expression was just the one a Darwin-shocked Christian would use? Camus was an atheist, advanced to the point of anti-Christian scorn, conversing in circles where that scorn was common. He couldn't use the word that was correct, right, maybe even perfect, without sending a signal he didn't want to send, and looking like somebody he didn't want to look like: a Christian unable to recover from his Darwin-shock.

There's a lesson here about personal signals. Give more than two or three and, unless you are not the mess most of us are, some of them are going to contradict others. I think the signals in the following passage contradict the signal Camus sends with "absurd":

I want everything explained to me or nothing. And the reason is impotent when it hears this cry from the heart.... The world itself, whose single meaning I do not understand, is but a vast irrational. If one could say just once: "This is clear," all would be saved.

Camus can't lament the absence of a single meaning in the world without being seen to lament, along with everybody else who talks this way, the absence of God, the one being who gives a single meaning to the universe and a purpose to man. He's signaling Darwin-shock. And th at signals an immature atheist. Mature atheists have gotten over their shock, and speak more matter-of-factly.

Note: It will not be apparent now but Camus's (or his translator’s) use of the word "absurd" was a misuse that should have been apparent then.  Dictionaries at the time carried only "unreasonable" and its synonyms. Only later was the secondary meaning, "manifesting the view that there is no order or value in human life or in the universe," added — as we see now in Internet dictionaries.  More testimony to the power of Camus and the existentialists.

 

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6. "Frisson." "Schadenfreude." Which Has Legs?

"Frisson" has done good work for New York Times writers both through what it means ("shiver") and what it suggests (whatever it is in a French person's shiver that's different from a North American person's shiver.) Since 1981 they have used it 888 times as compared to 527 for "schadenfreude," the German word that means "happiness over the misfortune of another." Both are loan words. The late 20th-century surge by each suggests that they are also vogue words. Might they stay? Which has the better chance?

What "frisson" has going for it is that suggestion of a French sensitivity. It does for a sentence what "soupcon" does for a recipe. So as long as North Americans admire French sensitivity this will certainly push the word along. And unless German sensitivity gains an attraction it has so far lacked ,"frisson" can be expected to widen its lead.

What "schadenfreude" has going for it is its meaning. There's no single word in English that means "happiness in the misfortune of another." There's a niche waiting for it. Since that's the way loan words commonly stick in a language, and since there's no niche for "frisson," and no sign that one will open up ("shiver" seems to be doing just fine in the Times), I think we have to say that the smart money will be on "schadenfreude." Already, in the last five years, it has pulled ahead of "frisson," 282 to 261.

5. "Overdetermined." Are Editors Tolerating a Mess?

 

Here's that word "overdetermined" again, in the latest New York Review: "Fontane was at pains to orchestrate a narrative chain of events that would appear neither overdetermined nor random, but achieve naturally an impression of inevitability" (Phillip Lopate, 2-24-11). I think Lopate means "fixed too rigidly by the author," but if so what does Rachel Saltz, writing in the New York Times (4-27-10) mean when she says, "Mr. Gilroy's drama shuttles between the overdetermined and the absorbing"? Then there's a letter-writer saying an editor had "an obsessed, over-determined air" as he struggled with a book's annotation ("Robert Lowell: An Exchange," 9-25-03). And what do any of them have to do with all those other uses over the years in the Review and the Times to so many different things — processes, choices, prejudices, lives, arguments, meanings, readers? Do you know that irony, modernism, Robespierre's fall, an artifact's symbolism, the October Revolution, a politician's defeat, a man's choice of a career, the harmony of every phrase of tonal music, and an ad about Brooklyn can all be called "overdetermined"? Even "the A-bombing of Japan" gets called "overdetermined." That really puts it to me. I can take "overdetermined" to mean "fixed too firmly" and be back with Lopate, but I can't keep from picturing those pilots. Are they concentrating too hard, as the editor is? I'm very confused.

Maybe, friend, you'd be less confused if you looked into the word's origins. You'd find (if you'll permit me) that it was first used by Freud (Überdeterminierung) to discourage simple interpretations of dreams. Dreams were, in his eyes, a product of many features of the dreamer's life and came from many levels in his or her psyche.  For Louis Althusser political situations were like dreams. They had many sources and could not be fitted onto a thesis-antithesis line as some of his fellow Marxist philosophers wanted to do. The October Revolution could not be called a "thesis" because it was "overdetermined." That's the meaning — "having multiple causes or contributory factors" — that most of the dictionaries finally caught up with. Add it to those meanings that are clearer to you ("fixed too rigidly" and "concentrating too hard"), pay close attention to the context, and you'll be able to understand a lot of those expressions you were worried about.

All right then, when Harold Bloom says some readers were "overdetermined" (NYR 4-26-84) I will know by the context that he means "concentrating too hard." And when Jennifer Schuessler (NYR 6-11-09) says a "choice of career" is overdetermined I will know in the same way that it has many contributory factors. 

But wait a minute. Does Schuessler mean that a choosing of a career is often rendered oversimply by people or that choosing itself is complicated? Is the overdetermination in the thing or is it in how people render the thing?  Schuessler seems to be saying that the choice itself is complicated while Freud's word would have her say that people, like the analysts he was trying to discourage, were oversimplifying a complication.  On one side we've got the overterminer and on the other the overdeterminable.  What are we talking about here, dancer or dance?

But wait.  There are all those leftovers — "overdetermined" as the opposite of "absorbing," and describing the ad about Brooklyn, and summing up "our lives." And what will I do with a work of art as a "richly overdetermined compromise formation"?  Over all there's that word "over." Yet you and the dictionary tell me that "overdetermed" is just supposed to say to me "multiple." That's all Freud and Althusser mean by it. I can't see "over," though, without asking. "So what's right on the mark? How many causes? How bad is it to underdetermine?" I'm at a loss. What's happened is that Freud and Althusser have failed to do what we in America and England tell our college writers to do: when you introduce a new word, or a word you think is going to be hard for your reader, give him a sight of the word's old inside, as "experience" is inside "experiential" and "exponent" is inside "exponential." Freud and Althusser didn't do that. They didn't come close. They put next to their word a word that counters their word's meaning. "Over" cancels its neutrality. The reader has to go outside, to you or to a book of psychology or philosophy, to find that it doesn't. Just as he had to do with "existential." That's asking readers to do too much. Especially when what they get is so little. Work your way back to the neutral meaning, "multiple causes," and what do you have? A commonplace. Very few people think events have single causes. So most of the time the word just points to the obvious. The reader's hard work leads to boredom. It's work the writers could have saved them from if they'd been more careful.

I know, maybe it's the translators who needed to be more careful ("uberdeterminierung" and "surdetermination" may not carry quite the same charge) but either way it's depressing. Our intellectuals are teaching our magazine and newspaper editors to tolerate messes.  After our composition teachers have worked so hard to teach their readers what neatness is. 

Would you like to know what that teaching would require here?  It would require, for neatness, sticking with "complicated" for things and "over-simplified" for too simple representations of them until you saw that a special word from psychology or philosophy added something significant.

Violate that teaching and you're going to get a mess.  "Overdetermined" makes a big mess here because it comes with a license, signed by intellectuals: "This word, and words like it in European psychology and philosophy, don't have to meet the standards you count on."  If we American readers honor that license we can expect to get hung up on many more words like this. Or be bored to death.  Even reading our best newspapers and periodicals.

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.

3. Did We Dismiss "Deconstruct" Too Quickly?

"Deconstruct MAD," said Timothy Egan (NYT Online, July 14, 2010) about the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction. And he went on to show just what should be done. That may not worry most readers but it should worry a lot of English-speaking philosophers and their followers, like me. Egan is using "deconstruct" in a way that looks sensible! That word that we took to be just a Paris fad.

The main complaint was that it was superfluous. We already had "dismantle" and "disassemble" available to tell people to take something apart; all "deconstruct" did was add a little French spice. And there's where Egan snags us. From his pen the word means, "take it apart very carefully, with close attention to what went into its construction, including the intentions of those who constructed it." That's not spice, that's solid referential meaning, and we can't deny it.

Nor, if we attend to history, can we deny the source. Egan got that meaning from the despised Jacques Derrida, who under the name he coined, "deconstruction," carefully took apart Plato's Phaedrus, and gave his followers the model.

Why was Derrida despised? Because, in layman's terms, he was a Fancy Dan. Laughably so. When he analyzed a piece of fiction he would speak deeply of what he called its "double invagination," which meant "the verted reapplication of the outer edge to the inside of a form where the outside opens a pocket [and] comes to extend (or encroach on) the invagination of the lower edge."

If you giggle at that, layman, maybe you can understand why philosophers, after (in their way) giggling at it, and therefore despising, the author, are going to have a hard time giving him credit for a sensible coinage. Which they have to do, after reading Egan. There's no way out of it. He's a Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist. And that's the Times he's writing in.

Might it be, though, that Egan is just one swallow, and there will be no summer for Derrida? Let's check the Times for the last twelve months.

Who would have guessed how many things are now being deconstructed. Patterned fabrics, police shootings, dance steps, Lorenz Hart's song lyrics, the first lady's outfit, blackface minstrelsy, sugar-laden breakfast food, the flavors of a salad, and conceptions of space and matter are all being given the treatment. And those are only the more plausible-sounding things. How do you deconstruct mother's milk, photosynthesis, an automobile, the living conditions of a fossil frog, and a Knicks' loss on the basketball court? Our Anglo analytic professors were right. The word's a continental sell.

When we get to "culinary deconstruction" we're sure of it. Those chefs who put the word on their menus (for a traditional dish broken down into its constituent parts) are using it only for its philosophical flavor. That's not serious usage.

But then we find a choreographer carefully breaking down a predecessor's work and criticizing it. That fits and it's serious. And there's nothing funny at all about a proposal to deconstruct a Congressional plan for national health spending. That's just what Egan wanted done with the State Department's policy of mutually assured destruction.

So the evidence is mixed. Maybe the best thing to do is imagine an occasion where we'd be happy to have the word in our vocabulary. How about the drafting of President Bush's State of the Union speech before the invasion of Iraq? "Axis of evil." Egan arrives at the conference and says, "Come on, deconstruct this." Would we like to have somebody there taking apart Bush's speech as carefully as Derrida took apart Plato's Phaedrus? If so we can be glad we hadn't gotten rid of "deconstruction."