Skip to content

Archive for

Jul 30

Freedom, Fate, and Being Human: From Aeschylus to Marzano-Lesnevich

In her book The Fact of a Body, Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich employs the legal concept of proximate cause to consider the extent to which the things that have happened to us dictate who we are and what we will do.  Marzano-Lesnevich joins an investigation into a murder and the life of the murderer who was a child molester to her own memoir of growing up in a family in which she was molested by her grandfather.  At 18, she confronts her grandfather about what he had done to her as a child.  He responds that he too was abused as a child.  So, she wonders, is there no escape from this cycle?  Worse, is there no holding to account if the proximate cause continues to recede?

The troubles of the house of Atreus do not begin when Agamemnon sacrifices Iphigenia.  Agamemnon’s grandfather, Pelops, was served in a stew to the gods by his father and rescued by Demeter.  And his father, Atreus, serves up his brother Thyestes’s kids to Thyestes and only one son – Aegisthus — survives.  Aegisthus is the man that Clytemnestra, Agamemnon’s wife, is having an affair with when Agamemnon returns from battle and the man who helps Clytemnestra kill Agamemnon in the bathtub to exact revenge for killing Iphigenia.  Aeschylus writes a final part to this story to address the question of how there can be freedom from what has gone before.  On Aeschylus’ telling, justice is the break of the bloodletting cycle of revenge.  Each actor in the family up until the intervention of Athena into this story has been constrained to seek revenge by what has befallen them or what has gone before them.  Athena introduces freedom into the story by justifying Orestes and refusing the Furies drive to exact revenge on him.  But this freedom for Orestes comes at the real cost of Clytemnestra’s murder going unpunished.  On the calculus of Orestes’ familial responsibility, he must exact revenge for his father’s death, but this revenge will also require its own revenge.  Athena frees Orestes not by ending that familial responsibility, which he does fulfill, but by allowing Orestes not to be held responsible for fulfilling that responsibility. Read more

Jul 23

Exploring Indiana: McCormick’s Creek State Park

I just returned from a weekend camping at McCormick’s Creek State Park in Owen County, Indiana.  The first night was likely the hottest and most humid night of the summer.  The second night it rained and thundered.  It was likely the weekend with the worst weather of the summer.  Still, we had a good time.  This trip was the first time we went camping in Indiana, and so first time at McCormick’s Creek.  I wished I had had some of this information before going and was surprised that I couldn’t find some of this online.

So first, the primitive campsites are quite decent.  There are pretty regular water pumps around the loop.  The best sites seem to me to be the farthest ones on the outside of the ring, furthest south on the map (213, 214, 215, 218).  The sound carries through the ring pretty easily and quiet hours are not really enforced.  It was difficult for me to sleep because I could hear people talking late — like until 2 or later.  Sites from 190-202 are on the paved road and might be more exposed to noise from cars but seem more isolated from one another.  There is an outhouse on the top of the ring.  I read that there are showers at the electric sites, but I couldn’t see that on the map and didn’t go looking (there are showers at the pool, which you have to pay $3 to enter, but the entry fee lasts for the whole day and you can come and go).  Some sites do say that the bathrooms at the electric ring have showers, so I guess you could drive over. Read more

Jul 20

Power and the Pursuit of Justice

Corey Robin makes the case that we tend to associate virtue with  powerlessness and to see power as a vice, a position which leads us to suppose that to be good we must be without power and that, as he says, “strongmen are strong.”  I think he’s right, and I think this view of virtue as powerlessness follows from an association of power with self-interest that can be traced back to Plato.

As I argue in my last post, the problem of political nihilism is that it seeks power for its own sake, and justifies all power just by virtue of being power.  As Thrasymachus (and Judge Jeanine Pirro) argues, everyone knows you do what you do in order to get power and it is right as long as you can get away with it.  Socrates does not argue that power is bad, but that justice should have the power, rather than pure self-interest, which is divided against itself since lacking knowledge of what is good, one pursues only power.  I’ve long thought that Socrates makes an argument that is itself will-to-power–the power of the philosopher, a power legitimated by the positing of the good, which the philosopher pursues.  Seeking to set up the philosopher as the ruler, Socrates is subject to Thrasymachus’ complaint–he too seems to be acting and arguing for the sake of his own power, just as everyone does.

The difference between Socrates and Thrasymachus is that Socrates thinks that justice should have power, rather than any old person who can get the power.  This point leads to several difficulties.  The philosopher making this case in the cave that justice should rule rather than whoever achieves the rule has to appeal to those who just want power.  The philosopher does not even claim to have access to that justice–or at least there’s a case to be made that Socrates denying that he knows is distinguished from his fellow citizens only in his concern to pursue justice and to pursue the rule of justice rather than power alone.  He has to appeal to the desire of his fellow citizens for power in order to make the case that justice should be the ruling authority.  The lack of knowledge and the lack of desire for justice in his audience requires him to appeal to their desire for power in order to get them to desire justice.  Not being able to directly impute knowledge of justice, not least because Socrates does not have it, Socrates only posits the idea that there is such a thing, and that such a thing would be better for those who rule and those who are ruled.  Again and again, Socrates makes this case to Glaucon and Adiemantus who get on board with a depiction of a city some would call absurd because they think they will rule in this city because they think they can have such knowledge.  Socrates then uses the desire for power to motivate a desire for knowledge and for justice. Read more

Jul 18

1 Comment

Political Nihilism: The Trolley to Hell

This morning I read this in Brian Beutler’s latest piece at the New Republic:

“As someone who’s run for office five times, if the devil called me and said he wanted to set up a meeting to give me opposition research on my opponent,” Judge Jeanine Pirro, the maniacal Fox News host, said on Sunday. “I’d be on the first trolley to hell to get it. And any politician who tells you otherwise is a bald-faced liar.” She added that “there is no law that says a campaign cannot accept information from a foreign government.”

Pirro is referring to the meeting that Donald Trump, Jr. took with Russian nationals claiming to have information that would help his father win.  One of them was a former spy.  Beutler is making a case that our elections and politics require candidates to act above reproach so that not even an appearance of wrongdoing or interference can be seen in order to maintain the full faith and confidence of the American people in our election process.  But Pirro makes the case that politics is just about self-interest, everyone knows it, and everyone who supposes they would act otherwise is lying to themselves.

In March, I wrote here about similar problems in the ways that people were talking about healthcare in this country–as if the various penalties and difficulties don’t matter if you don’t think you will ever be subject to them.  But Pirro takes this notion even further and says, it isn’t blameworthy, it’s what anyone would do because we all know the point is to win.  There is no room here for other possible motivators–say the pursuit of justice or the good.   Read more