Smart Energy

Plato rides a Penguin in this edition of The Laws.

review by Brian Charles Clark

The Laws
by Plato
trans. Trevor J. Saunders
Publisher: Penguin, 2005

In the Republic, Plato (using his dead mentor Socrates as a mouthpiece) outlined his idea for the ideal city. The Republic is generally considered the earliest example of a utopian philosophy. The ideal city, in Plato’s view, would be ruled by a benevolent dictator, a “philosopher-king” who would be shielded from corruption but a great number of constraints on his personal freedom. Plato was antagonistic towards democracy, fearing, with some justification, the rule of the mob. It was a democratic vote, after all, that sentenced Socrates to death in 399 B.C., on the charge that Socrates corrupted the youth of Athens and introduced new gods. In general, though, it is recognized that what Plato called “democracy” would be better understood by the modern ear as “anarchy”: the extreme freedom and equality in which “‘there’s no compulsion either to exercise authority if you are capable of it, or to submit to authority if you don’t want to; you needn’t fight if there’s a war, or you can wage a private war in peacetime if you don’t like peace; and if there’s any law that debars you from political or judicial office, you will none the less take either if they come your way” (Republic). We should also remember that Athenian democracy really was the direct participation of its citizens (as the Greek words demo-cracy imply) and therefore unlike modern democracies, where the power and participation of individuals is mediated by elected representatives. Read the rest of this entry »

Arts and Minds

review by Brian Charles Clark

Arts and Minds
by Gregory Currie
Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2005

Arts and Minds is a collection of essays in the philosophy of aesthetics written over the past five or so years. Many of the essays have been previously published or presented at conferences but have been revised for book publication. The essays range widely over the major issues of contemporary aesthetics; indeed, the book is divided into three sections, “Ontology,” “Interpretation,” and “Mind,” corresponding to major areas of current concern. As Currie points out in his introduction, aesthetics suffered a setback in the twentieth century in the form of “Attempts to carve out a domain of problems about the arts that could be investigated without serious help from other areas of philosophy” (1). Currie clearly eschews any hermetically sealed form of inquiry: his essays are peppered with insights from other disciplines, mainly philosophy of mind but also anthropology and cognitive science. This makes for challenging and stimulating reading, not only, I think, for philosophers but as well for scholars in other areas of the arts and sciences. Read the rest of this entry »

The Penguin Pound, Up Early Writing

review by Brian Charles Clark

Ezra Pound: Early Writings
edited by Ira B. Nadel
Publisher: Penguin, 2005

Ezra Pound was the godfather of the modernists. James Joyce, the reigning Titan, said that “Nothing could be more true than to say we all owe a great deal to” Pound: “I most of all.” Unlike T.S. Elliot, who is better remembered for his poetry than his criticism, it was Pound’s critical faculties that made him such a seminal influence among his peers. Like some omnipresent deity from Olympus (apparently a mountain near Pound’s birthplace in Hailey, Idaho), he had his fingers in everything and everybody’s business as a kind of jovial dictator and boss vivant.

Collected here are some of the early works of the mature Pound. No juvenilia sullies the mix of poetry and prose. As a poet Pound was always interested in translation—from the Anglo-Saxon, the Chinese, and other languages—and the surprising discord and serendipitous harmonies to be heard when poetry crosses borders. So here we get Pound’s wonderful “Seafarer,” one of the oldest poems in the English language, rendered in modernist (if not exactly “modern”) English, and “Liu Ch’e,” “a wet leaf that clings to the threshold” separating the placid, nature-loving philosophy of Chinese poetry and the speed-obsessed futurism of the early twentieth century. Read the rest of this entry »

H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life

review by Brian Charles Clark

H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life
by Michale Houellebecq
Publisher: McSweeny’s, 2005

French bad-boy novelist Michel Houellebecq (pronounced well-beck) is famous for his Platform and Elementary Particles, books stuffed with depressing, depressed and amoral characters who love to sexually humiliate each other. Houellebecq has been accused of writing misogynistic narratives, but you’d have to have tunnel vision to see them that way: Houellebecq doesn’t just hate women, he hates the entire human race. Houellebecq is, in other words, an misanthropic existentialist’s dream date.

Houellebecq’s dream date, in turn, is H.P. Lovecraft. If Houellebecq is the international star of a new wave of illiberal misanthropism, Lovecraft (1890 – 1937) is the pater familias of that wave. Read the rest of this entry »

Quincy's PLato Unmasked

review by Brian Charles Clark

Plato Unmasked: The Dialogues Made New
by Keith Quincy
Eastern Washington University Press, 2004

For many centuries now, people have been making big piles of hay out of the dialogues of Plato. Each pile created has the remarkable property of closely resembling its maker. Totalizing philosophers are absolutely positive that Plato’s hodge-podge of dialogues all piece together to make a nice neat system. Nietzsche said that Plato was boring because the Greek was a philosopher first and a citizen second. I.F. Stone, the late great investigative journalist, accused Socrates, Plato’s beloved teacher and mentor, of fascism. Enter Keith Quincy, who, while never using the “F” word (neither did Stone), is quite adamant that Plato was anti-democratic. Read the rest of this entry »

Telling Time: Essays of a Visionary Filmmaker

review by Brian Charles Clark

Telling Time: Essays of a Visionary Filmmaker
by Stan Brakhage
Publisher: Documentext, 2003

Stan Brakhage died of cancer induced, he says in an interview on the Criterion Collection’s DVD anthology of 26 of his films, By Brakhage, by the dyes he used to hand-paint many of his avant-garde films. He left a body of work that includes nearly 400 films ranging in length from nine seconds to four hours, as well as numerous lectures, essays and books. The present collection of “Essays of a Visionary Filmmaker” (as the editor, Bruce McPherson, has subtitled the book), are all but two of his contributions to the quarterly Toronto magazine Musicworks, written between 1989 and 1999. As a child, Brakhage was a musical prodigy, grew up aspiring to be a poet, and was influenced by Abstract Expressionism as a young man in New York before turning to filmmaking. These depths of influence and aspiration are all represented among the essays in Telling Time. Read the rest of this entry »

review by Brian Charles Clark

Ecocriticism: Creating Self and Place in Environmental and American Indian Literatures
by Donelle N. Dreese
Peter Lang, 2002

Donelle N. Dreese’s short book, Ecocriticism: Creating Self and Place in Environmental and American Indian Literatures, manages to cover, in the space of only 116 pages (not counting the index or bibliography) and five chapters, 10 major works by contemporary Native American and feminist writers. The thesis and purpose of the book is quite ambitious: “Working from postcolonial and ecocritical theoretical notions that place is inherent in configurations of the self and in the establishment of community and holistic well-being, the purpose of this book is to examine the centrality of landscape in contemporary poetry and prose works by writers who, either through mythic, psychic, or geographic channels, have identified a landscape or environment as intrinsic to their own conceptualizations of self” (3). The first of the book’s six chapters contains the theoretical underpinnings that support her subsequent readings of N. Scott Momaday, Linda Hogan (whose work is examined twice, in chapters 2 and 4), Joy Harjo, Chrystos, Gloria Anzaldúa, Susan Griffin, Wendell Berry, Simon Ortiz, Wendy Rose and Gerald Vizenor. By covering major works by these important authors who frequently turn up on the reading list of a feminist or Native American literature class, Ecocriticism should be an important contribution useful for both students and professors. Read the rest of this entry »

Regarding the Pain of Others

review by Brian Charles Clark

Regarding the Pain of Others
by Susan Sontag
Publisher: Picador, 2004

Susan Sontag’s new book, Regarding the Pain of Others, updates, expands, and in certain respects repudiates her 1977 book On Photography. Where On Photography was quite theoretical and full of jargon, following, as it did, the work of the French critic Roland Barthes, Regarding the Pain of Others is a series of simple ideas written in plain language. The new book is nonetheless, or perhaps more so because of its simplicity, a work of profound and needed philosophy. The core questions of this short book are, Do photographs of the destruction and pain caused by war in any way inhibit such acts? Or do such photos, because of their prevalence, inure us to the pain of others? Where once, as during the Vietnam war, “photography became… a criticism of war” through a public display of the carnage, “[t]his was bound to have consequences,” a “blowback” reaction since the “mainstream media are not in the business of making people feel queasy about the struggles for which they are being mobilized.” Contemporary news media are, rather, in the entertainment business. Thus, in the current war, the media have been willing and eager flag-waving dupes of the military. Read the rest of this entry »

Fragments of Heraclitus

review by Brian Charles Clark

Fragments: The Collected Wisdom of Heraclitus
Translated by Brooks Haxton; foreword by James Hillman
Viking, 2001

Heraclitus, the ancient Greek philosopher, may have written a book that he might have called On Nature. If Heraclitus did write such a book, and if that’s what it was called, he did so while Pythagoras, Buddha, and Lao Tzu were all alive. But nobody really knows for sure—all that survives the intervening 2,500 years are fragments incorporated in the works of others. Personally, I’m not convinced that Heraclitus wrote a book—whatever it may have been called—at all. I think the old philosopher was a little like Ludwig Wittgenstein in that respect: mistrusting of the permanence of words on paper, never quite satisfied with the way things came out when he did write things down. Heraclitus seemed to have preferred conversation (when, as legend has it, he let you within a hundred feet), just like Wittgenstein, so much of whose thought was written down by his students, his listeners. Read the rest of this entry »

Cogito, Ergo Sum: A Life of Rene Descartes

review by Brian Charles Clark

Cogito, Ergo Sum: A Life of Rene Descartes
by Richard Watson
David R. Godine, 2002

René Descartes’ life and times have been gone over with a fine tooth comb. Within a few decades of his death, in 1650, the first biography appeared: La Vie de Monsieur Des-Cartes (1691). A steady stream of biographies have appeared since then-though none, as Richard Watson points out in his amusing, contentious, and contemplative new biography, have offered much in the way of new information. Rather, biographers have tended to tender theories about how or why Descartes did thus or such, and especially as to why Descartes was (or still is) a Great Man.

Watson takes a different tack: he writes as a skeptic, placing the Great Man theories in doubt. As well they should be, of course: Descartes did contribute to the formation of modern science and analytical philosophy, but got things off on the wrong foot with his silly notion of a mind and a body the twain of which shall never meet. Read the rest of this entry »