Monday, October 23, 2006

Philosophywatch, Oct. 15-22

Whoops! Philosophywatch -- a Brainiac feature wherein I take a weekly look at banal and embarrassing mentions, in magazine, newspaper, website, and newswire stories, of the names of great thinkers and authors -- took an unexpected vacation this month. Thanks for the emails, everyone, and not to worry. I'm back now, with a 6th installment.

Last Monday, someone at the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources worked a line from Camus into a US States News newswire press release about foliage:

"Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower," said French author and philosopher Albert Camus, and he very well may have been describing the palette of colors soon to be showcased in South Carolina.

One doubts that Camus was talking about South Carolina. I also wonder where in Camus, exactly, this line comes from. A Google Books search shows that this line is attributed to Camus in a reference book titled "20,000 Quips and Quotes," but the same search turns up no actual Camus books. I searched inside "The Stranger" and "The Myth of Sisyphus" on Amazon.com (I realize that translations may vary) and found nothing. When I searched inside "The Plague," however, I did find the line "In autumn ... we have deluges of mud," which sounds rather more like Camus, to me. (You can see why it takes me a long time to do a single installment of Philosophywatch.)

A reader points out what she believes is a frivolous use of a philosophical term in Ian Parker's New Yorker essay on Christopher Hitchens, from the issue dated Monday, Oct. 16. Here it is:

"No, excuse me," Hitchens said. His tone tightened, and his mouth shrunk like a sea anemone poked with a stick; the Hitchens face can, at moments of dialectical urgency, or when seen in an unkindly lit Fox News studio, transform from roguish to sour.

Sorry, but I don't see any problem with this example. Hitchens likes to boast that he is a former Trotskyist, after all, so the "dialectical" jab seems appropriate, to me. Let's move on.

Here's a line from a sports story in the Monday edition of the Lewiston (Idaho) Morning Tribune that caught my eye:

The first question put to Rosenbach, the quarterbacks coach, was, "Can you put a finger on why it's been so difficult for your guys to punch it in?" How to describe Rosenbach's resolve over the next few minutes? Friedrich Nietzsche would perhaps call it a Will to Vagueness. "We're just not doing a good enough job coaching," he said. "We've got to get the ball in the end zone.... We've got to do a better job."

That's more like it! Then, on Tuesday, an editorial in the St. John's (Newfoundland) Telegram described a graffiti battle in a local men's washroom -- one person had written "Gay is God's way," another had added the word "not" between "is" and "God's," and then a third had changed the "not" to "hot" -- in the following manner:

With apologies to the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, it is the perfect graffiti dialectic, the development of an argument through the use of thesis and antithesis...

Using all three of Hegel's names is a bit much, but maybe the writer has a point? I'm on the fence. On Wednesday, the blog Gawker used a post debunking retro notions of what a New York editor's daily life is like as an excuse to mock people who talk about philosophy:

Maybe there is, like, one rockstareditor left in this city, swilling hard liquor long into the night with his rockstarauthors while discussing, you know, Sartre v. Camus. He is statistically insignificant compared to the thousands of us who steal milk and toilet paper from the office because we can't afford our own, and go to readings for the free canapes.

Did you catch the parallelism -- French philosophers vs. canapes? Clever stuff. More existentialism ahead: On Wednesday, writing a preview of a Kris Kristofferson concert in the Riverfront Times of St. Louis, Missouri, Roy Kasten got off this zinger:

As you read this somewhere in Soulard or some west county karaoke horror, a drunk is singing Kris Kristofferson's "Me & Bobby McGee." But as an apotheosis of crippling nostalgia there's mystery at its core: "Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose." Camus never got free will so right. Kris Kristofferson did.

Yowza. A Friday review of a new video game titled "Dark Messiah of Might and Magic," which appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer, uses everybody's favorite German philosopher in a particularly lame way:

DMMM takes the top spot for two reasons: the use of Valve's Source engine (Half Life 2) for its first-person view, and a multiplayer aspect that is deep. Deep like Nietzsche. All of the detailed individual skills (spells, melee combat, etc.) for your DnD-type characters in single player are available in multiplayer.

That is deep. This Saturday, in the Globe and Mail (Canada), a review of a new thriller, "The Ruins," by "A Simple Plan" author Scott Smith, starts off like so:

Four young Americans get caught by a grisly and esoteric evil that draws from Mayan lore. The story wields examples of Kant's categorical imperative, Nietzsche's myth of eternal return and John Stuart Mill's utilitarianism.

Eh? The author of the review, Barb Minett, is identified as the owner of The Bookshelf in Guelph, Ont. One probably gets a lot of heavy reading done in Guelph, this time of year.

OK, one last item, also sent in by a reader, who points out that an essay studying biases in venture capitalists' decision-making, from the November issue of the Journal of Business Venturing, contains the following sentences, which the essay's authors felt the need to footnote:

"Birds of a feather flock together" is the saying that illustrates the basic hypothesis of this paper. The insight per se is not new.

What did the footnote say? "Goldstein (1980) cites Aristotle and Spinoza already describing such a phenomenon." This academic overkill is funny, yes, but we expect it. It's not really Philosophywatch material. Still, keep trying, readers! Your emails are most welcome.

Previous installments: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

Posted by Joshua Glenn at 03:18 PM

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