Reading the Troubled Past

Josh Landy
What’s so great about the so called Great Books?

Ken Taylor
Aren’t they full of discredited attitudes about race, gender and sexuality?

Josh Landy
Should we even bother to read them anymore?

Ken Taylor
Welcome to Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. We’re coming to you from the studios of KALW San Francisco.

Josh Landy
Continuing conversations that begin at Philosophers Corner on the Stanford campus, where Ken teaches philosophy, and I direct the philosophy and literature initiative.

Ken Taylor
Today, we’re Reading the Troubled Past.

Josh Landy
You know what, Ken that past really is full of trouble. I’m not sure we should be reading it anymore. I mean, take Aristotle: he said some people are born to be slaves. I mean, that’s not just a bad argument. That’s a dangerous argument and it license cruelty for centuries.

Ken Taylor
Josh okay. But there’s way more than that. And Aristotle, there’s way more than Aristotle in the canon. Come on, you really you can’t be suggesting that we should junk the whole canon because of one bad argument. In one philosophy book.

Josh Landy
Well, isn’t just one bad argument. I mean, Rousseau talked about the so called noble savage. You know, Horace denigrated women left and right, Dante sent gay men to hell. I mean, the more you read, the more the West starts to look like a history of prejudice and and its books are just like a justification.

Ken Taylor
We overgeneralizing your judge. I mean, think about I don’t know marks, or Simone de Beauvoir, or Dubois or Descartes, Galileo, come on. The Western canon is full of people who come for liberation, liberation of blacks and women of the Boer liberation from the church and the king and patriarchy. Gosh, so many people in again, and they weren’t defending the powers that be they weren’t attacking them.

Josh Landy
Some of those folks talk to good game can but did they really believe what they were saying? Thomas Jefferson, saying all men are created equal while being a slave owner. I mean, the Western canon can’t it’s it’s nothing but an apologia for oppression, plus the few Figley—

Ken Taylor
Nothing but that? Come on, you can’t really believe that.

Josh Landy
Well, you’ve got to admit Ken, way too many of these authors clearly believed that straight white males are superior to everybody.

Ken Taylor
Oh, well, there are the Greeks who are an exception, right? Okay. And besides the authors, all these authors thing they don’t agree on on anything. I mean, take male he celebrated democracy, but Plato despised it. Adam Smith loved capitalism. John Paul saw it. Look, you can’t read the Canon as a set of like fixed answers. It’s a set of questions.

Josh Landy
Well, okay, but who gets to decide what those questions are? I mean, not women. Not people of color, not colonized subjects,

Ken Taylor
You’re talking about the way it used to be.

Josh Landy
Oh until like 10 minutes ago?

Ken Taylor
Well, you have to admit we have expanded the canon. Okay, I admit, belatedly, I mean, WEB WEB Dubois, Toni Morrison, Asha Jabbar, Chinua Achebe. None of them were in the canon when I was a great book you back at Notre Dame put it all in there now.

Josh Landy
Okay, so why don’t we just forget all the morally compromised dead white guys? I mean, I mean, there’s plenty of great writing by modern voices, all that stuff you just mentioned. And it doesn’t come with all the oppressive baggage, so so let’s just read that like.

Ken Taylor
Josh come on, you can’t be such a triumphal presentist that you think there’s nothing to learn from reading the troubled past as troubled as we still have. We still have stuff to learn you. You’re not really saying that nobody should ever read Aristotle’s ethics ever again.

Josh Landy
You can read it if you like. I’m just saying we have to stop venerating it as a so called Great book. I think it’s time to ditch the very idea of a canon.

Ken Taylor
I don’t agree we shouldn’t ditch the canon, we shouldn’t ditch the idea of the canon. We just need to expand the canon and our idea of it. And you know what we also need to do we no need to learn how to read it. You don’t read it for the fixed answers that it delivers. But for the questions it raises.

Josh Landy
Well, I still have plenty of questions can and that’s why we sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Holly J. McDede, to investigate what happens when great art turns out to be made by terrible people. She files this report.

Holly McDede
When I was a freshman in college, I fell in love with author Kurt Vonnegut, especially the book “Slaughterhouse Five.” It’s an anti war novel about time travel and fate. I could relate to everything he wrote about feeling like a machine. It felt like somehow this bitter middle aged war veteran understood me.

Kurt Vonnegut
Billy is spastic in time, has no control over where he is going next. And the trips aren’t necessarily fun. He’s in a constant state of stage fright.

Holly McDede
But I also noticed a lot of Vonnegut’s work is filled with sexist and misogynisyyic tropes. His short story “Welcome to the Monkey House” describes rape as deflowering. Many of his female characters are freakishly one dimensional.

Kurt Vonnegut
She was a dull person, but a sensational invitation to make babies. Men looked at her and wanted to fill her up with babies right away.

Holly McDede
You could argue this is all a clever satire meant to critique sexism. After all, Vonnegut writes beautifully about the importance of kindness. But if you read about Vonnegut’s life, you’d be forced to grapple with a masterful writer who was also an angry person who could be cruel to his wife and emotionally abusive.

Carol Hay
Most art is made by and for men.

Holly McDede
Carol Hay is professor of philosophy at UMass Lowell. She says the debate over what to do with work that degrades and objectifies is not new. But the #MeToo movement has given it a new spin.

Carol Hay
For a very long time, right, we haven’t really bothered asking how artwork about women actually affects women.

Holly McDede
She says that for centuries, female writers have had their work discredited solely because of their gender. Women are conditioned since childhood to relate to male protagonists and enjoy sexist literature.

Carol Hay
When we talk about what it is to be human. We are often in sort of smuggling in these implicit assumptions that what we really like the person that we think of as as a sort of generic human is almost always implicitly gendered male.

Holly McDede
But it’s not just Vonnegut whose life and writing are problematic. Charles Dickens, he gets occasional flack for his vapid female characters. And he also attempted to have his wife committed to an insane asylum so he could marry someone. Ezra Pound and Richard Wagner—raging antisemites.

Carol Hay
Given how racist, how sexist we are, howe homophobic transphobic—all these things, right? Of course, that’s that’s going to show up in our art.

Holly McDede
But does that mean we shouldn’t read Vonnegut or we shouldn’t teach Dickens in school? Mary Beth Willard teaches philosophy at Weber State University. She says the real question we should be asking is what do we do with work by artists who are bad people. She’s still grappling with what to do with Michael Jackson’s music.

Mary Beth Willard
I grew up listening to his music, and I’m not that old, but my parents had “Thriller” on vinyl. And I think I wore that thing out. So there’s a sense in which music sort of forms the soundtrack of your life. Then you find out Jackson seems to have been a pretty horrible person.

Holly McDede
In the documentary “Leaving Neverland,” two men accused the King of Pop of sexually abusing them as children. Jackson has faced allegations of child molestation for decades.

Leaving Neverland
He told me if they ever found out what we were doing, he and I would go to jail. For the rest of our lives.

Holly McDede
Willard says it can be hard to separate Jackson, the musician who changed pop music forever with Jackson, the alleged monster.

Mary Beth Willard
Should I let my three year old dance to Billie Jean, should I introduce my six year old to those songs to say, Hey, this is this is how good pop music sounds. This is something you should know how to moonwalk, you’re an American child.

Holly McDede
Willard says these questions also depend on whether the artist is alive or not. Boycotts don’t work so well for people who are dead. And some artists work is ingrained in our culture and inescapable Willards advice consumed their work if you still find it meaningful. But don’t forget about the harm these artists caused.

Mary Beth Willard
We have a tendency as human beings to idolize those people whose music or artwork or sports prowess we admire. But we really should resist that because somebody can be a great musician and a horrible human being. And I think that that’s, you know, is the lesson that the kids are going to have to get.

Holly McDede
After all, if we tossed all the work from all the problematic artists who ever existed in the trash, we’d have nothing left. And so it goes. For Philosophy Talk, I’m Holly J. McDede.

Ken Taylor
Thanks for that tour of great art by troubled artists. I’m Ken Taylor, with me is my Stanford colleague Josh Landy and today we’re reading the troubled past.

Josh Landy
We’re joined now by Julie Napolin, Professor of Digital Humanities and author of a forthcoming book titled, “The Fact of Resonance: Modernist Acoustics and Narrative Form.” She also happens to be a former Roving Philosophical Reporter on this very show. Julie, welcome back to Philosophy Talk.

Julie Napolin
Hey guys, thanks for having me.

Ken Taylor
So Julie, thanks for coming back. I missed those days. You were uh you were a rock rhetorician, radio personality. So tell me What first got you interested in the in the in question of the canon and, and reading the troubled past? Was there something that you read that, you know, troubled you perhaps?

Julie Napolin
Yeah, I really came at this question through the work of Joseph Conrad and also someone like William Faulkner. And I came to literature as someone who was working in sound and music and listening. And a book like Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was filled with voices and sounds and was this canonical text. But I realized that if I wanted to think about what was so interesting about that text, at this level of its sounds and its voices, I would have to contend with it psychology of racism, and how Conrad and someone like Faulkner is using sound and voice precisely to unpack the psychology of racism.

Josh Landy
That’s really interesting. Yeah. So that brings me to a question about the the conversation Ken and I were having at the beginning, you know, should we keep reading these folks? I mean, you’re still reading and writing about and teaching people like cotton and Faulkner, I take it. So seems like you think it’s kind of okay. But do you ever have a moment where you where you wonder, gee, should we stop reading them and read some other people instead?

Julie Napolin
Yeah, absolutely. For whatever reason, these are the texts that I keep coming back to. And I’m not alone in doing that people have been coming back to them for decades. But there have been moments, sometimes in the classroom and sometimes reading essays by others. I read Chinua Achebe’s essay on Conrad, and he says Conrad is a bloody racist. This is a famous quotation from a che Bayes essay. And that really gave me pause. But I came out of that thinking that rather than not reading, we should read more, read better and read alongside of other texts.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, well, okay. Well, well, we’ll get to the read more and read better. But I want to ask you, though, I mean, why really? Can’t read why in the face of activities? Bloody racist accusation? I mean, as students, I don’t teach Conrad to students, but I bet you if I tried to teach current around to certain students at Stanford, they’d be bloody up in arms. What would you say to those students who are bloody up in arms about you teaching this text that they would think embodies a racist attitude?

Julie Napolin
Yeah, well, and I’ve experienced that before. And one of the things that I keep coming back to is that Conrad was someone who was a historian of empire, and that our present of imperialism and globalization didn’t come out of nowhere. And he was someone who was writing, really at the beginnings of what we now understand as globalization. And my explanation is that if we want to understand the present, we have to have the history of the present. And Conrad is a part of that he was he was his novel was a kind of record of that transformations.

Josh Landy
And it’s not just it’s not just a novel that’s racist, even if it has some racist elements. It’s also a powerful critique of the, you know, the Belgian colonial project. I mean, doesn’t that present that project as as bloodthirsty, cruel, exploitative, and everything else?

Julie Napolin
Absolutely. But my response is usually, that the novel is a racist critique of racism, right, that the you know, Conrad doesn’t present Africans as having self determination. But he does present Empire as as this delusion as this radical deception. So how do we hold those two things together, that he fails in some ways to imagine Africans, in many ways fails, but that he also saw through colonialism and saw through the use of empire?

Ken Taylor
Well, I think that’s a deep question. And it’s kind of question we want to dig into more, because many texts have this same kind of flaw that you’re pointing out, you’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re reading the troubled past with Julie Napolin, author of “The Fact of Resonance.”

Josh Landy
How should we approach books from our troubled past? Should we read them as repositories of wisdom? Or should we challenge them, contextualize them, and try to sort out the good from the bad?

Ken Taylor
Parsing the perilous past—plus your calls and emails, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Bob Dylan
And every one of them words rang true and glowed like burning coal, pouring off every page like it was written in my soul from me to you, tangled up in blue.

Ken Taylor
Do the words of 13th century poets still ring true, or are they too full of outdated attitudes? I’m Ken Taylor. This is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy, and today we’re reading the troubled past. Our guests is Julie Napolin and author of “The Fact of Resonance: Modernist Acoustics and Narrative Form.”

Ken Taylor
Julie, it sounded like, Okay, I think you and Josh and I agree that we should continue to read these fraud old books, but I think you were raising a question about how we should read them. I mean, so let’s dig into this Are there better and worse ways of going about the reading of these fraud old books?

Julie Napolin
Sure. And and I think I’ve gone through both good ways and bad ways myself as a teacher. And I’ve learned that in teaching a really fraught texts like Heart of Darkness. If you just throw the text at the students without any contextualization, it’s very dangerous and in certain moments really hurtful for a lot of student readers. So I think contextualization is is one of the best ways to approach a fraught text.

Ken Taylor
I want to explore that thought a little bit more, because I don’t know, I think I agree with you. But I’m not sure. Because I do think I do think students. So look here, here’s the thing. Students thinks lots of things. I’ll tell you the experience I had. I teach WB Dubois, the souls of black folks to freshmen, I once had a freshman tell me, I’m not sure I can quite say exactly what he said on the radio, but I’ll paraphrase what he said. She said on the radio, she said, WB Dubois is just another colonized negro. Right? Because the way he describes black people, the freed blacks in the post Bell himself, he says, As as dazed, not knowing what to do with their freedom, they fall into criminality, and they’re not industrious. And these are all the complaints of the white southerners about blacks. And he seems to be validating them. And she said, he’s just another colonized negro. And, and I think that student wasn’t really reading this text. Right. So there is a danger there that students will miss read it. But tell me, how does how would contextualization have helped? Could contextualization have helped get the student beyond that? Because in a way he was, she was right, that the boys thought black people had a kind of diminished consciousness. And it wasn’t because they were intrinsically at fault was because consciousness was shaped by the social world?

Julie Napolin
Well, I think with a writer like Dubois, we’re thinking about a really long trajectory, where what he’s writing in 1903, is not the same as what he’s writing in the 40s. True. And it takes like The Souls of Black Folk to is really a document of, as you say, a transformation and a consciousness. And he takes himself as documenting certain moments along the pathway of consciousness. And I think that some contextualization would help with an author like that, because looking at the failure of reconstruction, the failure of the promise of emancipation in that moment, how that must have felt, psychologically, to bring that to representation. I think that that would be something really important to discuss.

Josh Landy
I agree. I mean, I think you know, a couple of things are first, look, if you conceptualize if you if you can explain to the students look, this was the this was the atmosphere in which DuBois was writing, look how progressive he is, for that moment. Don’t just view him from the sort of perfectionist standpoint of our present, but understand what an extraordinary blow who was striking for production is moment. Yeah,

Ken Taylor
that’s true. But take a take Aristotle, who never recognized the full agency of women who thought that women had different kinds of souls than men who thought that women had souls that were fit to be governed because they didn’t have fully developed reason. And men had souls that were fit to govern because at least certain men and had had had fully developed reason. How do you contextualize that?

Josh Landy
And that’s a case where I would say, I don’t think contextualization is sufficient.

Ken Taylor
Right. What do you think, Julie?

Julie Napolin
Yeah, I mean, contextualization, is is probably not the answer to everything. I think with a writer like Conrad, where he’s really taking up his historical present, contextualization is very helpful. Now, with, with the kind of texts that you’re bringing up, say, Aristotle, Aristotle has actually been really important to a lot of feminists. And in a situation like that, what some writers do is they find these holes in the argument, they find places where the text is raising its own questions and and not complete, if you will. And feminists have taken up that opportunity to find what an Aristotle can be transformed, not turning his words against him, but filling in the gaps of his own thinking and expanding it on on the terms that he lays out.

Josh Landy
I think that’s really important work. I think so I mean, conceptualization can get us somewhere where people like Dubois, I think, but the kind of work, you’re talking about filling in the holes, seeing seeing possibilities, and even just sorting out the good from the bad. I mean, I think, you know, if we want to keep reading these books, what we’re doing at the end of the day, is reading a set of books that are going to make us ambivalent, you talked about Conrad being a racist, anti racist. I love that expression, right? These works are complicated, they’re difficult. They refuse our you know, our desire to put them in a simple counter.

Ken Taylor
Let me challenge both of you Okay, from I’m not sure what I believe about this. So I’m not playing devil’s advocate, but I am offering a thought that will challenge you. Okay? There are critiques of colonialism post colonial critique that are not racist, anti racist, right? What does the student have to learn? What do we have to learn from the racist, anti racist, rather than just from the flat out anti racist? Why bother? If we want a critique of colonialism? Why bother? Oh, you know, why bother with Conrad? There, there are plenty post colonial Caribbean? No, that’s a biggie. But no, why not just go straight to fun?

Julie Napolin
Oh well, it’s interesting. In my book, I kind of get to fund on by way of Conrad, but also the reverse. I get to Conrad by way of Fanon and I argue that these two writers are, to some extent, completing each other. And with a writer like Conrad, what interests me about him was his kind of vexed desire for blackness, that if we don’t understand the psychology of racism, we’re not going to get very far that there’s something about getting inside the mind of a racist, that is helpful towards the project of critique and of liberation. And Conrad is someone who was conflicted, helps us to understand that racism is also about punishing this other that you desire. And I don’t think there’s a lot of texts that get it that complication of racism, that it’s not just about hatred, it’s about desire.

Josh Landy
That makes a lot of sense. And I also think that there’s just something to be said, for asking people to grapple with ambivalence, right, presenting with books that can’t simply be categorized as just bad or good, yes, or no up or down. But where you have to say, gosh, you know, we have to reject this part. But we really want to keep this other part. And, and maybe there’s a third part where you think that’s a kind of symptom of something this is this is, you know, hinting at something about the way racism works, and, and so there’s just so much to be gained, as long as we’re properly critical. And we don’t just think Conrad Conrad knows the truth about everything, and we have to just swallow it. If we’re properly critical, and can handle our ambivalence. We’re getting something really powerful.

Ken Taylor
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk, we’re talking about, we’re reading the troubled best, but I’m still not quite sure. Here’s something else. Julie said, I wonder if you think this is important. You said something about, you know, we come out of this past. So I say the students, I say, Look, if we’re not willing to interrogate the past, then we’re not willing to interrogate ourselves, because the rooster parser. So here’s the thing. I’m wondering about Conrad. I mean, what would you expect the first critique? How would you expect a European critique of colonialism to arise? It would be a disenchanted European, but a European of that time, would not see the full agency of the Africans who had been colonized by the European. So is it surprising? No, it’s not surprising. But it’s interesting that even in Europe, among the Europeans, there could be this falling out with colonialism. What do you think about that thought?

Julie Napolin
Yeah, absolutely. And that’s what interests me about Conrad is that his European ism and whiteness were vexed things. And that impart his writing of this kind of mythology or fantasy of the African was one of the ways that he was achieving his whiteness. And we think of whiteness as this thing that’s given in advance, but it has to be one, it has to be secured. And that there is something about Conrad that in that moment, he is the disenchanted European, but he’s also writing through this fantasy of blackness in order to secure his own European identity. That’s what’s interesting.

Ken Taylor
So let me ask you another question along that lines. Okay, so here’s a critique that one often hears of the so called canon, that you have to judge it by the voices that are missing, right? There are so many missing voices. So the because the European who, who falls out with colonialism still doesn’t see the agency of the African. What’s the point? What’s the point of reading this stuff in which my agency as a black person, your agency, as a woman is just not recognized is not fully recognized? What’s the point of my reading list now? I mean, okay, maybe there was a point a long time ago, but there is no point now. So what’s the enduring point of reading the gallon?

Julie Napolin
Well, I think I would take issue with that, that there that there is no point now as if these struggles are over. So transformations aren’t completely They’re, they’re slow coming. They’re hard won. And what interests me about a novel like Heart of Darkness is that you, the narrator, he begins as one man and he ends as another. His change of mind is not this grand epiphany. And I think that changes of mind are rarely a grand epiphany. It’s about this kind of slow transformation where you realize you’re on the other side of something, and you can’t go back to the way you thought before. And so what are the limits and the possibilities of change? And, you know, the struggles are not over. So, a text like that is a great opportunity to think about those limits and possibilities.

Josh Landy
I like that idea, you know, and it makes me think of something I’m a little more tentative about, but you know, but I sometimes think about the books we’re writing now, you know, we’re, I think we like to think of the books we’re writing now, as morally perfect, like we’ve overcome really well, some people do. That’s just read the word from today. And, and, of course, we’ve made a lot of moral progress. But, you know, most of the novels you’re gonna read today, take for granted that eating meat is, is okay. Or, you know, at least not heinous. But it might be that in 50 years, or 100 years from now, we look back at meat eating the way we currently look back at smoking, you know, something that’s bad for you, and just just bad, morally wrong. So it makes me wonder, you know, will there ever be such a thing as a morally pure book of philosophy, a morally pure work of fiction.

Ken Taylor
I wrote a morally pure book of philosophy just last year.

Josh Landy
And it was really good. You know, so I wonder whether, whether maybe we’re making a mistake, if we say, Look, you know, we should just never read Conrad again, we should never think there’s anything worthwhile and engaging critically, of course, with Conrad, because, because if we do that, then we’re basically saying, You know what, this kind of no point in a sense, nothing’s going to endure, nothing is going to endure, everything’s going to be viewed 50 years from now, 100 years from now, as not being quite all the way there. And so maybe our, our willingness to sort of, you know, keep our history alive is a promise to the future. It’s not just a gesture of the past, it’s also a promise to the future, you know, what you make the best effort you possibly can in the moment and in the, in the, in the now to write something as true as it can possibly be as honest as moral as it can possibly be. And, you know, we’ll venerate you for the effort that you made. What do you think?

Julie Napolin
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think that it’s a dangerous path to expect that any work, as you say, be morally pure. And I’m not convinced that literature, or even philosophy teaches us how to be I was kind of with Ken, what he said at the beginning, that there’s that, that the canon, if anything, is a repository of questions. And it’s very hard to predict what the future is. And there’s something that that was kind of my point earlier that these works are, are by nature incomplete, that they require others to take them up, because we don’t know what the future is. And we don’t know by what standards, the future will will hold us in the present by what Sanders will be held to. If that makes sense.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, it makes perfect sense. You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. We’re talking, we’re reading the troubled past. And we’ve got a Doug from Oakland on the line. Welcome to Philosophy Talk, Doug, what’s your comment or question?

Doug
Hello. Well, that last comment sort of is actually around the answer slightly, the question is going to ask, but I’m just interested in the way that somehow, like the idea of the perfection is present, which she just kind of addressed. But actually, if there’s some sort of false and imperialistic sense of that, like imagine teaching these principles in another country, for instance, like, you know, saying that the West is somehow perfect if we’ve got like, we’re not rates, you know, what I mean, sex, that there is, you know, these are qualities that are going to be found in other places, and to impose that think about imposing those values and the way that they have been imposed, to kind of like, oh, democracy is so much better than any other system. You know, what I mean? Yeah, we’re not sexist, so we should go invade places that are sexist. And also, just lately to see Conrad also the second language learner, you know, anyway, so those are some issues that I’d be interested in your discussion.

Ken Taylor
Thanks a lot. I think all of us I think, would reject what I call the triumphalism of the present that triumphalism of this moment. Because I do think I do think that’s part of what’s going on in our rejection of the canon, the kind of triumphalist presentism. I don’t know if you agree or not, Julie, good comment briefly on that.

Julie Napolin
Yeah. And I wanted to pick up on something that was in the roving philosophic report where one of the interviewees was saying that it’s usually presumed that the audience or the generic human being is implicitly male. And we could also add implicitly white. And, you know, we can’t presume a neutral universal audience for anything. You can’t presume that your position is totally applicable everywhere. And in all times, I don’t want to open up a kind of can of worms of relativism, but, but I think that there is something to that of what the caller was saying about presuming that motive reading in one context should be the same in another context.

Ken Taylor
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. We’re reading the troubled past with Julian Napolin, author of “The fact of Resonance.”

Josh Landy
If the canon is full of morally troubling books, should we revise it? Expand it? Or dump it in the trash?

Ken Taylor
Firing the cannon—when Philosophy Talk continues.

They Might Be Giants
I know politics bores you, but I feel like a hypocrite talking to you and your racist friend.

Ken Taylor
Is reading the Western canon like talking to a racist friend at a party? Is it time to talk to someone else? I’m Ken Taylor. And this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
… except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy, our guest is Julie Napolin and author of “The Fact of Resonance” and former Beto O’Rourke band member.

Ken Taylor
I think that former Beto O’Rourke bandmate.

Julie Napolin
I was on bass.

Ken Taylor
And we’ve got a caller on the line. Kristen from Oakland. Welcome to Philosophy Talk, Kristen, what’s your comment or question?

Kristen
Hello, in your discussion, I’ve not heard any mention of the intrinsic artistry of these works. The beauty of the words, the beauty of the language, the art itself, which I think is separate from the political content. You don’t throw them on the trash heap? Because you don’t agree currently with the political content of it. These words have a body and life separate from the political content. What about the beauty? What about the art?

Ken Taylor
What do you think about that? Julie, I have complicated thoughts. What are your thoughts?

Julie Napolin
Well, you know, in Chinua Achebe, his essay, he makes the point that it’s, he disagrees with seeing Conrad as a work of beauty or as a work of so called great literature because of, because of what he felt was its ugliness, and that its content for him, overcomes its form. And I don’t think that work should be read for their beauty alone. That is in a position that I hold. But I do happen to think that Conrad is an incredibly beautiful writer. But I don’t think that form and content are separate. I don’t think that something can just be beautiful. Without its content, also taking up something that has magnitude.

Josh Landy
Well, we may disagree there. Actually, I am super grateful to Kristen, for that colleagues really getting a really interesting dimension. If you think about to take Leni Riefenstahl’s movie The Triumph of the Will of famous work of Nazi propaganda. What I want to say about that is, if that movie hadn’t been so aesthetically powerful, it wouldn’t have been so dangerous, you know, so there can I think there can be morally troubling works that have beauty and that’s actually what makes them in a way worse, it makes them more

Ken Taylor
Yeah, but I don’t know, I’m, I don’t know, there is the power of the work to move you. I’m gonna call it a statically. I’m not quite sure that’s the right word. But that is not a separate, entirely separate look, a movie that I despise, and I think should never be shown again. But some people great think is the work of great American cinema gone by the way, he’s gone with a win. It’s I despise that. Well, but not everybody agrees with you about that. Right? It’s played and replayed. And all this sort of stuff. It’s a morally bankrupt lie. I don’t think I can separate my as I mean, I know these people knew how to do the art of cinematography, I knew that no, they knew how to tell the story that was moving and gripping right enough? No, they knew how to create a character but was in service of an utter lie. So um, what what do we make of art then?

Josh Landy
Okay, but but maybe we can take you know, we can dial down the volume a little bit take take slightly less vaccine cases, right. You take so, you know, go back to something about ourselves, obviously, philosophy but but, you know, Dickens stuff that or that Holly German, Dr. Robin philosophical was supportive of talking about take some work of fiction that we think rightly has powerful aesthetic merits. Well, what if it has one or two moments that are mildly troubling, as opposed to GM where the wind which is just really saturated, right? I would want to say with Kristen, you know what, we should keep those works around. We should venerate them. Of course, we should warn people about the one or two moments that are moral—that we can make them safe for us,

Ken Taylor
What do you think, Julie?

Julie Napolin
Well I do you want to point out something that was happening earlier in the argument, which is that we quickly went to film as a different example. And I would point out that the literary work of art is not the same as the cinematic work of art. And then, aesthetically talking about words and talking about images. These are different things. So we have to we have to approach them with different tools. I just want to flag that. But yes, I would agree with Josh that works that have troubling moments. Those moments shouldn’t be forgotten. And in some cases, I think that they can be magnified. And that a lot can be done without magnification. The first chapter of my book is actually 100 pages about two words and Conrad’s first novel.

Josh Landy
Fair enough. You know, I guess my caution is let’s not go overboard on I think about Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man. I think it’s incredible novel about race. And it’s an incredible novel identity. And it’s doing amazing things, but former the novel, and okay, it’s a little bit weak on gender. But I don’t think we should throw it out.

Ken Taylor
That’s different. That’s, that’s the moment. But so it’s a complicated moral landscape. But we got another caller on the line, Pam from San Francisco, what’s your comment or question?

Pam
I was thinking, I grew up with grandparents who were very well versed in the canon, and admiring that and thinking that was, I should be, and then realized later that I shouldn’t be didn’t want to be as complete as that. But I wanted to comment about another thing, which is that I read Jack Kerouac three times, I read on the road three times, and I read it the first time identifying with the men, which is what I did, from the age that I could begin to read, identified with the men because they had the interesting role. I read it a second time, and I hated every minute of it. I know he’s not the cannon, but I want to tell you this story. And I hated every minute of it for the sexist behavior and attitudes. And I read it a third time. And I said, Yes, but look, he’s talking about things that no one was writing about. And he was able to write about them. And it was quite liberating. And I felt the same way about Henry Miller. I felt the same way about Kurt Vonnegut, you know, and in fact, I grew up in Indiana, Indiana, and I admired Kurt Vonnegut for being able to say many of the things he said while growing up in Indiana, which he was people who a person who, whose parents knew my grandparents, and I really understood where he was coming from. And I just feel that Conrad, all these people that I talked about, were writing about things that no one had really written about, and they are valuable for that. And we’re talking about, Well, should we teach it in the canon? Should we teach it in college? Well, maybe I don’t know. So I’m gonna read 10 books in their life. And that’s got, we want that to be one of them. So you know, having read hundreds and hundreds of books in my life, I, I think I want to read all of it.

Ken Taylor
So Pam, your bottom line is there’s deep ambivalence read, maybe not, maybe not. So what do you say? Thanks for the call. What do you think, Julie? What? There’s deep ambivalence there about about this Canon thing? Grew up with parents who loved it, fell away from it came back to it.

Julie Napolin
Yeah, I mean, what I loved about what Pam was saying is that she described a situation of transformation and something that is not static. And in a recent essay in the times by Nagi, wah Tango on Conrad, he basically tells a similar story, like, I turned away from Conrad, then I turned back towards him, then I turned away again, now I’m back. And a critic who I like a lot roll on BART, he has this notion of the work versus the text. The work tends to be closed in some ways, but there’s something about a text and I think what she’s saying about Kerouac is that it’s a text. Is that it? It’s open, it’s not static, it’s it’s changing.

Ken Taylor
You’re right. I think that’s right. I want to bring up one one other thing, then I will ask you a closing thought question. So look, I have been recently teaching Simone de Beauvoir a lot. And she has this thing about our attitude toward the past. She calls it the aesthetic attitude. And she says about the aesthetic, she says about the past. It’s a museum of human projects. And what we’re called upon to do with the past is judge it, but not relive it. Right? The past he says, Now, if we had the aesthetic attitude toward the present, that would be bad, because the present is the most is the is the moment now is the time of decision and commitment. Now is the time to move the project forward. But I look back at the Romans and there’s no project that they’re saying take sides in this project. side with Caesar over the Visigoths or whatever, right. I just get the judgment, but I don’t have to live it. So why can’t we just read I mean, the music aim of the human pass is something there to be interrogated. It’s something there to be probed to be judged to be read judged to be seen in this light. So why should we be so upset that it’s a morally different universe? It’s a museum. It’s dead, right?

Julie Napolin
Well, like someone like Faulkner would say that the past is not dead. And this, I would take issue and say that the dividing line between the past and the present is actually really hazy. Read someone like Faulkner, it’s happening in the 30s. But you’re like, my god, this could be now I agree.

Ken Taylor
But that’s the thing that Simone de Beauvoir doesn’t ask, where does the moment of decision and commitment begin? And where does the dead past end?

Josh Landy
But in a way, precisely because of that, it’s another reason to read these texts, because so much of our current ways of thinking so much of our practices, even if you think about the way that you know, Toni Morrison in her novels draws on the classics about the Odyssey showing up in Song of Solomon. So, just, I mean, I love your point, Julie, that the past isn’t dead, the past in the present? I think that’s another actually good reason to be informing ourselves.

Ken Taylor
Well, that’s a complicated question. But let’s ask you one last thought, we’re gonna make you ruler of the of the university education around the world, you can shut this and you can either chuck the can and revise the cannon and expand the cannon. What do you do?

Julie Napolin
Um, I say, revise the Canon updated and expand it. Can I give you an example? Yeah, sure. This came to mind earlier, when Ken was talking about Dubois and I was thinking about how the name Hegel never comes up in the Souls of Black Folk. But a lot of what Dubois is doing in the Souls of Black Folk is revising, updating and expanding Hegel. And he’s saying that Hegel denied history, history, the status of history to African peoples, and Dubois says, I’m going to show how African peoples and people’s descended from Africans have a world historical status, and he needed Hegel systems, Hegel system of dialectics to show what was so devastating about the consequences of racism on a psychological level of consciousness. So I think teaching to boys with Hegel is a is a perfect example of this revision of the canon.

Ken Taylor
I totally agree. And then you could also teach the boys with the, I guess, left or right a gay aliens because he’s a Vanguard is just like them. But you know, on that note, Julie, this has been a fascinating canonically fastened and I’m gonna thank you for joining us. It’s been great having you back.

Julie Napolin
Thank you so much, guys. It was great to talk to you,

Ken Taylor
I guess, has been Julian Napolin, she’s a professor of Digital Humanities. She’s author of a forthcoming book entitled “The Fact of Resonance: Modernist Acoustics and Narrative Form.” So Josh, what do you think you know, you having resonant thoughts?

Josh Landy
Oh, very resonant. Listen, I think about Scott Fitzgerald, saying that the test of a first reading intelligence, the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. I think reading these old books is an exercise in handling ambivalence. And I think there is a good way to read them. You know, we don’t don’t read them for answers, read them for questions. Read them for habits of mind, read them for models of beauty, as Kristin was saying, and yeah, read them to live in ambivalence and be able to function.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, there you go. I totally agree with you. The conversation continues, and philosophers corner at our online community of thinkers where our motto is with apologies to that dead white man Descartes, Cogito ergo Blago, I think, therefore, I blog, and you can become a partner in that community by visiting our website, philosophytalk.org.

Josh Landy
And if you have a question that wasn’t addressed in today’s show, we’d love to hear from you. Send it to us comments@philosophytalk.org, and we may feature it on our blog. Now, here’s someone who reads his past at troubling speed: it’s Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales… Much is made of the politically correct culture on campus. Young people are triggered by depictions of rape, by smoking onstage, loud music, sexist cussing, or seeing the “n word” in print. Fainting and lawsuits prevail. It’s raised havoc. No more Huckleberry Finn, Joseph Conrad, Kipling, no more screenings of Birth of a Nation, The Jazz Singer, or every thirties musical that featured a blackface number, which was roughly most of them. Black people were not alone in being the brunt of prejudice. Swedes, Jews, comic Irishmen, Germans, Chinese, on and on, fresh off the boat, talking funny, smelling like herring, wearing weird shoes for the amusement of the audience, which also conformed to some kind of weird ideal. I imagine the ideal American 1930’s audience looking a lot like Tucker Carlson, whose day job was writing snarky headlines for the newly launched TIME Magazine. Today it’s more white students than black, it seems, having fainting spells encountering our racist past. Which is odd, because the arguments for Conrad and Twain and whoever mainly come from white conservatives, who not only think we’ve come a long way racism wise, racism doesn’t even exist. So why get upset about the past anymore? It’s just a quaint artifact. I just read an opinion in the Wall Street Journal, by Joseph Epstein, who wrote, “… racism is what you accuse people of who don’t agree with you.” He says we don’t have Jim Crow, and race riots and Pinkertons and lynching and torching homes. So any time the Reverend Al Sharpton- the goto guy for conservatives on this issue I guess because of the whole Tawana Brawley hoax, which happened back in 1987, speaking of things that are over- any time Al Sharpton calls racist, it rakes the old leaves up and it’s so unfair, you guys. And you can’t SAY it’s unfair, because that just gets called another form of racism. Epstein concludes, “the real racists in this country are those who insist blacks are permanent victims.” The REAL racists. Hard to find, but all around, so long as you look at black people, and not white conservatives, who are always on the lookout for anti-racism that is actually racist somehow. The anti racist racist backlash is everywhere. Teevee’s Laura Ingraham, for instance, did a segment on our “race obsession” as she put it, with Harry and Megan’s royal baby. See, Laura Ingraham doesn’t doubt racism exists. She just thinks Obama’s responsible for not ending it within his first 100 days. Laura Ingraham has been accused of dropping the dog whistle and picking up the megaphone. I know just what that means! When I was in college I worked as a janitor at a black bar. One day a new bar opened in town and all the brothers who worked at or frequented the black bar were infuriated. Why? The new bar had a racist admittance policy. No hats allowed. Wait, I asked, though I should have kept my trap shut, how is that racist? Because, I was told, black people like to wear hats. And I realized it was true. This was a hat filled period in casual black fashion because of Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield, and that boss chapeau Ron O’Neal wore in Superfly. This was the first I realized there was such a thing as a dog whistle, the opposite of virtue signaling, letting people know you’re a racist without admitting you’re a racist, seeing how much you can get away with, before a fight breaks out and then you can blame the other guy for starting it. So, blatant racism of the past is shunned. We now have veiled racism, racially charged barbs and tweets, with feedback. We play the race card. Or not. Discuss. We got innuendo, secret gestures, coded language, race baiting. But in this age of me too and rampant triggering, it all seems so insidious. How much more innocent racism used to be. It was just lynching and minstrel shows. Are we better off? Instead of the Ku Klux Klan riding, we have solitary psychos with semi-automatic weapons. Nobody reads any more, so we only need to worry about racist rants in chat rooms. It’s the content of character, not the color of skin, say the old white poots who think they still run things. And now we’re talking about reparations. I ask you, ask conservatives, how is that not NOT racist to chide black people for wanting compensation for years of oppression? Ipso facto. None dare call it back pay. So the real racist is, therefore, of course, Oprah Winfrey. Because Al Sharpton. Right? Well no. Not to be racist about it, but to be racist you gotta be white. Sorry. Like Tucker Carlson. Like Donald Trump. I gotta go.

Ken Taylor
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW local public radio San Francisco, and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2019.

Josh Landy
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Ken Taylor
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Josh Landy
Thanks also to Merle Kessler, Angela Johnston and Lauren Schecter.

Ken Taylor
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from Stanford University and from the partners at our online community of thinkers.

Josh Landy
The views expressed or mis expressed on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders.

Ken Taylor
Not even when they’re true and reasonable.

Josh Landy
The conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you too can become a partner in our community of thinkers. I’m Josh Landy.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.

Heart of Darkness
The offering was barred by a black bank of clouds and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.