Among The Hedgerows

This is a short story I wrote this week. Enjoy!

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Among the Hedgerows

According to the Post Office I live in a city, but I only have to step outside my door and walk for a few minutes and then it’s nothing but sheep, dales and hedgerows, and one of the great joys of my life when presented with a sunny weekend afternoon is to get out into that glorious quiet and amble around. As I’ve got older I’ve found myself drawn to flowers the way so many people find themselves drawn to birds; I haven’t learned all the names and I don’t use an app but it’s nice to just get up close to a flower, take it right in and see what it’s about. I like to get into the mind of a bug, or a hummingbird, or a bat. I’m not crazy. It’s just nice to see things from another creature’s perspective. I suppose they haven’t learned the names either.

One particularly fine Saturday afternoon, a good few years ago now, I was making my way along the hedgerows and admiring the flowers as I like to do, and I lost track of where I was. There’s no danger in it; there are signs here and there and anyway I had my phone. The sky had an otherworldly hue, and the scents and colours were at the height of their force. I was getting tired, first gradually and then all at once, and I sat down on the verge and watched the cars whizz by. My heart was beating fast. I couldn’t tell if I was having a good time or bad time, but in any case I needed a rest. I sat on the grass for a few minutes, and had a feeling it would be leaving a green stain on my jeans. I didn’t really mind. I don’t wear my best jeans on my walks in the country.

By and by I heard a curious sound behind me, like a cricket, or maybe just the wind chancing upon a naturally occurring flute as it sometimes does. I didn’t pay much attention at first but the sound didn’t go away, and I had a curious, silly feeling that the sound was directed at me. I shifted around to look and it seemed to be coming from a drooping white bell-shaped flower about eighteen inches from the ground. Still tired, I scooched over to take a closer look.

I peered inside the flower, and saw that the source of the sound was a tiny little creature calling out to me. It was about the size of a Lego man, with green skin, big green eyes and big bulbous feet. It was wearing a smart set of pale blue dungarees, and it was in trouble. It was clutching one arm with the other, and had got upended and had to brace its legs against the petals to avoid falling out, from a height which to the tiny creature must have amounted to a very great one. I marvelled a moment to see it, but there was really no time for that and its emergency needed to be dealt with. I cradled the flower in my right hand, snipped it from the stem with my left thumbnail, and slowly set the flower with the little creature inside it onto the grass in front of me.

‘Thanks,’ it said.

‘You’re welcome,’ I said. It shuffled out of the flower and then sat down on it, squashing it nearly flat.

We stared at each other. Neither of us was afraid. I suppose the circumstances of our meeting had got us off on a friendly footing. With each passing moment the creature seemed less marvellous; it’s remarkable how quickly we can adapt to even the most unexpected things when they are undeniably, vividly real.

‘Call an ambulance!’ said the creature. I got out my phone and began dialling 999. ‘No!’ said the creature. ‘Not a human ambulance! They’d cut me up into pieces for science!’

‘What then?’

‘I need a faerie ambulance!’ It told me the number and I began to dial it in. It didn’t sound like a real phone number to me. I waited for it to ring.

‘Will you talk to them?’ I said. I hate making calls.

‘Aaaaarrgghh!’ wailed the creature. I listened to the phone. It wasn’t going to connect.

‘I don’t think I can call that number from my phone,’ I said. The creature sighed.

‘OK, you’ll have to use mine. It’s in my back pocket.’

‘You have a phone?’

‘Of course I have a phone. Was I surprised that you had a phone?’

There wasn’t much for me to say to that. The creature, still clutching its broken arm, stood up so I could reach the back pockets of its dungarees, and I fished out what looked for all the world like a tiny Nokia 3310, maybe three millimetres long. I wondered how I’d be able to press the buttons. I patted my pockets and thought about what I could use; I tried with part of my watch buckle but it was still much too big. Then I realized there were plenty of thorns around and I broke off a suitable one which did the job just about. The creature told me the number again and I dialled. A squeaky voice on the line replied in a language I didn’t understand.

‘English?’ I said. I wasn’t sure whether I should be speaking louder or quieter than usual.

‘Ah,’ squeaked the voice. ‘What service do you require?’ It spoke perfectly well, but slowly, as if worried that I might not understand.

‘I need a faerie ambulance. I’m with someone who’s broken their arm.’

‘Ambulance, very good. What is your location?’

‘I think this is the B5213.’ There was silence at the other end. ‘Where should I say we are?’ I asked the creature, covering the phone with my finger.

‘34 Binkleton Boulevard.’

‘34 Binkleton Boulevard?’ I said into the phone.

‘34 Binkleton Boulevard, very good. We’ll have someone along in a few minutes. Chin up!’

I pressed the red button with the thorn and put the phone back in the creature’s pocket. ‘They say it should just be a few minutes.’ The creature sat back down, looking calmer than before, but still quite sorry for itself. In a few minutes it would be gone and I’d probably never see it again. I felt like I should be making the most of the time, bombarding it with questions, but I didn’t want to impose when it had a broken arm, and anyway I couldn’t really think of anything to ask.

‘Do you play chess?’ I asked. Its face lit up. When it smiled two little yellow fangs showed at the corners of its mouth. So I got the chess app up on my phone, put a couple of minutes each on the clock and we got to it. I’m sorry to say that it wiped the floor with me in the first game. We were still in the opening of the second when we heard a little clockwork ticking noise, somewhere between a music box and a childproof medicine bottle, which the creature seemed to immediately recognize as an ambulance siren. A tiny little vehicle like a tractor was driving towards us, green and almost invisible against the grass. Another little green creature with big eyes and bare feet got out, this one dressed as a paramedic.

‘Hello,’ I said.

‘Is that the patient?’ said the paramedic, but then just got to work instead of waiting for an answer. Soon enough it had bundled the creature into the tractor and was ready to drive off.

‘Thanks for the game,’ said the creature. ‘And for saving my life, of course.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘You really showed me a thing or two there.’

I felt foolish. The tractor drove away, disappearing into the grass and then off round a bend in the road.

I looked around me and all was just as it had been before. The sky, the sun, the flowers, the smells, the sheep. Then I remembered trying to call the faerie ambulance number from my phone. I went to my dialled numbers list and there it was. Without thinking twice I pressed delete. It felt momentous, scrubbing the last trace of my encounter with the creature and its world, the last thing left to reassure myself that I hadn’t dreamt it and it really did happen — although I must stress at this point that it most certainly really did — but I felt strangely at a loss. I don’t have anything to do or say on momentous occasions. I looked at the squashed flower on the verge. It just looked like a squashed flower.

‘Well that’s that, then.’

So, How's The Writing Going?

Fans of the blog new and old will have been on something of an emotional rollercoaster over the last couple of months. On February 14 your favourite website burst back into the blogosphere with a renewed sense of purpose; I was going to write frequent posts even when I had nothing to say, exercising it like a long-neglected muscle until it became a powerful mouthpiece through which I could eventually put something valuable into the world.

The following week I posted about how I'd been eating at least one banana each day this year and documenting the journey on my second favourite microblogging site — I'm still keeping that up, by the way — and formed an intention to write a post each week. The following two Fridays brought posts about my various reading habits and the Kinks song Plastic Man. Things were going well.

Cracks began to show in week five, when my post was about how I'd got in over my head trying to write a post about Susan Stebbing and the second dogma of empiricism and wasn't going to be able to put up anything proper that day. The following week was also touch and go behind the scenes but I did manage to get one out about poetry. That's the most recent one, and it was twenty days ago. So, what happened?

The Distractions Of Ambition

The short answer is that I've been working on the Stebbing post. That needn't have been a problem: my plan was to keep at it while still putting out something else on Fridays, and then put the Stebbing one out in the week it was ready. But as you'll recall from the first post of the new era, the first step of the post was percolation, and you can't be percolating posts about poetry and bananas when you're distracted by something else. Or at least that's how it's turned out for me. And with no percolation, I've found myself tired and uninspired on Fridays, and of course it's so much easier to just put a little joke on Bluesky about how people will have to spend their Friday nights doing something else.

It isn't just the regular blogging that this Stebbing post has distracted me from. Remember I said I was reading a set theory textbook? Well I haven't opened that for weeks, and I'm wondering if I ever will. Perhaps I should just return it to the library and give up on the possibility of ever arguing for the indeterminacy of the continuum hypothesis based on Avicenna's notion of conceptual parts.

One big part of the distractions from the Stebbing post were that the second dogma part sent me down a bit of a Quine rabbit hole. (Or is it an undetached rabbit-part hole?) I still like Quine and find him interesting and enjoyable to read, and so after reading Two Dogmas to refresh my memory I ended up rereading the rest of From A Logical Point Of View as well, and some of the papers in Ontological Relativity, and it's all been very fascinating but any time spent reading and thinking about Quine is time not spent percolating frivolous blogposts about fruit or writing poems that scan perfectly and contain no interpretive secrets. And of course I've been reading things by and about Stebbing too, although it doesn't really feel like it's been that much.

The Stebbing Post

So anyway, what's this post about? What is this connection between Stebbing and the second dogma that I've been so keen to tell you all about? Well basically I read a paper of hers years ago called 'Logical Positivism and Analysis' from 1933, and was struck by the fact (if it is a fact) that one of the main positions she was critiquing was the second dogma of empiricism. But her response to it was entirely different from Quine's, which makes it all the more interesting, and so I thought I should write it up at some point.

Nonetheless, writing it up has proven difficult. I didn't think it'd be that difficult, because I first read the Stebbing paper years ago and had kind of integrated my thoughts on the topic into my general worldview, and so I ought to be able to be able to talk about it more or less off the cuff. I could reread the relevant texts so I can explain how what they say links up with what I'm saying, and that'd be that. But as can be the way with these things, rereading one thing leads to reading another, and you try to make sure you're interpreting things right and not missing out on mentioning important things that really ought to be mentioned, and things get away from you. Eventually you start wondering whether there's really anything important to say here at all. It can be fairly disspiriting at times, although parts of it can be exhilarating too.

Ultimately I think I can see myself falling prey to the kind of perfectionism that I talked about in the Field Of Dreams post. I don't expect the end product to be great in spite of the extra work I've put into it; this is history of philosophy after all and I don't really know what I'm doing. The basic ideas I want to get across are straightforward enough:

• 'Logical positivism and analysis' is a really interesting paper and is now available to read online, so if you're interested in that sort of thing, go and read it!
• Quine describes the second dogma of empiricism as 'reductionism: the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience' (1951/1961:20), and Stebbing is arguing against a very similar idea in her paper. Quine was thinking in large part about Carnap as his opponent, and so was Stebbing. And Quine was writing almost two decades later, so how about that.
• Stebbing and Quine both associate the dogma with the logical positivists/empiricists' verificationism, according to which the meaning of a sentence is or at least is determined by what would count as a verification that it was true. And they both thought the verificationists were onto something, in that experience is ultimately where the rubber hits the semantic road. They don't go worrying about how statements of the verification principle aren't themselves verifiable or anything like that. They just don't think meaningful statements all reduce to statements about immediate experience.
• Quine's response to the dogma, famously, was to adopt a kind of holism in which we don't think about the meanings (or for Quine, synonymy relations) and confirmation or otherwise of sentences in isolation, but instead think of sentences and the beliefs they express as standing in an interconnected web which responds to unexpected experiences by making modifications all over the place. But we should nonetheless be careful not to think of Quine as a semantic or confirmational holist, because Hilary Putnam says that's a mistake, and he should know. (Quine doesn't really believe in meanings or confirmation at all, you see.) Now, Stebbing's response is entirely different:
• Stebbing responds by introducing the notion of the indirect given. Just because belief about things remote from the given have to be based on beliefs about the given, doesn't mean they have to be based on beliefs about immediate experience, because being given need not mean being directly given the way immediate experience (and not much else) is.
• She isn't fully explicit in that paper about what she means by the indirect given ¹, but I like to think of it in these terms: directness is a causal matter, whereas givenness is a normative matter. Your belief that there is a tree through the window is at one end of a time-consuming causal chain with the tree at the other end and photons, eyes and visual cortices in the middle. But that doesn't mean it's inferred from beliefs about experience or anything else, because it isn't inferred: you need not and could not reconstruct the (in fact causal) process whereby the belief came about in order to justify it. It's just "oh look, there's a tree out there". The belief about the tree enters on the normative ground floor.
• Now, one fun thing to notice about Quine's and Stebbing's responses to the dogma are that the dogma has two parts and they pick different parts to attack. Quine attacks the reductionism part, and Stebbing attacks the to-experience part. Isn't that neat? I think it's neat. And it opens up the possibility that they're both right: Quine is right about beliefs being a web that responds to unexpected inputs all over, and Stebbing is right that the inputs aren't immediate experiences; they're everyday out-there propositions about trees and so on. And I actually think they are both right in this sense, although I wasn't planning to argue for that in the post.

The Rabbit Hole

The problem is that I don't feel like I can just write a post with the outline above and have done with it; I want to make sure it's right — I suspect some of the claims in the outline above aren't right — and I want to connect it up properly with the texts, and it sprawls. One thing I found when reading the Quine stuff — it's actually in 'Epistemology naturalized', which is much less obscure than most people's least obscure paper — was a reference to an exchange between Carnap and Neurath in 1932 where they talk about whether protocol sentences should be sentences about experience or sentences about physical things, or sentences about ourselves having experiences of physical things.

The papers were in German but have since been translated into English, which is good for me because I can't read German, and Carnap kind of gets talked out of the strong form of methodological solipsism which Stebbing was objecting to². This was in 1932, the year before Stebbing's paper came out; her paper was based on a talk she gave on March 22 1933. So it seems Carnap's methodological solipsism was raising eyebrows all round. The famously tolerant Carnap seems to think in his paper that there's more than one way to climb his methodological mountain, and he gives an alternative account of protocol sentences which he credits in large part to Karl Popper, in which protocol sentences are about physical things and can be basically any statement about them, and they can act as protocol sentences in one context but admit of further justification in other contexts. I think there's a lot in that, and it points away from the second dogma stuff in both the direction Stebbing took things and the direction Quine took them. And that was Carnap himself, already, in 1932. And Frederique Janssen-Lauret (2017) argues that Stebbing herself was also going in a holist direction that anticipates Quine and Susan Haack to an extent, although I haven't properly got around the textual evidence for that yet.

Neurath's paper is also of interest; it includes the famous bit about how we're like mariners trying to rebuild our boats on the open sea, but instead of the idea being just that you have to do it a bit at a time so the boat doesn't sink, it's also important to the image that you only have access to materials that are already on the boat. I wasn't aware of that angle. Neurath also argues in that paper that private languages are impossible. And if you're impressed to see someone doing that in 1932, Quine (1969a) reports that Dewey was dismissing the possibility of private languages way back in 1925. It's all fascinating of course, and I wanted to include it all, but it's just too much and I fear that if I don't let go of this mindset then you'll never hear about any of it, so I'm not really sure what the best thing to do with the project is.

I'm on holiday next week — that's also why this is coming out on a Thursday — but hopefully I'll see you the week after that!

Notes

[1] She does refer us to Stebbing (1929) for the sense in which perception is indirect, and basically the answer is fairly standard for people who think perception is indirect, in that it's mediated by a sensum. To be honest I was a little disappointed when I read this, but hope something more interesting can be made of the notion of the indirect given.

[2] There's a fun bit in Stebbing's paper where she's talking about the methodological solipsism of Carnap and whatever kind of solipsism Wittgenstein adopts in the Tractatus, where she says "The doctrines of both Carnap and Wittgenstein seem to me to suggest that Wittgenstein’s statement—’What solipsism means is quite correct, only it cannot be said’—is just the reverse of what they require. For, in my opinion, methodological solipsism ought to assert: ‘What solipsism means is ɴᴏᴛ correct, but only solipsism can be said’. I do not, however, suppose for a moment that either Carnap or Wittgenstein would regard my suggestion as other than absurd." (1933:74, her emphasis)

References

• Carnap, Rudolf 1932/1987: 'On protocol sentences', translated by ; Richard Creath and Richard Nollan, Noûs 21(4):457-470
• Dewey, John 1925/1958: Experience and Nature (La Salle, IL: Open Court)
• Janssen-Lauret, Frederique 2017: 'Susan Stebbing, Incomplete Symbols and Foundherentist Meta-Ontology', Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 5(2):6-17
• Neurath, Otto 1932/1959: 'Protocol sentences', translated by Frederic Schick, in A. J. Ayer (ed) Logical Positivism (New York: The Free Press):199–208
• Quine, W. V. A. 1951/1961: 'Two dogmas of empiricism'
• Quine, W. V. A. 1961: From a Logical Point of View, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper and Row)
• Quine, W. V. A. 1969a: 'Ontological Relativity', in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (Columbia University Press): 26–68
• Quine, W. V. A. 1969b: 'Epistemology naturalized', in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (Columbia University Press): 69-90
• Stebbing, L. Susan 1929: 'Realism and Modern Physics III', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes , 1929, Vol. 9, Knowledge, Experience and Realism, pp. 146–161
• Stebbing, L. Susan 1933: 'Logical positivism and analysis', Proceedings of the British Academy 19:53–87

Confessions Of A Bad Poet

Like every non-serious person who grew up as a gifted kid, I secretly harbour hopes of achieving greatness through what I think of as a cheap shot. I might elaborate on what I mean by this another time, but one thing that would qualify is writing a widely and rightly beloved poem that shows up in anthologies all the time because it's such a stone cold banger. You'll be relieved to hear that this is not the only iron I have in the fire, but it is one of them. I should hasten to clarify that I do not expect any of the poems I've written so far to ever attain this status; the most likely candidate is probably 'My Hair Is Remarkably Long', which fans of the blog will already know and presumably love. One point in that poem's favour is that the balder I get the funnier it gets, which is incidentally a nice demonstration that the quality of a poem need not be fully intrinsic to it.

Immortality And Mortality

Achieving artistic immortality through a cheap shot is in many ways a numbers game, for a couple of reasons, of which only one is the obvious fact that one must typically cast many a sprat to catch a hake. The other reason is that in order to promote one's poetry one will ideally be legible as a poet, and this means putting out at least one slim volume of verse to supply a friendly environment for your banger to shine. The poems don't all have to be bangers, but people are much more receptive to a poem when they're in poetry-reading mode and it's surrounded by other poems than when it's sitting awkwardly in a rectangular space carved out of a magazine article.

So what I need is enough poetry to fill a slim volume. Let's suppose that'd be about fifty poems, counting long poems that take up multiple pages as more than one poem. I'm now forty years old, I have been writing my poems for about twenty years, and I have about ten poems that I consider successes, so at this rate I should be able to put out my slim volume when I'm 120. Actuarially speaking, I would do well to up my work rate a little.

Now you might be surprised to hear this if you're familiar with my poetry, but I actually find it very difficult indeed to write them unless inexplicably struck by inspiration. I don't know what prompts it or how to speed it up; I have just occasionally been struck by inspiration and written a poem I consider a success. I have also sometimes been struck by inspiration and written a poem I consider a failure, but there aren't very many of those either. I am painfully unprolific. In contrast to my blogging output, which I have been able to ramp up enormously over the last few weeks through an act of sheer will, I would have no idea how to make myself a more productive poet. I suppose I could commit to posting a poem every Tuesday come rain or shine, but nobody really wants to see that. So I fear that my projected slim volume may never appear, and any bangers I write will go wasted on the desert air.

Hits And Misses

As I said, I've written a handful of poems I consider successes, and a handful or two that I consider failures. 'My Hair Is Remarkably Long' is of course in the former category, but I'll show you another of the successes and one of the failures so you can get a sense of what my standards are.

First, the success. It is a double dactyl, information which is necessary to read it with the right meter and which helps explain some of the artistic choices. Years ago there was a brief and minor vogue for writing them about philosophy to which I made a couple of contributions, and I'm sorry to inform you that this is the better of the two.

Guggenheim Flügenheim
Leopold Löwenheim
Pondered the hierarchy
Cantor had sired

With Skolem's help he proved
Model-theoretically
Higher infinities
Are not required

I don't want to toot my own horn too much, but I'll say a little about why I consider the poem a success, because I think it illustrates some things about the ethos with which my poems are written. First and foremost, when read correctly it scans. Lots of poetry settles for not scanning properly, whereas I am quite keen for my poems to scan more or less perfectly (except in the case of one called 'Computer' in which the meter breaks down intentionally in the middle).

It also adheres strictly to the rules of the form I've written it in, at least as I understand them, which is important to me when I write one in a specific form. Beyond these things the success criteria become more nebulous, and it's not something I've reflected on a great deal. Perhaps part of it is that there are no secrets: you might have to google who Leopold Löwenheim is, but in principle I think the reader should be able to understand this poem just as well as I do without me having to explain anything further about it (assuming you recognize a double dactyl when you see one). It is, in an important sense, not personal. When asked what my favourite poem is, my longstanding answer is 'Recipe For A Salad' by Sydney Smith, and I think one could say the same about that. Irritatingly, however, this isn't actually the case for 'My Hair Is Remarkably Long', because to fully appreciate it you have to know what I look like. Oh well.

Now for the moment you've all been waiting for: the failure. This poem is a limerick about Goethe.

There once was a fellow named Goethe
A novelist, bard and Frankfurter
Man of science astute
And a statesman to boot
He was basically Norris McWhirter

This poem is a failure in my eyes, although I hold out some hope that with some judicious workshopping in multiple places it could become a success. So, what's wrong with it?

Attentive readers will have noticed that it meets all the success criteria I mentioned for the successful one. It is undeniably a limerick. (If you don't already know, I'm sorry to be the one to tell you that it really is normal for English people to pronounce "Goethe" to rhyme with "Frankfurter" and "Norris McWhirter".) When read correctly it scans perfectly. And while you might need to Google Norris McWhirter, you don't need me to tell you anything in order to understand the poem as well as I do. And yet, as I am sure you'll agree, it is deeply unsatisfying as a piece of art.

The problem as I see it is that it has holes in it: some of the words are essentially placeholders where a word that improved the poem could have been put but I couldn't think of one. "Fellow" is an example. That should be replaced by a more interesting word applying to Goethe. "Astute" is not great. "He was basically" is an abomination. When writing it I looked up whether I could put "The Westphalian Norris McWhirter", but unfortunately that's not where Westphalia is. Returning to it today I considered "The Enlightenment's Norris McWhirter", but I don't like that because drawing attention to the fact that Goethe was one among many polymaths of approximately his era rather detracts from the point of the poem. Maybe one day I'll come up with something, but today is not that day.

The poem was originally written as a reply to a tweet seeking recommendations for "a decent biography of Goethe that isn't 20'000 pages long"; it appears that the date (21 March 2018) was World Poetry Day, and so I replied with a poem. I thought it was funny, but as I recall the poster didn't like the tweet. I'm over it; as I say it's not a good poem. But when looking this up, I realized that today is March 21 too, so happy World Poetry Day, and see you next week!

No Post Today

I'd intended to write a post today about Susan Stebbing and the second dogma of empiricism, but through a combination of it being a more challenging topic and this Friday having more distractions than usual, it got to the point where I realized that wasn't going to be happening today, so you're getting this post instead.

Regular readers will recall that I'd hoped that by getting into a routine from writing frivolous posts I'd be able to send more substantial posts down the production line and produce them in a timely manner. On the other hand, I mentioned a couple of philosophy posts that I said I was proud of but wouldn't have been able to write quickly, and so I shouldn't really be surprised that the one I had planned for today has been taking a bit longer.

It is, without doubt, a setback, but I still hope to be able to have a post for you about Stebbing and reductionism in the next couple of weeks. I guess I'll keep working on it on off days and put it into the schedule when it's ready. But hopefully it won't get torpedoed by the kind of perfectionism that'd been keeping me from writing much in the past. What I will say is that I should be careful not to go into next Friday expecting to get it finished and then find myself unable to, so hopefully if you don't get that one you'll get something more interesting than this one. Or at least something longer.

I'm sure you're all as disappointed about this as I am, but I'm still new to regular blogging and still learning my limitations, and I won't let it get me down. I'm happy enough with how I've handled this setback. See you next week!

Plastic Man

Like all British people, my dream is to one day become notable enough to be invited onto the long-running BBC radio programme Desert Island Discs. I expect most of us have also got our list of eight songs plus a book and a luxury at the ready for when we get the call, and one of my songs is Plastic Man by the Kinks.

It's a catchy song, and Wikipedia informs us that is was released specifically in the hope of having a hit following their now critically lauded but then commercially disappointing album The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, but this didn't work out for them because the BBC wouldn't play the song on account of it containing the word "bum". The best laid plans.

Anyway, while the catchy tune and lyrical cheekiness do appeal to me, that's only half the story about why I'm taking it to my desert island. The other half is that I think that in a way I'm something of a plastic man myself, and this week I'd like to talk a little about why.

Žižek

I'm not exactly a fan of Slavoj Žižek, and I've sometimes heard from people who speak with more authority about him than I can that there are good reasons not to be, but he's a big name, and one time I decided that even if only in a fairly minimal way I should check out what the deal was with him and I so I read a picture book called Introducing Slavoj Žižek: A Graphic Guide (Kul-Want and Piero 2011). The book contains several fairly arresting images, but one thing that really made an impression on me was in a section titled "The Removal Of Risk":

'A further reason why Žižek is suspicious of the equation that is made between happiness and self-realization in Western society today is how cautious and guarded people are about allowing any sesne of intensity, risk or emotional excess into their lives.

"This is reflected in the creation of a new series of products: coffee without caffeine, cream without fat, beer without alcohol."

These products are popular precisely because they are deprived of their malignant properties.' (Kul-Want and Piero 2011: 115)

He goes on to talk about the same mindset being manifested in some modern varieties of warfare, sex, politics, and also multiculturalism, but that's not so much what struck me about the passage. What struck me about it was that I thought "That's me! I drink decaf coffee and non-alcoholic beer, and I eat vegetarian meat too! I even have multiple plastic plants in my home. What's wrong with depriving things of their malignant properties?"

I expect it was around the same time that I first discovered Plastic Man, which (as you'll be aware if you're familiar with the song or at least followed the YouTube link earlier) is about a man made of plastic (bum included) who surrounds himself with plastic objects, including plastic flowers like I have. And so the song and Žižek's tirade against my beloved defanged simulacra became inextricably linked in my mind.

Keeping It Unreal

Now, I don't want to oversell my plastic lifestyle. I do drink plenty of real coffee (mostly instant, but still caffeinated) but switch to decaf after around four or five in the evening, and sometimes go with decaf earlier in the day too if I already feel sufficiently wired at that moment. There are now at least two real plants in my home in addition to the several plastic ones (including some lego flower arrangements which I think are especially nice, although they were built by my partner so I can't take credit for them). I am a vegetarian and so all the meat I eat is fake meat, and a month or so ago I switched to drinking mostly but not exclusively non-alcoholic beer. I also drink diet Coke, Pepsi etc in preference to the sugary versions when they're available.

Embracing products like this can be quite liberating, because it essentially means you can uncouple drinking coffee from getting wired, drinking beer from getting drunk, surrounding yourself with plants from looking after plants and so on. It allows you to be more intentional about how you spend your time: you're not finding yourself doing one thing just because you decided to do the other. It's also worth noting that non-alcoholic beers have got a lot better since they first appeared, just as vegetarian meat has. I'm not old enough to rembember being able to tell decaf coffee from regular in a blind taste test, but if you are, that's got better too. With most of these things, if you think it's bad because you tried some twenty years ago and it tasted kind of nasty, then your information is out of date. Even astroturf has come on a lot as I understand it.

The Desert Of The Real

Žižek did in fact write these things over twenty years ago, in an essay called "Passions of the real, passions of semblance", which is the first chapter of a book called Welcome to the Desert of the Real! Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates (Žižek 2002)¹. The excellent title of the book, as he explains in the essay, is from something Morpheus says to Neo after he wakes up from the Matrix and sees "a deslolate landscape littered with burnt-out ruins — what remains of Chicago after a global war" (Žižek 2002: 15).

I read the essay for the first time quite recently, and to be honest it didn't really flesh out the critique of my plastic lifestyle in a way I found very satisfactory. I quite enjoyed reading it nonetheless, although I don't really feel equal to giving a précis of it for you. One theme in it is the idea that Americans in then-recent times had tried to insulate themselves from the real, but 9/11 happened and America was forced to confront the kind of violent and dangerous realities that it had been trying to confine to other parts of the world, and when it did Americans processed the events in a manner more suitable for processing fiction. Major American landmarks being destroyed is something that happens all the time in disaster movies, but wasn't supposed to happen in real life.

I don't really feel qualified to have much of an opinion about whether he's right about 9/11, but after taking the side of the plastic men against Žižek for so long, maybe it's worth me re-evaluating my position now that I've finally read the essay he was attacking us in. Should I be waking up, cleaning off the goo and walking among the burnt-out ruins of Chicago?

The Experience Machine

Before we give the obvious negative answer to this question, let's think a little about the experience machine. Robert Nozick (1974: 42–5) proposed a thought experiment where people can plug themselves into a machine and experience a virtual reality much nicer than the one that Neo and the rest of us experience in The Matrix, and in fact one of our own choosing, with the only catch being that none of it is real. (We'll ignore David Chalmers' (2009) surprisingly persuasive arguments that the world inside the Matrix actually is real.) Nozick's argument is supposed to be an argument against hedonism, or any other view of wellbeing on which only experiences matter, and by extension hedonistic utilitarianism, because the experience machine gives you all the experiences you could want but doesn't give you everything of value, and so there must be something of value other than experiences (and a fortiori something other than pleasure.)

Nozick notes some things you might want from the machine — to do things rather than just feel like you're doing them, be a certain way, and to experience a deeper reality — and proposes further machines to meet some of those further needs. He still doesn't think we should want to plug in, and thinks that the problem is the machines living our lives for us, rather than our living them ourselves, "in contact with reality" (Nozick 1974: 45).

This is a fun thought experiment to discuss when you're new to studying philosophy, and not everyone agrees with Nozick that plugging yourself into the machine isn't the way to go. I personally do have the hoped for negative gut response to the scenario, but my considered view is that people act as well as experiencing and the idea of a human life that's experiences-only isn't really coherent, and I'm not sure the results machine really helps. A life with all cognition and no conation would be like a life with all inhalation and no exhalation. Introducing conation into the experience machine scenario — there's conation in the Matrix — would change it a great deal, and I think it's possible that if it could be fully made sense of and still contain enough pleasure to be the challenge to hedonism Nozick is after then we might stop being able to ignore Chalmers' surprisingly persuasive case for the reality of virtual worlds.

This doesn't sound like a complete response to the experience machine case because it isn't one, but it's where I am with it these days. But now we've been sweet-talked into valuing the real, let's see if we can get ourselves some sympathy for Žižek's take on plastic plants².

Blurring The Boundaries

Žižek complains that "What happens at the end of this process of virtualization, however, is that we begin to experience 'real reality' itself as a virtual entity" (2002:11), and then he starts talking about the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center and disaster movies. So, is he right? Does drinking non-alcoholic beer and filling your home with plastic plants lead you to start seeing reality itself as a virtual entity?

Let's see if we can find our way round to it by thinking about the experience machine and what it tells us about the value of the real. The problems with the machine are that it stops you doing things, being certain ways, and communing with a deeper reality, and that it lives your life for you. But non-alcoholic beer and the rest don't have these problems. You're still doing things, and you still have a personality; they're just different things and perhaps a different personality. They might stop you communing with a deeper reality, I suppose, but if so it's contingent and not at all for the reason Nozick gives about the experience machine, which is that it's limited to what we can create. That's a problem that's really quite specific to being hooked up to a machine, because if you're drinking a non-alcoholic beer there's still plenty of non-artificial stuff in your environment to be communing with.

I've tried to figure out a case for it, but I just don't think Žižek's right here. Maybe he's right about disaster movies or some other aspect of American life at the end of the 20th century, but I think the decaf angle is a red herring. And the reason essentially boils down to this: non-alcoholic beer is real. Decaf coffee is real. Plastic plants are not real plants, but I don't think it's that much of a stretch to say that they're real too. They are real things in my home. You can knock them over. They don't make as much of a mess as real plants when you do, but you can still do it, and if you can knock them over, they are real.

Now, I realize that by writing that last paragraph I'm leaving myself wide open to the charge that the blurring of the real and the virtual has already happened to me! Perhaps that's true; it would be difficult for me to know. But I don't think it has, so I'm going to keep drinking the unreal ales for now. Cheers, and see you next week!

Notes

[1] If you want to read it then I should give you a content warning for discussions of self harm and violent pornography, but I won't be discussing those themes here.

[2] The latter is not one of his examples but I think it would serve: apart from anything else, real plants die.

References

• Chalmers, David J. (2009) 'The Matrix as Metaphysics', in Susan Schneider, Science Fiction and Philosophy: From Time Travel to Superintelligence (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell) pp35–54
• Kul-Want, Christopher and Piero 2011: Introducing Slavoj Žižek: A Graphic Guide (London: Icon Books)
• Nozick, Robert 1974: Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books)
• Žižek, Slavoj 2002: Welcome to the Desert of the Real! Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates (London and New York: Verso)

Reading Habits

I like to read, and like a lot of people with the same affliction, I've sometimes found that I'm not quite where I want to be as regards reading. Maybe I'm not reading enough, maybe I'm not reading the kinds of things I want to be reading, or even if I am maybe there's still a mountain of things that I feel like I should have read but haven't got round to, and I wonder if I ever will. At one point I was legitimately confused at how it's possible that I seem to have read thousands and thousands of books when I only seemed read about ten books a year if that. Twitter's search function isn't what it was and I couldn't find the tweet, but perhaps some of you will relate.

The good news is that while I'm still not exactly where I'd like to be with respect to this stuff, I'm in a much better place than I used to be a few years ago. I've hit on a few habits that I find help me, and I'm going to talk about them here. I'm not recommending you try any of this stuff at home; different things help different people and we don't all have the same options in our lives. This post is about me.

Three books at once

Perhaps the biggest breakthrough was when I hit on the system of having three books on the go at the same time. It's great, and so much better than what I was doing before. I used not to have a system at all really; I'd start a book when I thought I could handle taking it on or couldn't wait, whatever else I was reading at the same time. I'd often put one book on hold to read another, and then put that on hold to read another, until I ended up with a matryoshka of unfinished books with bookmarks sticking out of them somewhere near the beginning. That's no way to live.

In the current system I'll read three books at once, but not just any three books. It's three distinct slots with different purposes, not an unstructured quota of three. Basically the idea is to have a light one, a heavy one, and an intermediate one.

The light one doesn't have to be especially light in either its content or its materiality; previous occupants of that slot include The Goldfinch and Crime and Punishment, although admittedly I read those on an e-reader rather than lugging them around. The key criteria are that it should be a book that I can still appreciate if I read it in short bursts, and it should be something that I can reliably get in the mood for when circumstances provide a short burst for me to read it in. The current occupant is Upstate by James Wood. I'm not as into it as I was into his The Book Against God, which I think I've read twice, but I'm still enjoying it and I'm glad to be finally checking it out after it's sat on my bookshelf so long. It's good; I just really liked his other one.

The heavy slot is for books which very much don't fit the two criteria for the light slot, but which I'd still like to read. The Critique of Pure Reason went in the heavy slot, for example. The current occupant of that role is the set theory textbook I mentioned a couple of weeks ago — I am now partway through chapter 3 but have been slacking off on the exercises — and the previous heavyweight was A Discourse Concerning The Love Of God by Damaris Masham. I've mentioned this before, but it's especially important to have at least one other book on the go when I'm reading a book by Kant, because otherwise when you think "ugh, that's enough Kant for the day" you also have to stop reading books for the day altogether, and things really don't need to be like that. Just because you're willingly reading a book on your own initiative doesn't mean it's not effortful or even a bit of a chore, and you don't want to put yourself in a position where reading in general is, for you at this time, a chore.

I've sometimes heard people who for professional or educational reasons had a lot of books to get through saying that they feel bad about reading anything not on their list of obligatory reading, because if they're reading at all they feel they should be working their way through the list. But of course they're not always up for reading something from the list, and so they just scroll on their phone or watch TV or go to the gym or whatever instead. This doesn't make sense. There can be reading on both sides of your work/life balance.

The intermediate slot is for other books. Books which are in no way a chore to read but which don't quite fit the criteria for the light book. The current intermediate book is Why Are We 'Artists'? 100 World Art Manifestos, edited by Jessica Lack. There's a certain amount of slippage between the intermediate slot and the slots on either side; when I finish Upstate I may put the art manifestos in the light slot and put a philosophy book in the intermediate slot.

Occasionally I'll be down to two books when I've finished or given up on the book in one slot and haven't decided what to replace it with, and sometimes after very careful consideration I'll introduce a fourth. The latter only really works when it's something I'm confident I can get through pretty quickly, because otherwise I'm back to the matryoshka. I tried it once with Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit when I was reading it along with Gregory Sadler's YouTube lectures, and you won't be surprised to learn that I did not get especially far into it, although that was still a lot of lectures and I think that at the time I got a fair idea of what the Preface is about¹.

Recordkeeping

The other big breakthrough for me was that in January 2019 I started keeping a record of what I read. I don't include squibs like Daily Mash articles, but books, magazine articles, blogposts, encyclopedia articles, op-eds and poems go on there. I originally intended to include things I only read parts of but that's no longer such a big issue because now that I've got my system I tend to finish things more.

It's sometimes useful to be able to check whether I've read something or to find something I've read — I include URLs to things I read online in the entry — but it also just makes me feel better about my reading life to have a record of it. I don't show the list to other people, and to be honest I don't really understand why it makes me feel better. I guess it's partly that knowledge is power and so recordkeeping is empowering, and partly that if you're scared that you're not where you want to be with respect to your reading life, then some of that can be a fear of the unknown and keeping records makes it less unknown. If I spent a lot of time reading through the list and thinking about what a great guy I was to have read all those things then that would explain it, but that's not something I really do, so it isn't that. But whatever it is, it does seem to make me feel better about my reading, and so I'm going to keep doing it.

Read on the bus

I get the bus to and from work, and on the bus I usually read my light book. I also read it on my breaks at work. That's why it's important for the light book to be something that works when read in short bursts and which I'll reliably be in the mood for when those short bursts present themselves.

One benefit of this habit is that I don't have to make the effort to carve out time to read. I'm as lazy and weak-willed as the next person, and when I'm left to my own devices I'll often go on social media or play online chess or do some puzzles. But it's nice to have a book on the go which you dip into regularly, a little narrative running in the background, and having dedicated situations when I dip into it makes sure that this nice thing is an ever-present part of my life. Except when I'm off work.

Read at bedtime

I'm actually not doing this one at the moment. Currently at bedtime I just go on the internet for a bit, and sometimes watch some TV or a movie if there's time. But a month or two ago I was in the habit of reading at bedtime instead, and it was really good. I got to sleep more quickly, I was safe from the possibility of getting stressed out by the internet when I was supposed to be going to sleep, and I had extra time to read. What's not to like? I didn't stop for any particular reason. Perhaps I'll get back into it, although as I say, I'm as lazy and weak-willed as the next person. I got a new bedside lamp recently so maybe that'll tip the balance.

Read aloud

It's a little unusual to read a book on the bus these days, but probably my most eccentric reading habit is that when I'm reading by myself I often read aloud. As I recall I first started doing this with Thomas Kuhn's The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions, which according to my records I finished in July 2020. I suppose a lot of people probably developed some eccentricities around then what with the pandemic and the lockdowns, but I've kept this one up and I'm glad of it. I think I understand things better when I read them aloud, and it gives you a heads up when you're misparsing a sentence because you'll read it wrong and probably stumble over it.

Reading aloud also opens up new avenues for having a bit of fun with what you're reading. One thing I sometimes find happening is that I'll do different voices for blockquotes, perhaps modelled on the voice that was used for reading out viewers' letters on the old BBC show Points Of View, or at least my memory of it; doubtless if I went back and listened to it the voice they do would turn out to be nothing like the one I do. I also sometimes find myself reading the footnotes in my head even when I'm reading the main text aloud. I don't know why.

Some people will tell you that the ancients all used to read aloud except for St Ambrose, but I vaguely remember hearing that this is based on a misunderstanding of something St Augustine wrote. So I won't pretend that by reading aloud to myself I'm participating in a long and venerable tradition. I expect some people would also find that reading aloud slows them down a lot, but I read pretty slowly at the best of times, at least for someone who reads as much as I do — I usually reckon on about three minutes a page, adjusted up or down a bit depending on the usual sorts of thing — and so I don't have to slow down all that much for my voice to keep up.

Device compartmentalization

I don't have a smartphone but don't be fooled: I'm still probably at least as internet addicted as you are, and perhaps more so because I'm accessing the internet on a Chromebook with a proper keyboard and a much bigger screen and so it's much more enjoyable for me. So ideally I wouldn't do my reading on an internet-enabled device, with the siren song of social media within earshot. Sometimes this is hard to avoid of course, but I've managed to get round it to some extent with one weird trick that I call device compartmentalization.

Put simply, in addition to the Chromebook that I use for my social media and so on, I also have a PC laptop that I don't. I break the rule occasionally, for example when I slip on some ice and break my Chromebook, but for the most part I don't use social media on my PC. This, somehow, has the effect of meaning I'm generally not tempted to go on social media on my PC. So if I'm reading something and don't want to be distracted, I can read it on my PC. I read FH Bradley's Appearance and Reality that way, and let me tell you that if you can focus on the longer second part of that ('Reality') without getting distracted then you can focus on anything.

Print magazines

There's a flaw in the device compartmentalization method though, which is that it only works when I'm at home, as I don't carry my big chunky PC laptop around with me. And sadly when I'm out and about is exactly when I want to read quality longform magazine articles. What to do? Enter the last of my eccentricities to save the day: I subscribe to the print edition of a well-known American magazine. Perhaps you think this is an absurd thing to do in 2025, and that as a fully grown adult you would simply get a hold of yourself and read 15,000 words of Louis Menand on whatever he's become interested in this week without abandoning ship for your favourite microblogging site, but in the words of Cher, I really don't think you're strong enough. I'm certainly not. See you next week!

Notes

[1] It's about dialectics.

Bananas

I'm not really a big one for new year's resolutions, but this year, and not for the first time, I began with the intention of eating more bananas. I like bananas, and when I do my weekly big shop at the weekend I almost always buy a bunch, but I've often found that by the end of the week I've only eaten one or two and the rest have had to be thrown out. It's far from ideal, and I've now decided to take control of my life in this small way and eat lots of bananas.

It's been going well: to the best of my estimation, I've eaten one banana each day this year, and I don't remember having to throw any out. I think once or twice there have been small parts of the day's banana that weren't good and which I didn't eat, but that goes with the territory when it comes to bananas.

I've also been recording my journey in a Twitter thread, which mostly consists of posts with a number of banana emojis corresponding to the number of bananas I've eaten to date. I also occasionally use the thread to document obstacles I've encountered and the like. It's now day 52 and I think I've proven my commitment to the bit, so although I have no intention of stopping any time soon I thought I'd take some time to reflect.

Because It's There

An obvious first question that someone coming across my thread might ask is "Why are you doing this?" It's a fair question. A mutual called The Outsider Humanist actually did ask me this on February 4, and my response was "I felt like I wasn't living my best life". I think that's accurate: I mentioned above how I like bananas but I wasn't getting through the ones I bought and that wasn't ideal. Eating a banana every day is much closer to ideal. But although that was why I started doing it, I think that the project has gathered an increased significance for me.

It's not just about eating bananas anymore; it's about starting something and then keeping it going come rain or shine, or snow. Leaving the record of it in my Twitter thread is important to me too: there's a lot of sadness in the world and a lot of it probably gets presented to you on the timeline of your favourite microblogging site, but I hope that when people see my banana tweets they'll think "Ah good, Mike's still out there eating his bananas" and that'll give them something positive to cling to.

Human endeavour is not typically something that stands in need of external justification. People run marathons, they put people on the Moon, and I'm eating a daily banana, not to secure some instrumental good, but just as a further expression of the human spirit. Humans are not the only animal that eats bananas, and we may not even be the only animal that eats a banana every day, but we're the only animal that decides to eat a banana every day and then follows through on it for as long as fate permits, and I think this unique quality of ours is something to be celebrated.

The Thread

If you'd like to read the thread and you're willing to access Twitter, it begins here. I'll briefly recount some themes that have emerged when making the thread.

Arrangements

Partly to inject a bit of interest, and partly just to make them easier to count, I often put the banana emojis into some kind of special arrangement rather than just putting them in a long string. I first put them into a 2D rectangle on day 15. On day 19 I arranged them into the number 19, which was how I learned that they don't always display the same way when you post them as they did in the composing box, and so the 19 is a bit wonky. I tried finding a blank emoji that I could put in as a spacer, but I didn't find anything suitable so I've just been using spaces and being mindful of how it might look with different widths for the emojis and/or spaces. On day 36 I arranged them into a triangle rather than a square, to draw attention to the fact that in addition to being the sixth square number, 36 is also the eighth triangular number. On day 42 I arranged them into what was supposed to be a Babel fish. And on day 50 I arranged them into an L.

Shopping

Bananas often don't last the whole week between my big shops, especially since most of the bananas in a bunch will tend to be at around the same stage of ripeness, so I've often found myself running out of bananas midweek and having to swing by a shop to secure the supplies I need to keep my project on track. The most dramatic occasion was fairly early on, when I still wasn't sure how committed I was, and buying the bananas would mean taking a detour through the snow and ice. Near the end of last year I had quite a scary fall on some ice and so when it got icy again in January I was quite nervous walking through it, but I decided to make the effort and continue with the daily banana-eating. Forty-six days and forty-six bananas later, I'm glad I did.

It's also not so bad having a midweek banana run pencilled into the diary on occasion¹, because it means that if there's something else I need or want I don't have to decide between going without and making a special trip.

Potassium

More than one person has suggested that by eating so many bananas I might eat too much potassium. It is possible to do yourself a mischief by eating too much potassium — if you get it your doctor will apparently call your condition "hyperkalemia", which sounds to me like Greek for "too much potassium in the blood" — but I looked it up and I'm not worried about this happening to me. In the course of researching this issue I learned that, assuming I didn't miscalculate, a healthy amount of potassium to eat is about a kilo a year. (That's about 2.2 pounds, for my American readers.)

Eating a banana also exposes you to a small amount of ionizing radiation, apparently mainly due to the radioactivity of one of the isotopes of potassium. The Banana Equivalent Dose is even sometimes used as a unit of radiation, equivalent to approximately 0.1 microsieverts. My understanding is that this is not very much radiation and so I don't need to worry about this either.

Discipline

[W]hen philosophy is not disciplined by semantics, it must be disciplined by something else: syntax, logic, common sense, imaginary examples, the findings of other disciplines (mathematics, physics, biology, psychology, history, etc.) or the aesthetic evaluation of theories (elegance, simplicity, etc.). Indeed, philosophy subject to only one of those disciplines is liable to become severely distorted: several are needed simultaneously. To be ‘disciplined’ by X here is not simply to pay lip‐service to X; it is to make a systematic conscious effort to conform to the deliverances of X, where such conformity is at least somewhat easier to recognize than is the answer to the original philosophical question. (Williamson 2006: 182)

It's a long time since I read that paper; I haven't reread it in order to research this post, and I don't appear to have read it since I started keeping extensive albeit non-meticulous and non-comprehensive records of my reading in January 2019. But the idea in this passage that philosophy must be disciplined by something stuck with me. Of course Williamson says that you need to be disciplined by more than one of them, but why is it OK not to be disciplined by all of them?

I really don't expect this would be Williamson's answer to the question, but I think that at least some of the value of discipline is that by anchoring oneself to a project with legible constraints you give yourself a structure for valuable things to accrete around. You give yourself problems you need to work on, and reasons to do things you'd rather not do. Discipline your philosophy of language with logic, and you can't just wave away semantic paradoxes. Discipline your philosophy of time with physics and you can't just wave away the relativity of simultaneity. Discipline yourself with going to the Moon and you have to invent teflon and astronaut ice cream, or whichever of the supposed by-products of the space program wasn't an urban myth. Discipline yourself with daily banana-eating and posting about it, and you have to face your fear of the snow, go to the shops midweek and figure out which arrangements of banana emojis will display properly on the screen. Or decide to write more frequent blogposts even when you don't have anything to say, and perhaps you'll eventually find that you do.

Last week I said I wasn't intending to write them weekly, but I've changed my mind and now that's the plan. It wasn't long after finishing the last one that I started looking forward to writing this one. It feels good, like I've finally got my voice back. See you next week!

Notes

[1] Why not every week? Well, after acquiring some bananas midweek I'll sometimes have some left over when I do my big shop, which means I can buy a bunch that's still green and so will have its most delicious period at the back end of the following week.

References

• Williamson, Timothy (2006), 'Must Do Better', in Patrick Greenough, and Michael P. Lynch (eds), Truth and Realism (Oxford, 2006; online edn, Oxford Academic, 1 Sept. 2010), pp.177–187, https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199288878.003.0010, accessed 21 Feb. 2025.