Inbox: - Book reviews - https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/nietzsche-psychology-and-first-philosophy/ - [https://www.cornell.edu/video/hegel-and-the-philosophy-of-pictoral-modernism](https://www.cornell.edu/video/hegel-and-the-philosophy-of-pictoral-modernism) - Marginal Revolution only Pippin link - Reviewing Zizek on Hegel: [https://mediationsjournal.org/articles/back-to-hegel](https://mediationsjournal.org/articles/back-to-hegel) - Pippin on Westerns (political psychology) - Pippin on Film Noir ## Filmed Thought book interview https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/new-books-in/robert-pippin-filmed-thought-z9CGHZIMav2/ Not "this film illustrates trolley problem or Descartes evil demon" but rather film as form of thought in their own right. Questions of expression. Non propositional ways films present their world's and ideas using dynamics of sound, camera movement, Mise en scène and so on. "We do not know what a film can do." (Apologies to Spinoza) Writing on Henry James convinced Pippin that there are other modalities of philosophy besides discursive analytic philosophy. I'd always been interested in the concept of political psychology, that's to say why human beings are willing to accept the authority of the states coercive monopoly on violence. It occurred to me that it had nothing to do with the acceptance of very subtle arguments about the legitimacy of State power based on you know contractualist arguments or veil of ignorance arguments. What psychological inputs are necessary to lead people to be willing to sacrifice for a regime. It occurred to me that the great Western's of classical Holywood period especially by Howard Hawks and John Ford were good examples of explorations of the psychological dynamic issues that wasn't very acceptable in traditional philosophical circles. Got the idea of doing a lecture series that would try to explore this issue of political psychology. => Westerns lectures Hollywood Westerns and American Myth: The Importance of Howard Hawks and John Ford for Political Philosophy https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300172065/hollywood-westerns-and-american-myth His central question concerns how these films explore classical problems in political psychology, especially how the virtues of a commercial republic gained some hold on individuals at a time when the heroic and martial virtues were so important. Westerns, Pippin shows, raise central questions about the difference between private violence and revenge and the state’s claim to a legitimate monopoly on violence, and they show how these claims come to be experienced and accepted or rejected. Pippin’s account of the best Hollywood Westerns brings this genre into the center of the tradition of political thought, and his readings raise questions about political psychology and the political passions that have been neglected in contemporary political thought in favor of a limited concern with the question of legitimacy. ## Pippin What is a Western? https://humanities-web.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/philosophy/prod/2018-10/What_is_a_Western.pdf Then did another series on 1940s film noir. https://www.upress.virginia.edu/title/4435 Where most Hollywood films of that era featured reflective individuals living with purpose, taking action and effecting desired consequences, the typical noir protagonist deliberates and plans, only to be confronted by the irrelevance of such deliberation and by results that contrast sharply, often tragically, with his or her intentions or true commitments. Pippin shows how this terrible disconnect sheds light on one of the central issues in modern philosophy--the nature of human agency. How do we distinguish what people do from what merely happens to them? Looking at several film noirs--including close readings of three classics of the genre, Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street, Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai, and Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past--Pippin reveals the ways in which these works explore the declining credibility of individuals as causal centers of agency, and how we live with the acknowledgment of such limitations. Hegel on art as a sensuous or affective form of thought or spirit. There's not really a shorthand way to express what it means to convey an idea. A repeat viewing is a way of trying to develop a more coherent reflective attitude towards a film. Aesthetic / experiential dynamic of watching film vs the reflective dynamic - Relationship between the two not well understood. - Thinking has an affective aspect as well, to be intrigued, puzzled, challenged, inspired to think by a film is not a bad thing. Great films ask you to do more than just passively receive, be entertained. Hitchcock Rear Window Ethical problems with spectatorial way of being in the world - rather than participant. Casting James Stewart for that role was a very odd, high risk choice. Interviewer: On Pippin reading, Almodóvar wants to take us to a point not beyond good and evil but perhaps beside it, in other words the point seems to be not to dismiss the duty of moral judgement, but suggests that there may be a parallel moral judgement to avoid resting too easily in pronouncing it. There is no doctrine of forgiveness in Kant. Bear the burden of moral error forever. The Almodóvar films explores the theme of forgiveness and redemption following grave wrongdoing. How to move beyond past wrongs, carrying the burden but not constantly being punished by the burden. When does that point arrive? Are there things that are unforgivable? I don't think we understand that very well, there aren't really any coherent philosophies of the conditions for forgiveness. Stopped at 34:08 https://lnns.co/bOLE5e8RVZz/2048 ## Pippin on Bernard Williams on Nietzche https://webshare.uchicago.edu/users/rbp1/Public/Williams%20on%20Nietzsche.pdf ![[Pasted image 20210526193053.png]] ![[Pasted image 20210526193103.png]] ## Robert Pippin Nietzsche, Psychology & First Philosophy p.10 Nietzsche likes the essays, pensees and maxims of the French moralists because they are presented without, and do not rely upon, deeper theories or philosophical foundations. This is taken to be a necessary condition for honest writing, and so, a virtue. [Against theory. Against systematisation. In favour of - eros? Fragments.] p.11 The Montaigne problem: How did Montaigne stay cheerful, and feel at home in the world? (Despite awareness of the human all too human) We go wrong if we ask him for his theory of what matters, of significance, of human nature. p.14 Desire for the unconditional assurance of the ultimate justifiability of one’s projects. p.15 conventional reading… philosophical truth or wisdom is an active, legislative thing p.15 Love is partly expressive and evaluative, but not the product of deliberation and normative evaluation think of our attachment to some sort of ideal (like the philosopher’s ideal, truth), some goal of satisfaction, in as complexly psychological a way (neither naturally caused nor reflectively deduced), and then think of that attachment as a condition of life, a condition of any practical sense in life. This event is not really just something that happens to us, nor something we just decide to do; the exclusive categories of event or action do not help us understand the phenomenon. p.16 philosophers as a type are not distinguished by what they know or by any method. They are distinguishable best by their distinct eros, what provokes or inspires desire, what grips them. (According to Diotima’s teaching in the Symposium philosophy is properly understood as a higher form of sexual desire.) p.21 What is possible now depends essentially upon what we take to have happened. Hence the importance of amor fati. p.26 Can Nietzsche reconcile his views on self-overcoming with his criticisms of the ascetic ideal p.28 depth commitments -> commitments we passionately identify with; orienting commitments historical dimension to the psyche. history of depth commitments p. 35 The gay science is a knowledge of erotics, not so much a knowledge of what love is, but a knowledge of how to love and so live well “dreaming” without having to “sleep”, loving an ideal without having to simply ignore the demands of reflective adequacy, is his figurative statement of the problem p.38 “our passion”, “the drive to knowledge” “has become too strong for us to be able to want happiness without knowledge or the happiness of a strong, firmly rooted delusion; even to imagine such a state of things is painful to us!" there is no better image of philosophical eros than that of “unrequited love" the philosophical type can sustain a lifetime of unrequited love. p.43 suggestion that the self-image philosophers have of themselves as courageously trying to see what lies hidden is better understood as an obscene attempt to look up a woman’s dress. It is more inappropriate and grotesque than impossible (in, say, Kant’s sense). pp.43-4 In The Gay Science (§59), Nietzsche recalls the simple fact that the poetic language of love cannot survive (without loss of meaning) any radical literalisation. It is impossible and quite wrongheaded to understand such figurative or poetical expressions as appearances or distortions plastered onto some sober secular truth. Here especially "the truth” does not remain truth when the veils are pulled aside, as if the idealisations and appeals to imagination would “mean the same” when “honestly” expressed as some adaptation in an evolutionary game; or if expressed in Oedipal psychoanalytic terms; or if translated into some naturalistic interest in power or satisfaction. It is possible to say that there is some sort of biological drive behind our efforts in reproduction, for example, and even behind the creation of social rules for that process, but it is not possible to imagine such language of need and drive employed in an address to another, as a practical proposal to another, within what Nietzsche has called the context of “life”. […] We need […] a philosophical language like this erotic language, not a flowery embellishment of literal truth but one which has overcome thinking of the matter in [terms of an alternative between appearance and reality]. […] Nietzsche wants to sustain the intellectual conscience constitutive of a philosophical life, but now without what had traditionally been understood as philosophy, the exposure of the reality behind, hidden beneath, appearances. !!! #toreflect p.50 [Footnote quoting Freud on Melancholy] Melancholy is psychically designated by a deeply painful disturbance, by a suspending of interests in the external world, by a loss of the capacity to love, by a restriction in activity and an emphasis on a feeling which expresses itself in self-condemnation and complaints against oneself and which escalates to a deluded expectation of punishment. p.51 [What’s wrong with the pale atheists?] “people for whom nothing much is important beyond their own immediate happiness and their security in achieving future happiness.” “too easily satisfied with a secular materialism and easy unbelief and do not understand the erotic aspirations and ideals Nietzsche elsewhere treats as “conditions of life””. p.53 Acting is negating what there is and so presumes some sort of experience in which an absence or a barrier or a limitation or a simple fact becomes unacceptable, not merely noted. […] Acting in the light of this unacceptability is “acting for a value”, and what we are [looking for] is the source and meaning of such unacceptabilty, given the death of God p.54 [Nihilism is not a direct consequence of intellectual enlightenment] p.54 [Nihilism as a failure of desire] p.55 [Nietzsche is not merely talking about] the presence of powerful urges or passions, or their matter-of-fact absence. […] It is the possibility of some second-order passionate identification with some project or goal, some dedication to a hierarchy of what matters, that interests Nietzsche p.57 GS §334 “Love too must be learned" p.59 [Nietzsche assumes the distinction between a human action and an ordinary event.] The psyche amounts to a historically achieved and quite variable way of holding ourselves to account. p.60 He assumes that we are so disposed that the deepest suffering we can experience is from lack of any sense in the suffering. [..] [Our] second-order awareness is originally reactive and negative, seeks to cancel out in some way what injures so meaninglessly. p.61 the natural world is a world without genuine individuality […] is formless, brutal, chaotic, and indifferent, and to live a human life is (and essentially is only) to resist this, to make oneself something other than all this, all because, up to now at least, we have not accepted it p.61 Individuality is always understood as a kind of fragile, unstable, threatened achievement, not a state of being. p.63 Prometheus created the light by desiring it p.64 [Nietzsche trying to provoke the expectation of meaning?] GS §276 "I want more and more to perceive the necessary characters in things as the beautiful: I shall thus be one of those who beautify things. Amor fati: let that henceforth be my love! I do not want to wage war with the ugly. I do not want to accuse, I do not want even to accuse the accusers. Looking aside, let that be my sole negation! And all in all, to sum up: I wish to be at any time hereafter only a yea-sayer!" p.67 [Modern moral philosophy as clinging onto Christian precepts] p.72 [Wittgenstein: how and should we distinguish my arm going up from my raising my arm?] p.77 expressivist theory of action: Inseperability thesis: intention formation and articulation are always temporally fluid, altering and transforming “on the go” […] as events in a project unfold. […] there is no way to confirm the certainty of one’s “real” purpose except in the deed actually performed. […] The deed alone can show one who one is, what one is actually committed to, despite what one sincerely avows. p.79 [A succesful action] is one in which I am able to “see myself” in the deed (sometimes the surprising, unexpected deed) as actually performed, see it as an expression of me (in a sense not restricted to my singular intention) [and ALSO one in which] what I understand is being attempted and realised is also what others understand. p.82 There is a difference between actually legislating values […] and a fantasy of self and value creation. p.87 [slave morality] motivated not by what they consciously (and sincerely) ascribed to themselves, but subconsciously by resentment and a profound hatred of their masters p.89 Real motives, according to Nietzsche, are often exactly the opposite of what is avowed, even sincerely avowed, and most problematically the real motives are hidden because the agent hides them. p.90 [The psychological phenomenon of self-deceipt] is at the centre of Nietzsche’s concerns and what he is mostly referring to when he insists that the traditional interpretive notions of the manifest and the hidden, or appearance and essence, are inadequate to capture the phenomenon. The mistake is identical to the one made in thinking that what is hidden in a literary text can simply be “extracted” and placed on view in a literal form, as if criticism had as its goal paraphrase. We at last know better what is first of all necessary/ it namely, cheerfulness, every kind of cheerfulness, my friends! also as artists : I should like to prove it. We now know something too well, we men of knowledge : oh, how well we are now learning to forget and not know, as artists! And as to our future, we are not likely to be found again in the tracks of those Egyptian youths who at night make the temples unsafe, embrace statues, and would fain unveil, uncover, and put in clear light, everything which for good reasons is kept concealed. No, we have got disgusted with this bad taste, this will to truth, to "truth at all costs," this youthful madness in the love of truth : we are now too experienced, too serious, too joyful, too singed, too profound for that. We no longer believe that truth remains truth when the veil is withdrawn from it : we have lived long enough to believe this. At present we regard it as a matter of propriety not to be anxious either to see everything naked, or to be present at everything, or to understand and "know" everything. GS, preface 8 p.92 [The slavish] can hide from themselves the cruelty in their morality of sympathy and pity p.92 GS §44 Important as it may be to know the motives from which humanity has acted so far, it might be more essential to know the belief people had in this or that motive, i.e. what humanity has imagined and told itself to be the real lever of its conduct so far. For people’s inner happiness and misery has come to them depending on their belief in this or that motive - not through the actual motives. p.95 There are […] two ways of sketching the Freudian notion of the unconscious. On one account, an appeal to the unconscious in an explanation of some human action is a dramatic extension of the domain of the psychological. […] Freud’s genius, on this account, was to have been able to show that what appeared as symptoms I suffered could be understood as psychologically motivated deeds that I am trying to accomplish; they could be understood as actions, not mere natural events or sufferings. […] [On the second account] we can think of the unconscious […] as a kind of radically independent second mind, only this time the drives typical of such a material mind are more like a brute, nonintentional force intruding on and affecting and interfering with the conscious mind. I must be said, on this model, to have been seized by a material force; something has taken hold of me. I cannot be said to be attempting anything; there is no motivated irrationality. […] something is happening to me p.100 When describing much philosophy as an illness, Nietzsche does not think of such philosophy as simple a manifestation of a diseased body but as something much more complicated. “Philosophy has been no more than an interpretation of the body and a misunderstanding of the body. Behind the highest value judgements that have hitherto guided the history of thought are concealed misunderstandings of the physical constitution.” GS, preface §5 p.101 self-knowledge is not observational but interpretative and, let us say, always promissory, futural, as complextly interpretive as the interpretive question of just what it is that is being done; action explanation is not causal, and motives cannot be understood as fixed, datable mental items. Rather, self-ascribing a motive is more like provisionally trying out an interpretation. […] Being aware of what is to oneself an unpleasant interpretive possibility about oneself, and, under the press of its unpleasantness, manufacturing another roughly plausible interpretation is not like looking away from a causally effective determinate motive that is nevertheless paradoxically still “there”, still before the minds eye. {{ But what are the truth conditions for an interpretation? Some fairly complicated combination of factors, it seems…}} If we think of any present avowal of motives as more like provisional commitments to act, based on various highly provisional and uncertain interpretations of one’s personal history, past and present motives, and context, then the inaccuracy of some self-ascription is no great paradox and can be confirmed (if it can be) by what occurs in the future […] in what the agent does and does not do. [we are unwise to assume] a momentary or punctuated observation that a subject then tries to hide or flee from p.102 [The intentional stance] is not to be understood as a claim for metaphysical truth but is itself an achieved interpretation in one community at a time of what could be and has been interpreted in many different ways. p.103 The manifest avowals of allegiance to values such as equality and humility as the basis for the condemnation of the masters could have been “true”. What makes them untrue is not that they are made up at the time by the slaves who pretend to be commited to them but who are really, at the time, knowingly seething with ressentiment, but that the future history of this moral institution betrays its true allegiances p.107 philosophical positions as psychological symptoms p.115 the language of negation that is also an affirmation p.116 necessity and freedom, affirmation and negation the conditions necessary for the attainment of freedom - the proper relation of attachment and detachment - seem […] largely prevoluntary and extend in scope beyond what individuals can do. p.119 [Modernity is] The first epoch in which we must admit that we do not know, in the traditional objectivist or religious sense, what is worth wanting or aspiring to GS §347 "one could conceive of such a delight and power of self-determination, a freedom of the will in which the spirit takes leave of all faith and every wish for certainty, practiced as it is in maintaining itself on light ropes and possibilities and dancing even beside abysses. Such a spirit would be the free spirit par excellence." we should follow Nietzsche’s lead in considering the “problem of freedom” to be a “psychological” problem in his sense of the term. That is, Nietzsche clearly considers freedom to consist in some sort of affirmative psychological relation to one’s own deeds, a relation of identification, finding oneself in one’s deeds, experiencing them as genuinely one’s own. […] [This relation] involves both a kind of wholehearted identification and affirmation as well as the potential for great self-dissatisfaction. It is a state of extreme “tension”. no to Nietzsche as philosopher of the will. rather, like Socrates, a philosopher of eros.