Thibodeau and Kelley Exploring Ethics

For over a decade and a half, Prof. Jason Thibodeau and I have engaged in regular and sometimes rather lengthy discussions of moral philosophy. What matters? What does it mean for something to matter? Lately we have initiated the practice of recording some of these discussion. Whether the recordings amount to a podcast, I do not know, being unfamiliar with the conventions of that genre. Regardless, you can listen to our discussions here: https://open.spotify.com/show/7nwBlqMrRfZuczbYFUfaeL

On Of Real Things

I don’t feel comfortable offering my own interpretation of my own poem.  My experience generally has been that when the artist attempts even a disinterested critique of their own work, the results are are either timid or vainglorious.  Simply put, self-disinterest is nearly impossible.  I would, however, like to recount how the musical accompaniment to Of Real Things came to be.  But to do that, I must give some idea of the genesis of the poem itself, to which I added the score later.

At the top of this page, Essays and Commentaries, you see a link to what I blushfully call the “podcast” of Jason Thibodeau and me.  In our discussions we focus on a branch of philosophy called metaethics, trying to understand what makes good good or right right.  We have affiliated ourselves with a school of thought within metaethics called moral realism, the belief that there are moral facts and that these facts are objective.  Our moral judgments–for we must make judgements–aim to represent moral facts.  Jason’s publications situate themselves firmly within the norms of academic discourse; he is a professor of philosophy.  For some time now, I have wanted to introduce moral realism to the general public.  However, when I made the attempt of writing such an exposition, I discovered that it was beyond my powers to translate the details of this rigorous philosophical view into nonspecialist language.  The upshot is, the current document notwithstanding, lyrical expression energizes me more than does expository prose.  Thus I decided to attempt a didactic poem of some heft.

First I must observe that, as I disclaim in the “Epistle” dedicating Of Real Things to Jason, didactic is a nasty word these days, or at least it was when I was young.  Maybe it’s swinging back into fashion (but I doubt it).  Didactic describes a work of art, generally a poem, that aims to teach.  Indeed, the instructional element was raised until quite recently to justify the very existence of poetry.  Some ancient Roman, I think it was Horace, described poetry justified in this way as dulce et utile, sweet and useful.  That is, both pleasurable/beautiful and instructive.  In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries this stricture got really out of hand, especially with the requirement of “poetic justice,” the insistence that in a play the bad guy must get his precisely metered comeuppance, so we all get taught a lesson.  By the 1890s, overt didacticism was growing out of favor.  The slogan was “art for art’s sake”: that is, art should be appreciated for its intrinsic merit, not for whatever moral sustenance it dishes out.  Early in the 20th century, didactic came to mean, almost exclusively, preachy, self-righteous, pedantic, etc.

But as I claim in the “Epistle Dedicatory,” “it’s good to teach and it’s good to write a poem.”  It would help, I believe, if we gave the verb to teach a gentle nudge.  If by teach we mean, “make somebody learn,” then teaching is a monologue, boring or domineering.  If, however, we mean “to facilitate learning,” or merely, “to help somebody learn,” we acknowledge that we can’t make anybody do anything, not ethically.  Hence, the learner in a true teacher-student dialogue already consents to whatever the teacher has to offer.

Obviously, an author and a reader do not enter into a dialogue in real time. However, I would claim that our encounters with works of art are much like dialogue and that the artist does not participate. Moreover, the instructional element serves at most as an optional accessory and remains distantly absent, certainly in most modern artworks. A work of art should be beautiful and truthful, so dulce is a must. Utile, not so much. Hopefully it goes without saying that beauty is often not pretty.

I had two great models for a hefty didactic poem.  One, An Essay on Man by Alexander Pope (1734), offered an exposition of a particularly optimistic flavor of British Empiricism.  Empiricism is the view that all knowledge, indeed all ideas, come from the senses.  The optimistic tone comes from Pope’s insistence that “whatever is is right.”  Of Real Things denies strenuously that whatever is is right, with frequent focus on violence, anxiety, depression, addiction, war, poverty, and the depredations of empire.  However, there is more to the world than what we can perceive.  Math facts, which are outside the world of space, time, and sensation (“the phenomenal part of the world”), and, I claim, moral facts establish at least the optimistic possibility that “we can say with confidence That good will be good circle circle.”  A second model for my hefty didactic poem is De rerum natura, by the first-century Roman poet Lucretius.  Lucretius apparently intended a deliberate throwback to the pre-Socratic period, when philosophers like Thales and Parmenides wrote philosophy in verse, and his own work no doubt inspired Pope.  De rerum natura offers an exposition of Epicureanism, the view that pleasure is the highest, and perhaps the only “present,” good.  I feel no compulsion to rank the good things in life, but certainly pleasure is up there.  Much of De rerum is occupied with the evocation of sensory pleasure; I imitate Lucretius’s catalogues of pleasant perceptions in (at least) the first and the sixteenth chapters.  And I imitated his title, Of the Nature of Things, for my own.

I planned the poem very informally.  I knew that I wanted to begin and end with the rosy scenario of “good will be good,” and that there would be much acknowledgement along the way of conflict, anxiety, addiction, and so forth.  Above all, I knew that my approach would be primarily lyrical–that is, expressive–rather than dramatic or expository.  Consequently, much autobiographical and indeed confessional material appears.

From the beginning I allowed myself free recourse to certain recurrent verbal formulae such as the coinage “fluxuous” and phrases like “the phenomenal part of the world” and “mingles and separates.”  Long ago I had encountered the use of such leitmotifs in the works of Thomas Mann, who got them, of course, from the music dramas of Richard Wagner.  (At the mention of an avowed antisemite’s name, we must remember to distinguish the artist’s beliefs from whatever intrinsic merit his works possess; troublingly, to put it mildly, Wagner’s antisemitic themes manifest themselves in those very works, thereby significantly vitiating their value.)  Leitmotifs, basically recurrent melodic phrases, appear frequently in Wagner’s works, especially the Ring, to accompany specific themes and characters.  This technique has been eagerly adopted in popular culture so that, for example, a specific leitmotif signals the arrival of Darth Vader or Princess Leia or the Imperial Fleet. The use of verbal leitmotifs came quite naturally to unify, to some degree, my sprawling and list-laden work.

With the appearance of the musical term leitmotif, I can at last begin to broach my promised topic of relating musical composition to the poem.  I knew that my twenty-odd chapters would try the reader’s patience.  Indeed, I will be pleasantly surprised if anybody gets all the way through it.  A particular challenge arises in my habitual omission of punctuation.  On the Poems page of dkpoems you will see that I just don’t punctuate.  My excuse, probably feeble, is that I didn’t start writing poetry seriously until I was pushing 30.  (I’m not saying that around 30 I started writing good poems.)  By the time I got serious about poems, I had already written many songs, and I’ve always considered it pointless to punctuate the text of a song.  This is the kind of arbitrary stricture that artists often impose on themselves.  I believed, and still do, that the lineation and, especially, the rhythm of the words and phrases should bear the burden of syntactical intelligibility.  However, this practice, cultivated for short poems, becomes quite a problem with a work as hefty as Of Real Things.  Thus I decided to to record my own reading, in short, to make an audiobook.  The appropriateness of this choice was endorsed early on by friends and family members.

Virtually the instant I decided on the “audiobook,” I further decided upon musical accompaniment.  And since verbal leitmotifs already inhabited the work, musical leitmotifs seemed a natural and enabling choice.  The basic gimmick is variation on a theme.  A simple musical phrase is placed in some verbal context and becomes associated with the content (the “idea”) of the words.  Slight variations in the leitmotif alter its mood and significance in different verbal environments.  Thus, there is a leitmotif for the vulnerability we associate with children (“goatboy”).  In variations amid varying verbal contexts, this leitmotif, like any its its tribe, can establish the mood of pathos or danger or heroism or any other mood.  There are leitmotifs that I call “empire” and “birth” and “the one life.”  Early on, therefore, in my “Essays and Commentaries” project, I intend to discuss some of the musical leitmotifs in the score of Of Real Things.  I’m sorely tempted to begin here with the big, highly variable ones, but it would surely be better to begin with simplicity.  The simplest and least varied of the leitmotifs is, I believe, “science.”

Leitmotif: Science

Chapter 7, “Majesty and Mosquito,” recounts the ride of several friends in early middle age upon a raft on the Salmon River.  They “trade a modicum of bullshit” and “wax philosophical” about what makes a life meaningful or valuable.  I observe that they are stoutly “Confident of their integrity physical and ethical.”  I felt that the musical accompaniment should suggest the slightly mechanical quality of their knowledge; I think one or more of them might have been a technologist:

I did not compose the music in sequence.  I composed chapter 6’s music after I had composed the accompaniment of chapter 7.  The close association of science–of knowledge of “the phenomenal part of the world”–and technology reminded me of the raft riders.  I would use the rhythm of the opening phrase of chapter 7, and I decided to compose the “science” theme in a scientific, data-driven sort of way.  I composed a tone row, the basis of the “twelve-tone technique.”  Instead of arranging the tone row myself, I used an online randomizer (not AI!) to put the twelve tones available in Western music in a random sequence.  This, I thought, would be a neatly contemporary way to accomplish aleatoric music, which I thought would be appropriate in our stochastic age.  The science leitmotif appears in its basic form in chapter 6, “Science and the Fall”:

The synth sound here is the simplest wave form possible, a sine wave.  But the rhythm, borrowed from the driving rock of chapter 7, has a little swing to it.  I modified the tone row slightly to match the swing of chapter 10, Consciousness Extends.

Chapter 7 denounces the arrogance of the human species in imagining for itself dominion over the world and its inhabitants.  Chapter 10 similarly dismisses as “jejune narcissism” this habit of “arrogating consciousness to homo sapiens alone.”  The chapter sweepingly claims consciousness for all organisms and further notes the indistinct boundary between the living and the “seemingly inanimate.”  To make this case I catalog, and somewhat parody, that “great chain of being” essential to the Empiricist metaphysics of Pope’s Essay on Man, from humans “downward” through apes all the way to viruses, more like molecules than organisms.  And the sci in consciousness is the sci in science: to know.  Obviously, “a tree no doubt knows not as I know As I know not as tree.”  Nevertheless, “I should respect though I will never fully know The experience of tree”–a sentence that appears at least twice in Of Real Things.

I find it fascinating that we have little in the way of literal language to refer to mental processes.  The way of knowing that we designate science concerns itself with the objective, that is to say “the phenomenal part,” of the world.  There is, of course, a science of neurology, which can offer hints as to how the “matter” of the brain is related to the movements of the “mind.”  I put those words is scare quotes because they exemplify the sort of binary opposition that a realistic metaphysics explodes.  Weirdly, that a person should feel a certain way is an objective fact.  We are objectively likely to grieve, for example, when we lose a loved one.  But individual subjects enjoy privileged access to what we quite reasonably call subjective experience.  We cannot observe the thoughts and feelings of another person.  We know another’s experience only to the extent that that person expresses it, consciously or unconsciously.  Thus, we tend to refer to subjective experience in figurative language.  One of the most basic of these figures of speech is the metaphor of knowledge as light or seeing.  We say sometimes say “I see” when we mean “I know.”  I returned to the science tone row in chapter 21, “More Light”:

For the musical accompaniment of chapter 21 I nudged the swing of chapter 10, “Consciousness Extends,” toward the funk of “More Light.”  The children’s voices add, I hope, to the feeling of optimism I was trying to express.  I make the claim that scientific knowledge, scientific enlightenment, is beautiful, especially for its own sake.  Science applied to technology can also be perfectly unobjectionable, but only if it serves wellbeing.  When technology serves only economic interests, bad things happen, to people and to the planet.  And we must regard our scientific knowledge with humility.  First, because science can only treat “the phenomenal part of the world,” and not that part of the world occupied, for example, by mathematical facts, which are not bound by space and time, and by moral facts.  Secondly, “the phenomenal part of the world” is characterized by unmasterable flux.  There’s a leitmotif associated with the mixed and “fluxuous” character of this part of the world.