Class 11: Critiques of Practical Reason and Innocence

“Without names, our knowledge of things would perish,” according to Linnaeus. Linnaeus, an Enlightenment-era scientist, took this idea to heart and invented the modern taxonomic system (the system of giving names to each species on the basis of its genus and specific difference). This system rendered the order of the animate world more visible, and it enabled and drew forth new levels of detail and differentiation in our understanding of that world. The relevance of Linnaeus’s claim about names and the preservation of knowledge to The Lady Eve is made clear in the opening scene, in which we find a scientist, called simply “Professor,” giving Hopsy a snake and a taxonomic name: the snake is newly discovered, and the Professor has given it its name, and name that places this snake within the ordered system of living creatures and that also honors someone who is presumably a friend or esteemed colleague (a Dr. Marzditzia). Hopsy promises to take care of the snake and then adds – and it seems important to him to express this – “I want to tell you how much I’ve enjoyed being on this expedition with you. If I had my way, this is the way I’d like to spend all my time: in the company of men like yourselves in the pursuit of knowledge.” The tone and pitch of this declaration is interesting: it seems very staged, rehearsed, theatrical, and we must wonder, For whom is the declaration important and why? Why did it need to be rehearsed? (This last question assumes that one agrees that it sounds rehearsed; if one disagrees, then I would point to the fact that we are rather explicitly pointed toward Hopsy’s tendency to rehearse and then reuse in his use of the phrase “up the Amazon,” which is used five times (three by him and twice by Jean, who seems to intentionally echo him, likely as part of her seduction), and in his “way back” speech (which Jean, as Eve, listens to as if hearing it for the first time, although she’s already heard it as Jean; whether one believes that Hopsy is authentic or inauthentic here depends on whether one believes that he knows (either consciously or subconsciously) that this is in fact Jean again).)

Right away, then, we are pointed toward taxonomy and to an ordered life lived among a community of men (not women) who, free to pursue whatever they want, pursue knowledge of a certain kind (a taxonomic kind: they wish to discover things and given them a proper name). Hopsy would like to do this too – if he had his way. We are thus forced to yet another question: Why cannot he have his way? Why is he being forced out of the Eden, which Man gives Creatures their Name? The film suggests an answer with the next line of dialogue: “So long, Lulu. I’ll send you a postcard.” The Professor then wishes Hopsy well and is sure to let him know that “[i]f you get a chance to come back, this is where we’ll be.” The suggestion is that the possibility of this supposed Eden always awaits – it is simply, for Hopsy, who seems not to be in a state of full liberty, a matter of chance (not choice).

This theme of naming and knowledge is immediately picked up and complicated when the camera turns to passengers on the bridge of the S.S. Southern Queen. It scans along them and as it does we pick up a string of conversation that seems to run like a single confused train-of-thought among the passengers. The first bit of dialogue is, “There he is!” This seems, both epistemologically and ontologically, like the most basic and obvious of statements. It is, of course, immediately complicated – and implicitly critiqued – by the Babel of dialogue that follows. “You’d think he’d have a bigger yacht than that if he’s so rich,” say the next passenger. This shows that she does not know Hopsy: she has an image – a thought – of him that does fit what he appears to be, as if either the appearance is deceiving (such that he is not really there, in some sense, or at least not what he seems (and what does he seem like to us, the audience?) or her image of him is wrong from the start. We then turn to the name of things. “That isn’t a yacht; that’s a tender,” says the next passenger, correcting the woman who thought that one would think that he’d have a bigger yacht (correcting not her impression of what one would think he’d have but her misnomer). “What’s a tender?” is the reply. Here we witness the basic ignorance of what words mean, which in turn leads to an inability to call things what they are, which then in turn bespeaks an ignorance of what things are.

We then go deeper, as a passenger confuses Pabst with Pike and then another confuses Puke with Pike. And then, again as if this is not a crowd of distinct individuals but a single entity (society itself?), we are carried alliteratively from Pabst and Puke and Pike to “peekaboo”: “Go put on your peekaboo.” We’ve moved from the proper names of people and things to a slang term that arose in the early 1900s: a “peekaboo” is “an item of clothing decorated with a pattern of holes so as to allow glimpses of the wearer’s body; a partially transparent garment” (OED). It is, then, an article of clothing designed to seduce. And so, with the maxim “Go put on your peekaboo,” we have, as it were, followed out the consequences of not knowing what things are. We get just a partial glimpse of things, and we are seduced by the glimpse into thinking that we know what is before us (when in fact we do not), and this partiality is what can lead us astray – out of an innocent relation with things as they are into one that is false. The peekaboo, then, can be seen as a symbol for the sense of the real that dominates in the Cave.

At the same time, however, this peekaboo reflects a deeper truth of both perfectionism and the philosophy of Kant: there is, it seems, no escaping this partial, limited view. For Kant in particular, there is a conceptual schema (“a pattern of holes”) that gives us, if not glimpses of the noumenal, a.k.a the thing-in-itself (the “wearer’s body”), then something similar (the appearance of it as phenomena, which is the only (indirect) glimpse of it that we can get). From a perfectionist standpoint, one wonders if the peekaboo does not describe the future self – and/or our first encounter with another or indeed any encounter with our own self. We adopt forms of life that allow only a glimpse of who we are. This sense of a surface hiding-while-revealing something underneath it connects with the original meaning of peekaboo as “a game played with a young child which involves hiding onself, or one’s fact, and suddenly reappearing, saying ‘peekaboo’” (OED). And this in turn seems to connect with the game that Jean will play with the child-like Hopsy. She appears and disappears and reappears again – and if Hopsy is to be believed, that first appearance was itself a reappearance, as he claims that his knowledge of her goes “way back.” Indeed, after hearing the injunction “Go put on your peekaboo,” the camera scans up a deck, where we meet Jean, who, after an exchange with her father that reveals them as scam artists (in spite of the fact that she will turn out to be good, such that her first appearance to us is itself a kind of peekaboo), she introduces herself by dropping an apple on head of Hopsy, whom we’ll next see reading a book entitled, “Are Snakes Necessary?”

Class 10: Kant's Metaphysical System

Class 9: Hildy's Return to a Cave without Ends

We began class by tinkering with our schedule a bit: our next reading is Kant. In particular, I had intended to have you read an excerpt from his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), and while I do indeed have a brief excerpt available, I asked if you wouldn’t like to read the whole thing. The entire work is relatively short (sixty-six pages in the Cambridge edition), and this is one of the most important (if not the most important) works in the history of moral philosophy. In previous iterations of this course, reading the whole work was not appropriate (in one case, because it was a seminar for students of all majors and not an actual philosophy course, and in the other case, because it was an introduction course and the Groundwork is too much for an introductory course in philosophy). However, given that this is an upper-level course cross-listed as philosophy, and given that many of you are philosophy minors, and given that most of you have not encountered this text, the most reasonable conclusion is that we must read the whole thing. Otherwise, I leave you chained by your errors.

The text is available as an ebook through Reese Library. It can also be purchased on Amazon.

As a brief aside, here are some dates and periodizations for you with respect to the philosophers we have so far encountered:

· Plato’s Politeia (ca. 370s bce)

o Classical Greece (a period running from 510 (the fall of the last Athenian tyrant and the institution of democracy in Athens) to 323 bce (the death of Alexander the Great))

· Locke’s The Second Treatise of Civil Government (1690)

o Neoclassicism (Enlightenment) (a period running from about 1687 to either 1789 or 1804)

· Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785)

o Neoclassicism (Enlightenment) (although there are clear Romantic characteristics in Kant’s work)

· Mill’s On Liberty (1859)

o Romanticism (this period has its origins in the 1780s, and it starts to give way to modernity by the end of the 1850s)

As for the films, they all take place between 1934 and 1949 during a period called “the Golden Age of Hollywood” (which runs from the late 1920s (the end of the Silent Era) to the late 1950s):

· It Happened One Night Frank Capra 1934 Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert

· Mr. Deeds Goes to Town Frank Capra 1936 Gary Cooper, Jean Arhtur

· The Awful Truth Leo McCarey 1937 Cary Grant, Irene Dunne

· His Girl Friday Howard Hawks 1940 Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell

· The Philadelphia Story George Cukor 1940 Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn

· The Lady Eve Preston Sturges 1941 Barbara Stanwyck, Henry Fonda

· Woman of the Year George Stevens 1942 Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy

· Gaslight George Cukor 1944 Ingrid Bergman

· Adam’s Rib George Cukor 1949 Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy

We spent the majority of class investigating His Girl Friday. We ended with a brief and rough introduction to Kant’s moral philosophy, with an emphasis on some points that connect with HGF, although we didn’t have a chance to spell out those connections.

I began by reminding us of the distinction Cavell makes between ‘genre-as-medium’ and ‘genre-as-cycle.’ The idea of a genre as a medium applies to those genres in which the genre is not the point of the film but rather the medium in which the ‘film’ thinks and/or expresses its thought. (I put ‘film’ in quotations because it is, of course, odd to think of the film as the thing that thinks; rather, people think. However, the film is rarely the expression of a single person in the way a text of philosophy or literature is. It just now occurs to me that, in this respect, film is more like a society than either philosophy or literature.) Furthermore, the instances within a genre-as-medium resist conformity to the medium (whereas such conformity defines instances of a genre-as-cycle), and this is shown by violations of the list of generic features that constitute the genre. (This raises the interesting question of how one comes up with a list of features for a group constituted by members that all contain violations of that supposed list. For Wittgenstein students, the answer should be clear: you need a ‘family resemblance’ view of concepts (and not an essentialist/representationalist view).) Cavell claims that the Hollywood remarriage comedy is a ‘genre-as-medium.’

In order to understand the violations, we will need a list, and we will induce a list as we go. I don’t have one at present – or at least I didn’t until I wrote this blog post; you will find the initial list down below; most of it comes from Cavell. Cavell introduces the genre of the remarriage comedy by way of contrast with classic romantic comedies in which “the problem of the drama is to get a young pair past the obstacle of an older figure, usually a father, and see them married”; in the remarriage comedies, the focus is on “getting a somewhat older pair who are already together past some inner obstacle between them and hence together again, back together” (Cities of Words 10). He then lists the following features, which he claims are generated out of the essential difference with classic romantic comedies (without ever explaining or justifying this claim):

1. The woman of the principal pair is never a mother.

2. The woman is never shown to have a mother. (one exception)

3. The father of the woman is always on the side of her desire, not the law.

4. The narrative opens in the city and ends in the country (the “green world”). (This seems to me to not be a true generic feature.)

5. The principal pair seems to speak – even invent – their own language.

6. The principal pair is a mystery to the world around them.

7. Some element of melodrama appears – but does not shatter the com(ed)ic universe. (10)

8. The news plays a role. (This is a point that he makes later in the book.)

9. We begin either in media res or with an explicit exposition. (This point is also made elsewhere; I believe it’s at the start of the chapter on IHON.)

10. There is some element of manipulation or duplicity – something that goes beyond self-deceit. (This is my addition to the list.)

Cavell claims that each film must ‘make up’ for its violation by contributing something new to the genre. I would go further and say that the violation is the key to unlocking the rebellious, perfectionist thought of the film.

We spent a bit of time talking about the potential violation(s) of HGF (and I wonder if (a) there must be one and (b) if there may be more than one). We looked at Cavell’s own claim: the violation is that the film takes place entirely in the “black world,” which he equates with the Cave, and never moves to the “green world,” which is a utopian place in which the ideal is realized (at least temporarily). HGF even seems to make a point of this violation, as it makes clear that the couple is headed to Albany, where they will cover a strike as part of their honeymoon. We raised two other possible violations, which were perhaps a matter of degree rather than the absence or presence of something: the amount of action (including the rapidity of the speech) and the outright-ness of the manipulation.

As I write, a fourth possibility occurs to me: the newspaper is here not intrusive (as such) but is in fact integral to the authenticity of the perfectionist pair and the expression of consent. And it further strikes me that this bears on the general theme of the private/public that runs throughout these films. The theme has some irony: there is a problem of making things explicit (expressed), and this is what the press tries to do; however, this causes problems of some kind for the perfectionist couples (even Walter and Hildy). Yet the problem is not that the couple resists making things explicit; rather, there is a problem with how the press goes about doing it. Tied to this is a point that Cavell makes about the absolute, which I think will become relevant as we look at Kant: the demand for an absolute (in any field of thought, be it political, religious, philosophical, or so on) leads to privacy – to what, in Platonic terms, we might think of as the ineffable communion with the intelligible (with the Good understoodd as something that we can see but ultimately not say). Thus, the demand for the absolute leads to privacy, to silence, to a distance between people. The alternative to this demand is the “the acceptance of finitude,” i.e., of human limits beyond which I cannot go. One might note that, paradoxically, the demand for the absolute is an attempt to transcend human limits that in fact draws those limits too narrowly. It often reinforces this by demanding conformity to that absolute. And this is the connection with the press: the demand is for the absolute truth about a person, but this is cast in terms of isolated factual (often prurient) details, and these end up falling for short of the person. Tracy realized this. Peter eventually realized this. And Hildy realizes it. Yet Hildy differs insofar as she sees the better possible ‘self’ of the press. (Note that, like Peter, she can actually write – and Walter implies that she is the only one on his staff who can actually write; the men in the press room seem to second this, reinforcing the idea that she is the only one among them who can write – that she alone can bring some truth to the Cave.)

Class 8: Millian Social Force and Nora's Non-miraculous Transformation

Class 7: Millian Genius, Eccentricity, and the Tarantella

Class 6: Millian "Peculiarity of Taste" and Macaroons

Class 5: Locke, It Happened One Night, and Expressing the Tacit