I am going to hold back on my follicular study of the whole of Western philosophy (Nietzsche’s will-to-power-eternal-recurrence mustache; the workers-of-the-world-unite Marxian beard), but I think it has to be said that a haircut can have significant philosophical consequences. Jean-Paul Sartre, the French existentialist thinker, had a particularly traumatic tonsorial experience when he was only seven. Up to that point he had had a glittering career as a crowd-pleaser. Everybody referred to young “Poulou” as “the angel.” His mother had carefully cultivated a luxuriant halo of golden locks. Then one fine day his grandfather takes it into his head that Poulou is starting to look like a girl, so he waits till his mother has gone out, then tells the boy they are going out for a special treat. Which turns out to be the barbershop. Poulou can hardly wait to show off his new look to his mother. But when she walks through the door, she takes one look at him before running up the stairs and flinging herself on the bed, sobbing hysterically. Her carefully constructed — one might say carefully combed — universe has just been torn down, like a Hollywood set being broken and reassembled for some quite different movie, rather harsher, darker, less romantic and devoid of semi-divine beings. For, as in an inverted fairy-tale, the young Sartre has morphed from an angel into a “toad”. It is now, for the first time, that Sartre realizes that he is — as his American lover, Sally Swing, will say of him — “ugly as sin.”
“The fact of my ugliness” becomes a barely suppressed leitmotif of his writing. He wears it like a badge of honor (Camus, watching Sartre in laborious seduction mode in a Paris bar: “Why are you going to so much trouble?” Sartre: “Have you had a proper look at this mug?”). The novelist Michel Houellebecq says somewhere that, when he met Sartre, he thought he was “practically disabled.” It is fair comment. He certainly has strabismus (with his distinctive lazy eye, so he appears to be looking in two directions at once), various parts of his body are dysfunctional and he considers his ugliness to count as a kind of disability. I can’t help wondering if ugliness is not indispensable to philosophy. Sartre seems to be suggesting that thinking — serious, sustained questioning — arises out of, or perhaps with, a consciousness of one’s own ugliness.
The Phenomenology of Ugliness
I let my nephew, 9, give me a buzz cut with the electric clippers last week. He had a look on his face like he was getting away with something he shouldn't. After trimming it up in a few places myself, I can't tell the diff between this and when I pay the barber to do it. It's been darned hot outside this summer.
So, Fidel, does that mean you're a philosopher now? Or maybe you were already a philosopher when still beautiful.
I just looked at some pictures, and big thinkers are not uglier than the average. Allowing for period fashions and hairstyles, they look like a random bunch of middle-aged and old white guys, like you might collect at the mall.
I suppose I like to think of it in the reverse, that my butterfly years as they say of young people were really coccoon years for me. I've met some very physically appealing smart people. But I imagine brilliance tends to be associated with the kind of people who haven't spent a lot of time socializing for whatever reasons and instead buried themselves in books and deep thought. It must take a certain kind of strength of mind to be able to isolate one's self from the pack for long periods in order to think great thoughts. I think there will come a time when human intellect will be enhanced by technology. Imagine that there are a few million Platos, Sartres, and Einsteins in the world. These might some day be considered the dark ages of philosophy and science and perhaps in as little as 30 or 40 years from now.
These are dark ages. But, as you say, great thinkers may be produced by technology. Maybe they'll look like 7of9.... after.
I look like this guy:
I still bring the crowds.
When I read this thread title, I had a [url=http://www.lust-for-life.org/Lust-For-Life/ThePhenomenologyOfFucking/The... flashback to my teens[/url], and an article someone lent me from [i]Telos[/i].
I should see someone about those flashbacks...
....I imagine brilliance tends to be associated with the kind of people who haven't spent a lot of time socializing for whatever reasons and instead buried themselves in books and deep thought...
I would agree with this. Buckminster Fuller had chronic health problems as a child, so he just sat and read and thought for a long time. I doubt that it is as simple as a straight causative relationship, but I think there is some relationship.
Yeah, i guess you can't do much deep thinking on the rugby field. But it's not necessary to be sickly or isolated: any kid with a decent brain will learn if s/he's given access to books and time to read them. Send a boy down mine at age ten, and he's not likely to become a great scientist. Marry a girl off at thirteen, make her cook, clean, wash clothes and drop babies until she's a knackered hag of thirty-five, and she's not likely to come up with a comprehensive theory of life, the universe and everything. Not saying there can't be exceptions (Kudos to Marie Curie and Johannes Kepler) but it's a whole lot easier to think deeply in a comfortable chair with as full stomach, few bedbug bites, and nobody to whup you if the firewood's not stacked.
I agree, the reason why the person has uninterrupted time to just sit and think is far less important than the fact that the person has the opportunity to do so.
Is that what you lot think philosophers do these days? Find a nice rock and sit and think? They at least have to read Hegel--as someone who's had to do that myself, I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy.
Sartre may have been ugly, but his Being and Nothingness is a spectacularly beautiful piece of thinking; someone compared it to a crystal palace, so intricate
Every so often I try googling for a certain quote by Hegel, in German, but until now have never found it. It sounds cool in German, but essentially means the State is God walking on Earth.
Bei der Freiheit muß man nicht von der Einzelheit, vom einzelnen Selbstbewußtsein ausgehen, sondern nur vom Wesen des Selbstbewußtseins, denn der Mensch mag es wissen oder nicht, dies Wesen realisiert sich als selbständige Gewalt, in der die einzelnen Individuen nur Momente sind: es ist der Gang Gottes in der Welt, daß der Staat ist, sein Grund ist die Gewalt der sich als Wille verwirklichenden Vernunft.
Now I need to find the source. Hegelians?
Through Googling I turned up Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820) and they translated it as "The state is the march of God through the world" and "The existence of the state is the presence of God upon the earth." Funny guy, that Hegel. Who said Germans don't have a sense of humour?
This idea was apparently crucial to the development of German nationalism in the early 19th century. It's been 20 years since I studied all this, so I don't remember all the connexions very well.
Hegel also supposedly fits into a trend that runs from Rousseau, through Kant to Marx, that suggests the state has the power to change human nature, which seems to have been a huge burden on leftists. Right-wingers don't try to make people any different, they just want to make money.
Wow... when I think I'm thinking for myself I'm not really because I am just a little piece of the Borg. What a charming thought.
Interesting quote actually. thanks.
Wow... when I think I'm thinking for myself I'm not really because I am just a little piece of the Borg. What a charming thought.
But you knew that already Winston. Now, when I hold up four fingers, how many do you see?
I think I prefer Hegel's version of things to that of elimination of God and common rights from protection of the law in enclosure era England. It paved the way for commodifying people and nature as labour and real estate. It's evident today that this narrow neo-classical accounting of things is unscientific and bound to turn out badly in the long run. Right-rightists believe that people are basically driven by the seven deadly sins. Socialists believe we are more than just one-dimensional prisoners of our own self-interest and greed. The more I discover about rightwing views the further to the political left I am driven.
@ Fidel
Yes, I know it can be read in a positive and a negative way. Even though there is truth in it it's a pretty harsh message for anyone who has a streak of individualism.
On the other hand, I'm not familiar with his work, so it might read a bit differently if I knew the context. Like I said, it's interesting.
Wow... when I think I'm thinking for myself I'm not really because I am just a little piece of the Borg. What a charming thought.
But you knew that already Winston. Now, when I hold up four fingers, how many do you see?
Funny, it made me think of that literary moment too - the bit about the party being immortal.
And Fidel, it also makes me wonder what he means by God, because one could read that passage as meaning that God is collective will of the people - or at least that our will is what brings god into the world.
But regarding your initial question, it's a good one and I have some thoughts about it. It's late though, and I have work to finish tonight.
Does Beauty Really Equal Truth?
What's the argument against beauty?
There are two separate political arguments. One is the claim that beautiful things distract us from injustice, and therefore sabotage our ability to dedicate our energies to increasing the overall well-being of the world. The other is that when we look at a beautiful object, whether a person or a flower, we actually damage the object by turning it into a mere object that we feel superior to.
Not only are both of these arguments wrong, but they even contradict one another. In the first one, we're assuming that human acts of looking are very good things, and therefore we want human attention to be directed to something such as an injustice so that an act of repair will come about. The second argument just assumes that we are incapable of generous and capacious acts of looking, and that we will actually damage anything that we're staring at.
Beauty prevents one from standing up for injustice?
Oh, sure. Lots of Marxists worry about this. [Bertolt] Brecht has a poem: "I will sing no more of rooftops by the seaside, of apples ripening in attics." I'm not quoting the poem exactly, but the point is, "I will no more be caught up by the beautiful surfaces of the world when there's pain and injury going on."
This is kind of sideways, but I just saw a great Takeshi Kitano gangster film called "Fireworks" where he plays the part of this jaded cop. Kitano can't really act, so he just has a perpetually stoic expression and wears these John Lennon sunglasses and becomes this beautiful, iconic face who just observes injustice: people getting shot, beaten up, double-crossed.
Your implicit question is, I take it, the problem that comes from the fact that we can imagine an act of looking that is amoral or even willfully immoral because it may be licensing the injuries coming about. And certainly there are instances where something beautiful gets enlisted into a cruel act.
I would say, by the way, as a kind of primary response, that I think that one of the reasons that violence has in our own era been so easily anesthetized is precisely because we've gotten unanchored from beauty. If we were more conversant with beauty, we would not so easily let something that involves an injury to someone ever get associated with the aesthetic. But just going on from that to the deeper question: What does it mean that something that is cruel can actually appear beautiful? What I would say to that is: All good things can be enlisted into acts of injury. That's really sad but it's true. For example, a cruel person could have somehow used some incredible act of higher mathematics in that act of cruelty, yet we would never get confused and think, "Gee, that must mean that higher mathematics is inherently suspect."
Bullfighting is apparently beautiful, while sometimes hockey teams are most successful when they rely on scoring ugly goals.
(There's possibly a point in there somewhere.)
I think some people can turn ugliness, or a physical or mental disability (not to equate these different things or imply that a disablility makes one ugly) to their advantage, and I see how it might lead them to see inward or be more aware of things that others are not. But it certainly depends on the person. I don't think everyone with fatal high blood pressure and hypochondria becomes Glenn Gould.
I have heard the opinion that someone who has a mild but chronic health condition is in some ways better off than a person who appears perfectly healthy, because that person will be conscious of the need to take care of his or herself, whereas many of us stumble through life thinking we are immortal until we hit age 40.
And I think any young person who has been in a life-threatening situation grows up very quick. On a news piece regarding that woman who faked cancer they interviewed a 9-year-old cancer survivor who was incredibly mature and articulate in her assessment.
On the other hand, I don't think it is always something that isolates a person. There are also enough stories of ugly or disfigured people who are highly social. Mirabeau and Talleyrand were two figures from the time of the French revolution who were the exception to that rule.
There was also a contemporary description of Jesus which came to light recently which (if it is to be believed, and if he existed) claimed he was strikingly ugly, bald, with a patchy beard and a hunched back.
Don't know if I have ever seen that other guy, but this description sounds like something I may have seen on my cheese toast one morning.