Man is nothing but a subject full of natural error that cannot be eradicated except through grace. Nothing shows him the truth, everything deceives him. The two principles of truth, reason and senses, are not only both not genuine, but are engaged in mutual deception. The senses deceive reason through false appearances, and, just as they trick the soul, they are tricked by [the soul] in their turn: it takes its revenge. The senses are disturbed by passions, which produce false impressions. They both compete in lies and deception.
Pascal, Pensées (1987:42)
Showing posts with label simulation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label simulation. Show all posts
24 January 2010
falsehood in silky garments
I am bored with gabbers and their gab; my soul abhors them.
  When I wake up in the morning to peruse the letters and magazines placed by my bedside, I find them full of gab; all I see is loose talk empty of meaning but stuffed with hypocrisy.
  When I sit by the window to lower the veil of slumber from my eyes and sip my Turkish coffee, Mister Gabber appears before me, hopping, crying, and grumbling. He condescends to sip my coffee and smoke my cigarettes.
  When I go to work Mister Gabber follows, whispering in my ears and tickling my sensitive brain. When I try to get rid of him he giggles and is soon midstream again, in his flood of meaningless talk.
  When I go to the market, Mister Gabber stands at the door of every shop passing judgment on people. I see him even upon the faces of the silent for he accompanies them too. Thy are unaware of his presence, yet he disturbs them.
  If I sit down with a friend Mister Gabber, uninvited, makes a third. If I elude him, he manages to remain so close that the echo of his voice irritates me and upsets my stomach like spoiled meat.
  When I visit the courts and the institutions of learning, I find him and his father and mother dressing Falsehood in silky garments and Hypocrisy in a magnificent cloak and a beautiful turban.
  When I call at factory offices, there too, to my surprise, I find Mister Gabber, in the midst of his mother, aunt, and grandfather chattering and flapping his thick lips. And his kinfolks applaud him and mock me.
  On my visit to the temples and other places of worship, there he is, seated on a throne, his head crowned and a gleaming sceptre in his hand.
  Returning home at eventide, I find him there, too. From the ceiling he hangs like a snake; or crawls like a boa in the four corners of my house.
  In short, Mister Gabber is found everywhere; within and beyond the skies, on land and underground, on the wings of the ether and upon the waves of the sea, in forests, caves, and on the mountaintops.
  Where can lover of silence and tranquility find rest from him? Will God ever have mercy on my soul and grant me the grace of dumbness so I may reside in the paradise of Silence?
  Is there in this universe a nook where I can go and live happily by myself?
  Is there any place where there is no traffic in empty talk?
  Is there on this earth one who does not worship himself talking?
  Is there any person among all persons whose mouth is not a hiding place for the knavish Mister Gabber?
Khalil Gibran, Mister Gabber (Thoughts and Meditations, 1969: 40-42)
  When I wake up in the morning to peruse the letters and magazines placed by my bedside, I find them full of gab; all I see is loose talk empty of meaning but stuffed with hypocrisy.
  When I sit by the window to lower the veil of slumber from my eyes and sip my Turkish coffee, Mister Gabber appears before me, hopping, crying, and grumbling. He condescends to sip my coffee and smoke my cigarettes.
  When I go to work Mister Gabber follows, whispering in my ears and tickling my sensitive brain. When I try to get rid of him he giggles and is soon midstream again, in his flood of meaningless talk.
  When I go to the market, Mister Gabber stands at the door of every shop passing judgment on people. I see him even upon the faces of the silent for he accompanies them too. Thy are unaware of his presence, yet he disturbs them.
  If I sit down with a friend Mister Gabber, uninvited, makes a third. If I elude him, he manages to remain so close that the echo of his voice irritates me and upsets my stomach like spoiled meat.
  When I visit the courts and the institutions of learning, I find him and his father and mother dressing Falsehood in silky garments and Hypocrisy in a magnificent cloak and a beautiful turban.
  When I call at factory offices, there too, to my surprise, I find Mister Gabber, in the midst of his mother, aunt, and grandfather chattering and flapping his thick lips. And his kinfolks applaud him and mock me.
  On my visit to the temples and other places of worship, there he is, seated on a throne, his head crowned and a gleaming sceptre in his hand.
  Returning home at eventide, I find him there, too. From the ceiling he hangs like a snake; or crawls like a boa in the four corners of my house.
  In short, Mister Gabber is found everywhere; within and beyond the skies, on land and underground, on the wings of the ether and upon the waves of the sea, in forests, caves, and on the mountaintops.
  Where can lover of silence and tranquility find rest from him? Will God ever have mercy on my soul and grant me the grace of dumbness so I may reside in the paradise of Silence?
  Is there in this universe a nook where I can go and live happily by myself?
  Is there any place where there is no traffic in empty talk?
  Is there on this earth one who does not worship himself talking?
  Is there any person among all persons whose mouth is not a hiding place for the knavish Mister Gabber?
Khalil Gibran, Mister Gabber (Thoughts and Meditations, 1969: 40-42)
15 January 2010
the silvery holes of her sieve
Sabina felt lost.
The wild compass whose fluctuations she had always obeyed, making for tumult and motion in place of direction, was suddenly fractured so that she no longer knew even the relief of ebbs and flows and dispersions.
She felt lost. The dispersion had become too vast, too extended. A shaft of pain cut through the nebulous pattern, Sabina had always moved so fast that all pain had passed swiftly as through a sieve leaving a sorrow like children's sorrows, soon forgotten, soon replaced by another interest. She had never known a pause.
Her cape which was more than a cape, which was a sail, which was the feelings she threw to the four winds to be swelled and swept by the wind in motion, lay becalmed.
Her dress was becalmed.
It was as if now she were nothing that the wind could catch, swell and propel.
For Sabina, to be becalmed meant to die.
Anxiety had entered her body and refused to run through it. The silvery holes of her sieve against sorrow granted her at birth, had clogged. Now the pain had lodged itself inside of her, inescapable.
She had lost herself somewhere along the frontier between her inventions, her stories, her fantasies and her true self. The boundaries had become effaced, the tracks lost; she had walked into pure chaos, and not a chaos which carried her like the galloping of romantic riders in operas and legends, but which suddenly revealed the stage props: A papier-mâché horse.
She had lost her sails, her cape, her horse, her seven-league boots, and all of them at once. She was stranded in the semi-darkness of a winter evening.
Then, as if all the energy and warmth had been drawn inward for the first time, killing the external body, blurring the eyes, dulling the ears, thickening the palate and tongue, slowing the movements of the body, she felt intensly cold and shivered with the same tremor as leaves, feeling for the first time some withered leaves of her being detaching themselves from her body.
... she now could see the very minute fragments of her acts which she had believed unimportant causing minute incisions, erosions of the personality. A small act, a kiss given at a party to a young man who benefitted from his resemblance to a lost John, a hand abandoned in a taxi to a man not desired but because the other woman's hand had been claimed and Sabina could not bear to have her hand lie unclaimed on her lap: it seemed an affront to her powers of seduction. A word of praise about a painting she had not liked but uttered out of fear that the painter would say: "Oh, Sabina . . . Sabina doesn't understand painting."
All the small insincerities had seeped like invisible rivulets of acid and caused profound damages, the erosions had sent each fragment of Sabina rotating like separate pieces of colliding planets, into other spheres, yet not powerful enough to fly into space like a bird, not organic enough to become another life, to rotate on its own core.
... And all her seeking of fire to weld these fragments together, seeking in the furnace of delight a welding of fragments, into one total love, one total woman, had failed!
Anaïs Nin, A Spy in the House of Love (1982: 92-3)
The wild compass whose fluctuations she had always obeyed, making for tumult and motion in place of direction, was suddenly fractured so that she no longer knew even the relief of ebbs and flows and dispersions.
She felt lost. The dispersion had become too vast, too extended. A shaft of pain cut through the nebulous pattern, Sabina had always moved so fast that all pain had passed swiftly as through a sieve leaving a sorrow like children's sorrows, soon forgotten, soon replaced by another interest. She had never known a pause.
Her cape which was more than a cape, which was a sail, which was the feelings she threw to the four winds to be swelled and swept by the wind in motion, lay becalmed.
Her dress was becalmed.
It was as if now she were nothing that the wind could catch, swell and propel.
For Sabina, to be becalmed meant to die.
Anxiety had entered her body and refused to run through it. The silvery holes of her sieve against sorrow granted her at birth, had clogged. Now the pain had lodged itself inside of her, inescapable.
She had lost herself somewhere along the frontier between her inventions, her stories, her fantasies and her true self. The boundaries had become effaced, the tracks lost; she had walked into pure chaos, and not a chaos which carried her like the galloping of romantic riders in operas and legends, but which suddenly revealed the stage props: A papier-mâché horse.
She had lost her sails, her cape, her horse, her seven-league boots, and all of them at once. She was stranded in the semi-darkness of a winter evening.
Then, as if all the energy and warmth had been drawn inward for the first time, killing the external body, blurring the eyes, dulling the ears, thickening the palate and tongue, slowing the movements of the body, she felt intensly cold and shivered with the same tremor as leaves, feeling for the first time some withered leaves of her being detaching themselves from her body.
... she now could see the very minute fragments of her acts which she had believed unimportant causing minute incisions, erosions of the personality. A small act, a kiss given at a party to a young man who benefitted from his resemblance to a lost John, a hand abandoned in a taxi to a man not desired but because the other woman's hand had been claimed and Sabina could not bear to have her hand lie unclaimed on her lap: it seemed an affront to her powers of seduction. A word of praise about a painting she had not liked but uttered out of fear that the painter would say: "Oh, Sabina . . . Sabina doesn't understand painting."
All the small insincerities had seeped like invisible rivulets of acid and caused profound damages, the erosions had sent each fragment of Sabina rotating like separate pieces of colliding planets, into other spheres, yet not powerful enough to fly into space like a bird, not organic enough to become another life, to rotate on its own core.
... And all her seeking of fire to weld these fragments together, seeking in the furnace of delight a welding of fragments, into one total love, one total woman, had failed!
Anaïs Nin, A Spy in the House of Love (1982: 92-3)
13 January 2010
you sometimes pretend
... "by the way, you heard about the shoulder from me, which means that at this moment you are making wicked use of my own simple-heartedness and trustfulness; but you must agree that that shoulder really wasn't as bad as it seems at first sight, especially for that time; we were only beginning then. I was faking, of course, but I didn't know I was faking. Don't you ever fake, for instance, in practical cases?"
"Just now, downstairs, I waxed a little sentimental, and felt very ashamed, as I was coming up here, at the thought that you might think I was faking. It's true that on some occasions, though your feelings are sincere, you sometimes pretend; but downstairs just now it was all natural."
"That's precisely it; you've defined it very happily in a single phrase: 'though your feelings are sincere, all the same you pretend.' Well, that's exactly how it was with me: though I was pretending, I wept quite sincerely. I won't dispute that Makar Ivanovich might have taken that shoulder as an added mockery, if he had been more clever; but his honesty then stood in the way of his perspicacity. Only I don't know whether he pitied me then or not; I remember I very much wanted that."
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Adolescent (2003: 126)
"Just now, downstairs, I waxed a little sentimental, and felt very ashamed, as I was coming up here, at the thought that you might think I was faking. It's true that on some occasions, though your feelings are sincere, you sometimes pretend; but downstairs just now it was all natural."
"That's precisely it; you've defined it very happily in a single phrase: 'though your feelings are sincere, all the same you pretend.' Well, that's exactly how it was with me: though I was pretending, I wept quite sincerely. I won't dispute that Makar Ivanovich might have taken that shoulder as an added mockery, if he had been more clever; but his honesty then stood in the way of his perspicacity. Only I don't know whether he pitied me then or not; I remember I very much wanted that."
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Adolescent (2003: 126)
25 July 2009
Cui bono?
People often assert that they are ill or that another person is sick. It is an error to believe that people say these things only because they have a disease or only because the person they call sick has a disease. People are often sick but do not say so or say so only to a few confidants, and they often assert, for a variety of reasons, that others—about whom they know next to nothing—are sick: thus, people simulate illness or malinger (to avoid military service), simulate health or deny illness (to avoid medical attention), and claim that others are sick by diagnosing them (to justify treating them as patients). These elementary truths have not been lost on artists, who provide us with perceptive accounts of the often complex and devious motives of patients and doctors.
Having a demonstrable disease is not enough to explain why the subject asserts that he is ill (assumes the sick role) or why others assert that he is ill (place him in the sick role). To understand the myriad nonmedical meanings and consequences of illness—that is, the tactical rather than descriptive uses of terms such as "ill" and "patient"—we must, at least temporarily, ignore the pathological dimensions of the concept and instead focus on the classic problem, Cui bono? Cicero explained the importance of posing this question, primarily to oneself, as follows: "When trying a case L. Cassius never failed to inquire, 'Who gained by it?' Man's character is such that no man undertakes crimes without hope of gain."
No man asserts that he or someone else has an illness without hope of gain. The potential gains, for oneself or others, from asserting such a claim—for example, securing medical help, monetary compensation, excusing crime, and so forth—are virtually endless. They depend on the claimant's character and motives, the social context in which the claim is advanced, and the ever-changing legal and social milieu in which medicine is practiced.
Thomas Szasz, Pharmacracy: Medicine and Politics in America (2001:6-7)
Having a demonstrable disease is not enough to explain why the subject asserts that he is ill (assumes the sick role) or why others assert that he is ill (place him in the sick role). To understand the myriad nonmedical meanings and consequences of illness—that is, the tactical rather than descriptive uses of terms such as "ill" and "patient"—we must, at least temporarily, ignore the pathological dimensions of the concept and instead focus on the classic problem, Cui bono? Cicero explained the importance of posing this question, primarily to oneself, as follows: "When trying a case L. Cassius never failed to inquire, 'Who gained by it?' Man's character is such that no man undertakes crimes without hope of gain."
No man asserts that he or someone else has an illness without hope of gain. The potential gains, for oneself or others, from asserting such a claim—for example, securing medical help, monetary compensation, excusing crime, and so forth—are virtually endless. They depend on the claimant's character and motives, the social context in which the claim is advanced, and the ever-changing legal and social milieu in which medicine is practiced.
Thomas Szasz, Pharmacracy: Medicine and Politics in America (2001:6-7)
23 July 2009
to suit his purpose
Lying and bluffing are both modes of misrepresentation or deception. Now the concept most central to the distinctive nature of a lie is that of falsity: the liar is essentially someone who deliberately promulgates a falsehood. Bluffing, too, is typically devoted to something false. Unlike plain lying, however, it is more especially a matter not of falsity but of fakery. This is what accounts for its nearness to bullshit. For the essence of bullshit is not that it is false but that it is phony. In order to appreciate this distinction, one must recognize that a fake or a phony need not be in any respect (apart from authenticity itself) inferior to the real thing. What is not genuine need not also be defective in some other way. It may be, after all, an exact copy. What is wrong with counterfeit is not what it is like, but how it was made. This points to a similar and fundamental aspect of the essential nature of bullshit: although it is produced without concern with the truth, it need not be false. The bullshitter is faking things. But this does not mean that he necessarily gets them wrong.
... Telling a lie is an act with a sharp focus. It is designed to insert a particular falsehood at a specific point in a set or system of beliefs, in order to avoid the consequences of having that point occupied by the truth. This requires a degree of craftsmanship, in which the teller of the lie submits to objective constraints imposed by what he takes to be the truth. The liar is inescapably concerned with truth-values. In order to invent a lie at all, he must think he knows what is true. And in order to invent an effective lie, he must design his falsehood under the guidance of that truth.
On the other hand, a person who undertakes to bullshit his way through has much more freedom. His focus is panoramic rather than particular. He does not limit himself to inserting a certain falsehood at a specific point, and thus he is not constrained by the truths surrounding that point or intersecting it. He is prepared, so far as required, to fake the context as well. This freedom from the constraints to which the liar must submit does not necessarily mean, of course, that his task is easier than the task of the liar. But the mode of creativity upon which it relies is less analytical and less deliberative than that which is mobilized in lying. It is more expansive and independent, with more spacious opportunities for improvisation, color, and imaginative play. This is less a matter of craft than of art. Hence the familiar notion of the "bullshit artist." ...
What bullshit essentially misrepresents is neither the state of affairs to which it refers nor the beliefs of the speaker concerning that state of affairs. Those are what lies misrepresent, by virtue of being false. Since bullshit need not be false, it differs from lies in its misrepresentational intent. The bullshitter may not deceive us, or even intend to do so, either about the facts or about what he takes the facts to be. What he does necessarily attempt to deceive us about is his enterprise. His only indispensably distinctive characteristic is that in a certain way he misrepresents what he is up to.
This is the crux of the distinction between him and the liar. Both he and the liar represent themselves falsely as endeavoring to communicate the truth. The success of each depends upon deceiving us about that. But the fact about himself that the liar hides is that he is attempting to lead us away from a correct apprehension of reality; we are not to know that he wants us to believe something he supposes to be false. The fact about himself that the bullshitter hides, on the other hand, is that the truth-values of his statement are of no central interest to him; what we are not to understand is that his intention is neither to report the truth nor to conceal it. This does not mean that his speech is anarchically impulsive, but that the motive guiding and controlling it is unconcerned with how the things about which he speaks truly are.
It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the thing he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.
Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit (2005: 51-56)
... Telling a lie is an act with a sharp focus. It is designed to insert a particular falsehood at a specific point in a set or system of beliefs, in order to avoid the consequences of having that point occupied by the truth. This requires a degree of craftsmanship, in which the teller of the lie submits to objective constraints imposed by what he takes to be the truth. The liar is inescapably concerned with truth-values. In order to invent a lie at all, he must think he knows what is true. And in order to invent an effective lie, he must design his falsehood under the guidance of that truth.
On the other hand, a person who undertakes to bullshit his way through has much more freedom. His focus is panoramic rather than particular. He does not limit himself to inserting a certain falsehood at a specific point, and thus he is not constrained by the truths surrounding that point or intersecting it. He is prepared, so far as required, to fake the context as well. This freedom from the constraints to which the liar must submit does not necessarily mean, of course, that his task is easier than the task of the liar. But the mode of creativity upon which it relies is less analytical and less deliberative than that which is mobilized in lying. It is more expansive and independent, with more spacious opportunities for improvisation, color, and imaginative play. This is less a matter of craft than of art. Hence the familiar notion of the "bullshit artist." ...
What bullshit essentially misrepresents is neither the state of affairs to which it refers nor the beliefs of the speaker concerning that state of affairs. Those are what lies misrepresent, by virtue of being false. Since bullshit need not be false, it differs from lies in its misrepresentational intent. The bullshitter may not deceive us, or even intend to do so, either about the facts or about what he takes the facts to be. What he does necessarily attempt to deceive us about is his enterprise. His only indispensably distinctive characteristic is that in a certain way he misrepresents what he is up to.
This is the crux of the distinction between him and the liar. Both he and the liar represent themselves falsely as endeavoring to communicate the truth. The success of each depends upon deceiving us about that. But the fact about himself that the liar hides is that he is attempting to lead us away from a correct apprehension of reality; we are not to know that he wants us to believe something he supposes to be false. The fact about himself that the bullshitter hides, on the other hand, is that the truth-values of his statement are of no central interest to him; what we are not to understand is that his intention is neither to report the truth nor to conceal it. This does not mean that his speech is anarchically impulsive, but that the motive guiding and controlling it is unconcerned with how the things about which he speaks truly are.
It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the thing he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.
Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit (2005: 51-56)
27 June 2009
in the land of consideration
He recognized Osmond, as I say; he recognized him at every turn. He saw how he kept all things within limits; how he adjusted, regulated, animated their manner of life. Osmond was in his element; at last he had material to work with. He always had an eye to effect, and his effects were deeply calculated. They were produced by no vulgar means, but the motive was as vulgar as the art was great. To surround his interior with a sort of invidious sanctity, to tantalize society with a sense of exclusion, to make people believe his house was different from every other, to impart to the face that he presented to the world a cold originality—this was the ingenious effort of the personage to whom Isabel had attributed a superior morality. "He works with superior material," Ralph said to himself; "it's rich abundance compared with his former resources." Ralph was a clever man; but Ralph had never—to his own senses—been so clever as when he observed, in petto, that under the guise of caring only for intrinsic values Osmond lived exclusively for the world. Far from being its master as he pretended to be, he was its very humble servant, and the degree of its attention was his only measure of success. He lived with his eye on it from morning till night, and the world was so stupid it never suspected the trick. Everything he did was pose—pose so subtly considered that if one were not on the lookout one mistook it for impulse. Ralph had never met a man who lived so much in the land of consideration. His tastes, his studies, his accomplishments, his collections, were all for a purpose. His life on his hill-top at Florence had been the conscious attitude of years. His solitude, his ennui, his love for his daughter, his good manners, his bad manners, were so many features of a mental image constantly present to him as a model of impertinence and mystification. His ambition was not to please the world, but to please himself by exciting the world's curiosity and then declining to satisfy it. It had made him feel great, ever, to play the world a trick. The thing he had done in his life most directly to please himself was his marrying Miss Archer; though in this case indeed the gullible world was in a manner embodied in poor Isabel, who had been mystified to the top of her bent. Ralph of course found a fitness in being consistent; he had embraced a creed, and as he had suffered for it he could not in honour forsake it.
Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (1976:393-94)
Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (1976:393-94)
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