Fighting Incompleteness
Mann was profoundly influenced by two philosophers, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, who returned to the most ancient of all philosophical questions — “How to live?” — and whose writings offered novel perspectives for considering that question (much more perspective-offering than rigorous argument!) In working towards ways of reading Mann, so that his own advances in suggesting new perspectives will become more vivid, I do some fairly standard philosophical analysis of ideas in Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. In elaborating how “philosophy by showing” works, and in defending the idea that literature and music can contribute to philosophical “showing”, I am also doing something more standardly philosophical. But I view most of the book as an interweaving of philosophy and literary criticism. If that entails a broadening of a standard idea of philosophy, it’s a broadening I’d like to see happen.
Philip Kitcher interviewed by David Auerbach.
metaphors and minds
Once when Bjork was speaking to a chorus, she said “Make it dolcissimo, like marzipan.” I think she was driven to metaphor here because there was a very specific property she wanted their voices to have — a particular combination of richness, sweetness, and bitterness — that we don’t have a word for in our language (English or Icelandic). She couldn’t demonstrate the sound directly herself, because she’s not a whole chorus. But once they hit on the sound she wanted, she could say “Yes, like that. Let’s call that the marzipan tone.” And from then on, ‘the marzipan tone’ would literally refer, by stipulation, to the sound she could only metaphorically gesture at before.
Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Elisabeth Camp.