Fwd: Philosophical Rap Contest: Misc. background to MoP

[Mark Kohut]

To: All

As some misc. background re Coetze, since Richard Ryan has sent stuff around, here is something I have. If uninterested, delete. 

For awhile I had a stringer journalism gig covering book, cultural, whatever, events in the tri-state NY area. It was fun.

I had never read Coetze before I had a chance to cover two world-famous philosophers discussing a paper from another (unpresent) philosopher about
a separately-published chapter from Coetze's "Elizabeth Costello". Got that?  The chapter was an argument/dialogue about vegetarianism. Ms. Costello was one. 

This--my piece--is overwritten, I know. Full of mixed metaphors, at least.
It was written 'off the top' as they say, for deadline. However, I still like the way of it. 

If it isn't clear through my loose prose, one philosopher took Ms. Costello at her argumentative word. The other felt she was ..not reliable. 

What was most 'touching' to me that evening was the way McDowell wanted to
'comfort' or soften his 'victory' in the exchange of papers. Cavell has the legendary reputation.

I now know, from other of Coetze's works, that the nature of his narrators'
consciousness is a major part of many of them, including "Master of Petersburg", I foreshadow. 

Mark


--- On Sun, 9/14/08, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
> Subject: Fwd: Philosophical Rap Contest
> To: "Mark Kohut" <markekohut at yahoo.com>
> Date: Sunday, September 14, 2008, 4:04 PM
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
> Date: Mon, Mar 27, 2006 at 11:37 PM
> Subject: Philosophical Rap Contest
> To: Gary Shapiro <gshapiro at nysun.com>
> 
> 
> When are two philosophers' papers like a rap contest?
> When their mutual face-off ends like Eminem's 8
> Mile---one of them unable to
> respond.
> 
> It was an amazing evening of thinking aloud. Two
> internationally
> famous philosophers, the legend emeritus, Stanley Cavell,
> philosopher
> of movies and art and Thoreau and Emerson and life in each
> and all,
> man thinking in Emerson 's phrase, in the So-American
> grain and John
> McDowell, keeping the University of Pittsburgh in the top
> of
> Departments, lured from England for his stature and growing
> achievement.
> 
> Last Thursday, they came together--standing and sitting
> room only at
> the Faculty House near Columbia's Heyman
> Auditorium---to read papers
> on a paper of Cora Diamond, third leading philosopher only
> present in
> her words on Elizabeth Costello, the latest novel by Nobel
> Prize-winning J. M. Coetze. (Yea, sounds more precious than
> watching
> Plato's famous shadows in a rear-view distorting
> mirror,
> but.......trust me, it wasn't. To be grounded in a
> superlative, subtle
> novel featuring a writer and intelligent thoughts on things
> that
> matter, mattered. When philosophers have all of
> 'reality' at their
> disposal is when we can feel in a funhouse.)
> 
> Cavell led with a typical Emersonian-Cavellian essay,
> centering on the
> theme of the evening: why, should we, eat any animals and
> under what
> conditions and for what reasons?-- taking off from a
> section in
> Elizabeth Costello, a section separately published by
> Coetze called
> The Lives of Animals. Cavell's piece was rich,
> associative, folding in
> Thoreau, squirrels as company, slavery, Schweitzer leaving
> sugar out
> for ants, loss and prophecy, Nietzsche
> screaming--"that gentlest of
> men"--- the social contract and private language and
> Wittgenstein, of
> course. Cavell''s paper centered on a key deep
> theme: "the
> mechanization of agriculture" from a famous passage in
> Heidegger..and
> in Cora Diamond's explication linked to
> "mechanized corpses [in the
> 20th Century]"...."like blockades leading to
> famine"....."like the
> effects of atom bombs'.... Mechanization everywhere,
> how do we live?
> 
> Cavell ended with riffs on Ms. Costello's
> "wounds' as Coetze writes of
> them, arguing that in the book, "a possessor of a
> [human] body has a
> stigma", that Elizabeth seemed to "welcome the
> effect she caused" and,
> if I got it right, that it is part of the human condition,
> which we
> must feel deeply, to eat animals, that Coetze wants to
> argue that to
> not feel our wounds, to embrace vegetarianism is to so
> distance
> ourselves--we are also animals--- from the human condition
> as
> to be ultimately an immoral act.
> 
> The Knickerbocker went to the circus later that night but
> Cavell's
> piece was the best juggling act of the evening. A pro in
> his elements.
> Then it was Prof McDowell's turn.
> 
> His rap began by quoting Cavell, " no one knows
> anything everyone else
> can't know", that old private language
> impossibility rephrased and
> then surprised with this: Cora Diamond is using
> Cavell's themes, he
> argued. Nice homage.  He proceeded to explore some of these
> themes
> within other parts of Ms. Diamond's paper, alluding to
> cannibalism in
> Soylent Green and most particularly to this question:
> Elizabeth
> Costello's "reality", picking up on
> Diamond's Ted Hughes poem quoted,
> being 'shouldered out" of our reality, on
> Elizabeth's "unhinging
> perceptions", on whether we can get our minds around
> reality, her
> reality. He threw a change-up curveball, a 'hidden
> football" reverse
> play and Costello's supposed perceptions became perhaps
> her "fugitive
> perceptions" and a shell game trick: Argument over
> here now:
> Costello's words show us a dislodged woman, from which
> no arguments
> reasonably follow. Cavell's themes applied to a woman
> whose reality
> was "dislodged"; from whom her arguments were
> irrelevant.
> What a magic trick, I didn't see a thing.
> 
> And, seemingly, neither did Stanley Cavell. When asked by
> the
> moderator for his response, there was a pause...then there
> was more
> silence...then Mr. Cavell said, "I don't want to
> say anything
> offhand".......then there was more silence....Cavell
> thought.......Cavell apologized for 'having no
> response; I want
> to"......the  room hunted silently for pins to
> drop.......there was
> more silence.......it was just like the end of 8 Mile
> when Eminem had anticipated the dissing he would take from
> his
> opponent and worked all the dissing and answers into his
> own rap and
> when the guy got the mike........he had nowhere to go and
> nothing to
> say.....then Stanley joked that he had had a "McDowell
> moment"......the paper reminded him of  when he read
> Mind and Matter
> [McDowell's book] and "every other sentence seemed
> wrong".........
> 
> McDowell was kind to Stanley. He leaned into him to show
> how close he
> was; he mumbled something about "not wanting
> to...." but I couldn't
> hear it.
> 
> Later during some interesting Q & A (from some other
> international
> names which I could drop for you), Stanley said almost
> excitedly,
> recoveringly, "Now I recognize me" as one of his
> themes emerged more
> clearly in one of McDowell's answers.
> 
> It was, in its way, as fascinating as anything at the
> circus; as
> interesting as the day Chekhov visited Tolstoy. A legendary
> philosopher is sorta refuted by his own themes, maybe,
> maybe not and
> the deep questions of a great writer start getting asked
> with
> unintended consequences.
> 
> Read Elizabeth Costello. I am.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> --
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