Fwd: Philosophical Rap Contest

[Mark Kohut]

when I was a stringer for a newspaper, I got to go to cultural/author events and write about them.

This was two first-rate philosophers talking about a paper by another philosopher on Coetzee's 
Elizabeth Costello. 

Yes, I overwrote. Like they said of Pynchon, I remark, laughing my ass off at that idiotic comparison. Deal with it or don't read it. 

Then read ELIZ COSTELLO, as I immediately did. 
> 
>  
> One on philosophers and a Coetzee novel....
>  
> This phenomenological, allusive, rendering is how I wrote many pieces......
>  
> This one is OVERWRITTEN, i know.....edited i would have had to cut those sports metpahors and more.....
>  
> BUT I love this one because of some of my connections........
>  
> And because of what happened........poor Cavell, mute.....McDermott, leaning in and apologizing......
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> Enuff,
>  
> mark
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> 
> 
>  
> ---------- 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 Coetzee 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--"that gentlest of men" screaming--- 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 for it 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, sweet, " no one knows anything everyone else can't know", that old private language impossibility rephrased and then he 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.
>  
> Then McDermott threw a change-up curveball, or called a 'hidden football" reverse play and Costello's supposed perceptions became perhaps her "fugitive perceptions" and a shell game trick: The argument's 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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>  
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> 
> 
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