is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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Full of Lack.
There's a fourth cat in the cat-gang now. I call him Cowboy because he's full of swagger and empty of guile. You might say he's full of a lack of guile, much how Mario's La Fiesta Mexican Restaurant in Berkeley offers as one of the fillings for its burritos an item called "no meat." Gus and I, when we dined there over the summer, both thought it might be a great idea to order something that was filled with nothing. But he likes meat and I like cheese.
Still, the question: What's in that burrito? No meat. What's in that Cowboy over there? No guile.
That leads me to a strange, and strangely related, observation. It is almost impossible to avoid finding oneself speaking in language that students will find funny despite your best intentions to be unfunny, sometimes. Like recently I've realized, mid-long-concrete-example, that I'm using terms that could be hilarious because they can be construed sexually. Terms like "pie" and "jug." It might make a lot of sense to say that in a pie-baking contest we care a lot more about success than we do about effort. But then you're still talking about pie in a class where you have to discuss a lot of fairly dry essays on desert. And no, I don't mean dessert, which is inherently more exciting than desert.
But the thing that links this observation to Cowboy's lack of guile is the jug. I was recently making a point about the difference between form and content (I had to make this point first, in order later to undermine the difference, since it is not always so clear that form and content are utterly distinct, you know?) and I was talking about how a jug is a form that can hold many contents. It might hold water, it might hold bleach, it might hold apple juice. And if you drink the contents and they please or displease you, in any case it will not be the "fault" of the jug. (In this way many of our ideas about procedural justice can remain neutral with regard to our moral ideas about law, because according to the theory that neutrally-applied procedures are fair, it doesn't matter what the procedures are or what their outcome is, what matters is that they are applied fairly and consistently. In other words, if the jug is the form of justice, whatever fits in there is just. But we can already see the weakness of that theory.)
But then you find yourself standing in a room full of 20-year olds talking about jugs, and pie. And that can't fail to be funny, at least to some of them.
I blame Heidegger for this, because he's the one who wrote that damned essay called Das Ding/The Thing in which the example of a jug is used in extended fashion. For instance:
"The jug's bottom and sides obviously take on the task of holding. But not so fast! When we fill the jug with wine, do we pour the wine into sides and bottom? At most, we pour the wine between the sides and over the bottom. Sides and bottom are, to be sure, what is impermeable in the vessel. But what is impermeable is not yet what does the holding. The empty space, this nothing of the jug, is what the jug is as the holding vessel."
Here's the part for the potsmokers:
"Sides and bottom, of which the jug consists and by which it stands, are not really what does the holding. But if the holding is done by the jug's void, then the potter who forms sides and bottom on his wheel does not, strictly speaking, make the jug. He only shapes the clay. No--he shapes the void.... From start to finish the potter takes hold of the impalpable void and brings it forth as the container in the shape of a containing vessel. The jug's void determines all the handling in the process of making the vessel. The vessel's thingness does not lie at all in the material of which it consists, but in the void that holds. And yet, is the jug really empty?"
Cowboy's cowboy-ness consists at least in part in what he lacks. Also, my Jill-ness consists at least in part in what it lacks whenever Gus isn't around (o! how I miss him when he is not around). The same may not be true of a no-meat burrito, though it IS true within the mindset of someone who thinks that "no meat" is the best way to express the phenomenon we know as "vegetarian burrito." Justice may sometimes be best achieved by applying procedures equally and fairly to everyone. But you don't have to be a philosopher to know that the form of the procedures will have some impact on what they can hold, content-wise. Not to mention the truth that even the best/fairest procedures will sometimes be unjust because they remain indifferent to particular outcomes.
Sometimes, as in the case of the pie-baking contest, what really matters is how the pie tastes (heh), and so we don't care if Arlene tried harder than Joe to make a pie, or put more thought into making a pie than Joe, if Joe's pie is more tasty. Joe deserves the prize, we say, because his pie is so very tasty. But other times we think that effort, motivation, intent, all those things that come prior to the outcome, those are what determines what someone deserves. If some greedy terrible person donates ten million dollars to charity because she wants a tax break and a PR boost, we might not like her as much as we like the person who quietly gives up some of her money and time so she can help inner-city kids improve their literacy rates. That's the person, in this instance, who we may think deserves a prize.
And that could be because we suspect that she lacks guile, relatively speaking. She's our cowboy hero.
1:41 p.m. - October 21, 2007
Bunny - 2007-10-22 12:49:32
the question thus becomes, does Cowboy have cowbell?
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Craig Brown - 2007-10-22 13:15:50
That's one good post there. The more obvious questions (to me) are all of a different type of philosophy:
Is the jug a good jug?
Was it made by good people, for good people?
Was it MADE to be good jug, or was it made as a saleable commodity?
Is the jug 'worth' more than it's components, cost of manufacture, and damage done to produce?
Is the jug really needed?
Does the jug, in the end, have a right to exist?
These things I think on, now.
Craig
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jill - 2007-10-22 13:36:30
cowboy has metaphoric cowbell, yes. but he, like all the rest of us (except maybe christopher walken) could use some more cowbell. and a well-made jug full of catfood.
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