Serious Larks: The Philosophy of Ted Cohen

SERIOUS LARKS

Serious Larks

THE PHILOSOPHY OF

Ted Cohen

Edited and with an introduction by Daniel Herwitz

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO AND LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2018 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2018

Printed in the United States of America

27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-51112-2 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-51126-9 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-51143-6 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226511436.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Cohen, Ted, author. | Herwitz, Daniel Alan, 1955– editor, writer of introduction.

Title: Serious larks : the philosophy of Ted Cohen / edited and with an introduction by Daniel Herwitz.

Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017032679 | ISBN 9780226511122 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226511269 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226511436 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Philosophy, American. | Popular culture—Philosophy.

Classification: LCC B945.C641 H47 2018 | DDC 191—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017032679

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Introduction

1  North by Northwest: The Face of America

2  Metaphor and the Cultivation of Intimacy

3  Notes on Metaphor

4  What’s Special about Photography?

5  Sports and Art

6  Clay for Contemplation

7  There Are No Ties at First Base

8  A Driving Examination

9  Objects of Appreciation

10  And What If They Don’t Laugh?

11  Liking What’s Good: Why Should We?

12  Language Games

13  Ethics Class

14  Kings and Salesmen

15  One Way to Think about Popular Art

16  Caring

17  The Idea of Absolute Gin

18  Playing by the Rules

19  Freedom from Rules

Acknowledgments

Index

Introduction

Daniel Herwitz

Ted Cohen was chair of the Department of Philosophy when I arrived at the University of Chicago in 1977 as a graduate student. The first time I met him, he gave me an extended lecture on the problem of penile frostbite and how it affects joggers in the Chicago winter. A dazzling array of riffs followed over the next thirty-seven years, a number of which became the essays of this volume. Each of these essays began in conversation, and they retain that Socratic freshness in their essayistic forms here. The subject matter of Cohen’s riffs included which university gyms have stained-glass windows, why Americans enjoy fast food, the way the lapels of an Italian suit should be tailored, the reasons why Poles are so funny and Dubrovnik is so beautiful, the nature of the beautiful and why Hegel was a million miles from understanding it, how being a Cubs baseball fan is an exercise in altruism, whether one has a moral duty to visit Auschwitz, America’s ambivalence toward Europe and how this is expressed in Hollywood movies, and why if he were the czar of Russia he would be richer than the czar of Russia, which is my favorite of the millions of jokes I learned from Ted Cohen.

Two Jews from Odessa are talking and one says to the other, If I were the czar of Russia I would be richer than the czar of Russia.

That’s impossible, says the other. It’s ridiculous. If you were the czar of Russia you would be the czar of Russia, ergo you would be exactly as rich as he is because you would be he.

Oh no, the man says.

So how would you be richer, Mr. Big Shot?

It’s very simple. I’d give Hebrew lessons on the side.

Cohen was a master at inflecting philosophical ideas through deftly discussed ordinary examples (here the issue is what makes this joke so funny, so philosophical, and, most important, something called a joke at all). He wrote about Alfred Hitchcock’s film North by Northwest, Hitchcock’s monument to America (that essay begins this volume and is in many ways its masterpiece). Cohen was fascinated by the use of razors in that film and how the tiny razor that Cary Grant (a.k.a. Roger Thornhill) uses to shave after he exits the night train in Chicago magnifies the size of his face, preparing its merger with the monumental faces of the presidents cut from the granite of Mount Rushmore, on which a vertiginous chase scene takes place at the end of the film. Cohen said that for Hitchcock, a Brit, America’s vast spaces appear either too crowded or too empty and share with cinema the astonishment and anxiety of the larger-than-life. And yet the film is about Hitchcock’s becoming at home in America, becoming an American. Cohen also wrote a wonderful short story about driving, which featured his grandfather Max, and another about an old philosophy professor’s encounter with a know-it-all student, casting the old professor as an unblemished version of himself. (These stories are also included here.)

Cohen grew up in a tiny Illinois town with the unlikely name of Hume (no known relation to David). Everyone played basketball. He was athletic but quite a bit less than the required six foot four. And he was brainy, and Jewish, although in such a place he hardly knew what that meant and would spend a good bit of the rest of his life in the discovery of it. The aloneness made him a lifelong joiner, wonderful in James Joyce or Torah study groups, president of the Quadrangle Club and the Temple, eager to share experiences with people in whatever currency. His philosophical writing shares this temperament; it is often peppered with What would you think?, How would you decide?, and other conversational techniques to include the reader, as if that reader were sitting across from him in a café or visiting him in his office. He abhorred condescension toward ordinary people and celebrated ordinary life for its inventiveness. Some of his finest ideas were about the ways prosaic uses of language in jokes and metaphors turn out to have the crystallized power of works of art, being superlatively imaginative, cultivating intimacy, refining and deepening emotion and recognition, allowing one person to take up the world of another.

Then there was the wit. I once had occasion to mention the old adage that it takes all kinds. He said, "I don’t know if it takes all kinds but there certainly are all kinds. To Nietzsche’s famous remark that whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger, Cohen replied, Apparently Nietzsche was not thinking about being shot in the stomach or the knees."

Ted Cohen never lost his boyish enthusiasm for the wide world, even if he brought a grown-up’s ironic twist to it. He felt if you study the world with a bemused, humane, honest attentiveness, you can find something to philosophize about more or less anywhere: in reading the newspaper, drinking your morning coffee, wandering the malls of southern California or the bazaars of Istanbul. He was rewarded by places like truck stops across this country’s continental divide and its small towns and second cities, parts of Eastern Europe few venture to visit, obscure parts of Oxfordshire and the New Zealand shire: he would return filled with anecdotes, bursting with new ideas.

These things are not peripheral to the charm, power, and proclamation of freedom central to the essays in this volume, nor to what is philosophically unique in them.

Ted Cohen was an original and captivating essayist, someone who, like Stanley Cavell (his teacher and an important source of inspiration), reflected deeply on what it meant to have studied in Emerson Hall (at Harvard University) and sought to become someone in the spirit of that great thinker of the new, with more than a little midwestern Mark Twain adding spice to his projects. I refer to the Emerson who, delivering the graduating address to the students of Harvard in 1837, some fifty years after American independence, stated in boldface that there were as yet no American scholars—the project of America, its newness, requiring the invention of new forms of thinking adequate to its state of becoming.

This announcement of what is now called American exceptionalism was not without its defects. I believe these are defects central to all settler societies, which are uniformly plagued by xenophobia, deriving from their breakaway from the European host country about which they are so ambivalent, not to mention from their projects of asserting the destiny of conquest over land and peoples within. They are loath to learn from others (even today, America seldom studies how Canada, its neighbor to the north, and Europe have gotten health care right, believing it has to invent everything for itself, which is a sign of its omnipotent and self-righteous superiority). And there is the tendency toward communalism: if you are not one of us you cannot understand us, and this is because we are so different from you, a belief that has been used to justify American slavery, the place of the Afrikaner in the South African apartheid state, and Israel’s brutal security policies. Today exceptionalism is the object of much criticism, some of the knee-jerk variety, but Cohen understood that there is also something profoundly right about the Emersonian vision, a vision demanding of philosophy that it participate in the invention of character, culture, the soul of a place and people—a vision that William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey took very seriously, along with Emerson’s student Friedrich Nietzsche, and Ted Cohen.

Cohen begins his essay on North by Northwest with these words:

If one could be an American philosopher—if that were a kind of thing to be—then one would have to be an American. What would that be? That is a very hard thing to say, perhaps an impossible thing to know; but the first part of an answer is the discovery of something it cannot be to be an American. It is a marvelous and possibly painful irony that this discovery, which seemingly must be accomplished over and over again in every time, in our time was made and presented by an Englishman. It was a discovery of Alfred Hitchcock’s [and screenwriter Ernest Lehman’s, also an immigrant], and it is presented in North by Northwest.

North by Northwest is Hitchcock’s complete discovery of America and his revelation that he has become an American.

The film is about an advertising man, Roger Thornhill (a.k.a. Cary Grant), from the Madison Avenue of the 1950s who drinks too much and cannot or will not tell the difference between truth and expedient spin. It spins out his transformation into what Cohen calls an American worthy of the name and identity, which requires Thornhill’s discovery that truth is shattering and absolutely must matter and his (related) assumption of individual agency (freedom). The film monumentalizes him while simultaneously humanizing him, finally merging his face with those American presidents carved into the granite of that mountain (north by northwest of New York City in a place as vast and daunting as the American landscape). This duality, that America, if decent, is or can be or must be both monumental and humane, is so brilliantly crafted in the script of cinema as to make one feel Hitchcock is doing the same for cinema—Americanizing it. For cinema shares with America a size, scope, and daunting emptiness demanding to be filled in, which is to say fulfilled, according to a similar promissory note.

The market has largely taken over American culture, not to mention politics, courtesy of its media forms and corporatizing strategies. Americans have been turned into producers and consumers. This extends to the culture of universities, which resemble huge, corporate, multinational forms as they churn out science, social research, and philosophy according to market-driven routines, modes of production that in the humanities often go under the name of theory, especially in philosophy, which makes a racket of this, allowing an endless stream of PhDs to enter PhD programs and spin out their five cents according to the reigning dollar brand. I exaggerate of course, but not so very much, and this was the America that Ted Cohen’s childhood among farmers, his studies in Emerson Hall, and his own sense and sensibility refused. It is the America that, new on the scene of history when Hitchcock made his masterpiece, was the condition to be overcome. And that meant creating a new kind of person, which Cohen believes is the point of the film.

The essay was a crucial philosophical form for him, but this also isn’t quite right, because the tenor of his essays is that they read like presentations or talks given to small audiences, which in many cases they were. They actively solicit the input of that actual audience of their presentation, as well as the virtual audience of we the readers. In short, they are really closer to speech than writing (this is not true of his wonderful short stories), and here the model is the great Oxford philosopher J. L. Austin.

Austin delivered the lectures subsequently published as How to Do Things with Words at Harvard in 1955, and apparently Stanley Cavell was among the few people in the audience. Cavell claims never to have recovered. Austin ends those lectures with the statement that he has throughout the lectures been doing two things he dislikes, the first being lecturing. This code of dislike could be transcribed into any of Cohen’s essays, which eschew the formality of the lecture, much less the polished version of the written text, and instead seek to approximate an intimate seminar gathering or office tutorial (which remains a preferred Oxbridge knowledge-producing form also). Austin’s close attention to the features of ordinary language as it is actually in use by speakers serves as a clearinghouse now, as it did then, and with consistently surprising and profound results. These results range from a new way of thinking about linguistic practice in terms of force, effect, and both in relation to the declarative sentence, to amazingly interesting implications for the stability, trust, and fallibility of knowledge as it is actually relied on by speakers and encoded in their beliefs about and knowledge of the meaning and power of words. Austin sought to liberate the study of language in relation to truth and knowledge from the ideology of logical empiricism and logicism, which, to boil things down far beyond what is adequate, were positions that claimed language has truth and knowledge functions only by virtue of its approximation—messy, inadequate, but close enough to work sometimes—to idealized logical structures. These structures were concatenations of words that mirrored the structure of the world, allowing correspondence between the two in the right circumstances, and it was a goal of the ideology to specify what the right circumstances were. By the 1950s this ideology was widely challenged, first and foremost by Ludwig Wittgenstein and his rejection of the picture theory of meaning in the Philosophical Investigations, but also by antipositivist thinking by W. V. O. Quine, Norwood Russell Hanson, and others in the philosophy of science.

Austin was a key player in this palace revolt within the ranks of analytical philosophy, his goal, shared by Wittgenstein, being to understand and limn the ways ordinary speakers of a language know how to use the words they know, and to understand what it is to have such knowledge and trust and acknowledge it under certain circumstances. Austin called this knowing how to do things with words, the acknowledgment of which could no longer be encapsulated in the philosophical project of essential definition, a definition that would in Platonic form capture the necessary and sufficient conditions that putatively comprised the building blocks of our metaphysical world, from scientific truth to linguistic assertion to the nature of the self (personal identity) to the world of art and aesthetics, not to mention morals. Rather, as Austin suggests, attention must be paid to what it is we know how to do when we use words like art or beauty or, in Cohen’s universe, baseball or American, and to how well we know it, with what degrees of certainty or uncertainty, amenable to what kinds of diversity and unresolved or unresolvable quarrel. This would involve rethinking the very ideas of certainty, trust, authenticity, aesthetics, virtue, the right and the good, and so forth.

Equally important for Cohen’s work was a well-surveyed idea of Wittgenstein’s that to know the meaning of a word is to understand the kind of tool it is in the linguistic practices in which the speaker is embedded with others. And this is to be part of what Wittgenstein calls a form of life. If meaning is approached through use, it turns out that many words have families of overlapping uses, the word game being Wittgenstein’s iconic example, where there are a number of different kinds of games with no essence common to them all—not even the idea of winning, which pertains to many games but not all, and certainly not all gaming. Wittgenstein’s idea is that most if not all words share this overlapping family of uses with the word game, hence he speaks of languages games. What then becomes of interest is diversity, the various ways games/words are interrelated, their overlapping systems of intersection, their synergies between contexts, and their variegated characters.

This in turn focuses philosophy on the central role of comparison, something Voltaire has his protagonist Candide proclaim in his first criticism, mild to be sure, of the philosopher Pangloss—he of the rose-colored glasses—when arriving at the best of all possible worlds somewhere in the mountains of Peru. Overwhelmed by the splendor and moral perfection of that place, Candide realizes there is more to life than dreamt of by Pangloss’s philosophy. It shows, he tells his servant Cacambo, that one ought to travel—meaning broaden the field of comparison.

Which exactly puts Cohen in business, since he revels in such connections as thinking about being a baseball fan in the light of issues of altruism and Kantian morality; comparing jokes, metaphors, and works of art so that each is illuminated through the acknowledgment of linkage; and focusing on connections between sports and art along the lines of the importance of virtuosity. Cohen is a surfer who glides across the divides between high and low, canonical and fresh, refined and popular. And his purpose in doing so is to expose fusty ideology and liberate a deeper acknowledgment of what the objects of alternately adulation and disdain or condescension really have to do with each other, not to mention what the real uses of words like high, low, popular, and the like are. Many of these inherited distinctions are the result of social history and class, of economy, markets, nationalism, and colonialism, which are not—for better or worse—part of Cohen’s purview but are very much part of the larger story of what it meant to inherit and use a language, with its accrued and often unconscious terms of inequality. (Derrida of course made a racket out of exposing the depths of these inheritances, and Foucault, and Marx, and Nietzsche.)

The result of Cohen’s expansions and comparisons were a lot of raised eyebrows from various colleagues. As he puts it in the opening beat of Objects of Appreciation:

Some of my friends and colleagues, including some who have a good opinion of my philosophical sense and capacities, have wondered about my seriousness, . . . that I have become less philosophical. Those with a deep interest in the history of philosophy had expected more work on Kant’s aesthetics, a monograph on Hume’s marvelous essay on taste. . . . The less historically minded expected a theory of art or a theory of beauty, or perhaps a sketch of the logic of fictional speech acts. . . . But I . . . moved off . . . producing remarks on Hitchcock’s movies, jokes, and baseball. All this has made me dubious in the regard of both philosophers of art and philosophers in general. Many philosophers already regard the philosophy of art as a relatively unserious kind of philosophy, and philosophers of art are apt to suppose that the serious part of their study concerns (1) the understanding of art as a general philosophical problem, and (2) the specific study of the abstract characteristics of painting, literature, and music. When I moved, seemingly, to the periphery of even the philosophy of art, I wandered to the circumference of one of philosophy’s more distant epicycles.

He then shifts to a direct mimicry of the style of J. L. Austin:

1. I am learning a great deal out here. The air is fresh. The view is not cluttered with moribund theories, and the terrain is not littered with monuments of Great Historical Importance.

2. I would like to ask: Who is being serious and philosophical, and who is not? My critics, friendly and otherwise, are sure that when I collaborated on a paper about Velázquez’s painting Las Meninas, I was being more serious and more intellectually respectable than when I wrote a piece on baseball. Why do they think that? What makes them so sure? Is it obvious that the paintings of the Spanish Renaissance are more important, culturally and philosophically, than American baseball? I am a philosopher, after all—at least I have the customary credentials—and I should like to observe that declaring something obvious is one of the most antiphilosophical maneuvers I am aware of. It is a device that smells bad, like its companion declaration that something is natural. When someone tells us that something is obvious (and therefore true) or natural (and therefore good), if we have any drop of true philosophical blood in us, we will demand a general account, a theory in fact, of obviousness and naturalness. There has to be some non-question-begging way of telling the obvious from the unobvious, the natural from the unnatural, besides simply accepting the pronouncement of a self-appointed judge. I know of no tenable theory along these lines. If the critic has no theory, and he has nothing to rest on except his conviction that this is the way things have always been done, or that these are the things that have always been believed, then he has no claim worthy of a philosophical response.

Nowadays these ideas have become increasingly accepted, but when Cohen wrote, he was early. What does it mean to be early? Emerson was, and Nietzsche, and Charles Sanders Peirce. It means one is opening a new form of thinking where there are not a lot of precedents, much less routines, for how to do it. One is on one’s own, bucking the crowd, trying to get a general picture of the lay of the land rather than refining things already known. Wittgenstein urged his readers to go back to the rough ground, which is where Cohen lived: among the truck stops and the card games, the baseball pitches and the television programs, and these in relation to the smoother registers of Renaissance art and symphonic music.

In Objects of Appreciation, Cohen says,

If an American has any birthright at all, it is one that releases him from the need to dance to the tunes of others.

I have not said that baseball is more noble than Spanish painting. I have not said that it is as noble. I have not said anything.

He has a reason for harping on Spanish painting, namely that he has written on it, and well, in an essay with Joel Snyder on Velázquez’s Las Meninas, published originally in Critical Inquiry. He knew the extraordinary power of that painting, and yet he asked (as I quoted above), Is it obvious that the paintings of the Spanish Renaissance are more important, culturally and philosophically, than American baseball?—a truly philosophical question.

Later, in the essay Liking What’s Good, he reinforces this refusal to speak in the traditional voice, as he sees it, of philosophical aesthetics, with its canons of taste and excellence: By now, whether or not you agree with me, you can see, surely, (1) that I don’t believe in any compelling argument to the effect that one thing is (aesthetically) better than another, and (2) that I don’t believe it possible to show that it is better to like better things. Where does that leave me? You might say, Nowhere, but I prefer to think that I’ve been freed to start again, to try to understand what to make of the communities of people who care for the things they care for.

He isn’t entirely left nowhere because he chooses a different route into questions of taste and value than that given by tradition, with its certainty about rankings and who is capable of doing the ranking. Above all tradition favors Hume, who is sadly not the patron of Cohen’s little town in Illinois (that would be a connection too good to be true), but still the object of lifelong reflection by him. Hume begins from the observation that while people tend to believe taste is an individual and subjective matter, if you study their practices they are ready to lambaste those whose taste seems to them deeply inferior, and moreover they believe strongly in the values of lifelong practice, talent, and genius, which privilege some over others. The question is what this state of privilege amounts to, and Hume says it amounts in rare instances to the true judge, the one who has practiced and made comparisons, is blessed with natural subtlety (the ability to detect all the parts of the object) and strong and vibrant sensibility, and is free of all prejudice, clearly an ideal state but one to which those rare individuals meaningfully approximate. And Hume believes that over time these worthies tend to reach the same kind of overall consensus and internal correction that judgments in the law achieve—it’s not perfect but good enough for a standard of taste along the lines of a legal standard. Hume’s idea is clearly elitist because the club of judges is so few, rather like the best men’s clubs in Mayfair where port, cigars, and a great deal of red meat are consumed and conversation flows witty and subtle like fine wine.

This club that is meant over time to set the standard of taste would convulse if the terms of comparison were broadened in the manner of Candide to include Peru, baseball, Japanese koto music, township jazz, and a great deal of whatever else occupies the vast diversity of the human race. It would have no way of proceeding. Law can only be formulated within a subscribed community, and there are many. So Cohen thinks, Why not begin with the intersecting strands of similarity and difference between appreciators, or what Kant calls communities of taste, rather than a body corporate? He begins, like so many philosophical essayists (Montaigne and Saint Augustine among them), with himself: I like, he says, Mahler but also baseball and also percussion, I like certain types of jazz, and all this places me in various communities of taste, comprised of persons who might well have nothing to do with one another; I am the middle term between them. Instead of rankings, which are either obvious or absurd or both, the question is reformulated to, What kinds of people care about this or that, what else do they care about, and what does this say about them? It might say they are lousy and racist, or that they are uneducated but subtle, or very American, or very French, or very well-dressed, and on and on.

There is of course no end to the story once its telling is begun, for it invokes the narration of humanity in its various differences. Today it would be called crowdsourcing. So instead of obsessing about what is better than what or why, whose taste represents authority, and the like, the issue becomes the study of people. Cohen once told me that he believed the only metaphysically interesting thing in the world was people. I would add animals, but you see the point.