Swotting like a machine
Just under a year after our very first newspaper crossed through in learning Norwegian like a machine, we gave our statistical fine-tuning a boost by following, and working diligently for two months, a philosophy course at university. It goes without saying that the best use of a college course is still, from our perspective, its diversion for the purpose of linguistic improvement. So much so that higher education, which our advancing age does not deter us from, belongs, on the same footing as reading the newspaper or watching documentaries, to that set of things which it would not cross our mind to undertake in our mother tongue and independently of such a parasitic benefit. By the measure of the somewhat devious objective we set for it, the semester of cramming is of unmatched efficiency. It is volume fine-tuning catalyzed by a well-circumscribed syllabus, an abundant corpus of premium quality with respect to language inoculation, and a deadline.
It is difficult to follow young people who decide, at the age of passions, to devote themselves to the dry, sedentary, debilitating, and nowadays perfectly unproductive activity that is following a university program. Naturally, the verb to decide carries a connotation of independence and free will that is here perfectly out of place: blind as a newborn, the undergraduate has been carried there by a torrent of exogenous pressures, the injunctions of a family which, with almost two decades' delay, fears for the future of the individual engendered, the ubiquitous spectacle of the American way of life of suburban subdivisions, the frenetic itch of social media some of which specialize, through the unbuttoned exhibition of « success stories », each head in a circle, in the channeling of ambitions and computational capacities toward the great universal multi-storied organization, its tracks and brands bringing variations of at most dialectal order, of managerial work on swivel chairs. One sees them then in libraries, a club sandwich in the left hand, a mouse in the right, overextending their back over a computer open before them, as they apply to the multi-windowed content of the semester the same galvanic hopping that pervasive pocket electronics have inculcated in them from an early age. They will learn to pass the exam while slipping through the slightest drops of knowledge and know-how that the hasty wringing-out of subjects cookie-cut from the great body of science might still have been suspected of letting trickle down. A certain number of professionalizing happenings, from the solemn role-play seminar to the brazen petits fours evening sponsored by major corporations, will instill in them the progressive awareness that the way out of their misery depends on the alignment of points on a curriculum vitae and the rapid embracing of the managerial discourse that prevails wherever it’s possible to earn money, that earning money, precisely, happens through mere acquiescence to drinking the managerial discourse to the source, until total imbibition, to performing the preposterous choreography, the successful coercion of which can be qualified as a veritable tour de force, which consists in going around in circles in offices while putting on grand airs, obeying abstruse protocols intended solely to lull people to sleep, ultimately, in simulating to perfection the activity one will not carry out, or with a slowness that defies every chart of human neuronal activity, all of it in a bucket of crabs. The managerial edifice has as its main intention, albeit a secret of Polichinelle, quiet conservatism: its lackeys, akin to university books in non-challenging languages, whose natural vocation is to be used as table shims, keep it in place by fossilizing inside their alveolus and not making waves. That’s what the students’ little pink, fresh hands, their minds numb, are getting ready to enlist in as they click away on their computers. Fortunately for the higher education industry, whose servants’ second most ardent wish, after the earliest possible retirement, is no doubt the preservation of their apostolate and, to that end, of their religion, even informing students of their already written destiny would, of course, not dissuade them. For, we confirm that everyday in learning languages like a machine, the human is obstinately difficult to educate other than the hard way, that is, through volume exposure to reality and firsthand trial and error.
It is always moving to brush past this student body visibly suffering from lack of exercise and natural light, only half-duped, and, consequently, intermittently anxious, quite rightly, that their future looms as rather carceral. Come to think of it, it is the serenity of being too old for this kind of doom, joined with a compassionate tenderness for our own youth that this headless cohort evokes. Ultimately, if their behavior would be perfectly irrational were they to have laid bare before their eyes the precise workings of the social organization and the tricks of power, the psychology of the student, as they toil punily in the dark, is an open book. To enlighten them is vain, and, following the reasoning of Des Esseintes in À Rebours which, by its relevancy, we cannot refrain from citing, perfectly inexpedient.
— Ce serait tout de même dommage, se dit-il, car en agissant de la sorte, j’avais réalisé la parabole laïque, l’allégorie de l’instruction universelle qui […] s’ingénie, au lieu de crever définitivement et par compassion les yeux des misérables, à les leur ouvrir tout grands et de force, pour qu’ils aperçoivent autour d’eux des sorts immérités et plus cléments, des joies plus laminées et plus aiguës et, par conséquent, plus désirables et plus chères.
— It would be a pity all the same, he said to himself, for in acting thus, I had realized the lay parable, the allegory of universal instruction which [...] contrives, instead of definitively and out of compassion putting out the eyes of the wretched, to open them wide and by force, so that they may perceive around them undeserved and more clement fates, joys more refined and more keen and, consequently, more desirable and more dear.
(Huysmans, 1884)
One notes that, paradoxically, the nefarious effect Huysmans here assigns to universal instruction, that of opening the eyes of the wretched, is diametrically antithetical to the one we credit to higher education: closing them, so that they may rubber-stamp their being put into production on the great logistical chain of the world. Higher education does have its virtues.
At any rate, to us, it does, who have not come here to seek blindness, but rather volume learning material. Yet, the university we find is not the one we briefly visited in our earliest youth, and, in certain regards, its novelties rack us. The mechanisms of enchantment it deploys mirror exactly those of the workplace or entertainment mediated by pocket electronics: gamified, almost fun, automatic and no-life, irresistible, out-of-pace with natural mind activity, and, probably for that reason, inherently irritating. So much so that, ironically, hierarchies get ironed out by the very tricks that power wields to maintain itself. Students, teachers, and laypeople, among them the white collars, all end up managed through the same kind of metrics that they are nudged to run after: credit scores in the ones, h-scores, key performance indicators and likes in the others. All in the pot! Enrolling at university, even as a guest student, means you’re agreeing to at least dip your toes in the broth. Of course, you can keep your guard up and vow not to let them walk all over you, but when the devices result from decades of groundwork by top-notch, high-priced scientific collaborators optimizing for user retention, resisting them is an absolutely vain wish. The poster children of such civil systems, social media and electronic terminals, whose toxicity and expediency to induce addiction no longer needs proving, find their scholar counterpart in the requisite personal account that’s soon to become the student’s little burrow. In short, the novelty lies in the total digitization, which imposes on you all the epileptogenic paraphernalia, even should you prefer to do without it. Which forces by design the study experience through a peremptory prism: dull conforming. At this spectacle, it is by a hair’s breadth that emotion does not give way in us to gloom. And it’s willingly that we pervert this great soul-grinding machine to strictly contemplative ends.
Through a conjunction of spatiotemporal circumstances with which we shall bore no one, we find ourselves enrolled in a Norwegian philosophy program. We begin by devouring the three hundred pages of the reference book that distributes across three parts, Ethics, Metaphysics and Epistemology, some thirty classical and more contemporaneous selected pieces. While the exam does not concern us as padding for a curriculum which we have long since slam-dunked into the wastepaper basket, we are aware of its catalytic powers. The contemplator in the starting blocks. It includes a take-home essay that delectably diverts us from our objective, as we plunge into an anglophone exegete of Descartes, and a sit-down exam essay, moreover difficult to rig. Rather, laboriously riggable, with a labor perfectly in line with our objective. We thus spend two months preparing our rigging of the exam, several hours a day, at the Nasjonalbiblioteket, in the reading room on the second floor (in fact the first, Norwegian buildings being systematically one floor lower than they claim, as they number from one instead of ground floor), which overlooks Observatoriegata. The essay must tackle one or a few open questions on a theme from the syllabus, for example, what are classical debates in metaethics; how can we explain psychology through natural selection; or what are Hobbes' and Locke's views on the state of nature. Simply, we excavate the paradigmatic questions from each chapter and craft their answers in full prose, in Norwegian, taking care all the way to the literary finish. The occasion is too good to pass up. We read in extenso the Norwegian versions of the works from which the syllabus extracts are drawn. Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Plato’s theory of Forms, the greatest hits of contract theory. We read, we glean, we build. A large file pieces together all our fragments, and when it takes shape, we work it over. We refine, revisit. Blank page, new question, attempt at an answer in three points, drafting in full. We render below one of the minimalist essays put together that way. Virtue and happiness.
In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle argues that there is a connection between acting morally and being happy. How are these connected, according to Aristotle?
An essay universally comprises bricks and mortar. The bricks are the raw ideas, the arguments, which one energetically brews in their logical pipes, excavates from the bric-a-brac of memories, or shamelessly parasitizes off others, like the cuckoo that eats the eggs of a random brood to find the energy for its own procreation. The mortar is the sophistry one tosses in small trowelfuls around the bricks to hold them together, especially where the joints creak. A kind of inevitable structural cosmetics. The better the trowelwork, the more smoothly the little hitches slip through. The Norwegian university essay has no use, it seems to us, for the pomp of the dialectic (thesis-antithesis-synthesis) wanted elsewhere: the bricks shall be of the known-fact variety, in the vein of reading comprehension checks or ophthalmological exams. Everything will be in the mortar.
We gradually bring about the conclusion:
Hos den vise sammenfaller lykke, dyd og nytelse – ja, han oppnår kvintessensen av hver av de tre. Det er oppdragelsen som fører til å finne nytelse i dydig handling, den handlingen som kroner lykke.
In the wise person, happiness, virtue and pleasure coincide - indeed, he attains the quintessence of each of the three. It is upbringing that leads to finding pleasure in virtuous action, the action that crowns happiness.
First, the notion of continence shows that Aristotelian virtue is all in the character: virtuous behavior demands effort from the continent person, while it comes naturally to the virtuous one. Virtuous conduct holds to the middle way, equidistant from the extremes. Morality according to Aristotle gives no sieve for discriminating virtuous action: but when a kind of action is extremely bad, it is known.
Noen lidenskaper eller handlinger kjenner ingen middelvei, og selve navnet avslører at de er ekstreme, overdrevne eller mangelfulle, for eksempel «ondskap, skamløshet, misunnelse og, når det gjelder handlinger, utroskap, tyveri og drap». (Aristoteles, 1107a 8-14)
Some passions or actions admit of no mean, and the very name reveals that they are extreme, excessive or deficient, for example “malice, shamelessness, envy and, in the case of actions, adultery, theft and murder”. (Aristotle, 1107a 8-14)
We skip to happiness after a trowelful of mortar: happiness coincides with virtue, it is the preserve of the highest virtue, the virtue of reason, and in it the highest pleasure merges. Gleaning, bricklaying, wading in the linguistic matter.
The obvious impediment to this kind of practice is the almost necessary stationariness, if not for reading, which can be superimposed on a slow walk among the shelves, at any rate for the writing of essays. It seems quite evident that sedentarism plays a key role in the physical debilitation of Western populations, where sedentariness, beyond its metonymic sense of form-agnostic staticity, must also be considered in its etymological pertaining to the seated position specifically. More precisely, seated with legs bent at right angles, feet on the ground, on high chairs. The everyday use of the latter, initially the preserve of the upper strata, is at most a few centuries old. It has swept over the rest of the population in step with affluence and comfort, until plaguing just about everyone in the era of offices. Now, it seems that the malignant postural creases that such prolonged chair sitting irons in lead steeply downhill to the grave: loss of muscular tone, metabolic weakening, demise. At least, that’s what a study of postural habits in the Hadza of Tanzania reveals, a hunter-gatherer population that mostly squats, kneels, lies down or sits crossed-legged or legs flexed on one side on the floor when resting. Do you mean squats, the painful movement one drives 20 miles to go do 3×8 reps of at the gym twice a week, if all goes well? Apparently, that’s it.
For soleus, the assisted squat posture (squatting with heels in ground contact and with the buttocks resting on a small rock) elicited significantly higher muscle activity compared with chair sitting. For soleus, vastus lateralis, and tibialis anterior, the full squatting posture (squatting with heels in ground contact and buttocks elevated from the ground) elicited higher levels of muscle activity compared with chair sitting.
The researchers summarize the hypotheses they dread seeing confirmed:
Inactivity is a growing public health risk in industrialized societies, leading some to suggest that our bodies did not evolve to be sedentary. Here, we show that, in a group of hunter-gatherers, time spent sedentary is similar to that found in industrialized populations. However, sedentary time in hunter-gatherers is often spent in postures like squatting that lead to higher levels of muscle activity than chair sitting. Thus, we suggest human physiology likely evolved in a context that included substantial inactivity, but increased muscle activity during sedentary time, suggesting an inactivity mismatch with the more common chair-sitting postures found in contemporary urban populations.
(Raichlen, 2020)
So wherever you sit in the cake, the Hadza have, it seems, an edge. Ironically, German has Vorsitzende (front-seated) and English chairman for the one who has the privilege of sitting on a throne at the headquarters (der Sitz, literally, the seat). Perhaps a Hadza jibe made terminology.
Luckily, in the reading room of the Nasjonalbiblioteket, facing the windows over Observatoriegata, and opposite, the bay windows of vast offices where presidents put on important airs on their swivel chairs while passing video calls with other seated people, there, there are two wingback armchairs so ample that it is possible to alternate in them lotus, squat and other tonic figures in socks. In short, we try to cheat chairs as much as universities, by finding noncanonical ways of sitting that make use of them and, on balance, benefit us.
Are your efforts not in vain? Most certainly, by many a benchmark. It does not escape us that the same exam was probably passable, had that been our driving objective, by the mere distracted reading of the book's broad outlines over three languid afternoons. Some worry and grieve that the professional destinations of the student fuel convoys are drying up. That is the least of the difficulties, one that those whose earthy vocation is to keep the machinery running will not take long to settle, which they are already settling through the rhizomatic laying of universal virtual entertainment, in which the very simulacrum of studies partakes. What should rather be deplored is the soullessness of studies consisting in validating glacial modules on a computer screen, a prelude to a life spent on the conveyor belt. In this regard, we also fail to shake the walls of such edifices raised by the fanatics of order and vacuity. Worse, by our mere presence, our registration number, be it that of a visiting student, we serve as furniture shims to a department. Nevertheless, the contribution of our caste (that of overage guest students enrolling abroad in random courses for the sole purpose of linguistic crunching) being, most likely, hardly countable, we can’t decisively call ourselves collaborators, while our diverting tactics let us off the hook further still. We have, for that matter, no more interest in the collapse of the university castle of wind than in that of the commercial internet, highway billboards, Kentucky Fried Chicken or even the Bayreuth Festival, whose dissonant bursts of wrath interleaved with the laments of a swan being slaughtered have resounded since 1876, and which its eager historical endorsement by the Nazis has not sufficed to get canceled: the grey discourse of management, and the hollow thought it carries, fill, like gases, all available space, which makes it an immaterial enemy, every manifestation, every embodiment of which should be annihilated for its eradication to be complete. A passing thought makes us shudder: we would be quite aggrieved if a general collapse also swept away the supply chain which, when pulled, brings to our table, from Portugal, canned wild Alaskan salmon in organic olive oil. Ultimately, we are set to pervert the present premises in the same innocuous fashion: to profane a board created for volume and speed, blind attrition, to ride it, for as long as it lasts, as though it were a publisher of times past, a gracious one, asynchronously, and in our spare time. Our efforts are not in vain from the internal point of view, ours, that of the existence passing against this backdrop of shadows and matter. As in a wood, the hours are beautiful inside a library.
Glimmers of Frogner, blizzard, headlights and ferries amid the haze in the dark bay.
References
Huysmans, J.-K. (1884). Chapitre XI. Dans À rebours. Wikisource. https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/%C3%80_rebours/Chapitre_XI
Raichlen, D. A., Pontzer, H., Zderic, T. W., Harris, J. A., Mabulla, A. Z. P., Hamilton, M. T., & Wood, B. M. (2020). Sitting, squatting, and the evolutionary biology of human inactivity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(13), 7115–7121. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1911868117
Vi tar for oss følgende spørsmål om dydsetikk:
I Den nikomatiske etikk, argumenterer Aristoteles for at det er en sammenheng mellom det å handle moralsk og det å være lykkelig. Forklar hvordan disse henger sammen, ifølge Aristoteles.
Den tiende boken i Den nikomakiske etikk drøfter nytelse, lykke og etikk.
Vi skal beskrive forholdet mellom disse tre begrepene, for å klargjøre nettopp sammenhengen mellom det å handle moralsk og det å være lykkelig. Først må vi klargjøre hva moralsk handling er for Aristoteles.
At dydsetikken er karakterfokusert, blir tydelig hvis vi gransker det aristoteliske kontinensbegrepet. Etiske dyder – karakterdyder – tilegnes i barndommen, hvor oppdragelse sørger for at gode vaner dannes, men de er ikke ferdig utviklet før de suppleres med praktisk visdom, som er en av formene for intellektuell dyd. Å oppføre seg dydig krever faktisk en anstrengelse, synonymt med smerte mens den naturlige tilbøyeligheten, fristelsen av dårlige ting, styres av nytelse. «[Både] kunnen og dyd», sier nemlig Aristoteles, «angår alltid det som er forbundet med vanskelighet.» Følelsen av glede og smerte bør reguleres så handlingen harmonerer med det gode – det dydige – menneskets. Når det gjelder dette dydsmønsteret, når hun «har bestemt hva hun skal gjøre, trenger hun ikke å kjempe mot et indre press for å handle annerledes […] [Hun] blir ikke veldig fortvilet over å måtte gi avkall på en nytelse som hun innser at hun burde gi avkall på.» Den kontinente derimot føler denne indre spenningen, fordi den er underlagt følelser – begjær etter nytelse eller sinne. Den holder disse følelsene tilbake, takket være sin vellykkede oppdragelse, og oppfører seg som en dydig person, men er det ikke. (Kraut, 2022) Dette skillet viser tydelig at dyden ligger i personen, i karakteren, og ikke i handlingen, dens motivasjon eller dens konsekvenser.
Læren om dyd som mellomtilstanden «systematiserer vår forståelse av hvilke kvaliteter som er dyder». Alle dydene Aristoteles nevner, preges nemlig av en mellomtilstand mellom ytterpunktene. Vi er da i stand til «å identifisere andre middeltilstander som dyder, selv om de ikke er dyder som vi har et navn for». Dydsetikken begrenser seg imidlertid til å analysere dydenes natur: Den gir ingen prosedyre for handling, og ifølge Aristoteles er ingen etikk i stand til å gjøre dette, fordi hva som er det rette å gjøre, avhenger av omstendighetene. (Kraut, 2022) Selv om det ikke finnes noen beslutningsregel, har det gode mennesket – det seriøse mennesket, sier Aristoteles – et særegent klarsyn. Det «bedømmer hvert enkelt tilfelle riktig, og i hvert enkelt tilfelle fremtrer for ham det som er sant», og et slikt skarpsyn overflødiggjør nettopp behovet for en regel : Det «utmerker seg [...] mest av alt ved at det ser hva som er sant i hvert enkelt tilfelle, akkurat som om det var en regel og en målestokk» for vurderingen. (Aristoteles, 1113a 31-35) Denne umuligheten av en prosedyre for handling utelukker imidlertid ikke at det finnes kategoriske plikter og forbud: Noen lidenskaper eller handlinger kjenner ingen middelvei, og selve navnet avslører at de er ekstreme, overdrevne eller mangelfulle, for eksempel «ondskap, skamløshet, misunnelse og, når det gjelder handlinger, utroskap, tyveri og drap». (Aristoteles, 1107a 8-14)
Moralske handlinger er handlinger som ville blitt utført av et dydig menneske, hvis følelser er blitt regulert av oppdragelse og vane. Vi skal se nå nærmere hvordan Aristoteles definerer lykke, i forhold til dyd og nytelse.
Lykke er det vi «fastsetter som målet for menneskelivet». Hos Aristoteles er det et klart sammenfall mellom lykke og dyd : «Lykkelig synes det liv å være som leves i overeenstemmelse med dyden». (Aristoteles, 1999, s.276-277) Aristoteles sier også : Det finnes mange ting som «vi ville foretrekke […] selv om det ikke fulgte nytelse med dem» : for eksempel «det å se, vite eller å besitte dydene». Dyden etterstrebes for sin egen skyld, uavhengig av nytelse. (Aristoteles, 1999, s.201) Visse nytelser, de gode nytelsene, de som virkelig fortjener navnet nytelse, er likevel «blandet inn i lykke» : Det som fortjener navnet nytelse, er det gode menneskets nytelse: lykkelig og dydig. (Aristoteles, 1999, s.276-277)
Lykke er den virksomheten som er knyttet til dyd: Men siden den er det endelige målet for menneskelivet, må den være knyttet til den mektigste av dydene, den som springer ut av det beste i oss, det vil si fra det guddommelige i oss. Det mektigste og guddommeligste i oss er fornuften, og det er derfor den virksomheten som er fornuftens prerogativ, den teoretiske betraktningen, som er lykken – og den tilhørende dyden, er fornuftens dyd, altså visdom. Et liv i samsvar med menneskelige dyder, for eksempel mot eller rettferdighet, er også lykkelig, men bare «på en sekundær måte». Disse menneskelige dydene er fortsatt avhengige av kroppen og følelsene, og krever spesielle ressurser eller omstendigheter: Mot krever styrke, gavmildhet penger. «Fornuftens dyd», derimot, «er noe særskilt» : Visdom kan utøves uavhengig av ytre betingelser. Dessuten er «den som virker i overensstemmelse med fornuften [...] mest elsket av gudene», og den vise, som gudene elsker mest, er «rimeligvis også den lykkeligste». (Aristoteles, 1999, s.280-282) Og den virksomheten som «er i overensstemmelse med visdom» gir følgelig «mest nytelse». (Aristoteles, 1999, s.279)
Hos den vise sammenfaller lykke, dyd og nytelse – ja, han oppnår kvintessensen av hver av de tre. Det er oppdragelsen som fører til å finne nytelse i dydig handling, den handlingen som kroner lykke. For Aristoteles er nærmere sett nytelse og smerte verktøy i dydsoppdragelsen : Følelser må opplæres slik at man både «gleder seg over» «det man bør» slik at nytelse og smerte har «avgjørende vekt for, og evne til, å skape dyd og et lykkelig liv, ettersom folk beslutter seg for det som gir nytelse og unngår det som gir smerte». Dyden etterstrebes for dens egen skyld og uavhengig av nytelsen som følger av den, men den som er oppdratt til dyd, finner nytelse i dydig handling. Den som på fritiden oppøver seg til virksomheten som bringer frem det guddommelige i seg selv, oppnår den høyeste lykke.
Kilder
Aristoteles. (ca. 350 f.Kr./2021). Den nikomakiske etikk. I A. Stigen & Ø. Rabbås (Overs.), I E. Skjervheim, G. Skirbekk, & A. Gilje (Red.), Vite, være, gjøre: Exphil: lærebok med originaltekster (s. 307-322). Oslo: Gyldendal Akademisk.
Aristoteles. (ca. 350 f.Kr./1999). Den nikomakiske etikk. I Ø. Rabbås & A. Stigen (Overs.), Den nikomakiske etikk. Oslo: Bokklubben Dagens Bøker, Bokklubbens Kulturbibliotek.
Kraut, R. (2022). Aristotle’s Ethics. I E. N. Zalta & U. Nodelman (Red.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Høst 2022 utg.). Stanford: Stanford University.