"If Thy Penis Offend Thee"

 Essays on Essays Part #1: “Big Red Sun” By David Foster Wallace (Consider the Lobster, Back Bay Books, New York: 2006, 3-50).  


“If Thy Penis Offend Thee”

Originally, I thought I’d end up criticizing the ethics in David Foster Wallace’s essay “Big Red Sun,” which covers the AVN (Adult Video News) awards. And to some degree I will. But I cannot criticize his ethic of the porn industry because it is not clear to me that he has one. It seems, instead, that I am stuck carping on Wallace for something of which he seems constantly guilty: a story telling method which stifles or hides the strength or even existence of any argument. To my eyes, Wallace has the rather curious habit—at least in his essays—of taking a long time to say almost nothing.  

The perfect example appears in the first page of “Big Red Sun,” where Wallace begs men—certain self-mutilators exhausted by their own lusts—not to go through with castration or penis guillotining. “Stay your hand,” he writes, “hold off with those kitchen utensils and/or wire cutters. Because we may have found an alternative.” It’s a provocative beginning; really, it’s a provocative essay: mention of penises—or one third thereof—often has that effect. You wouldn’t want your mother to know you’ve read it.[1] But in any case, 47 pages make up the total of this essay, and yet Wallace never actually offers these men his promised alternative. I have searched the pages many times to no avail.

Of course, I grant that arguments and alternatives may be implicit to stories. Wallace, genius that he is, probably employs anecdotes in a didactic fashion all the time. But there are two reasons I disagree with this method of essay writing. The first has to do with the weakness of an ethical vocabulary in language paradigms—which I’ll get to shortly. The second is that anecdotes bypass the traditional essayist’s imposition: namely the act of assertion. It was either Frege or Pierce (I forget now) who first pointed out that the act of assertion implies a certain degree of commitment on behalf of the speaker: a willingness to defend or supply reasons for the truth of said assertion. Hence the traditional essay’s tendency to have a certain chutzpah about it;  it’s a ballsy act on behalf of the essayist. That’s why I can’t figure out why Wallace neglects the assertive balls to talk, if I may, ethically about porn balls. The two seem to hang together, as it were. The way I see it, when he opts for maundering within the narrative he opts for weakened prose.

You won’t find me guilty of the same sin—or, I guess, peccadillo.  Nor could you sensibly accuse Jesus and Freud of it—that is maundering—which is why I’ll bring them in on this discussion. Both of them have a knack for taking things to the extreme.

I often wonder, for example, what Freud would say about the fact that the porn industry has been dubbed the ‘adult’ industry. Probably he would balk at the notion, arguing that sexuality haunts us from infancy. “There’s very little adult about it,” I hear in a thick German accent. In fact, he’d probably want to say sexual sensitivity at large, whether taking the form of active prohibitions (usually religious) or commendations (like the porn industry), are a direct result of the ubiquitous sexual tension between mother and son. He is, without question, wrong concerning the universal applicability of the specifics—not to mention a bit suspect and creepy. But he is right about the ubiquity.

That is, Freud’s real insight lies with the interpretive range of sexuality, its causal connection and applicability to day to day living, how so much of human psychology and pragmatics hinges on vaginas and penises. It’s all very alarming and fantastic, for sure, but that’s what makes it important—and a bit funny too.

Is it any wonder why pornography dominates the American landscape in media, religion, and social politics? And what, by the way, is pornography if not a sexual instantiation of the easy access (pun intended) American motto? It’s flapjacks from the easy bake oven, if you know what I mean; it’s a sort of microwavable surf and turf, if you catch my drift.

But to return to the point, the classes of people with whom Freud is concerned—and who I wish to include in this essay—do not consist merely of porn industry employees, nor merely the men and men and women who purchase and partake of porn industry product. We also want to include those who repress and prohibit access to pornography because of a belief that it is immoral. In America this class usually consists of Evangelical social enterprises like ‘accountability partners,’ XXX.Church.com, purity ring seminars, and the like. I myself remember more sexual prohibitions during youth camp sermons than I remember gospel presentations. The American church (worldwide and historical) is as sexual an enterprise as any other, perhaps even moreso than most.[2]

And I think that the church’s staunch attitude toward sexuality comes from , among other things, [3]Jesus’ ethical radicalism. What, for instance, would Jesus have written had he been given the same assignment as Wallace? (For some reason an image of white Jesus wearing rimless glasses and writing on a journalist's notepad enters my mind and gives me a chuckle). If Jesus’ essay came in the form of a narrative, surely it would be a parable with a punch line, and not the empty prose or passivity of “Big Red Sun.” Surely not the spoken and articulate aloofness of, “stay your hand” without an alternative. I imagine, rather, that Jesus’ essay would consists in something near the exact opposite of what Wallace writes, something at once poignant and vulgar and shocking. Really, I see a fresh and amended Matthew 5:29-30: “If thy penis offend thee, grab thy kitchen utensils and wire cutters and saw it off”!  If we’re willing to pluck out eyes and cut off hands to join the kingdom of heaven , I see no reason why cutting of penises shouldn’t be included.

And you may dance however you like around the hermeneutics of Matthew 5:29-30. Odds are the majority of my readers (all 3 of you) haven’t done their homework, and it would be exactly that, a dance. So whether we are to take the passage literally, metaphorically, both, allegorically, as hyperbolic or quite seriously, or whatever is beside the point. Because the principle point Jesus is trying to make is true in all of these cases: immorality destroys human identity. Morality is a serious matter: the most serious of matters.  

You have to look at the vocabulary paradigm used by American (and historical) Christianity compared to class vocabularies that hide or stifle moral thought to see what I mean. [4] David Foster Wallace, as I’ve been arguing, avoids explicit moral vernacular in his essays. His language paraphernalia fostera a type of vocabulary that isn’t as much concerned with immorality as amorality, agnostic ethics, or moral ambiguity. His is not even like a Buddhist’s grammar, which generally wards off desire and then calls that warding off morality. I’m not saying that he cultivates an attitude of wretchedness; I’m saying he cultivates a type of that thinking that doesn’t think very much is wretched. It’s all tragically and obviously symptomatic of the times. Skepticism now covers the moral sphere where it belongs in the epistemic sphere,[5] truncating or atrophying the will toward action.[6] Or when an action does occur, especially sexual action, it happens to happen—it’s a matter of course, or an accidental property of high sexual tension.

So you have the dichotomy: a false one, I grant, but a useful one. Some of us are nonchalant about the porn industry and some of us are its greatest antagonists. I realize that many of us will oscillate between the two positions on a given day. But it seems to me—for reasons I have no space to express— that the good life consists in the moral life, and the moral life consists, at least in part, with a well thought out ethic concerning pornography. In other words, I am with Jesus on this one.

And tangentially, the moral life cannot consist merely in words but in deeds. “Because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just a matter of words too” (Faulkner). I myself do not bank on the historical fact of Jesus dying and rising again ipso facto because phenomenologists have demonstrated quite irrefutably that there is no such thing as any fact eo ipso­. It’s why ultimately I think trying to analyze the semantic dialectic between faith and works in James’ epistle ends up a futile exercise. When you exclude the epistemological claims of modern Christianity from the program, you end up with faith concomitant with action. The proposition that Jesus died and rose again, on this model, no longer causes moral action, moral action is the faith. Moral action does not demonstrate that I have belief in Christ, I am (present tense) believing in Christ while doing the good. Faith in this sphere is not assenting to a proposition in any sense of the term, but concomitant with action, every moral act one of banking on the hope that Jesus did, in fact, die and rise again—even, if not especially, where that hope is a fool’s hope.

---

[1] Take for example this passage, “It is difficult to describe how it feels to gaze at living human beings whom you’ve seen perform in hard-core porn. To shake the hand of a man whose precise erectile size, angle, and vasculature are known to you. That strange I-think-we’ve-met before sensation one feels upon seeing any celebrity in the flesh is here both intensified and twisted. It feels intensely twisted to see reigning industry queen Jenna Jameson chilling out at the Vivid booth in Jordaches and a latex bustier and to know already that she has a tattoo of a right sundered valentine with the tagline HEART BREAKER on her right buttock and a tiny hairless mole just left of her anus.”

[2] Take a look, for example, at the range of sexual thought and activity within Christian history: Paul, on my reading, got stuck in the quagmire that is sexual pragmatics. Au fond  he says, “Look, if you’re a ravenous mammal, too bad for you. Hop on the sex train and get married if you must. But if not, singleness is a most excellent, nay, much better alternative.”[2] Augustine wasn’t much different, though he had the trouble of being much hornier. In Confessions  we find a chronicle of his sexual misadventure supplemented by a philosophical discussion with the Stoics tradition concerning humanity’s appetitive nature. St. Abelard, that great medieval theologian and philosopher, suffered famously for the sexual prowess of his youth, having been castrated by the father of his beloved Heloise. During the tryst he and Heloise spoke of little besides their love; later Abelard confessed his relief that sexuality no longer burdened him. John Milton, among others, believed pre-fall Adam and Eve could control their sexual impulses, literally kick-start them on command, as it were. Certain sects of Puritanism—or so I’ve been told—taught their followers how to circumvent sexual pleasure altogether, opting solely for sex’s procreative uses—a most religious and unfortunate bit of dogma, if you ask me. Ascetics, monks, priest, nuns, and many more have been and are putatively known for rejecting any sexual activity. I could go on to the point of boredom, and probably, Christianity would do well to be given a history of its sexuality.

[3] Among these things is the rabbinic tradition. The three Semitic religions, in fact,—and their respective offspring—likely account for the highest concentration on ethical awareness in the world. Something about the Adamic myth, the creation of being and its corruption through moral failure has reverberated through history.

[4]  To what degree Nietzsche is responsible for this shift in vocabulary I won’t venture a guess. Probably, I think, his project turned out just as much descriptive as prescriptive. But few would agree with me on that.

[5] I agree with the skeptics within the liberal arts tradition. The data, whatever it is, may be interpreted in any way, religious or no. We have no particular reason to be Christians or Buddhists or Atheists in any evidentialist’s sense. Our penchants and parents guide us, and neither are sufficient grounds for epistemic belief. That’s why I say quite seriously, that ‘no’ I do not know whether Jesus died and rose again. How could I? Even if I were there, on that blessed day, I could not know it wasn’t an illusion. After 7 years studying philosophy, its not clear to me that we can ever know anything in a useful sense of the term, not even differing versions of JTB theory which seemed so promising for so long work out the problem. So epistemologically, I am about as agnostic as they come. But it’s not quite so simple and easy to say that humans have the luxury of moral agnosticism. Heidegger is right to think that our throwness here—our here and nowness rather than there and theness—obliges us to be morally authentic. We are beings stuck in time, and our limitations require a type of being in the world: morality isn’t an option, it’s a state of affairs. We are either successful or unsuccessful. Where Heidegger went wrong was in thinking that empathy follows from authenticity and throwness, and that humanity can build an ethic off of it: though, certainly, much of Western society has tried. Without delving into an argument, the very language of empathy requires a tradition within which to arise and have meaning. And empathy, so far as it has meaning, has Christian meaning.

[6] I have to go with Aristotle view of akratic action on this one. People always do what they take to be the good, whether they are conscious of it or not, whether that good is explicit or temporal believed to be good, or not. What type of akratic action can agnostic morality support? Anything consistent? Authentic/? Anything at all where it does not have an operant Good besides we do not know what the Good is?

Excerpts From Essays I Will Probably Never Finish

1. Because of course the epistemological problem with Absurdism (and with a little finagling, Emotivism) is that it separates the Good from the true. Many atheists would be surprised at their own, latent Christianity (not to mention Platonism) at assuming the necessary relationship between true utterances and their value as truth. There is no such necessity. If I may borrow and abuse Kripke, the relationship of a truth to its value as truth is contingent a priori. Only given state of affairs “x” where objective value exists can we say that true utterance ‘U’ is objectively valuable. In state of affairs “y” where there is no objective value, and only true utterance ‘U’ obtains, a theory of the relationship between the value and true utterance is necessarily subjective: that is, arbitrary, sentimentally inclined, or more to the point, not actually valuable.

Thus for the Absurdist who says, “the world is ultimately reducible to axiological meaninglessness,” the value of that utterance as true only obtains insofar as it rises in conjunction with a preset theory of quasi-value. In comes Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus and the like: sentimentalists. To even be consistent with themselves these thinkers can only call a true utterance quasi-valuable when that utterance supports the overarching, preset quasi-value conditions each thinker supplies. This proves a difficult task for one very simple reason. These thinkers operate from the Western, nay, human belief that the true and the Good ‘line up.’ They think that the truth is objectively valuable.

2. The pride of Raskolnikov, of the underground man, of Kierkegaard, of Camus, of Kafka, all consists in one very true truth: they have guts and most people do not. But one mistake I’ve noted of which all these existential thinkers are guilty is the conflation of intellectual naivety and intellectual weakness. They are not the same. Some people are simply incapable of complex self-reflection or reflection on abstract qualia. I do not think these thinkers nor we are disgusted with this phenomenon. We are disgusted with something else.  (Granted this unintelligent class is smaller than people think: one symptom of the problem is that too many people think that too many people are incapable of complex thought.) What we despise is cowardice not weakness. We despise banal distractions and a mechanical existence. We despise the psychological road blocks by which people barricade themselves; we despise the safety net and the self-delusions. Really, the existentialists are probably the most honest people in all the world, and they can’t stand liars. Existentialists have stared at the absurd face to face, and find it difficult to tolerate those who have not.

3. I want to talk about a class of phrases. They go something like, “only God knows” or “God obviously doesn’t want us to know” or “it’s one of God’s mysteries.” Theologically I have no problem whatsoever with these phrases when they are used rightly. They act as logical placeholders which function within a theological framework meant to distinguish the greatness of God from the weakness of man. I get that. That’s obvious. But I have a very simple observation: most of the time that people use these phrases, they are not distinguishing between God’s greatness and man’s weakness, they are pussyfooting around intellectual issues. In other words either laziness or cowardice  results in intellectual cop-outs. This occurs 9 times out of 10, and it s stupid and sinful.

4.The word cautious is used when the word terrified is meant.  That’s half the trouble now. Caution probably should never have implied something negative. It should have meant something like, “look what happens when you abuse out this or that good,” not, “avoid that good because it’ll cost you if you abuse it.” This is one fundamental problem with Christian fundamentalism. It avoids goods like a Buddhist monk and calls it Christian. There is a difference between setting oneself up for failure and over-generalizing the dangers of, say, alcohol. It is the difference between struggling with alcoholism and the potential to struggle with alcoholism. Everyone has the potential to struggle with alcoholism. Likewise everyone has the potential to murder.  But we don’t advocate avoiding human contact because we might kill a few of people. Why do we avoid alcohol if we only might become alcoholics?

Fundamentalists might answer that the proclivity for alcoholism is greater than murder. In the first place this is simply false. Many have murdered and turned to alcohol for consolation, not the other way around. Proclivities are particular to persons. This brings me to my second point: to talk of universal proclivities is an example of the ridiculous fundamental generalization. Fundamentalists generalize because fundamentalists are lazy thinkers and psychological weaklings. They want their rule fixed so they can follow it without having to think about particulars. They do not want to see Bob the man, how on Saturday he can have this proclivity and Tuesday not, how Bob might intentionally change his proclivities for the sake of God and the church, how Bob might transform altogether simply as a matter of course and never desire a drink, or how Bob might continue to struggle with alcoholism. They want a formula; they want to reduce Bob to sentence, as if a man were merely ‘an alcoholic’ or ‘a recovered alcoholic’ or ‘a recovering alcoholic.’ They want to say, “Well, since alcohol destroyed Bob’s life, we should all avoid it too.” But the trouble is that this is logically equivalent to saying, “Well, since Mary’s marriage destroyed her life, we should avoid it too.” The evil is not the thing, but the abuse of the thing. The thing itself is good. Because obviously there are goods which, unlike food and water, are not necessary to living—alcohol and marriage—which are disastrous when abused but good when not. That’s what the fundamentalist will never understand. Proper drinking is a beautiful thing, a laudable practice, a Christian virtue. And when he does not participate in it in the right way, he intentionally ignores a part of God’s creation. It would be like waking up at dawn and refusing to look at the sunrise for fear that one might commit idolatry. The beauty of nature can make us idolatrous, but does it follow that we should walk around blindfolded?

Scattered Thoughts on Method

         I have a penchant for putting the Christian faith in awkward situations. What happens, I often wonder, when you run this or that idea through the theoretical machinery of Christianity? Sometimes I think the machinery fails. That is, one particular brand of Christian theory fails, and a better, more suitable theory must be found to replace it. In the end, this method will probably result in me converting to Eastern Orthodoxy, or something. For now, however, it has only resulted in the near total abandonment of Evangelicalism.

        The problem with this method, I’m afraid, is that I have been raised by and large within an Evangelical setting. So when I say ‘Christian’ I conflate it, and was taught to conflate it, with ‘Evangelical.’ Really, when I say anything ‘Christian’ I probably mean something ‘Evangelical.’ At the very least, my starting stock vocabulary is Evangelical. This is tantamount to saying that I have a biased and prejudiced psychology informed by my vocabulary. We all do. In fact, the salient trait I’ve noted about converts to atheism is the narrowness of their views on Christianity. Rarely do they mean Christianity at large: of my atheist friends in this country, most live on the Eastern seaboard, and by Christian they mean Eastern seaboard Evangelicalism and the theoretical framework it espouses.

        But I know better than that, and realize that the actual facts place Evangelicalism on the fringe of Christian belief—historically, and, in more ways than ten, doctrinally. Ask any contemporary religious theorist, and he will tell you how little work has been done of those odd Evangelicals. Don’t take what I’m saying too far, though, I’m cheating (and so are the theorists) when I use ‘Evangelical’ as if its an agreed upon term. It isn’t. It can mean fundamentalist/ emergent/ anarchist/anti-intellectualist/solo scripturalist/ Calvinist/ Presbyterian/ Baptist/ American / superstitious/ emotivist/ etc/etc/etc. Depending on who you talk to it can be a positive or negative term. Any of these terms can. Fundamentalists do not take offense to being called fundamentalists: they take pride in it. The same with Calvinists and solo scripturalists. As far as I’m concerned, of course, they’re all something equivalent to a clown in a ball pit at the end of a rainbow. But in any event, what I mean when I say Evangelical is informed by the environ within which I grew up. Probably it is a useless word.
        So what am I talking about? If I had the space, and you had the patience, I would give numerous case studies to show what exactly happens in the process of theoretical paradigm shifting. There is a psychology to it. What happens to the literal/eternal view of hell, for example, when you ask the question, “how can God be a just God and require infinite punishment for finite sin”? If you don’t have counter-intuitions, fine, but it’s not because the question isn’t problematic to the view, it’s because you don’t understand the problem. The fact that you neglect the problem demonstrates something about the weakness of your curiosity, not the weakness of the problem. And if, as an alternative view, something like Annihilationism doesn’t, intuitively (and prima facie), solve the problem for you, then you are stilted yet again for some reason or another. In these cases, the problem is not the weakness of the proposed criticism or solution, it is the receiver of said criticism or solution. Where the idea cannot even be understood, how can it be said to be wrong?
        Anyway, its the intuition or counter-intuition I’m after, and I’m after them because I’m after the psychology of theorizing.  Theoretical shifting occurs through the conduit of intuitions, not beliefs or knowledge. What happens when the very intuitions we have are biased in favor of this or that system? All intuitions are biased. What happens, moreover, when the very systems we appeal to are biased in favor of intuitions? All systems are biased. Do we dive into the hermeneutic circle, letting our intuitions inform our overarching theories and our overarching theories inform our intuitions? Probably the answer is that we have no option in the matter, and yes. Time to strap on our speedos and take the plunge.  

        I think when we engage theory this way we find that the dialectic will push us toward a more prominent theoretical structure. I think this method will keep us vigilant and always willing to learn. I think this method will ensure that we have to hold more beliefs in abeyance than we wish—a sort of willing suspension of belief thing. I think this method will make us agnostics, but not dogmatic agnostics.

I Allowed Myself a Rant: Tensionism

In my college days i was accused of a little something called "Tensionism." My friends--critical swashbucklers that they were--invented the term in order to poke fun at my attitude towards theological positions, philosophy, and theoretical preoccupations at large. I liked the possibility of coalescing two seemingly incompatible notions; i liked the idea of saying, 'i don't know' with a calm sincerity, even though certainty felt safer; i liked the excitement of a world bigger than i had imagined, scarier than i was told, and richer than i'd dreamed.

Not much has changed since those days. Probably in fact my tensionistic bents have multiplied exponentially since college. 


This is only natural, of course. I attend one of the most liberally minded universities in America, and am working on a degree in Liberal Arts.

Liberal Arts. You realize, i hope, that that's an actual degree. Liberal: it means i study everything.  If someone asks, "Hey Kevin, what did you get your degree in," i may simply and truthfully answer, "Yes." It means that by the time i am done i will have a certified masters degree from the University of Pennsylvania in ....what have you.The plaque on my future office wall will read:

Kevin Hughes

University of Pennsylvania
Master of "What Have You"

I'm being obnoxious. But i have a point to make too.

Tensionism, God bless it, is guided by the general principle that humans are dumber than they think they are, and therefore everybody just needs to calm the balls down. Look at the current political discussions and think about it: polarities dominate, everyone's an authority, everyone's freaking out, and the whole damn things' a giant kerfuffle. Now compare it to the annoyingly popular debate between Calvinism and Arminianism (btw notice how the best theologians are totally unconcerned with this question). People are freaking out. Now take the rantings of Continental philosophers and compare them to the ravings of the Analytic philosophers. Freaking out. Christians vs Atheists. Freaking out. The formatlists vs. the informalists. Essentialists vs nominalists. etc, etc Dear sweet me where does the list end, if ever?


Look: i've made it my (short) life's ambition to dabble in a lot of different areas, to get a feel for a lot of different experiences, and to engage a host of different people. And if there's one thing that a master of everything learns it is that no one is a master of anything. Someone may know a lot about something (and those who know the most tend to say, 'i don't know' the most), but no one knows much. The truth is that none of us has crossed the pons assinorum of any subject, and we are all more or less just trying to get by.

So give your self a hug, take a breath, and most importantly don't treat theory like its dogma. Have few beliefs and a vibrant imagination. Sentiments work best when tied to beliefs, not to probabilities. The rest will take care of itself.
the end

Phil Of Language Paper: Jabberwocky

I am going to look primarily at two passages from Lewis Carroll’s Through The Looking Glass—1.) the Jabberwocky poem and 2.) the Humpty-Dumpty pericope—and analyze them in terms of Gricean and Davidson machinery. Of particular interest here is the first (and last) stanza of Jabberwocky which appears in both passages:

Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

I think most of us would agree with Alice that this stanza has all the appearance of meaning something, but that that meaning, if present at all, is unknowable without some form of help. “It seems very pretty,” she says after her first read, “but it’s rather hard to understand. Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don’t exactly know what they are.”[1] Some chapters later Humpty Dumpty gives Alice his somewhat dubious interpretation of the stanza, explaining the meaning of all the obscure words. For example, he explains that toves are “something like badgers—they’re something like lizards—and they’re something like corkscrews.”[2] In a way his interpretation does not feel like much of an improvement on the first, blind reading. But the very strangeness of the poem and their conversation about it are, I think, what make it worth analyzing in Gricean and Davidson machinery. Grice’s model supplies us with some  basic materials to make sense of Alice and Humpty’s conversation--including the nature of speaker’s intentions, a Cooperative Principle, and implicatures. Davidson, who both builds on and takes Grice to the extreme, touches more directly on words for which interpreters lack a lexical knowledge (like toves), explaining that  only what he calls a ‘passing theory’ sufficiently explains our ability to guess at these types of meanings.

---

     [1] Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, (New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 2004), 164.

     [2] Ibid., 220.

Mafia

Sam and I had planned the whole thing days ago. It was while we crossed the canal into Venice city that I said to him, “Sam, we have to play the perfect game. We have to be the Mafia together, and we have to kill everyone.” We spent the next hour wading through the sea and plotting the perfect storm.

A group of college students were touring Europe, and to kill the travel time 20 or so of us played Mafia in the back of a bus. You all know the rules: an omnipotent narrator controls the village, having all the players close their eyes, while the Mafia is asked to awaken and choose someone to kill. They choose, someone’s life is in danger, and the narrator asks the Mafia to close their eyes again. Next the Sheriff is awakened, asked to silently point out and accuse someone of being Mafia; they are then given the affirmative or negative nod by the all-knowing narrator, and asked to sleep again. Next the nurse awakens, is given the opportunity to save anyone, even themselves, and then falls asleep. No one knows who anyone is except the narrator. No one knows who lives and who dies. Finally, the whole village is awakened by the narrator who informs everyone about who is saved, if anyone, who  is dead, if anyone, and asks whether or not one of the villagers should be accused and hanged as the Mafia. Accusations are made, defenses are given, quarrels arise, a vote is taken, necks are strung, and then another round begins. Those who live till the end are the victors, either the Mafia or the villagers.

“Everyone close your eyes,” said the Narrator. Sam and I threw a knowing glance at each other and shut our eyes for what we knew would be mere seconds . “Mafia awake.” Two days previous in the back alleys of the Venetian labyrinth, tucked away in a whisper I managed to get the Narrator to agree to make the two of us Mafia together.

We knew what we had to do. The first kill was obvious: it had to be Joy. We had observed that no matter what role Joy played in previous games, Mafia, Sheriff, Nurse, or regular townsperson, she talked too much. She stirred the pot and was too good at it. We couldn’t risk that sort of chaos. We were banking on our rhetoric and we needed to silence our main competition.

But that part was obvious. Was easy. Was a segue into the real genius of the plan.

Because the real crux of the thing hinged on the very moment everyone awoke, after the first death had been served, when the accusations began, when the Sheriff—Sam and I did not know who—was in for a bit of a surprise.

“Joy has been killed by the Mafia,” said the Narrator. And I remember to this day the wince that came across her face. For like all the dead things on this earth, she could no longer speak, no longer participate. She was to watch from the sidelines the utter ruin soon to follow.

Then almost before the Narrator finished his words, Sam enacted the plan. He yelped, “Everyone, look, I’m the Sheriff, and I just accused Kevin. He is NOT the Mafia. We can’t hang him”!

Sam had lied. He was not the Sheriff and I was not a villager. We two Mafia had risked everything on a single sentence. We braced ourselves for the fight. It was to be only a matter of seconds before the real Sheriff spoke up.

But the silence that followed had not entered our calculations. For all of our planning, all our ingenuity, we had forgotten one sublime possibility. We had not prepared for the best case scenario.

You see, the idea was for Sam to feign being the Sheriff, to falsely accuse me, to vindicate me, and then for the both of us to prepare for a battle of rhetoric with the true Sheriff. We were to have the upper hand in every way. It would be two against one, the both of us highly confident in ways of manipulation. Sam had also spoken up first giving us the advantage, the actual Sheriff’s simply wouldn’t have had a well formed argument given such an audacious claim on our end.  I myself was ready to give a short speech saying that I heard Sam point toward me during the Sheriff’s time to accuse. And were things to get really iffy Sam had prepared a monologue about how we had planned that if one of us were get Sheriff that they would accuse the other so as to be able to solidify the safety of at least one villager. The strength of the argument was not its logic, but its appeal to the villagers: by eliminating 2 possible suspects—Sam as Sheriff and me as, well, his Deputy—the villagers could focus on hanging others, thus increasing their individual odds of survival. The real Sheriff would have too much stacked up against them. We would overwhelm the villagers with rhetoric, and hang the real Sheriff then and there or we would kill them the next night.

But silence. Complete and utter silence.

It hit us as immediately as it hit Joy’s wincing face. In that quietude we learned how dearly the Mafia gods loved us. By sheer luck we had killed the Sheriff in the first night. Joy was the real Sheriff.

I cannot explain how difficult it was to stifle our laughter.  The only point at which our plan could falter, the only point of risk, had been completely removed from the realm of possibility. As far as the villagers were concerned Sam was the Sheriff and I his Deputy. We were safe and reliable, trustworthy. If the village was to survive the onslaught of the Mafia it would be by our graces.

From thenceforward it was pure Sadism.

I spoke up, “Nurse, listen, you have to keep Sam alive. He’s the Sheriff, the more he can accuse the better chance we have of finding the Mafia.” Sam gave his bit of bull too, “Nurse, actually, even if you want to save Kevin, that’s fine too, at least he can guide the accusations when we’re awake.”

And so it was that the hands that fed them, fed them poison. I had the villagers arbitrarily hanging each other during the waking hours, and Sam had the pleasure of killing the villagers during the sleeping hours. But perhaps best of all we had the Nurse tending to the ailments of the Mafia. It was a massacre, an ambush, a Kansas City Shuffle if ever there were one. They died one by one, some near 20 people, without a single moment’s danger for either Sam or myself.

And what I remember most is the faces of the dead. Of course, when the Narrator said “Mafia wake up” for the next 7 or 8 rounds, the newly dead did not expect to find Sam and I’s eyes peering into the crowd, seeking whom we may devour. Sometimes there was shock, mouths agape, sometimes horror, other times anger, hands flailing violently into the air. They had trusted us with their lives because we made them believe we were trustworthy.

At one point someone even joked, “wouldn’t it be crazy if Sam and Kevin were Mafia”? They thought when we laughed we were laughing with them. We were laughing at them.

Of course Sam and I won. It wasn’t even a competition. Without doubt, after that evening the two of us never made it past the first two rounds. We were hung immediately and with malice. No one has trusted us ever since.

But it didn’t matter. We had played the perfect game. The game never to be surpassed.

First Paragraph of Religious Theories Paper

The footnote will probably make it to the trash bin—both because the beginning of a paper should not have an enormous footnote and because I should not start by treating my key interlocutor with blatant antipathy. But dadgumit, I find the guy irritatingly imprecise, and since my prof won’t be reading this footnote, maybe one of you will. That should make me feel better.

First Paragraph:

Wayne Proudfoot argues that religious experiences are constituted by language paradigms. More precisely, he believes that mystical experiences obtain their specific phenomenological character in part due to the logical apparatus inherent to a corresponding religious vocabulary. So, for instance, one of the conditions necessary for experiencing nirvana is the disciple’s familiarity with and, in some cases, adherence to predetermined doctrines specified by Buddhist’s dogma.[1] Proudfoot takes this basic argument and criticizes William James’ typology of mystical experience as it appears in The Varieties of Religious Experience. This paper aims to understand the extent to which Proudfoot’s theory is applicable to James and at what point the two thinkers are talking past each other.

---

[1] To say, as Proudfoot does, that when the Buddha characterizes nirvana as ineffable or St. Francis characterizes communion with God as ineffable that these two tokens of ineffability are not phenomenologically isomorphic experiences fails, in the end, to say much at all. If we bracket the harder points of Husserl’s phenomenological reduction, and assume, as everyone does, the real possibility of inter-subjectivity, no one may be said to share a phenomenologically isomorphic experience under any conditions. To use Husserl’s terminology, the horizonal content—retentions like memories or past experiences (including language) and protentions like present appearances or future possibilities—is always different for everyone. Falling in love for Bob or for Jane may be called the same thing by both, but that love appears differently to both people. Analogously, the ineffable mystical experience as it appears to any individual is inevitably different—whether due to the religious language employed or merely a difference in point of view i.e. both being part of the horizonal content. Given Proudfoot’s criteria, the same criticism might be applied to states of nirvana, i.e. that the Buddha experiencing nirvana cannot be the same as some other Buddhist experiencing nirvana in virtue of the two Buddhist’s differing language armamentarium. If Proudfoot wants to go the reductionstic route, he must either tell us where to stop or keep going to the logical conclusion. So far as I can tell, he gives no hints about stopping, only insisting that ineffability for Buddhists is different from ineffability for Christians. Well, of course it is! But if the criteria for these differences is merely the phenomenological character of an experience constituted by a language—where all persons have a different set of horizonal language games constituting the appearance or experience of mystical states—then, like ineffability, no state of nirvana is alike: no nirvana is the same as the original state of nirvana. Why is Proudfoot willing to critique differing religious paradigms and not homogenous religious persons where the criticism can apply to both groups? Why is Proudfoot comfortable keeping nirvana in tact and not ineffability? It all sounds vaguely Derridadian to me.