by Carl Pierer

“(…) [M]y own body is the primordial habit, the one that conditions all others and by which they can be understood. Its near presence and its invariable perspective are not a factual necessity, since factual necessity presupposes them. (…) I observe external objects with my body, I handle them, inspect them, and walk around them. But when it comes to my body, I never observe it itself. I would need a second body to be able to do so, which would itself be unobservable.” —Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Phenomenology of Perception, p. 93)

Having criticised the two dominant, opposing camps – one, broadly speaking, Humean, one Kantian – in the introduction, Merleau-Ponty tries to understand in the present section the role of our body in perception. He argues that the commitment to certain notions as fundamental shared by the two camps is mistaken; most relevant here are those of ‘subject' and ‘object'. In contrast to the inherited view that the subject-object distinction is fundamental, he argues there exists something more primordial: the body. For Merleau-Ponty, because of the body's priority, the accepted distinctions make sense only against the background of the body. To establish this, Merleau-Ponty first shows that our relation to our body is different from our relation to any other object. Then, he demonstrates that the former relation prefigures the latter.

In this quotation, Merleau-Ponty argues that the body cannot be thought as an object among others. If it could, then it would need to be given to us as an object of perception. But, unlike genuine objects of perception:

1. The body as an object of perception is not the same as the body that perceives.
2. Even as an ‘object' of perception, our relation to it is different from the one we have to any other object of perception. In particular, it features:
   1. ‘Near presence', and
   2. ‘Inevitable perspective'.

This essay will focus on (2.) to illustrate how thinking about its ‘near presence' and ‘inevitable perspective' reveals the inherited view to render our relation to the body ambiguous, one that fits neither that of a subject nor that of an object. This ambiguity will lead to the idea of the ‘primordial habit'. It would then be but a small step to show that the distinction is based on this primordial relation, yet to do so is beyond this essay.

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by Mathangi Krishnamurthy

Welcome to April. It is already the fourth month of the year, and I meditate as I write, on the simultaneous passage and non-passage of time. Everyday the newspaper tells me of a number of unbidden catastrophes, accidents of fate, so many lives snuffed out as if life were not, as I think it to be, certain and plan-worthy. The rude interruption of children, men, and women, to and fro in the business of life, and the visitation of deep and unthinking sorrow upon all those whose lives they touch.

Those lists I peruse a couple of times a week, “Ten Ways to be more Productive”, “Fifty Tips to Happiness”, and “The One Secret to finding your Purpose in Life”, all tell me to stop reading the newspaper. But this I cannot do. Long years ago, I was taught by well-meaning, upstanding, middle-class family members, that to be engaged in the business of the world, one must read the newspaper. And after all, if I am not nationalist enough to yell out praises at the nation morning, noon, and night, I can, at least, in good old Benedict Anderson fashion, read the damn newspaper.

Why, pray, you ask, are you so melancholic? This isn't on me, I plead. I am in the throes of PMS. Now the thing, of course, is that I may or may not be. Not that PMS is not real. But its symptoms, ranging across 200 or more possible sensations, and consequences, provide a wide ambit of possibilities. And within this ambit of possibilities, it feels as though my body gives me the permission to feel all those things that I keep tightly suppressed for worry of work, schedules, time, and money. So for a couple of days a month, I feel free. To not be cheerful, or happy, or certain, or plant my feet on the ground. I feel the freedom to be burdened, and uncomfortable. And this of course, is a gendered function; not a function of the female gender mind you, but a gendered function. For both, the inability and ability to show emotion, are deeply gendered propositions. The one that gives in to deeply felt traumas, and hysteria, and dislocations is weak, and not in control. But the one that is otherwise controlled, but feels compelled at key moments to give in to emotion is primal. And I'm in the throes of a primal PMS.

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Only in myth is death an illusion,
but there’s beauty in hope
and hope in myth
and myth in true profusion
…………….. —Angela DiSperanza
.
Grief to Myth

When they came to the tomb’s stone
it was set aside as if the occupant they’d loved
had gone to breakfast with friends
leaving a folded sheet for them
and some linen strips or not
and, as some say, a young man or an angel or two
who said, Your hope’s still in the world,
go find it. So their sadness left,
their grief became hope,
hope turned to myth
as word spread on myth’s wings
with love’s wind behind it
.

Jim Culleny
Easter, 2016

by Sarah Firisen

There’s never been a better, safer, healthier, fairer time to be a woman than right now. On the other hand, the bar was set pretty low for most of history. Yes, we are no longer chattel, the property of our fathers and husbands. We can vote, hell one of us is probably on track to be the leader of the free world come January. But in reality, there have been other major female leaders before: Margaret Thatcher, what about Queen Elizabeth I in the 16th century, how much did she do to advance the cause of women in England? How much did either of them do, either in terms of policy or as icons who caused a major shift in public attitude and behavior?

But yes, I’m glad I’m alive now. Even so, let’s not kid ourselves that the fight has been won, even if we end up with President Hillary Clinton come January. No matter where you look, women continue to be undervalued and underrepresented, and that’s the good end of the scale. When I say that there’s never been a safer, healthier and fairer time to be a woman, I really mean in the west. Women are still treated as chattel across much of Africa, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent and beyond. But even in the west, we have a long way to go. Even though women are now better educated than men, equally interested in the same careers and with almost as much experience in the workplace, a recent New York Times article cited the depressing fact that not only are women still earning about 87 cents on the dollar for the same job as men, but “when women enter fields in greater numbers, pay declines — for the very same jobs that more men were doing before.” And it seems this is job agnostic and actually also works in the opposite direction: jobs pay more once they start being done by men “Computer programming, for instance, used to be a relatively menial role done by women. But when male programmers began to outnumber female ones, the job began paying more and gained prestige.”

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by Leanne Ogasawara

“Italian Criminal Masterminds Heisted $875,000 Worth of Parmesan”

“Only in Italy,” I thought a few months ago when I read the headline above. Of course, Italian cheeses, like French wines, have been highly valued and given as gifts of diplomacy to kings and queens since at least the Medieval period. Samuel Pepys famously buried his Parmesan cheese in a hole dug in his garden when the London Fire broke out. Truly, Italian cheeses and wines are wondrous– just like the cities in which they were born!

And of all the delicious cities in Italy, maybe nowhere is quite as wondrously delectable as Modena.

A native son of the great city of cheese, Massimo Bottura is considered to be one of the greatest chefs on earth–and a few years ago, his 3 Michelin star restaurant, the Osteria Francescana, was ranked #2 in the world.

Located in one of Modena's back streets, Bottura says the city of his birth is defined by fast cars (Ferrari and Maserati) and slow food. Located between Parma and Bologna, the medieval town of Modena is situated smack in the middle of what is a world food capital. Yes, I am talking about gorgeous artisan cheeses carefully aged on cheese wheels (including the famed Parmigiano Reggiano), countless kinds of ham and sausage (Bologna gives its name to what it goes by in America), and a kind of Balsamic vinegar so it exquisite it reminds one of wine.

And did I mention vignola cherries?

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by Bill Benzon

Well, it wasn’t quite like that.

For one thing, they weren’t really trumpeters. They held the horns and blew through them, but not much came out. If those guys were trumpeters, then my name’s James Bond and I’m a secret agent who’s saved the world from countless psychotic megalomaniacal industrialists. Bond isn’t my name and I’m not a secret agent.

Chet the Jet

But I was part of a situation in which three trumpet players manqué did manage to escape from prison. Me and Chet the Jet—that’s what we sometimes called him, but only behind his back. Dr. Chester H. Wickwire was University Chaplain at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore back in the previous century. I’d been an undergraduate there and then took a job in the Chaplain’s Office. This was during the Vietnam era and I’d been a conscientious objector to military service and so had to perform alternative service, as it was called. The Selective Service System allowed me to work with the Chaplain’s Office.

We, Dr. Wickwire’s staff, sometimes referred to him as Chet the Jet. Just where and why that nickname, I don’t know. It had been in place for some time. But it was oddly apt. Dr. Wickwire couldn’t jet about anywhere. He’d had polio in his youth and needed two canes for support when walking, though he made do with one for short distances.

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by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash

Paul Krugman has become our most original and insightful commentator on the American scene. In his essential NY Times column, he was the first pundit to attack George W Bush, way before 9/11 or the Iraq War. He called Bush Jr a liar, and said Bush fudged his economic numbers.

But lately, Krugman has been a disappointment, because of his persistent sneering at Bernie Sanders.

What's up with that? Bernie Sanders may be our first honest politician, a straight-up progressive, who is doing America the favor of moving Hillary over to the left. He is an authentic dyed-in-the-wool liberal who complained about income inequality decades before Occupy Wall Street made it part of the national conversation. He voted against the Iraq War. His prescriptions would turn us into a socialist democratic state with a strong social safety net and a better single-payer health system. He stands for a $15 minimum wage. Free community college tuition, paid for by a Wall Street transaction tax. Big infrastructure spending for more jobs. Money out of politics. Break up the big banks.

What's not to like about Bernie?

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by Matt McKenna

Here’s the concept: two powerful white dudes fight each other until they’re forced to confront a common enemy, which more often than not is another powerful white dude. Are we talking about the plot of Batman v Superman or the sad reality of American presidential politics? Could be either, right? Well, both the movie and the current election cycle have left critics displeased and audiences entertained. Although Batman v. Superman has received only a 29% from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, it has received a much better 71% from the audience. The primary election season has experienced a similar dichotomy between critics and the general audience: hardly a moment passes without a cultural critic decrying the base nature of this election cycle, yet audiences are tuning into election coverage on cable news channels in record numbers. Personally, I find the film much less offensive than the current (or any) election cycle if only because the film is fictional.

Batman v Superman is the narrative linchpin for Time Warner’s “DC Extended Universe,” which is an attempt to cash in on its ownership of the DC Comics characters the way that Disney has cashed in on its ownership of the Marvel Comics characters through developing a film franchise in which all the heroes fight on the same team in recurring, ever more expensive summer blockbusters. Therefore, although the film is called Batman v Superman, viewers shouldn’t be surprised to find out that Batman and Superman eventually stop fighting each other so they can go after the “real” bad guy, which (spoiler!) is exactly how the United States’ primary election process will play out. For all the jabs Republicans Ted Cruz and Donald trump take at each other, they will ultimately join forces to attempt to defeat the Democrat candidate in the general election. The same goes for Democrats Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, who will somehow forget all their prior complaints and support each other in defeating the Republican candidate.

If Batman and Superman becoming buddies sounds a lot like presidential primary opponents supporting each other in the general election, then the similarity between Superman’s struggles and Donald Trump’s campaign will be downright obvious with the one major discrepancy being that Superman is famously known for his good haircut.

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by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

We have never embraced political conservatism. However, we also think that the conservative tradition in American politics is intellectually formidable. We find the best representatives of that tradition to be rigorous, insightful, and philosophically astute. They are political commentators for whom ideas matter. In their best work we find proposals and principles that we think are incorrect, but never merely stupid.

And this is as it should be. The entire system of American democracy is based on the premise that reasonable, intelligent, and well-informed citizens of integrity and good-will might nevertheless disagree deeply and sharply about fundamental moral, social, and political matters. Many of the most familiar political and constitutional mechanisms of our politics are aimed at managing such reasonable disagreement among citizens in a way that all disputants could be expected to recognize as even-handed, fair, civil, and rational. What's more, reasoned yet deep disagreement among intelligent and sincere citizens is not some unfortunate obstacle that democratic citizens should wish could be surmounted; working through such disagreements while sustaining conditions of civility and stable governance simply is what modern democracy is all about.

In this way, a modern democratic society needs there to be combating traditions of political commitment. Those who tend to find conservatism lacking need there to be stalwart defenders of conservative views that are articulate and smart. And the same goes for those who tend to reject various forms of liberalism and progressivism; they need there to be formidable exponents of the views they oppose. As we have written in previous 3QD posts, and have argued in our book Why We Argue (And How We Should), the only responsible way to oppose a view is to oppose the best version of it, and this requires one to know the best arguments in its favor. To put the point dramatically, modern democracy is an intellectual ecosystem that thrives only under conditions of civil disagreement among sincere and intelligent citizens. Were one of the many longstanding and noble traditions of democratic political thought to disappear from the public debate, the entire system would suffer.

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by Jonathan Kujawa

On March 15th it was announced that Andrew Wiles won the 2016 Abel Prize. Established in 2002, the Abel Prize has become arguably the most prestigious prize in mathematics. In contrast to the Fields medal, which is awarded to those under 40, the Abel prize set itself as the prize which recognizes long term contributions to mathematics.

In keeping with tradition (see here: 2015, 2014) we're taking the opportunity to check out the math of behind the Abel Prize. This is the rare instance when the prizewinner's work appeared in the New York Times and may well need no introduction. Wiles won for

…for his stunning proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem by way of the modularity conjecture for semistable elliptic curves, opening a new era in number theory.

— from the Abel Prize Announcement

Fermat's Last Theorem (FLT) is the claim that, for any n greater than or equal to three, there are no integer solutions to the equation

That is, you can't find numbers a, b, and c from among 0, 1, -1, 2, -2,… which can be plugged into

and have the same number on both sides of the equal sign. The same goes if the six is replaced with a 3, or 2016, or 187,201, or any other number greater than or equal to three.

If you haven't heard of FLT before, it's hard to see why anyone should give a rat's rear end about whether nor not there are integer solutions to this equation. On the other hand, Fermat conjectured FLT in 1637 and here we are in 2016 giving Wiles the Abel Prize for proving that yes, indeed, there are no such solutions. Something interesting must be going on.

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by Misha Lepetic

“She was Dolores on the dotted line.”
~ Nabokov

Artificial intelligence – or rather the phenomena that are being shoved under the ever-widening rubric of AI – has had an interesting few weeks. On the one hand, Google's DeepMind division staged a veritable coup when its AlphaGo AI soundly thrashed the world #1 Go player Lee Se-dol in the venerated Chinese strategy game, four games to one. This has been widely covered, and with justification. Experts will be poring over these games for years, and AlphaGo's unorthodox gameplay is already changing the way top practitioners of the game view strategy. It is particularly noteworthy that Fan Hui, the European Go champion who went down 5-0 to AlphaGo in January, has since then joined the DeepMind team as an advisor and played AlphaGo often. This is not a Chris Christie-style capitulation, but rather an understandable fascination with a style of play that has been described as unearthly. It's no exaggeration to say that the history of the game can now be clearly divided into pre- and post-AlphaGo eras.

Which isn't to say that this shellacking has beaten humanity into quiescence. Earlier this week, we exacted some sort of revenge by appropriating Microsoft's latest entry into social AI, the Twitter bot @TayandYou, and transformed it into “a racist, sexist, trutherist, genocidal maniac”. If we were to consider @TayandYou and AlphaGo to be birds of a feather, which is of course sloppy thinking of the highest (lowest? most average?) order, that would be a small consolation indeed, and not much different from stamping on an ant after you just got mauled by a bear, and still feeling good about it. But comparing @TayandYou and AlphaGo does lead to some useful insights, because one of the principal issues confronting the field of AI is the idea of purpose. This month, I'll look at the case of @TayandYou, and follow up with AlphaGo in April, since come April no one will remember @TayandYou, whereas with AlphaGo there's at least a chance.

Now, this idea of AIs lacking a purpose may seem like a daft claim. After all, the softwares in question were created by teams of computer scientists backed by wealthy corporations (artificial intelligence is the sport and pastime of what passes for kings these days). And in the popular consciousness AIs are implacably possessed of purpose, usually to the detriment of the human species. There seems to be little chance that there could be any ambiguity about such a basic question. Still, the extraordinary flameout of @TayandYou beckons the question of what, precisely, any specific AI is for. For what was really at stake with @TayandYou will, I think, be very surprising.

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by Tamuira Reid

My mother loves the ocean. It sings to her, she says. When we lived in Manteca we didn't have an ocean. The only place you could find water was in the swimming pool.

She says if it's not singing than it's telling her stories. She says she sees faces in the waves. She doesn't know any of them though.

***

I was nine when my parents divorced and we moved to Santa Cruz. We played in the white wash for hours, the salt sticking to our legs in sheets. My mother watched from her perch further up the shore. She didn't like to get wet.

“Can you believe it? Two blocks from the beach.”

“It's an apartment, mom. And it's green.”

She danced around the tiny two-bedroom apartment with my little sister on her hip. When she tugged on the mini-blinds, they scrolled up, the kitchen filling with an obnoxious light. Everything was bright in this town; there was light everywhere.

“Come on you guys. It's not that bad. Look – you've got a beach for a front yard, for Christ's sake.”

“I miss my dad.”

Maeghan started to cry. I decided the sound of the ocean scared her. My mother tried to quiet her, gently kissing the top of her head. Everyone was tired. She looked out the window at the U-Haul parked sideways across the front lot. Our old life had been reduced to nothing more than a sofa and some chairs.

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by Jalees Rehman

“Let others praise ancient times. I am glad that I was born in these.”

– Ovid in “Ars Amatoria”

When I struggle with scientist's block, I play 1980s music with the hope that the music will inspire me. This blast from the past often works for me. After listening to the songs, I can sometimes perceive patterns between our various pieces of cell biology and molecular biology data that had previously eluded me and design new biological experiments. But I have to admit that I have never performed the proper music control studies. Before attributing inspirational power to songs such as “99 Luftballons“, “Bruttosozialprodukt” or “Billie Jean“, I ought to spend equal time listening to music from other decades and then compare the impact of these listening sessions. I have always assumed that there is nothing intrinsically superior or inspirational about these songs, they simply evoke memories of my childhood. Eating comfort foods or seeing images of Munich and Lagos that remind me of my childhood also seem to work their muse magic.

My personal interpretation has been that indulging nostalgia somehow liberates us from everyday issues and worries – some trivial, some more burdensome – which in turn allows us to approach our world with a fresh, creative perspective. It is difficult to make such general sweeping statements based on my own anecdotal experiences and I have always felt a bit of apprehension about discussing this with others. My nostalgia makes me feel like an old fogey who is stuck in an ossified past. Nostalgia does not have a good reputation. The German expression “Früher war alles besser!” (Back then, everything used to be better!) is used in contemporary culture to mock those who always speak of the romanticized past with whimsical fondness. In fact, the expression nostalgia was coined in 1688 by the Swiss medical student Johannes Hofer. In his dissertation “Dissertatio Medica de Nostalgia oder Heimweh“, Hofer used nostalgia as an equivalent of the German word Heimweh (“home-ache”), combining the Greek words nostos(homecoming) and algos (ache or pain), to describe a medical illness characterized by a “melancholy that originates from the desire to return to one's homeland“. This view of nostalgia as an illness did not change much during the subsequent centuries where it was viewed as a neurological or psychiatric disorder.

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by Andy Martin

I don't know if anyone else has noticed, but there is a curious correspondence, almost an alignment, between Lee Child's Make Me and Jonathan Franzen's Purity, published in the same month, September 2015. Both have at their core, a murder story. I think there is only one in Purity, whereas there are approximately 200 more in Make Me. Industrial-scale. Jack Reacher has to solve that puzzle. Whereas in Franzen the murderer himself has to go and blab about it. He can't shut up about it. So the two writers must have been in touch recently – I like to imagine – just to compare notes and pass on a few tips.

JONATHAN FRANZEN RE-WRITTEN BY LEE CHILD

Begin with a backhoe. Obviously. Look at pp. 134-5 [of Purity]: Andreas spends far too much time digging. With a shovel. Get some decent machinery in there. Why struggle? Dig the hole deeper, shove the guy in, cover it over. Job done. Don't sweat it. And look, you postpone the murder till after page 100. Which is too long. Postponement is one thing, but you are going to lose a helluva lot of readers that way. (And then you take pages and pages just to do it! What is your problem?) You either need to kick off with the murder and then Andreas is the bad guy who must be hunted down (by the way, your solution for what happens to him… why the hell would he do that?) or… and this is more promising: what if he has a far better reason for knocking off this guy than… oh yeah, his girlfriend asks him to. ‘Hey, Andreas, would you mind if…?' Come on!

Stepfather? What about Godfather? What if you have Andreas, with all his skills, and his team of hackers, crack the mystery of this bad guy who must be channelling funds to Al-Qaeda while running drugs and girls and degraded nuclear material (probably polluting the environment too) and finally, and here we come to a climax, nailing this woman Pip, who is an ex-FBI agent (maybe abducting her, locking her up, and sadistically abusing…) And so Andreas is fully and righteously justified in offing him. No anxieties, no remorse. Maybe Pip could help bury him. A woman driving the backhoe. Which would be a breakthrough. Good revenge motive.

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by Yohan J. John

There is a story that I think anyone interested in human knowledge ought to know. It comes in many forms. Here is one version, incarnated as a joke: 'A policeman sees a drunk man searching for something under a streetlight and asks what the drunk has lost. He says he lost his keys and they both look under the streetlight together. After a few minutes the policeman asks if he is sure he lost them here, and the drunk replies, no, that he lost them in the park. The policeman asks why he is searching here, and the drunk replies, “this is where the light is.”'

A parable featuring the Seljuk Sufi mystic Nasrudin Hodja may be the earliest form of the story: 'Someone saw Nasrudin searching for something on the ground. “What have you lost, Mulla?” he asked. “My key,” said the Mulla. So they both went down on their knees and looked for it. After a time the other man asked: “Where exactly did you drop it?” “In my own house.” “Then why are you looking here?” “There is more light here than inside my own house.”' The Indologist Wendy Doniger quotes this parable in her book The Hindus: An Alternative History, as a way to prepare the reader for the disappointing realization that the “available light” on Hinduism — the hymns, the histories, the archaeological remains — tends to illuminate the perspectives of dominant groups, relegating to the shadows the viewpoints of women, lower castes, and other marginalized groups.

Noam Chomsky has a characteristically dry and precise version of the story: “Science is a bit like the joke about the drunk who is looking under a lamppost for a key that he has lost on the other side of the street, because that’s where the light is. It has no other choice.”

So historians, mystics, scientists and drunks have something in common: they all tend to seek the truth where the process of seeking is easy, rather than where truth is. Responses to this problem vary. The mystic is most likely trying to remind the listener of how limited human knowledge is, and how often we look for solutions in precisely the wrong places. The humanities professor Doniger uses the problem as a justification for reading between the lines: using the available light to speculate about what may lie in the darkness. And the cognitive scientist Chomsky seems to be using the problem to justify why scientists answer questions that are almost, but not quite, entirely unlike the questions they originally set out to answer.

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