About Andrea

And if I did not stand-up vociferously for the rights and freedoms of others, where would my conscience itself lie? Fallow. And my reputation? Fallen.

 

I’m sure you can alientate your parents and friends even in France by becoming a philosopher.  That’s a quote from the introduction  of “American Philosopher” by Phillip McReynolds. At least you can ruffle some French feathers if you’re an empirical minded philosopher, who loves science and objective truth. Where is all that talk of language games, and the “subjective truth of subjectivity”?

 

 

Well, from the pen of Andrea, you get hyper-objectivity – there are truths in science, aesthetics, morality, psychology, even politics. Truth is not a democracy. There is objective reality. Sometimes the state of reality is prior to and entirely independent of our observations. Sometimes it is prior to, but altered by our observations. On occasion, it is both created by and altered by the act of observation. Whatever the permutation, the act of observation and the objective reality observed are not to be equated or collapsed one into the other. That would be the folly of anti-realism. There is evidence, then there are hypothesis based on the evidence as to the objective facts. Evidence for one hypothesis may well be another hypothesis based on other evidence. That’s the way it is, get used to it. Occasionally, hypotheses rise to the level of generality and have survived such repeated falsification that they attain the status of honorary facts. But that is a grace-and-favour accolade, waiting to be withdrawn.

Some non-controversial examples. The Earth is round. Actually, because of centrifugal effects, the distance from centre to surface is approx 0.33% shorter at the poles compared to equator. The murder of millions in the Nazi gas-chambers happened.  Evolution happens. The universe consists of atoms and sub-atomic particles. I’m not making a crass series of category mistakes. I fully realize that some of the most interesting truths are, shall we say, inter-subjective and dependent on volatile states of mind or feeling – “Does s/he love me? Do I understand and appreciate my friend? If s/he knows that I’m doing this for her/his benefit for this reason, s/he’ll think that my motives are questionable, that I have ulterior motives. But I don’t want my intentions to be dependent on her misunderstanding of my wishes. ” There are cases where the content of your belief and feeling is dependent on a pre-emption of another person’s reaction to either your belief or your motives for holding that belief.  The content is also dependent on a theory of what it is to treat a person as an end in themselves. Etc, etc – substitute your own examples.  

 

I well understand that the scientific method requires not just theories that accord with the facts, offer powerful explanations, make testable predictions, and so far are falsifiable but not fatally falsified. Thank you Sir Karl Popper. The scientific method requires a plausible theory of meaning and truth, so that we can generate theories that explain consciousness and languages – that synthesize life and objective reality.

 

 

Nor am I a fascist theoretician of the perfectly ordered society. I would rather cut my wrists. Or take an overdose of anti-depressants, again. What I failed to say was that for many subjects, we have as yet no successful procedures for discovering truths, no predominant paradigms. Further, most of life requires a very, very wide margin of discretion, as English common law judges will remark. I may reasonably conclude you are in error, you may in fact be in error, but it was and still remains reasonable for you to think and act in erroneous ways. Perhaps for many subjects, though there is objective truth, we may never determine what it is. That is my strong realism.

 

 

But, proof of non-determinabilty is required, not mere pretentious postulation, spoken with a Gitanes Brunes non filter-tip on your lips and a hand waving for a copy of the New York Herald Tribune.

 

Liberty as a form of condescension, I here you quip? I have a better quip:

 

 ”Under the First Amendment, there is no such thing as a false idea,” and the only way that ideas can be suppressed is through “the competition of other ideas,” Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc., 418 U.S. at 339-340.

 

 

Get out there and argue. Don’t moan. Either shut up or speak out and act, though always with an honest ear for criticisms of your factual errors, wrong theories or daft contradictions. Freedom of expression is the founding freedom of the individual and of a democracy of individuals. Without it, no other freedoms can be exercised, no complaints reliably heard, no other truths discovered or propounded.

 

Freedom of expression, whatever its limits, is not governed by a dainty regard for your or my beliefs, or someones sensibilities, let alone anyones religious convictions, most certainly not a pride in a faction of friends or even a country. My fellows, engaged citizens of a republic, are women of phlegm and robust constitution. In the public sphere, we expect to be outraged and our most cherished opinions upbraided and rediculed. That, as well as taxes, is the price of civilisation. If that price is also to be called intolerant, or disrespectful or prejudiced or biased, or a thousand arrows pricking me with moral taint, then I reflect how a woman asking for a right to vote, to divorce, to equal pay, to autonomy in her choice of lovers, to governance of her fertility, was once called outrageous. Ha, the price for me is cheap.

 

 

I advance a theory or two. Monotheism and monogamy. They’ve got at least one thing in common. They’re factually wrong – there are no gods, reigning singularly or as materfamilias of a gaggle of divine delinquents. People do not have only one lover, either in practice or in their hearts and imaginations. More errors? They produce considerable anxiety, with no justification. There is no emotional benefit to giving or requiring exclusive fidelity, to fictional beings or real people. Such ideas are intellectually and morally corrupting. One is required to accede to a proposition one does not believe in and which the evidence demonstrates is false. Ascribing to falsehoods is per se ethically wrong, though there might be a higher justification, like lying to the Gestapo about the whereabouts of the hidden radio. Once you acquire the habit of entertaining patent falsehoods, it’s a slippery slope to falsehoods like “killing innocent people is more acceptable if they are of a different tribe or nation.”

 

In case I begin to sound as if I have a monomania for criticising monopolies, may I say I like classic film noir, shot in monochrome. How I wish I was as beautiful, sassy, sexy, well-dressed and smart as Dorothy Malone. How many people have the charm to handle Humph? Bookstores are interesting places to work, browse and observe. Oh, and flirt and sip on a bottle of rye, then get wet inside.

 

 

 

I’d probably vote for a good mass-transit system. In fact, I live not far from Springfield Marina. What do we need for the Olympic Village? Monorails!

 

What is my chief characteristic? Good friends put a skip in my step, as I rush like a schoolgirl to meet them. Once I sat on the sidewalk (I mean pavement) on St James Street off Oxford Street, talking with The Non-Barefoot Contessa and Fritz the Kat (pseudonyms, of course). The Contessa talked of her lover, who had bought her a tickling rabbit. Fritz opined that this was not in jest, and perhaps the lover was nervous. “Does your lover know you well enough to buy you presents that you would buy yourself?” I asked. “Not always”, the Contessa replied, and went on to detail how her lover’s parents keep a timetable of her lover’s life, including episodes when she and the lover are together. The lover lives with the parents. “Perhaps”, I suggested, “you should walk into the family home, say hello to the XY parent, offer to make love with said XY person for £100, and say the XX parent can admire the performance. Then take a good look at your lover to gauge where your lover’s loyalty lies. If people are so retro as to believe in heterosexuality and marriage, it’s their look-out.”

 

 

True enough, my good works – the works of peace of this heroine’s life – include love for a price. I am a not unattractive escort girl, whose forté is dating couples, preferably the XX/XY variety. The oft-told tale is that the young Johannes Brahms earned her-his-her living playing in taverns by day and brothels by night, the Animierlokale of Hamburg’s waterfronts. It may be a few years since I was in my teens, but I do not subscribe to the image conjured up – part moralised, part sentimental – of Johannes being shocked by the sights, and mocked by the waitresses for her studiousness. Nor do I suppose Johannes was so timid or incurious as to sit at the keyboard, spinning dances and marches, and reading from humdrum books of romantic poetry, yet never turning round to savour the engagements of the lovers. Despite a confirmed bachelorhood, nowhere in the music do I hear a trace of distaste for the feminine or earthy life. The composer of the Hungarian Dances understood unbuttoned joi de vivre.

 

 

No, in such circumstances I see one source of Johannes’ musical fingerprint. A love of formal perfection born from a determination to be exact in even the most uproarious circumstances. A deep emotionalism and realism, checked by the melancholic knowledge that passion or gaiety or companionship all fade by morning. This is Brahms the modernist and humanist. 

When someone has their fingers exploring inexpertly the moist folds of my pussy, or too roughly touching my clit, I take their wrist and stop them. The folly belongs to bio-men and bio-women. If I’m perched on their lap, I press my breasts against their chest, and kiss them to show my appetite for better intimacy. “Think,”‘ I say, “of the thousand ways to stroke the keyboard. Start again, as if performing to an expectant audience an intermezzo or rhapsody by Brahms. Know that I’m aching for you to do it well.” I raise myself from them, arch my back, raise my knees so they have full sight, and say: “Here is all myself, my means, my vehicle of love, my instrument for you to adore.” If they ask if I’m in love with them, I reply: “Did you come to me wanting to fall in love with me? Or perhaps with someone else?” If I am in jesting mood, I say, avoiding the question: “You look so beautiful, I can hardly keep my eye on when 1hr is up.”

 

In my fancy, I think how human life – an admixture of physics and psyche – could be re-embodied, recoded, reborn in music and language. Perhaps that is its proper realm already. We have our thoughts, our feelings in the machine states of the body, unreadable by current technology if in our private theatre, but eminently visible if we had enough computing power and synaptic readers. How much already of what we feel is well visible to any shrewd observer of our eyes, our lips, all our faces, our poses, our hands? Which of us walks just the paths of a private island, that we do not detect, react to and in turn influence the behaviours of others, in a hundred encounters - on the Tube, in the public toilets, on the staircase or lift at work, jumping a queue with an insincere apology at the supermarket. So much of this is transacted between the unconscious psyches of each of us, the effects bubbling up in our moods.

 

Les philosophes français are forever saying the distinction between the conscious and unconscious hovers in the distinction between the meanings of our sentences. Retrospectively, we may be content to say that we truly said what we meant, and the next moment have that conviction revised by a wise friend, a sincere lover, a disputant, a smart-alec lecturer, a passionate adversary, an overpaid analyst. By insight or by humour, they say what we more wisely wished to say, and so often about our feelings, so very often our feelings regarding another. And how embarrassingly frequent is the observation that we drive ourselves to act imprudently, or discourteously, or in frustration of our love for another, precisely because we do not realise the meaning of our feelings. If someone asks what is meant, in general form, by not realising the meaning of our feelings, my answer is incomplete.

 

 

Life and love as  language and music? The question then is how to retain the individuation that delimits each person, within this network? It is an interesting observation that at the finest concerts, audience and players are convincingly described as no longer strongly individuated.

 

 

They have become synchronised in emotional states driven by the musical forms. The players in a strong sense are on autopilot, transmuting the score into sound. Unless they’ve lost the bar, dropped the mute, or are unwrapping the sweet from its paper.