Coup de Grîce

by JLS
-- for the GC

THIS IS A COMMENTARY ON L. K. HELM´s genial post, "Other voices, other implicatures". As he notes, it all boils down to founding myths of this or that nation. And to understand the admirable features of a fellow nation, or one´s own, one has to be able to immerse oneself into the other implicatures, of the other voices -- the poliphonies of thought!

Thanks for the clarification, then about the "transitivity" or lack thereof, of things like "I admire". "I admire that you admire", "but I don´t go on to admire you" and so on. What a pretty complex verb that little thing, ´admire´ is, implicature-wise!

That was a good exercise of application, and I loved your title, "Other Voices, Other Implicatures". It is just genial.

Yes, many people admire Capote! In fact, I know people who´ve seen Hoffman´s playing Capote and came out admiring Hoffman FOR having played Capote. He has a new one now, "Synechdoche", which seems like a film with a Griceian ring to it!

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Perhaps part of the problem is the expression "man of letters". The French, we don´t know where they get their expressions from. But coming from a country which takes French culture very seriously I have suffered it! There is a "Faculty of Letters", for example. My PhD was delivered by the Department of Philosophy within the "Faculty of Philosophy and Letters"! -- Imagine the superficiality of it all: a philosopher graduated from a thing called, "Of Letters". What´s wrong with just Philosophy? The problem with "Philosophy" is that it is NOT grand enough for academia. Even in Oxford -- Grice´s faculty -- it´s even a Sub-Faculty of Philosophy. What can be more DEGRADING than that? When Grice actually graduated, in 1938, it was perhaps even worse, "Faculty of Literae Humaniores", and the BA and MA he got was in "classics" or "greats" -- the "great go", i.e. BA Lit. Hum. cum laude, and BA Lit Hum. The way to go! The present prime minister, for example, D. Cameron is a mere BA PPE! (The institution of the Philosophy, Politics and Economics, programme would have bee unknown to Grice).

--- So we have "litterae humaniores", the more human letters really. Where "humaniores" is comparative. The Humanities, so-called. Then in the Sorbonne, you can get a PhD but also a DLett, i.e. a Doctorate in Letters. So one has to be careful, academically speaking, when speaking of "letters"!

In the old days, -- i.e. the days of Sparta -- it was "grammatica". This was translated by the Romans as "letteratura", hence the emphasis on letters.

But maybe in the Anglo-Saxon countries, the emphasis has always been the sword against the pen. Pen mightier than the sword? Empty rhetoric! So "man of letters", I contend, projects the wrong implicature. I´m sure Churchill would have rather resented the implicature of someone EVEN mentioning the "of letters" bit. He was a man! Simpliciter!

The French!

Yes, typical of them to admire German men of letters! I never heard a Frenchman speak fluent German. But as you say, they rely on translations so much!

Camus was a good one. The other day, a friend of mine was asking for the French translation of his defense of suicide! Quite a piece of prose. I´ll see if I can retrieve it for analysis!

Unfortunately, Camus was wasted on me by my literature teacher. He (our professor) wanted us to get the existentialist message so strongly that it had the counterproductive effect. We couldn´t care less.

Freddie Ayer is right about the abuse of the verb to ´be´. In this club, R. B. Jones and I have been analyising another critic of Heidegger: Carnap. For Carnap, it wasn´t so much the abuse of "be" but the abuse of "nothing". His example of nonsense generated by pseudo-metaphysics was "Das nichts selbst nichtet" -- which Otto Papp translated as "Nothing noths", or something!

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Another thread we have had in this club was due to J. Kennedy, when analysing some French authors. He happens to be in love with a French thinker, so if he is not too offended, he should drop some good quotes. What we did discuss is the French pretentious prose of one Judith Butler -- whose sexual orientation was also some topic for discussion here, vis a vis some comments by L. Kramer!

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So, yes, -- myth making and nation. One wonders. Having just seen Bellini´s Norma, I do think that the French are pretty confused when it comes to their founding myths. I know *I* would if I were a French! There´s the Gallic element, and there´s the Franconian element, to say the least! The Gallic element is just swallowed up whole by the belligerent Franconian element. There is a lot of violence in the Languedoc and the rest of France. As an Italian, I obviously connect with the South of France, and can´t understand how the best of French culture which was the Provencal back in the day has been so minimised by generations of pretentious Parisians who just looked Down on the South -- literally! What warms my heart is that it was Queen Victoria and the English aristocrats who rediscovered the French riviera for the French!

----- There are a lost of "femmes" of letters, too, so one has to be careful. Some of them wouldn´t mind being called "men of letters" --. Nancy Mitford, for example. She thought of herself as partly French, just because -- she liked French perfumes better and her lover was a French. She despised Little England mentality! But her Sister! The Duchess of Devonshire! That´s British phlegm at its best, and with that sense of humour that escapes most French people!

They, on the other hand, let´s grant -- have the theatre of the absurd.

One good French philosopher who, alas, has such an Italian surname to him that hurts, is Francois Recanati. It is impossible to read Recanati if you Kant Kope with Grice in the original! What he says is "pure Grice" -- but in some form of French!

One should try him sometimes!