Korean Vowels

There are 21 Korean vowels, but they can be seen as combinations of only 6. Those 6 can be broken down to two dimensions: strong/weak/neutral and horizontal/vertical. All the strokes are straight and are either long or short.

Let's start with neutral horizontal: ㅡ
If you have an expressionless face, open your mouth a little and make a sound, it's basically this. You can think of it as an "oo" sound without rounding the lips, or you can think of it as an "mmm" sound or hum with the lips slightly apart.

Neutral vertical: ㅣ
This is an "ee" sound.

For the strong vowels, add a short stroke out and up:
ㅗ ("oh")
ㅏ ("ah")
(I introduced these vowels last time.)

For the weak vowels, down and in.
ㅜ ("ooh")
ㅓ ("uh")

That's it for the basics as I see them. See if you can remember their sounds:
ㅡ ㅣ neutral
ㅗ ㅏ strong
ㅜ ㅓ weak

Now consider just the verticals and we'll add two more: ㅐ and ㅔ. Visually, you can think of them as ㅏ + ㅣ and ㅓ + ㅣ. So they are strong and weak, respectively. ㅐ is pronounced "ay" as in hay and ㅔ is pronounced "eh" as in bed. ㅐ is more open than ㅔ; if you make the sounds for "ㅣ, ㅔ, ㅐ, ㅏ" in that order you'll know what I mean. Try it.

Now consider the strong and weak vowels:
ㅗ ㅏ ㅐ (strong)
ㅜ ㅓ ㅔ (weak)
Each of these are simple sounds, monothongs, which means that the mouth shape doesn't change while saying them. But they each have a corresponding diphthong that begins with the vertical neutral sound ("ee"). The resulting symbols just add another short stroke.
ㅣ + ㅏ = ㅑ
ㅣ + ㅐ = ㅒ
ㅣ + ㅓ = ㅕ
ㅣ + ㅔ = ㅖ
ㅣ + ㅗ = ㅛ
ㅣ + ㅜ = ㅠ
What do these symbols sound like? Let's take ㅑ. You start with ㅣ ("ee") and end with ㅏ ("ah"). Say it more and more quickly and you get what sounds like "yah". Same goes for the others; the vowels with two short strokes sound like the corresponding one-short-stroke vowels with a "y" added before it. But keep in mind that Koreans don't think of "yah" as a consonant sound plus a vowel sound (y + ah) but as a single vowel sound ㅑ. In the same way, we think of the English sound "I" as a single vowel sound even though it is a diphthong made of ㅏ and ㅣ, "ah-ee" said really quickly (this is more obvious to formal singers who have to hold out syllables more often).

On to combined vowels. The strong horizontal vowel (ㅗ) can be combined with the strong vertical vowels (ㅏ & ㅐ); likewise for the weak horizontal vowel (ㅜ) with the weak vertical vowels (ㅓ & ㅔ). These make diphthongs similar to the ones just above but with a 'w' sound rather than a 'y' sound.
ㅗ + ㅏ = ㅘ
ㅗ + ㅐ = ㅙ
ㅜ + ㅓ = ㅝ
ㅜ + ㅔ = ㅞ
Again, we'll take the one based on ㅏ as our example. To pronounce ㅘ, you start with "oh" and end with "ah". Say it quickly and you get something like "wah." Likewise with ㅙ: you start with "oh" and end with "ay" so you get "way." The next two are similar but because you start with "ooh" rather than "oh" the sound quality of the "w" sound is slightly different. It isn't very crucial to be able to distinguish these two to comprehend Korean speech. As one of my books puts it, the only difference between them is the "degree of clearness of the sound": clear ㅗ vs. dark ㅜ. I don't know how helpful that is, but you if you're determined to pronounce them exactly right, just make sure to make yourself think of each of these sounds not as a "w" plus a vowel sound but as a diphthong made from a particular pair of vowels. So for ㅝ, you start with "ooh" and end with "uh," getting "wuh"; and for ㅞ, start with "ooh" and end with "eh" to get a "weh" sound, but you think of this more in terms of a semi-vowel "ooh" than of a consonant sound "w".

All three of the horizontal vowels can combine with the neutral vertical vowel ㅣ, so there are three more combined vowels:
ㅜ + ㅣ = ㅟ
ㅗ + ㅣ = ㅚ
ㅡ + ㅣ = ㅢ
The first one here, ㅟ, is the most intuitive. You start with "ooh" and end with "ee", getting "wee". It seems like the next one, ㅚ, should sound extremely similar to this but in actual speech instead of ending with an "ee" sound, for some reason it actually sounds basically the same as ㅙ. As for the last vowel, ㅢ is just a combination of the sounds ㅡ and ㅣ. This has no equivalent in English but if you just say the two sounds together quickly, just like in the other diphthongs, you'll get the sound right.

There you go! All 21 vowels derived from the basic six. Here they are in their dictionary order:
ㅏ ㅐ ㅑ ㅒ (strong vertical)
ㅓ ㅔ ㅕ ㅖ (weak vertical)
ㅗ ㅘ ㅙ ㅚ ㅛ (strong horizontal/combined)
ㅜ ㅝ ㅞ ㅟ ㅠ (weak horizontal/combined)
ㅡ ㅣ ㅢ (neutral)

I'll end with a reminder that even though I presented the vowels by themselves in this post, they always appear with an initial consonant (and sometimes an ending consonant on the bottom as well) and never alone. Even when there is no consonant sound, they appear with a placeholder consonant, ㅇ. With the vertical vowels, the initial consonant goes to the left of the vowel; with the horizontal ones, the initial consonant goes above the vowel; with the combined vowels it goes above the horizontal part and to the left of the vertical part. So here are some examples using the familiar consonants ㄱ and ㅇ.

개 (dog)
여기 (here)
우유 (milk)
과거 (the past, days gone by)
귀 (ear)

Now you only need to learn the consonants to have a pretty solid base in written and phonetic Korean.

Another Recommendation - Paleo

Paleo is the stage name of a songwriter that I first saw at the Funky Church in Portland opening for Portland's Loch Lomond. Later he played at the venue I worked at and forgot his band t-shirt, which (after a few weeks) I decided to take home. It's now one of my favorite shirts, but I hesitate to say I'm glad that he forgot it because he had his luggage lost or stolen that day so he probably could have used the extra shirt. At least I bought his music! And though I like him mainly for his songwriting and singing style, he's also an inspiration for aspiring artists because one day he decided to try to write and record a song a day for a full year and actually pulled it off, 365 days in a row, while traveling and playing around America. He sells a DVD of mp3 files that includes all of those songs. Here's a random article I found about him that links to mp3 files and lyrics so you can check out a few of his songs. More songs are on his website, and he also has a myspace. Paleo can sometimes sound goat-like, but he's great if you like singers with distinct voices and good lyrics. For a sample, here's a video of a song called "Of Athens" that I remember liking when I heard him in person.

Ask a Korean

Sorry for the lack of posts lately; my mom is visiting me now in Korea (all the way from Oregon!) so I've spent less time reading and writing posts and more time traveling and meeting her friends. There is a post in the works as a follow up to my introduction to the Korean language that will attempt to explain all Korean vowels in one fell swoop. In the meantime I want to refer you to a blog that I'm following that is pretty good. It is called "Ask a Korean" and is usually interesting and intelligent, and there's the running joke of the main blogger's speaking in the third person as "the Korean." There's a good discussion of Korean culture, candid and actually intelligent answers to questions involving stereotypes/races, and occasional links to random other things the blogger finds interesting. Mainly he responds to reader questions that are e-mailed him. The most recent post, for example, was about the status and perception of homosexuality in Korea, which is something I'd been wondering about since arriving in Korea but hadn't asked anyone about. So! Without further ado: http://askakorean.blogspot.com/
More idiot posts coming soon...

The Antichrist

I recently finished reading the Antichrist, one of Nietzsche’s last books. Oftentimes Nietzsche asks to be read slowly and carefully, but this particular book seemed to have a torrential pace and I had to read it really quickly, like each section pushed me onto the next section and it was hard to stop. Turns out he also wrote it really fast: it was “the work of so few days that I hesitate to mention how many,” (Ecce Homo). By the end I feel like it got less controlled, more repetitive and not as exciting. But on my first sitting I was basically riveted and he puts his ideas very clearly and forcefully.

I can't summarize the whole thing, but it's mainly a invective of Christianity as an insidious subterranean conspiracy born of weakness and envy and revenge against everything that is healthy, powerful, and privileged. It's kind of ridiculous at times and also can sound anti-semitic because of his insistence that Christianity is the culmination of Jewishness, but it's good to remember here that he was writing in an environment full of fanatic Christian anti-Semites (like his sister) and this was a knife-twisting irony at their expense. Along the way he talks about all sort of things, including pity, Kant, the French Revolution, Buddhism, Jesus, the Gospels, the fall of the Roman Empire, the law of Manu, the Renaissance and Luther. As he's denouncing, at least/especially in the beginning, you get a sense of the type and way of thought way outside of Christianity from which he is speaking and this positive element sustains the reading more than anything for me.

The part about Buddhism was fascinating to me because he usually doesn't talk about it explicitly but mentions it really cryptically in passing so it's hard to tell what he thinks about it. Here he actually spends a few passages on it, and it compares so favorably to Christianity that it almost reads as an endorsement. He says Buddhism fulfills where Christianity only promises, Buddhism is a hundred times more truthful by talking in plain terms of suffering rather than sin, he expresses admiration for its lack of prayer, asceticism, and compulsion, he likes its practical focus on the individual (how can I stop suffering?), and even says "Buddhism is not a religion in which one merely aspires to perfection: perfection is the normal case." He is still not a Buddhist because he believes it is also nihilistic, meant to help those who suffer from life, but it's interesting to see how much he admires it. His interpretation of Jesus was really interesting too (he definitely does not equate Jesus' teachings with what ended up being Christianity) but I don't want to get into it now. My summaries are bound to be pretty superficial and slightly misleading anyhow.

Anyway, I don't think the Antichrist is Nietzsche's best book but I'm glad I read it. I don't remember whether or not I read it for my Nietzsche class long ago; if I did I forgot it all. But he leaves no room for doubt about his position on Christianity; he ends by calling it "the one great curse, the one great innermost corruption, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means is poisonous, stealthy, subterranean, small enough" and even "the one immortal blemish of mankind." And then, because he's ridiculous, after lamenting that we reckon time from the beginning of this 'calamity', the first day of Christianity, he says, "why not rather after its last day? After today? Revaluation of all values!" and that's how he ends the book: why not mark this moment the beginning of time because I say so? Of course, he didn't go around erasing calendars after that and it probably occurred to him in the heat of the moment, but it gives you an idea of how seriously he took the importance of his thought.

Unfortunately he never quite finished. The Antichrist was to be the first of four books that together would make up the grand work called The Revaluation of All Values. As it was, he had a mental breakdown and went permanently insane upon seeing a driver beating a horse in Turin a little more than three months later. That didn't stop him from writing two more books (an autobiography and an edited compilation) in between.

Incidentally, for those of you who were not previously aware, we are now on the 21st day of the 120th year on the Immoralist's Calendar. I guess it'd still be a Monday.

video

Music Video shot by the Penny Jam with my friend Derrek Wayne. I met him when he came to a show at the music venue I worked at right at the beginning of summer. He is a fellow former phil major, trained in barbershop quartet style vocals, a proponent of bike-riding and fun to play frisbee with. The video also includes Ben on belled soprano saxophone. It was shot on July 6th and afterwards we stopped at the Horse Brass Pub with the Penny Jam people, rode to drop off my drums at the Broadway Cinema where we'd open for the Independent Film Festival there the next day, then made it back to SE for a barbecue. The drums are my backpack set; I was pretty pleased with myself for being able to fit them all into a backpack guitar case and carry it around by bike.


Derrek Wayne at The Immortal Piano Company from The Penny Jam on Vimeo.
Pictures

The location, the Immortal Piano Company, was really cool. The lady who works there is really eccentric and awesome and taught us a little about the incredibly precise craft of piano repairing that she practices. That pedal piano at the beginning is set up to play all of the music from the Wizard of Oz.

Now that I've figured out how to post videos, anything could happen...

Very Simple Korean

A Korean consonant: ㄱ
A Korean vowel: ㅏ
A Korean word: 가

Simple enough? The consonant comes in front of the vowel, so far just like English.

An English consonant: G
An English vowel: o
An English word: Go

가 is the verb stem of the Korean verb that means to go. It can be used alone to mean "Go away." You now know enough Korean to watch this video.

These two examples, "가" & "Go", are both one-syllable words that begin with a consonant and end with a vowel. Now let's add a syllable-final consonant. In English, we just tack it on the end:

Consonant: G
Vowel: o
Consonant: d
Word: God

In Korean, that consonant instead goes beneath, as follows:

Consonant: ㄱ
Vowel: ㅏ
Consonant: ㅇ
Word: 강

The advantage of this is that written Korean is visually split up into syllables: each syllable takes the space of one square. So 가 and 강 are each one syllable and 강남대학교 is five syllables. This is nice because words look their length. (Unlike in English, in which "era" is longer than "droughts".)

On to pronunciation.ㄱ is somewhere between a G and a K, and "ㅏ" is an "ah" sound, so "가" is pronounced like "kah" or "gah". The word 강, which means river, is pronounced gahng. The nice thing is that, unlike in English with Go and God, the the vowel sound doesn't change when we add the syllable final "ng" (ㅇ) sound. As far as I know this is always the case in Korean so it is usually very straightforward to pronounce.

To get nitpicky, though: The place of articulation of ㄱ is actually farther back in the mouth than either G or K (at least how I say them), at the root of the tongue. The character ㄱ is actually designed as a visual representation of this. If you imagine a left-facing speaker, it shows the back of the tongue pulled up to touch the rear part of the roof of the mouth. (Likewise, the character for an [n] sound, ㄴ, shows the tip of the tongue behind the teeth.)

A note about the round character, ㅇ. When it comes at the bottom of a syllable, like in 강, it is pronounced like ng, but when it comes in the initial position it's just a place holder with no sound value. This is because letters can't stand alone in Korean the way they can in English (in the particle "a" or the pronoun "I"). So "ㅇ" takes the initial consonant position in syllables that begin with a vowel sound. For example, while 나 is pronounced "nah", 아 is simply "ah."

I'll teach you two more easy vowel sounds while I'm at it:ㅣand ㅗ. The first is just a vertical line and is pronounced "ee" as in see. The second is pronounced "oh" as in go. Notice that the long stroke of the second vowel is horizontal rather than vertical. With this kind of vowel, the initial consonant goes above it rather than to its left. So you should be able to figure out the following sounds:

1.아이
2.오
3.온기
4.가강
5.공
6.아니오

1. ah-ee (child)
2. oh (five)
3. ohn-gee (warmth)
4. gah-gahng (riverside)
5. gohng (ball)
6. ah-nee-oh (no)

At least some of Korean should be less mysterious to you now. Even though I've only taught you three consonants (ㄱ,ㅇ,ㄴ) and three vowels (ㅏ,ㅣ,ㅗ) you get the basic idea of how it's laid out. Now for the last word:

가자!

This is pronounced Kah-Jah. It is based off of the verb stem 가, includes the consonant ㅈ, and it means "Let's go."

Falsification

And now, the blog turns again to that guy with the mustache, Nietzsche. He has resigned from the professorship he'd held for a decade at Basel and has been living off of the pension writing books for a couple of years. He is about thirty seven years old and he is writing what he will later call his most personal work of philosophy, almost like a journal, called the Gay Science - cheerful, even silly at times, highly naturalistic, and right on the edge "of something incomparable" (according to Nietzsche later). It is made up of four major sections called "books," and the fourth book ends with the beginning of his favorite work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which he writes with such inspiration that he feels that Zarathustra "overtook" him. It is his first attempt at expressing his whole philosophy. The first two parts of Zarathustra were written the following winter and the summer, the third part the following year, and the fourth part (privately published and distributed to only seven friends) the year after. His next book is Beyond Good & Evil, his attempt to say "the same things as my Zarathustra, but differently...very differently", around the same time beginning to look back over, republish, and write new prefaces for his early books. This is the period on which I wrote my undergraduate thesis. He writes yet another book, Genealogy of Morals, as a clarification of Beyond Good & Evil, republishes with a new preface his third book, the Dawn, and finally, gets back to his fourth, the Gay Science, with which I started this post. This is when he publishes a second edition, not just with a new preface, but with an added fifth book, which instead of being like a journal has been popular among philosophers because its more argumentative and traditionally philosophic subject matter. The whole Gay Science hangs together, of course, but you can see what distance there is between the publishing of the first four books of it and its fifth! Three of his most famous works and a self-re-evaluation of all the books before it! Three huge attempts to communicate a philosophic world view that he hadn't had before! Zarathustra, Beyond Good & Evil, new prefaces to his previous works, and the Genealogy of Morals all lie in between the first four books and the fifth book of the Gay Science.
There's a point to all this, I swear. Skip ahead just over a century to a Nietzsche scholar named Maudemarie Clark, currently a professor at Colgate University. She was and still is regarded as one of Nietzsche's top scholars because of her highly acclaimed 1990 book, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy, which was reportedly so good that it "continues to serve as the gold standard for studies of its kind." In this book, she argues that a huge strain of Nietzsche's thought - his apparent radical anti-realism and skepticism about logic, math, science and even everyday objects - can all be explained away as part of a "falsification thesis" that Nietzsche develops early in his career and later gives up. Whew! This means we can bring him into the fold a bit...though he did debunk the ridiculous notion of an otherworldly, metaphysical truth, he still believes in the more modest, everyday notion of limited, empirical truth that we all rely on. The only problem with this: the crux of her argument, the entire PROOF or TEXTUAL BASIS of her argument, relied on the mistake of thinking that the fifth book of the Gay Science, from which her main example of this early "falsification thesis" came from, was written and published BEFORE his main works in which he reached his mature philosophical thought (and to say it again, although the first four sections of the Gay Science came earlier, the fifth was undeniably written AFTER Zarathustra, Beyond Good & Evil, and the Genealogy of Morals - his "mature" thought). In fact, the very passage that Clark cites as her main evidence, as THE passage in which Nietzsche realizes that he must give the falsification thesis up, is in Beyond Good & Evil, written and published before her main example of the "early" and problematic "falsification thesis" of the 5th book of the Gay Science.
Can you imagine how incredulous I felt when I discovered this as a fresh-faced young undergraduate? That one of the top Nietzsche scholars in existence, in one of the most influential books on Nietzsche in recent times, in an extremely influential interpretation, argued that a "later" passage showed that he gave up the views of an "earlier" passage up...and got the order switched up? That the passage that she needed to come after actually and undeniably, as a matter of historical fact, came before?
And I lied when I said that this was the only problem...there were plenty others, including the fact (pointed out in an article by Prof. Nadeem Hussain, now at Stanford) that the supposedly early "falsification" claims seem to appear elsewhere in the same book, Beyond Good & Evil, in which he supposedly gives it up. Had she just not read the book? Did she just pick this one passage out of context and put it into her argument of what Nietzsche should have said were he smart, or, in Clark's terms, of reading Nietzsche "charitably"? Keep in mind, this is a scholar who ranks as co-translator on an edition of the Genealogy of Morals!!! Shouldn't she know the text? And her response to Hussain, in which she explained away two of the many instances of the falsification claims in that book (saying the others can be 'similarly' explained away by careful interpretation), also seemed to me to be full of bad interpretation, ignorant of context. I disagreed with her interpretation of the crucial passage itself, the one in which he supposedly gives up the falsification thesis. In fact, I thought she was wrong on basically every point and brought forth many arguments and close readings to show it.
I think it's pretty well established that going to a good school and doing well has the danger of giving yourself too much credit. On the basis of this single scholarly interpretation of Nietzsche and fueled by my moral indignation to the wrong it did Nietzsche, I more or less decided that the secondary literature was not worth much reading, and that I would just go back to Nietzsche's text itself and do it right, do it better. Looking back, my actions said, "you so-called scholars are not paying enough attention to what he's writing! You're not getting everything he's saying! Look at me, I'm going to pay so much attention to him that I'm going to spend all year interpreting only these first four passages, two of which you so badly bungled up, of Beyond Good & Evil." It didn't help that my thesis adviser happened to have barely read any Nietzsche, and not since his undergraduate days, so I was always a position of intellectual authority over my professor, who basically helped me by telling me where to clarify and asking questions.

Nowadays if I read some of the secondary literature on Nietzsche from the realm of academic philosophy, the effect is basically humbling. Like, why the hell didn't I read this when I was writing my thesis? For example, John Richardson's extremely well-written introduction the the Oxford Readings in Philosophy Volume easily dealt with some of the things I couldn't figure out how to get across that well in my thesis, especially about how to deal with the apparent antimony between Nietzsche's thought and scholarly/academic philosophy.
It still is a mystery to me, though, whether or not anyone has bothered to point out Clark's chronological mistake in Nietzsche On Truth & Philosophy. Paul Katsafanas (who recently finished his Harvard dissertation on Nietzsche's applications to constitutivism about practical reason in the philosophy of action and mind) deftly sidesteps the issue using a footnote in his "Consciousness and Conceptualization", even though he there provides a better explanation of Nietzsche's 'falsification' claims. Leiter is sympathetic to Clark's basic interpretation but shifts the chronology a bit in his summary of it, and Richardson does something similar in the article I mentioned. None of them gets into the specifics. Richardson also notes that Clark revises the chronology a bit in a later article which I admittedly haven't read, but her response to Hussain postdates that article, and in that response (which is co-authored by David Dudrick) she sticks to saying that Beyond Good & Evil 15 provides evidence that he gives the falsification thesis up. Even more baffling to me was that in that later article (2004) she recognizes in a footnote at the back of the article that the fifth book of the Gay Science postdates Beyond Good & Evil but makes no mention of the fact that this undermines her main evidence for the crux of her interpretation, that Nietzsche gives the falsification thesis up.
At any rate, I'm left wondering whether it is academic politics or politeness that prevented this error from being an academic embarrassment for Clark, or if it has been pointed out somewhere I'm not aware of, or if maybe just nobody really cares. Maybe scholars see it as a technicality, a detail, and still like having her view out there as a possibility in the landscape of possible interpretations of Nietzsche on truth. I guess given how nebulous a lot of philosophy seems to be, with no clear yes or no answers on a lot of things, it would be refreshing for an interpretation to just be refuted and killed. Especially if you're a strange little man who feels like this is important to more than academic Nietzsche specialists in their towers, that Nietzsche has something actually important to say about truth.

a poem

Yesterday my uncle and I went to the house of a friend of his that I've seen a few times and really like. His name is Mr. Pak, but we usually refer to him as the Tin Man because of the role he played in a performance they and two pastors put together as part of a yearly community gathering (guess who played Dorothy?). Although he lives near the third biggest metropolis on the globe, he managed to find a neighborhood that feels like the country. He lives there with his wife and son in a traditional style Korean house. They have a small garden around the edges of the house and a small persimmon tree near the gate. He likes to drink country rice-wine and can play the traditional Korean bamboo flute, which along with the following earned him the additional pseudonym "dionysus plays the flute" on my uncle's phone: he has read a lot of and is grateful to Nietzsche. His specialty, however, is James Joyce, on whom he wrote a dissertation (in English!) even longer (and probably better written) than my thesis. He and my uncle like to get together to hike or, more often, to play guitar and sing. Yesterday he kindly translated a verse of a song he had just sung into English so I could get a sense of how beautiful and poetic he felt it to be, and he asked me if I had written any poems. As we were leaving the two of us waited by the persimmon tree for my uncle to come back out and I told him that persimmons reminded me of a poem of that title I once read for a class. He said he would like to read it, so I looked it up at home and figured I might as well share it as an easy post. Before we left, though, he reached into the tree and broke off a bit of branch for me to take home. It has two persimmons on it. I'd never held a persimmon before that save for one other time, the summer after I took that poetry class, when someone sent me one in the mail.

The poet is Li-Young Lee. Enjoy.

My only reservation about persimmons, though, is that they can look suspiciously similar to tomatoes...
(painting by Elizabeth Brandon)

Curses!

I have a valid excuse for the complete lack of posts lately: about a week ago, I got an e-mail notifying me that this blog had been identified as a potential spam blog. As a result, it was "locked" so that I couldn't make or edit posts and had to request someone to review the blog to "unlock" it. The good news, though, is that the blog is now again up and running, and, since it had to be reviewed by a staff member of blogger.com, I now know that at least one person has actually looked at it. :)

I suppose the spam filter arrested the blog because of the questionable use of profanity in its title. So I'll explain. The basic idea is that I have intellectually stagnated since college and this gives me a way to digest those and new thoughts into semi-interesting shit. I titled it the way I did so I didn't feel like each post had to be perfect or super-insightful, in which case I might never post anything. I also didn't want it to have a pretentious tone, which was something to consider since I wanted to write about Nietzsche. Those of you who know me, though, hopefully got that the title is mainly a joke on my name. Personally, it also reminds me of being in Korea, since, because of certain linguistics features of Korean, someone who pronounces my name with a thick Korean accent would get something vaguely towards that direction (though nobody here has actually pronounced that poorly so far). And because of how poorly I speak the language, I am kind of an idiot here, unable to understand the majority of conversation and needing help for a lot of basic tasks like figuring out how to get to an upper floor of a building or knowing which bus I should take.

Incidentally, I was shocked to discover that the most popular family name in Korea, which we all know as Lee, is not actually pronounced with the L in front. In fact, the "ㄹ" sound never begins a word in Korean except in adaptations of English words like "radio". The popular name Lee is actually "이" in Korean, which has no initial consonant sound; it's just "Ee". But I guess that just looks so weird in English letters that they decided to add an L. Likewise, names with the no-initial-consonant "Oo" sound (우) tend to have a W added to them when written in English. Since they are both weak consonants, the pronunciation doesn't change all that much when Western speakers mispronounce them as Lee and Woo, but it's still pretty strange.

At any rate, I've figured out how to type Korean characters using my laptop, so a possible post explaining Han-gul, the Korean alphabet, may be coming up for those who are curious.

Introduction

Hello! And welcome to this blog. I will think of it as the refuse of my mind, the stuff that I want to say to get rid of but don't have a good reason to say in everyday conversation. Most of it will be intellectual mumbo-jumbo left over from college, where the main thing I tried to digest in the last year and a half was the philosophy of Nietzsche. What goes in, must come out, I suppose. It may also be a place where I can throw up ideas that I haven't worked out yet, or other unintelligent rants. It may also include some reflections on Korea, where I recently moved, or it may just serve as an escape from it. If I ever figure out how to get the ability to type korean characters on my keyboard, perhaps there will be a bit about the Korean language, too, which I am teaching myself sporadically. Comments are always welcome. Thanks.
- idiot shit

"Pure Perspectives" in Nietzsche's Perspectivism

In this entry I want to share a problem I have with Brian Leiter's reading of Nietzsche's perspectivism. The article of his I cite is almost 15 years old now so it might be a bit dated, but I just want to get it out there. It will start with a summary of some of the main points of the article before I get to the criticism, but I'll keep it short. This may be interesting to anyone who is frustrated with the intellectual laziness encouraged by the prevalence of the "there's no truth, it's all how you look at it" way of thinking. Or anyone who has heard a bunch of hype about Nietzsche's perspectivism and wants to find out more about what he actually wrote.

In “Perspectivism in Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals,” Brian Leiter criticizes a reading of perspectivism that he believes “has attained the status of near-orthodoxy among commentators,” (334). He characterizes this "Received View" (RV) as follows:

(i) the world has no determinate nature or character;
(ii) our concepts and theories do not “describe” or “correspond” to this world because it has no determinate character;
(iii) our concepts and theories are “mere” interpretations or “mere” perspectives (reflecting our pragmatic needs, at least on some accounts);
(iv) no perspective can enjoy an epistemic privilege over any other, because there is no epistemically privileged mode of access to this characterless world.

Leiter sez: “the Received View cannot be sustained by a close reading of the central text in the work Nietzsche published in which he actually discusses perspectivism: section 12 of the Third Essay of On the Genealogy of Morals,” (335). Before he starts this close reading, Leiter puts up two basic problems with the RV. First, a big part of Nietzsche's philosophy is arguing that other views are mistaken, like when he says something has no basis in experience or that religious and moral interpretations appeal to “imaginary causes." This clashes with his supposed avowal that no perspective can be any more true than any other. Second, in insisting that no perspective can give an account of the world as it ‘really is’, the RV reinstates the distinction between appearance and reality that Nietzsche famously rejects.

Now let's go to the "central text," GM III:12, which provides evidence against the RV. Leiter notes that instead of presenting truth as something impossible to attain, Nietzsche begins the passage “with an attack on any metaphysics that posits the truth as essentially unknowable, with Kant’s thing-in-itself as a paradigmatic case in point,” (343). And instead of giving up objectivity for relativism, Nietzsche presents a different understanding of objectivity. He writes that “objectivity” should be:

...understood not as “contemplation without interest” (which is a nonsensical absurdity), but as the ability to control one’s Pro and Con and to dispose of them, so that one knows how to employ a variety of perspectives and affective interpretations in the service of knowledge.
Henceforth, my dear philosophers, let us be on guard against the dangerous old conceptual fiction that posited a “pure, will-less, painless, timeless knowing subject”; let us guard against the snares of such contradictory concepts as “pure reason,” “absolute spirituality,” “knowledge in itself”: these always demand that we should think of something that is completely unthinkable, an eye turned in no particular direction, in which the active and interpreting forces, through which alone seeing becomes seeing something, are supposed to be lacking; these always demand of the eye an absurdity and nonsense. There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective “knowing”; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more complete will our “concept” of this thing, our “objectivity” be. But to eliminate the will altogether, to suspend each and every affect, supposing we were capable of this—what would that mean but to castrate the intellect?— (GM III:12)

The passage proposes an analogy between “knowing” and literal, visual seeing: as seeing is dependent on visual perspectives, so “knowing” is dependent on interests or affects. Leiter spells out the analogy as follows:

In the visual case:
Necessarily, we see an object from a particular perspective: for example, from a certain angle, from a certain distance, under certain conditions (perspectivism claim).
The more perspectives we enjoy—for example, the more angles we see the object from—the better our conception of what the object is actually like will be (plurality claim).
We will never exhaust all possible perspectives on the object of vision (infinity claim).
There exists a catalogue of identifiable factors that would distort our perspective on the object: for instance, we are too far away or the background conditions are poor (purity claim).

In the “knowing” case:
Necessarily, we know an object from a particular perspective: that is, from the standpoint of particular interests and needs (perspectivism claim).
The more perspectives we enjoy—for example, the more interests we employ in knowing the object—the better our conception of what the object is like will be (plurality claim).
We will never exhaust all possible perspectives on the object of knowledge (there are an infinity of interpretive interests that could be brought to bear) (infinity claim).
There exists a catalogue of identifiable factors that would distort our knowledge of the object: that is, certain interpretive interests and needs will distort the nature of objects (purity claim).

The problem I have with Leiter is with the epistemic purity claim, which Leiter admits is “the most contentious.” He writes, "If we are to have the epistemic purity claim then we must be able to make out something like the following thought: certain interpretive needs and interests distort the nature of objects. We require, then, some criterion for distinguishing nondistorting and distorting needs and interests," (346). What I don't get is how needs and interests could be nondistorting. As I understand it, needs and interests cause us to focus on certain aspects of an experience or situation at the cost of others and to automatically process everything in relation to a certain idea, framework, or agenda, so the perspectives they produce are necessarily partial and unfair. The idea of non-distorting interests is mysterious, and Leiter's speculation as to what the criterion to identify them could be does not clear things up (I'll return to this below).

Moreover, if some perspectives are distorting and others are not, it seems like old Friedrich should tell us to avoid the bad ones and collect the good ones. Indeed, this is how Leiter goes on to qualify the plurality claim: we “can always benefit from additional *nondistorting* perspectives," (Leiter 346). But he does no such thing; in GM III:12 the plurality claim is indiscriminate: “the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our “concept” of this thing, our “objectivity” be.” Moreover, he makes it clear that one can learn from perspectives that one considers to be distorting and false. After all, immediately after beginning GM III:12 with “an attack on any metaphysics that posits truth as essentially unknowable,” using something he clearly disagrees with, Kant’s metaphysics, as an example, he writes that we should be grateful to this kind of metaphysical view for increasing our capacity for “objectivity” and thereby aiding us in our search for knowledge. This suggests that we can learn from all perspectives, not just some of them. There seems to be nothing in the passage to support the introduction of this fishy "pure perspectives" idea.

So what led Leiter to introduce it? The worry seems to have been that if all perspectives are misleading and distorting, that would leave no true or reliable perspectives from which we can learn. But I think N's point is precisely that such 'reliable sources' are empty fictions that have no role in a true search for knowledge; this is why he attacks such concepts as pure reasons, contemplation without interest, and knowledge in itself as absurd. I think he might add Leiter's pure perspective to the bunch, and that at any rate we can do without it.

I think we can read this passage as making a simple point: even if each point of view we take up is a partial, simplified, and distorted version of the truth, we can learn from each point of view if we understand *how* it is partial, simplified, and distorted. The more we recognize such interest-driven partiality in the beliefs and practices of ourselves and others, the better we understand those beliefs, the interests that shape them, the people who have them, and the world. Recognizing the partiality will drive us away from our comfortable beliefs to understand and learn from a variety of perspectives, which we can do despite the fact that none of them will give us a pure, nondistorted view into the true nature of the world. This does the opposite of encouraging laziness with beliefs because "it's all just perspective, anyway," by encouraging strenuous effort in understanding and criticizing many points of view, without retracting its attack on the old objectivity's claim to interest-free authority. Though this doesn't necessarily mean it is now understood better, I think that attack on metaphysical objectivity was radical at the time it was written but is seen as pretty commonplace today.


(As a footnote: I said I'd return to Leiter's criterion for telling distorting interests from non-distorting interests, so here we go. After observing that it must be those rare strong individuals who are capable of facing the terrible truth who have those nondistorting interests, he writes that "The mark or criterion of a nondistorting interest, for Nietzsche, is that it is adequate to the “terrible truth” about the world. But that “terrible truth” must be established on other grounds," (347). This would mean we can't know which interests are distorting and which aren't unless we know the truth already and can judge what we epistemically "see" from certain perspectives by comparing it to what we already know. So as you can see, this doesn't help explain how those strong interests could avoid shaping the world in a certain partial way.
Instead of explaining the strong's ability to know the truth by supposing that their strength is constituted by the passive possession of ‘strong, truth-adequate perspectives,’ I think it makes more sense to see their strength as an active ability “to control one’s Pro and Con and to dispose of them, so that one knows how to employ a variety of perspectives in the service of knowledge.” On this reading, strong people can approach the truth not because of the particular interests or perspectives they happen to have, but because they are able move between and learn from a variety of perspectives.)