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What’s Inside 04………………………………………………Does the Donkey Die? Tasfiah Tabassum
06…………………………………………No Film Critic Like Farber Neal Tolunsky
10……………………………………Candide: A Metaphysical Journey Amy Shteyman
12…Fahrenheit 2015: Why Books Are Banned & Why You Should Care Emma Jones
15……………………………………………………………………………………………Sad Songs Teddy Rashkover
17………………………1984: A Reflection of Orwell’s Life and Ideas Rebecca Siegel
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If someone asked me why I like philosophy (in philosophy, people often want to be asked questions which no one ever asks them), I might quote Jean Cocteau, “Asking an artist to talk about his work is like asking a plant to discuss horticulture.” I know, the quote is about artists, not philosophers, but they are the same thing. Philosophy is, like everything else, art. Philosophers are artists with ideas as their medium. This issue of 42, then, is Horace Mann’s work of philosophical art. Why--if ‘for fun’ isn’t a good enough reason--do we need a philosophy magazine like 42? Philosophizing (that’s a word) is not endorsed very much at schools. Subjects such as history and science discuss what is “true”, but not how and why and what if it weren’t and is there even such thing as “true”... That’s what a magazine like 42 is for, endorsing philosophizing in the school community. I would liken this first and concise issue of 42 to French food. The portions are very small, sitting on a comparatively large plate, but the food is delicious. That is how I see this eclectic mix of six interesting, philosophical articles. From dystopia to donkeys to depressing songs to banned books to film criticism to Voltaire, this first issue has enough ideas to provoke thought for...lots of time. I hope the articles are enjoyed and appreciated, even when disagreed with. 42 doesn’t promise the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything, but it should get you at least a tiny bit closer. Always bring your towel (look it up if you don’t get the reference), Neal Tolunsky Editor-in-Chief, Graphic Designer ***A very special thanks to Eric Blum, who gave me the courage and support to go through with this project. ***A big thanks to 42’s advisor Dr. Cannon. Content Editors: Alex Chang Lily Mayo Honor Mccarthy Zoe Vogelsang
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Does the Donkey Die? by Tasfiah Tabassum Picture this: a starving donkey stands between two identical stacks of hay set an equal distance apart from the donkey. The donkey in question always chooses the pile of hay closest to him - but what if neither stack is closer, and neither stack has advantages that outweigh those of the opposing stack? This is the dilemma Buridan’s ass faces unable to choose between two equally appealing haystacks, he is doomed to starvation. It’s a silly hypothetical, but one that raises some interesting questions in regards to free will and human thought processes.! The thought experiment takes its name from Jean Buridan, a 14th-century philosopher and Catholic priest who wrote extensively about free will. Although the paradox had existed prior to Buridan (it dates back to Aristotle’s commentary on Sophist ideals and was brought up again by a 12th century Persian philosopher) it was not popularized until Buridan wrote about the dilemma in 1340. Buridan used it to investigate the ideal response (based on personal judgment) to being given two identical choices.
Let’s think back to our ass’s predicament - but now, let’s substitute the donkey for a human. Assuming that hard determinism - a view that dictates that free will is nonexistent and that the brain makes choices based on cold hard computation - is true, logic decrees that the person will be unable to choose between two choices that the brain has weighed as identical. This is what Buridan believes a human would do - if a deadlock is established, with there being no room for human will, judgment will be suspended until circumstances change and the right choice becomes evident. However, philosopher Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, more than two hundred years prior to Buridan, suggested a man with a strong desire for two identical objects (while also being unable to choose both) will take one of them no matter what, based on an intrinsic human quality that allows us to differentiate between two identical choices through subconscious bias and pure will. Hamid al-Ghazali leaves room in his spin on the paradox for free will. Regardless of any computation done by the brain, he believes humans will always be able to choose between two options. It’s a realistic enough idea; a living donkey with a need to fill his stomach would never be dimwitted enough to stand idly between two equally good stacks of hay, and would, somehow or another, be able to choose before starving to death. Buridan’s version, however, seems to be the more influential of the two - while we are not donkeys and we do recognize the existence of our own free will, somehow his postulate based on hard determinism is logical. This ideology can be applied to ethics. Take, for example, a moral dilemma - if we must act solely based on which choice provides us with Does%the%Donkey%Die? % 4%
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the greater good, as Buridan’s philosophy says, we must suspend action in a situation in which two equally good choices exist. But we seem to believe that we have free will - as we believe donkeys do. A small catch: many philosophers believe that free will is a figment of our imagination. They believe that our choices are either determined necessary outcomes of the events that have happened in the past or they are random. Are we preprogrammed to choose arbitrarily? Perhaps. But simply dismissing our intuitions and deciding on things solely based on sheer will would be foolish - studies have tracked that the nagging hunches we keep in the back of our minds are usually correct. Of course, there’s no real way to find out if free will exists, though it’s a valuable idea to keep in mind that the human thought system is just as illogical as it is logical. Even in cases where a choice seems impossible, we are inclined to make a choice at some point, even if it is only because of a change in circumstance due to time lapsing. Buridan’s ass is destined to starve because he is timeless, struggling to choose for all eternity. For him, circumstances refuse to change and he is torn between left and right. Thankfully for us, and for all the donkeys of the world, changes occur as time passes. When Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza contemplated the problem of Buridan’s Ass, he reached the verdict that if a man truly sees two choices as equally compelling and the two things are balanced equally in his mind, he cannot really be thinking rationally. The human mind is not solely a tool of computation, after all. But let’s take an object that is entirely a tool of computation: a computer. A computer does not have a mind of its own, and therefore no ability to do anything outside of its programming. Even so, circuits make the same choice as Buridan’s theorized humans do. When faced with two choices that
are equal, the computer must suspend judgment until circumstances show that the two choices are not equal. If faced with A = B, the computer will determine that an error has occurred and refuse to continue calculation. In computer science, this problem is solved with something called an arbiter circuit. In some cases, living beings may find themselves wondering if by choosing one option over another, they are missing out on something, but Buridan’s paradox does little to explain human feelings of regret and incessant desire. All we really know is that thanks to the existence of free will, no donkey given the choice between two bales of hay will go hungry.
Jean Buridan (1295 – 1363)
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No Film Critic like Farber by Neal Tolunsky “The new Disney cartoon 'Bambi' is interesting because it's the first one that's been entirely unpleasant.” These are the first words of film critic Manny Farber’s review upon the movie’s release in 1942. It’s hard to imagine what kind of a film critic could dislike this Walt Disney classic, but Manny Farber’s distinctively sharp, witty writing and aesthetic vision is unlike anything in the history of art and philosophy. He is often described as “iconoclastic,” favoring genre directors such as Howard Hawks and Samuel Fuller over cinematic celebrities like Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles. His rich career and stunning writing can be traced to his interests and experiences as a child. Emanuel (“Manny”) Farber (1917– 2008) was born to Russian immigrants in Douglas, Arizona, a town bordering Mexico. His father ran a dry-goods store; his uncle was a film critic for the local Bisbee Gazette; and his two older brothers grew up to be psychiatrists. As a boy, Farber would go to the library and read film criticism. He was interested in films, painting, sports writing, and cartooning. In the 1930s Farber began his career as a carpenter, a teacher and a painter. He continued making furniture, teaching and painting throughout his life. Educated at the University of California at Berkeley, California School of Fine Arts, Stanford, and the San Francisco Art Institute, Farber moved many times, from California to Washington D.C., to New York, and back to California. Throughout these years, he was always writing for various publications. When he moved to New York, he rented a studio near City Hall with his future spouse (#3; the other two ended in divorce), Patricia Patterson, who collaborated with him very closely on his writing. After seeing a movie, they’d throw around ideas; Farber would write while Patricia talked. Farber began there by writing a column every issue for the magazine Artforum at the request of its founding editor Philip
Leider. He wrote for countless other publications: The New Republic, The Nation, Time Commentary, Commonweal, The New Leader, Cavalier, City, Film Culture and Film Comment. He first taught art and film classes at the University of California, San Diego. When he and his wife moved back to California, Farber received a projector for his film class and began renting movies to show his students at the University of California, San Diego. Farber’s unique teaching style involved lectures with elaborate notes; playing pieces of movies forwards, backwards, without sound; and comparing them with other films and paintings, reportedly switching between films as diverse as creations of Yasujiro Ozu and Bugs Bunny. As in his reviews, when teaching he placed more emphasis on the general appearance of a film than its plot points and formal analysis. He cared little for behind-the-scenes production and technical trivia, the idea of a masterpiece, a historical landmark, or a classic. Farber retired from teaching in 1987.
Painting with Woman and Canteloupe by Farber
Like his teaching style, Farber’s paintings often reflected his ideas about films and life in general. Most of his earlier works were abstract expressionist, composed of earthycolored paint on thick layers of Kraft paper of various geometric shapes, all untitled. His later—after he stopped writing film criticism—conceptual and representational collage-like paintings featured pop objects No#Film#Critic#Like#Farber# 6#
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such as candy, train tracks and flowers. They often referenced scenes from Farber’s favorite movies and had autobiographical elements, with names such as Howard Hawks II or My Budd (a homage to director Budd Boetticher).
Laura Embry / San Diego Union-Tribune / Zuma
The meat of Farber’s career and philosophical contribution, however, is in his film writing. Farber’s image is not like that of the average critic, arrogant and power-hungry, but rather one imagines a studious, but hip intellectual. Farber himself was “critical of criticism” and “the length of sentences and the amount of narcissism involved”, but he also said “I can’t imagine a more perfect art form, a more perfect career than criticism.” He is often thought of in the same class of critics as James Agee and Pauline Kael. His reviews, unlike those of his contemporaries, never have any conventional format. To Farber, “It’s the idea of writing about the film as commensurate with the way the filmmaker’s mind is.” He continued, “The work’s qualities should influence the structure of the piece . . . I don’t think you can be mimetic enough.” His writing is extremely concise with long strings of adjectives, rich similes, and abrupt changes in subject or tone. No word is unnecessary. His most reverentlyquoted and famous work is “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art,” an essay expressing a concept at the core of everything Farber has written. He defines these two opposing kinds of art vaguely and impressionistically. It is meant to provoke thought rather than make a scientific distinction. Of white elephant art, he said, “Masterpiece art, reminiscent of the enameled tobacco humidors and wooden lawn ponies bought at white elephant auctions
decades ago, has come to dominate the overpopulated arts of TV and movies. The three sins of white elephant art (1) frame the action with an all-over pattern, (2) install every event, character, situation in a frieze of continuities, and (3) treat every inch of the screen and film as a potential area for prizeworthy creativity.” Farber disliked “the idea of art as being an expensive hunk of wellregulated area, both logical and magical” something which “sits heavily over the talent of every modern painter from Motherwell to Andy Warhol.” According to Farber, directors Antonioni, Truffaut, and Richardson’s “aspiration is to pin the viewer to the wall and slug him with wet towels of artiness and significance.” On the other hand, he praised the work of termite artists, “The most inclusive description of the art is that, termitelike, it feels its way through walls of particularization with no sign that the artist has any object in mind other than eating away the immediate boundaries of his art, and turning these boundaries into conditions of the next achievement.” Filmmakers such as Laurel and Hardy, Howard Hawks, and Raoul Walsh, “seem to have no ambitions towards gilt culture but are involved in a kind of squandering-beaverish endeavor that isn’t anywhere or for anything.” This kind of thought is evident in the way Farber praises screwball comedies and B-films. He makes statements such as “Only sourpusses and unbending esthetes aren’t thankful for screwball comedies.” And astute observations such as “The B’s have generally a more convincing actuality than the expensive films, probably for the fact that they have less money to spend building sets and lighting them so they shine and sparkle, and designing costumes that almost walk by themselves.” In his introduction to Negative Space (a 1971 collection of his essays and film criticism), Farber describes the way a textbook might define film space, “There are several types of movie space, the three most important being: (1) the field of the screen, (2) the psychological space of the actor, and (3) the area of experience and geography that the film covers.” Farber goes on to describe the usage of space in various films, from Jane Fonda’s No#Film#Critic#Like#Farber# 7#
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acting to the crowded, Baroque space of The Wild Bunch. In his essay “Underground Films” (a term he coined), Farber discusses what he considers “the saddest thing in current films.” That is the way in which “the long-neglected action directors fade away as the less talented De Sicas and Zinnemanns continue to fascinate the critics.” According to Farber, the termite artists or “true masters of the male action film” such as Raoul Walsh, Howard Hawks, William Wellman, pre-stagecoach John Ford, Anthony Mann etc. are neglected while the white elephants of film “sustain their place in the halls of fame simply because they bear the label of ART in every inch of their reelage” (reelage is one of Farber’s made up words, by the way). In “Hard-Sell Cinema,” Farber states that “Avante-gardism has fallen into the hands of the businessmanartist.” What Farber evokes—he never explains—is the way in which a new class of efficient, hardworking artists/salesmen are replacing the idea of “felt,” committed art. Farber is referring to “the revolution that is occurring simultaneously in jazz (Brubeck, Guiffre, Getz); painting (Rivers, Kline, Hartigan, Brooks); the novel (Salinger, Bellow, Cheever); and films (Chayefsky, Delbert Mann, Kazan).” While serious in his ideas and observations, Farber’s writings are consistently infused with humor, with first sentences like, “While Hollywood, after all, still makes the best motion films, its 1952 products make me want to give Los Angeles back to the Conquistadores.” He is often sarcastic, almost omniscient in his understanding of director’s choices: “Whenever the modern film-maker feels that his movie has taken too conventional a direction and is neglecting ‘art,’ he need only jerk the Gimp-string, and— behold!—curious and exotic but ‘psychic’ images are flashed before the audience, pepping things up at the crucial moment, making you think such thoughts as ‘The Hero has a mother complex,’ or ‘He slapped that girl out of ambivalent rage at his father image, which, he says, he carries around in his stomach,’ or ‘He chomps angrily on unlit cigarettes to show he comes from a Puritan environment and has a will of iron.’” Adept at
seeing the ways in which films influence other films, he writes, “Only in the 1950’s did the ghost of Citizen Kane start haunting every A picture out of Hollywood.” Farber is often nostalgic for the films of the past and of his childhood, “Not so long ago, the movies, whatever their oversimplifications and distortions, still rested on the assumption that their function was to present some intelligible structured image of reality—on the simplest level, to tell a story and to entertain, but, more generally to extend the spectator’s meaningful experience, to offer him a window on the real world. What are they now?” In an essay rich with complex metaphors, he describes the theatres of his childhood, “The spectator watches two or three action films go by and leaves feeling as if he were a pirate discharged from a giant sponge.” Farber has an acute understanding for the way acting works, “The meat of any movie performance is in the suggestive material that circles the edge of a role: quirks of physiognomy, private thoughts of the actor about himself, misalliances, where the body isn’t delineating the role, but is running on a tangent to it.” Of Faye Dunaway who stars in Chinatown and Bonny and Clyde, he says, “The fluke of Dunaway is that her body moves uncannily in harmony with the film’s movement.” Farber was brilliant at concisely describing the general appearance/theme of a film. Take Bresson’s classic Au Hasard Balthazar. The plot/content: “A rich catalog of mythology and symbolism about donkeys squeezed into a queer script that wanders and doubles back, detailing the varieties of evil and self descruction that Bresson seems to be saying is Human Nature.” Later, the cinematography/feeling: “I think this a superb movie for its original content, exhilarating editing and Bresson’s Puritanistic camera work, belt-high and wonderfully toned, that creates a deep, damp, weathered quality of centuries—old provincialism.” Farber could also summarize a director in a sentence, usually without belittling him/her. After about seven pages on the films of Jean-Luc Godard, Farber concludes, “In short, no other filmmaker has so consistently made me feel like a stupid ass.” One could quote Manny Farber forever, but at No#Film#Critic#Like#Farber# 8#
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some point this article has to end (or else it can’t be published) . . . In short, no other film critic/painter/carpenter/philosopher has so consistently amazed me with an endless stream of original ideas. So, what did Farber have against Bambi? His critique of Bambi is not as heretical as it may seem to us today. He was a great fan of the Mickey Mouse cartoons. For him, what made the previous Disney films great was their magical elements, the way Mickey and Donald talked in a high-pitched inhuman voice, “lived in a beautiful escape land, where they flew through the air, swam underwater, died a thousand deaths and lived to see the end of each picture”—none of which occurs in Bambi. Instead, “the animals here behave just as Hollywood thinks we do, and behaving that way it’s old stuff and boring because of it.” And on top of that, the “bogus art which has been creeping into the Disney pictures is really hammered at you in this one.” Ok, Farber, done.
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Candide: A Metaphysical Journey by Amy Shteyman Author: François-Marie Arouet, better known under the pseudonym Voltaire. Candide is a satirical novella by Voltaire published in 1759. Candide, a sarcastic, disillusioned young man, is born in Westphalia, a region in Germany. There he lives in a majestic castle where he falls in love with the Baron’s sister, Cunégonde, but when the Baron finds out, Candide is thrown out of the castle.
He wanders from place to place, between Western Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas, believing that everything in life has a reason-both the good and the bad. Some of the adventures he goes through are funny; some are sad; some are eerie, but all are enticing. He begins to learn the reality of lifenot the sugarcoated version he had been taught. He sees that everything does not happen for the best as the philosophers and metaphysician Pangloss had told him in the Baron’s castle. In Europe and America, he meets a number of people from various walks of life. He encounters many philosophies ranging from the extreme optimism of Pangloss to the bleak pessimism of Martin. He experiences the love and total selflessness of
Jacques, an Anabaptist, and also the extreme cruelty and selfishness of a drunken sailor. Candide travels to many places, even reaching El Dorado in South America, an earthly paradise, yet he soon leaves in search of his beloved Cunégonde. He meets her again in Constantinople, Turkey. Finally Candide finds Cunégonde, who has turned extremely ugly. She insists that he marry her, which he does out of a mixture of sympathy and obligation. Candide, Cunégonde, and various friends that Candide meets on the way settle on a farm that Candide purchased. They finally realize that the only way to attain happiness is through honesty and hard work and not vague philosophy and baseless illusions. Voltaire brought the world yet another adrenaline-filled work of fiction, now a classic of philosophical literature. Voltaire satirizes religion, theologians, governments, armies, philosophies, and philosophers through allegory; most conspicuously, he assaults Leibniz and his optimism. This type of optimism stems from the theological philosophy claiming that because God exists, the world must be the best of all possible worlds. In the story, the metaphysician Pangloss represents Leibniz and his philosophies. In the story, he contracts syphilis, is nearly hanged, and encounters many other misfortunes, but stays optimistic. Martin, a realist, is the ideological opposite of Pangloss. Martin represents Voltaire’s view that not everything in the world happens for a reason. Additionally, he believes in the demise of society, and has a pessimistic view of human nature and the world. Voltaire’s view on philosophy stems from his own depressing life, encountering the Seven Years' War and the 1755 Lisbon earthquake. Candide in this novella, albeit more directly and humorously, Candide:(A(Metaphysical(Journey( 10(
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examines the nature of life, just like philosophers of Voltaire’s time. This novella is a must-read for all philosophy enthusiasts, as it depicts some of the most famous philosophies in history through a thrilling, action-packed story in 94 pages. The story is easy to follow and will make a great impression on you!
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Fahrenheit 2015: Why Books Are Banned and Why You Should Care
by Emma Jones
What do you not want to talk about? What makes you squirm when it gets brought up in class, in conversation, with your parents, with your friends, on the news? What really makes you want to get out of there as soon as you can? You, as a student, react in just that way: by exiting the conversation or being silent. But imagine, for a moment, that you have the power to silence that topic. Take it out of discussion and make yourself feel comfortable and safe. It’s not being talked about anymore so no one will hear about it anymore. What you’ve just imagined is a rough description of how legislators deal with the topics of banned books.
A quick look at the ALA list of most frequently challenged books for any given time period gives you an insight into what the concerns and repressed issues of that time period are. The number one banned book of the year of 2014 is Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian by Sherman Alexie, a semiautobiographical story of a Native American teenager growing up on a reservation in extreme poverty. Not only does this book address a group of people society as a whole attempts to silence, it entails masturbation, drugs, alcohol, and gambling. Concerned parents would cite that this is unsuitable for the age group that would be reading it, primarily young adults. The banning of this book, in a book banner’s ideal world, would just tell young adults that it’s wrong to gamble, engage in sexual activity, and do drugs. But that’s not what banning literature does. One of the most ironic examples of this is the fact that Jaycee Dugard, a young woman who was kidnapped and subject to sexual violence for her entire adolescent life, wrote a memoir that is listed as one of the most frequently banned books. This story is not fictional; this actually happened to Dugard as a child. Silencing her story, in which she gives advice and support to other young victims of sexual violence, re-enforces the culture that allowed her kidnapping and assault. Banning literature shuts down the conversation on the issues because when young adults are confronted with these real issues, they’re going to have no idea what to do or even what the problem is. Let’s look at number four on the list of banned books for the years 1990 to 1999, The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier. This book focuses on an issue that most young Fahrenheit)2015) 12)
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adults probably have to face at some point: conformity in high school. Whether it’s easier to stick out and be at the mercy of your peers or follow the crowd and feel security. The protagonist says no to selling chocolates to support his corrupt Catholic school. That seemingly simple choice has drastic repercussions. The book does not have a Hallmark ending and the misery and isolation that the protagonist feels as well as the horrific violence he experiences is very real. Yet it was banned for being sexually explicit, having profane language, and containing violence. This book and others such as Lord of the Flies, are banned essentially because they present the idea that adolescence was not as idyllic as adults remember it to be. Discomfort with teenager-on-teenager violence is at the heart of the reason that these books are banned. That kind of violence is much harder to morally grapple with—where is the line between kids being kids and violence that requires intervention? This topic in particular induces feelings of guilt and fear in people. But there’s a flip side to this: Not all banned books are banned for depictions of violence or profanity. Sometimes they’re banned not for depicting a happy ending and a loving, healthy relationship, but a kind of relationship that certain sects of American society want to cover our children’s eyes from. In 1982, author Nancy Garden came out with the novel Annie on My Mind. Annie on My Mind was a love story between two teenage girls, their discoveries of their identities as lesbians, and ultimately the happy ending they are able to find even among the prejudice around them. Had Annie on My Mind been about a heterosexual relationship, it would have been the poster child for an unchallenged, unbanned book. The love between Annie and Liza is deep and genuine and their happy ending feels incredibly well deserved. And yet Annie on My Mind was not only banned from many shelves but actually burned in a library
in the state of Kansas. And Nancy Garden’s novels are not the only examples of samegender relationships being censored, And Tango Makes Three, a children’s novel about two penguins of the same gender raising a family, is still one of the most frequently banned books today. It’s hard to talk about homophobia. It’s hard to talk about racism. We don’t want to talk about violence in high schools, how those big -isms and -phobias are present in youth today. The reason behind this is the guilt that we feel when our own prejudices show through. Banning books tells us that it is better for us to be silent, and for our children to grow up silent perpetrators or bystanders to violence we never talked to them about. Banning books assumes that all young adults have the privilege of never having to deal with this violence, that they fit into the boxes that society wants them to fit in. And even for teenagers who don’t have to deal with violence, books that deal with it can serve to educate them and make them aware. America is making vast progress with this—The ALA cites that books are much less frequently challenged for dealing with the topics of abortion, homosexuality, racism, sexism, or anti-family values in the new millennium than they were even in the 90’s. However, it’s important to realize that being from a liberal city in a school with a liberal majority, we often can live much more freely than those in other parts of the country. We have things like Unity Week and an entire office devoted to diversity, and we are incredibly lucky in that way. However, even in our community, the desire to block out things that are hard to talk about still exists. We need to remember this: Awareness can hurt, but if we just block out things that hurt us, we’ll never progress as a society. In Lord of the Flies, Ralph weeps for the end of innocence, but it’s important to remember that the end of innocence is also the beginning of awareness. Fahrenheit)2015) 13)
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Sad Songs by Theodore Rashkover Questions are intrinsic to Philosophy. “What is the meaning of life?” “Is there a god?” “Does this milk smell funny?” So I’ll take a stab at one: “Why do we love Adele’s songs?”
I’m not a fan of her music, but you likely are. Adele recently broke a U.S. sales record, selling more copies of her song, “Hello,” in a week than any other artist since 1991. If you’ve heard it, which you likely have, you would know that “Hello,” akin to nearly everything else that she’s sung, is mindnumbingly sad. She’s made a name for herself off of her sad songs, singing about romantic failures with a backdrop of a sad chord progression typically played by a sole piano. But what about Adele’s musical arrangements make them sad? The answer, of course, lies in YouTuber The Axis of Awesome’s video, “4 Chords” (watch it). The pop-parodying trio performs over 6 minutes of pop song choruses containing a common chord progression (C, G, Am, F). Some included choruses come from “Don’t Stop Believing” by Journey, Lady Gaga’s “Paparazzi,” U2’s “With or Without You,” and believe it or not, “Can You Feel The Love Tonight” from The Lion King, though each song triggers its own independent emotional response, despite the common progression. Adele’s songs, “Someone Like You,” and “Hello” (both not in the video), which depend on this chord
structure – a transposed version in “Hello” – both trigger a distinct sadness that sets Adele apart from other singers. Maybe her lyrics generate an unparalleled empathetic sadness. Maybe the songs’ slow tempos create it. Maybe her voice alone brings a tear to your eye. To truly understand what makes music “sad,” we must look at music without lyrics to see if music can, in itself, provoke emotion. But before we do that… Imagine a model scene in a movie: A young boy sits on his knees over a newly carved patch of ground as he stares at a rock, intended to be a tombstone for his dog. Tears falling from his eyes match the pelting rain from darkened, thundering clouds. Sad, right? Immediately, the viewer notices the crying boy staged in the foreground. Inexplicable sadness grasps the viewer – though the reason is unclear, someone is crying; therefore, I should be sad. Then, the viewer sees a freshly dug grave and a tombstone, bearing the connotation of death. Sadness is again conjured, but now it acts indirectly, as you feel empathy towards the boy, and by relation, you feel sadness. Now listen to Chopin’s Funeral March (formally, Sonata No. 2, Op. 35, 3rd movement). The opening is quiet. A melody in a minor key plays over two menacing chords in a low pitch. Something about these minor chords and the key of the melody forces sadness on the listener in the same way that tears of a crying boy evoke a subconscious sadness. For you music theory fans like me, this concept is called “arousal theory.” Meagan Curtis of Tufts University, in a recent study on the subject, finds that the minor third, found in the minor chord, produces an emotional impression of anger and sadness Sad$Songs $ 15$
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rather than happiness or pleasure. Although the mechanism isn’t well understood, this seems to be a widely shared effect.
You continue listening, and begin to notice the continuation of the chords played by the bass begins to sound like the clamoring of funeral bells, summoning an indirect, associative sadness. You understand why you feel sad, envisioning a sad concept and feeling the emotions it invokes. Now back in the pop-music world, out of the vacuum of absolute music, we encounter another tool in this excavation of sadness: words. Adele’s lyrics paint this picture in the same manner as musical or visual symbols, like the boy and the grave or tolling bells, but, according to psychologists Omar Ali and Zehra Peynircioglu, elicit emotions less effectively than melodies. So, although Adele’s lyrics may be heartbreaking, they don’t carry as much emotion as the music itself. Music manipulates a different alphabet, set in notes. Notes construct intervals and patterns, which we respond to with emotion, which Chopin’s Funeral March typifies, mastering minor chords, along with major to
provide contrast. But this language varies by speaker and technique. A performer may play more slowly, manipulating emphasis, trying to push a sensation of longing, or more quickly and relentlessly, expressing a passionate rage-just like a speaker who directs the emotion of their statement through tone and enunciation. Adele delivers her lyrics in her musical tone of force and sorrowful relent, building emotion through singing more and more, leading to an often higher-pitched chorus, and then abandoning it, returning to a lower register, which she sets over a soft up-and down piano harmony, resolving major chord into minor and minor into major. The result, like Chopin before her, is a powerful and expressive piece of music that has earned the title: sad song. So we understand why we call Adele’s songs “sad songs.” Verbal imagery accompanied by chord progressions expressed with her unique tone generates both an internal emotional reaction and an empathetically driven response, building the perception of sadness. Now on to the paradox of tragedy: Why do we seek tragedy if tragedy induces a negative emotion? Tamar Gendler argues Hume’s viewpoint from “Of Tragedy,” that sadness, provoked by art, is received differently from internally-produced emotions, and that we process this sadness as a positive emotion and view it as pleasant. Essentially, because one can appreciate the beauty of Chopin’s Funeral March without bearing the emotional sadness of one at a funeral, we experience a largely positive emotion. Like a masterfully painted depiction of a funeral scene, we gain enjoyment from the artistic excellence of the work. Rephrased by Gendler in his “Compensatory Explanations,” based on Aristotle’s Poetics: “although engagement with tragedy may bring unpleasantness, the reward gleaned from that experience outweighs the cost of the negative emotional experience.” In my words, Adele’s songs can be pretty catchy. Sad$Songs $ 16$
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1984: A Reflection of Orwell’s Life and Ideas by Rebecca Siegel The central theme of government control is reflective of George Orwell’s innermost thoughts on society. The entire idea of Big Brother spawns from Orwell’s creative imagination of what is right and wrong. These ideas are all heavily present in his masterpiece, 1984. From the first words on the first page, you understand his sense of paranoia. He projects his lunacy onto the reader. He makes it seem like Winston’s (main character) view is the right one, the only one. The plotline of the story leads you to a new conclusion. It leads you to the notion that we are not in control of ourselves. We are merely just toys built for the government’s amusement. This novel leads you to see through George Orwell’s eyes a view of the deception that was experienced in his own childhood and adult life.
George Orwell was born to an upper-middle class British-Indian family in 1903 under the name of Eric Blair. Orwell used his upbringing as influence in these novels. He took the elements of growing up under the harsh rule of the British monarchy in the early 1900’s and spun that into his earlier writing. He wrote about the control being forced onto him by his government, and also about the helplessness that he felt being an outsider.
Being born in British India, then moving to Britain itself, he felt isolated. The constant ridicule of his descent by his peers and also his elders provoked him to write many bestsellers, including 1984. Accompanied by his many other socially observant books, 1984 stands out as the defining piece of his career. Compiling a story out of the instances of government control he had seen, Orwell paints a vivid picture of oppression using influences like the Soviet Union’s control over Russia. Taking secrecy that he hadn’t really experienced to another level. The creation of the Union around the late stages of his childhood must have led to the idea of ignorance in suppression, wiggling its way into the deep recesses of Orwell’s mind. The succession of Soviets in 1989 only furthered Orwell’s point, being: government is the downfall of the civilized society. That point makes itself evident in most, if not all, of Orwell’s writing. It is clearly present in Animal Farm, where Orwell creates another story full of deceit and secrecy within government and presents an unbalanced situation to get his point of freedom only in death across. The fictional killing off of the horses one by one for personal and monetary gain of the government in Animal Farm further illustrates his vision. Orwell brings to his writing a clear, unadulterated view on government. 1984 begins with the paranoia of the main character Winston and ends with his absolution. The story starts in a city, where Winston is pacing his room, trying anything to avoid suspicion. He goes on to silently narrate to the reader an accurate view of Orwell’s personal feelings towards government. He comments on the people “watching him” through the TV screen and tracking his every 1984 % 17%
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move. His story goes on to detail the lives of the other souls in the apartments surrounding him, devoid of intelligence, and his sense that he is being watched. Sheep that have manifested as people. People who are so brainwashed that they can only remember this empty sense of devotion to their government. He tells of how the government has essentially neutered the population and taken away their humanity, feelings, and sexuality, replacing it with only a love for Big Brother. Next, the book tells of the intense details of the lives of the proles. The proles are essentially the lower, vagrant class. Winston regards himself as being a part of the middle. The proles are the troublemakers, the ones who steal and do the illegal actions, because they don’t have the means to make anything of themselves. At some points in the novel, Orwell uses such intimate details that it is hard not to see the proles as the Americans in his world. The interpretation of Orwell’s meaning for them varies, but I felt a sense of a deepseated prejudice against Americans from even the first few pages of his novel. The topic of proles is weighed on heavily in the context of the book. The proles give him his sense of individuality. Their defiance of the government gives him a new understanding of rebellion and also a new understanding of his government. He takes from the proles the incentive to remain unobservant to the government’s practices. The country he lives in, one of only three existing, is constantly at war and has to ration certain items, such as razors. The proles are able to provide him with such items. Winston finds his relief in shaving. An escape from the constant brainwash that the government has tried to force on him. The proles provide Winston with a channel to throw his unrelenting rage into; a chance to see the government for what it really is: a fraud. The most important key to Orwell’s novel is the love affair between Winston and Julia.
Their relationship begins as lust. The relationship started as stolen glances, but progressed into something much deeper: their combined hatred of Big Brother. Both carry their own contempt for Big Brother, which they exploited deeply with their relationship. They are not in love with each other, but are in love with the idea of defying the presence that has been so apparent in their lives— namely, their government. Winston pursues Julia, wanting to steal the innocence he sees in her, expose who she really is and guide her into the world of fear that he is thriving in. She is part of the government’s youth program. Together, they became so infatuated with the idea of going against Big Brother and finally exposing the government for what it really is, that they allow themselves to be caught. Personally, I believe that they are subconsciously sabotaging themselves, they go against everything they had ever known to be together, and that defiance of their natural instincts is what leads to the termination of their relationship. The novel entitled 1984 by George Orwell was one of the most complex and thoughtprovoking books that I have ever attempted to read. Orwell has presented his opinions on government throughout all of his writing, but this novel was his true masterpiece. The thought of freedom is scattered in the novel, only to be replaced by the eerie idea of constant surveillance. George Orwell’s last novel, 1984, predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union, and gave George Orwell a legacy. The book was published in 1949, nearly 40 years before the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Orwell’s legacy from his books provoked the thought that our governments have abundant control over all of us.
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