Why should we suppose that what is merely necessary to life is ipso facto better than what is necessary to the study of metaphysics, useless as that study may appear? It may be that life is only worth living because it enables us to study metaphysics–is a necessary means thereto.

— G.E. Moore, Principia Ethica §28

Have I mentioned how much I am drooling over my reading list for History of Philosophy III: 19th & 20th Century Philosophy? Read it and weep (I know I will when I am spending hours on single pages of Hegel):

• Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
• Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics
• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
• Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation
• Friedrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche (ed. Walter Kauffman)
• William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism
• Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings
• Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
• Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
• Individual xeroxed articles from Frege and Bertrand Russell

Now, one semester is only barely enough time to start talking about the Critique of Pure Reason or the Phenomenology of Spirit in any depth, so we will be moving really quickly and glossing over a lot. But it’s all OK: I’ll get the chance to dip into a lot of amazing work that I haven’t had the opportunity to until now, and when I need some more meat on my studies, I can take the Kant seminar that Dr. Jolley is offering next semester! Rock on!

I went to see A.I. today. The film was visually stunning and had a strong, if often sappy and very Oedipal plot line. I decided it would be a good time to finally get around to reading this intriguing article from Salon on the depiction of robots and mechanical intelligence in science fiction, and how it reflects our need to define ourselves in opposition to computers and technology. The mechanical intelligence of science fiction is usually either (a) docile servant, like Robby or Asimov’s robots, in which case it serves (for the male scientist-engineer) as the perfect substitute for women and for the proletariat, or else (b) hypermasculine and threatening because it is so ruthless and instrumentally rational and physically powerful and therefore a danger to humanity, like SkyNet or HAL, because it has violated its expected slavelike position. The futuristic robot acts to express both the hope and the terror of the male bourgeoisie.

An article on same-sex sexual contact in animals and the outraged reception of this research from many mainstream biologists helps perfectly to illustrate why sociobiology is, as science, useless: biologists’ interpretations of animal sexual behavior remain one of the healthiest repositories of every patriarchal and heterosexist prejudice you could think of.

Some true classics:

• Mainstream zoologists are shocked and alarmed by such queer activities as male lions head-rubbing and rolling with each other, or male whales caressing each other with fins, none of this involving actual genital contact. This tells us more about male zoologists’ hang-ups about physical intimacy between men than it tells us about whether there are queer animals or not.

• Mainstream sociobiologists seem to simply refuse to admit that animals might engage in sexual contact because it is pleasurable; one colleague of a primatologist who dared to suggest this as an explanation of lesbian sexual contact between Japanese macques remarked Well, if that was the case we’d all be in the aisle now having sex.

• Zoologists such as Tim Clutton-Brock of the University of Cambridge argue that

  “true” homosexuality–if strictly defined as male anal penetration by males who show no interest in females–is virtually unknown among wild mammals. They argue that animals who mount same-sex partners and the like are behaving aggressively or merely practising for heterosexual encounters. Or they may be advertising their availability, or trying to make a heterosexual partner jealous.

  I shouldn’t even have to say anything to ridicule this, but a few notes are in order: (i) Who the hell defines true homosexuality as male anal penetration by males who show no interest in females? Have lesbians, bisexuals, trans people, or even exclusively gay men who don’t particularly like anal sex, simply ceased to exist? (ii) What does the definition of mounting as an aggressive act tell you about the view of heterosexual sex being espoused? (iii) Aren’t these the exact statements that unrepentant homophobes make about LGBTM humans (e.g., they’re just experimenting, it’s just a phase, they’re trying to make their heterosexual partner jealous, etc.). It is explained that the favored theory of primatologists trying to cope with the fact of widespread lesbianism in Japanese macques was that it was a response to a shortage of male attention – because, as we all know, those dykes just need to find the right man.

All this helps highlight one of the main problems with the gene-programmed outlook of sociobiology: it simply refuses to acknowledge that there might be accidental consequences of evolution which have no basis in selected adaptations, but merely ride in on gene-complexes that are selected for other features. For example, there is clearly no genetic basis for the human practice of writing Petrarchan sonnets, but it is a consequence of our brains being adapted to cognitive and emotive processing for the purposes of survival. Since sociobiologists feel compelled, however, to find an evolutionary function for every behavior, they invariably subsitute in their own cultural prejudices about the proper purpose of behaviors. Thus, the purpose (or evolutionary function) of sex is assumed to be procreation, a page straight out of Catholic dogma.

Well, there are lots of different functions I could think of other than babies for generalized sexuality (such as reinforcing social relationships), which don’t require special explanations such as mistaken identity or dominance or jealousy for queer sexualities. And it may just be that sexual practice is an accidental feature of evolutionary adaptations rather than a functional adaptation in the first place. But since sociobiology rules such explanations out a priori, it inevitably has to substitute in all kinds of incedibly overt Right-wing cultural conservative ideology and pass it off as Eternal Laws of Nature. It is for this reason that late 20th/early 21st century Sociobiology has become the modern equivalent of late 19th/early 20th century racist anthropology as the naturalization of reactionary ideology.

UPS, bless their hearts, just delivered me the copy of Memoirs of My Nervous Illness that I ordered from bn.com. The book is a German Judge, Daniel Paul Schreber’s account of his own psychotic delusions while imprisoned in an asylum, and is one of the most celebrated cases of psychosis in the literature (through the memoirs, Schreber was analyzed by Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Jacques Lacan, Thomas Szasz, and many others). The book was also a major source of inspiration for Alex Proyas’s stunning movie Dark City (Kiefer Sutherland’s character is named Dr. Daniel Paul Schreber) and it will be very interesting to re-read the movie in light of Schreber’s madness. Sadly, there is very little on the web that takes any notice of this link, which is probably partly due to Proyas not having mentioned it in interviews. There is apparently an article in the Times Literary Supplement which explores the connection, but I’ve been unable to find anything more than some excerpts online. Sigh.