Table of contents for November 2017 in New Philosopher

“But lo! men have become the tools of their tools.”Henry David Thoreau In 15th and 16th century Venice, more than a dozen laws were passed to prevent ostentatious and wasteful consumption. One such law dictated that no more than six forks and six spoons could be given as a wedding gift; another outlined in detail what could be served as dessert at banquets (in-season fruit and small pieces of pastry). The theory was that cupidity was the root of all evil, that superfluous spending was a threat to the republic. Fast-forward 500 years and we can give or receive as many forks as we please, and we can serve our guests mangoes from India and mochi from Japan at any time of the year. In the 21st century there are…

Clean lines, absence of decoration, avoidance of clutter, simplicity, and above all functionality – these are the characteristics of modernist architecture that were encapsulated in the phrase ‘less is more’. Although originally coined in Robert Browning’s poem Andrea del Sarto, ‘less is more’ is more often associated with the modernist architect Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe, famous for his clean-lined glass and steel tower blocks in Chicago and New York City. But it was another architect, Adolf Loos, who started this obsession with simplicity. In 1908 he published a bizarre essay called Ornament and Crime. There he challenged received opinion by declaring that obsession with ornament, far from being a mark of sophistication, was rather a characteristic of a primitive stage in cultural evolution. Ornament, as he saw it, was…

After the sudden and unexpected death of my husband, I found it difficult to dispose of his clothing and personal items. Impulsively, I began to make photographs. I see now that I was trying to understand the power and mystery that seemed inherent in these (now dispossessed) possessions. There is ambiguity in the leftover scraps of ordinary lives, in commodities with no monetary worth. If they have any value, it lies in their power to evoke memory and the emotional frisson of touching something that once belonged. The objects embody remnants of a past in folds and creases, in etched abrasions or small stains, in hair, in tiny flakes of skin, and in the visibility of wear and touch. The scar speaks of accident and of survival but, like…

TAMARA RUSSELL TOP FIVE BOOKS 1. 100 Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez 2. Samarkand, Amin Maalouf 3. Being With Dying, Joan Halifax 4. American Gods, Neil Gaiman 5. Immortality, Milan Kundera FAVOURITE PHILOSOPHER Albert Camus FAVOURITE QUOTE In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer. Albert Camus DOCUMENTARY TO RECOMMEND Cowspiracy by Kip Andersen and Keegan Kuhn FAVOURITE ARTWORK The Kiss by Gustav Klimt FAVOURITE PIECE OF CLASSICAL MUSIC The Köln Concert by Keith Jarrett What is philosophy for you? A way to bring meaning and purpose to our lives through a deeper understanding of the mess that our minds can get us into. Why is philosophy important? Because as a society we have totally stopped thinking and are unable to…

1. Matter, material, articles, or activities of a specified or indeterminate kind that are being referred to, indicated, or implied. 2. A person’s belongings, equipment, or baggage. 3. British dated, informal: Worthless or foolish ideas, speech, or writing; rubbish, e.g. “stuff and nonsense!” 4. informal Drink or drugs. 5. Things in which one is knowledgeable and experienced; one’s area of expertise. 6. The basic constituents or characteristics of something or someone. Origin: Middle English (denoting material for making clothes): shortening of Old French estoffe‘material, furniture’, estoffer‘equip, furnish’, from Greek stuphein‘draw together’. Source: Oxford English Dictionary…

Tom Chatfield is a writer, broadcaster, and philosopher. Dawn Raffel is an award-winning editor and author. André Dao is the Deputy Editor of New Philosopher. Margaret Gibson is a university lecturer and writer. People are influenced by what they infer to be desirable on the basis of others’ actions. What’s your favourite advertisement? There was one on TV when I was young, a cartoon about a red car and a blue car having a race, whose theme tune still tinkles into my head the moment I think about it (“The red car and the blue car had a race, all red wants to do is stuff his face…”). It was for a chocolate bar that I turned out not to like, but begged my parents to buy anyway. It has…

Freud reminds us that mourning is both a labour and mode of haunting – it works within and through us in the mental images of the lost object. The surviving traces we leave behind have expanded from a social history of largely discrete physical objects in time and space to spatially abstract, temporally complex digital artefacts. Both constitute the economic and emotional stakes of inherited responsibilities and potential legacies of a life. In The End of Absence, Michael Harris signals the passing of a generation whose biography began outside computers and digital media networks. This is a generation in which digital things – the stuff of the internet, emails, mobile phones, and their internal data – have little or no deep biographical or mnemonic significance. This is a dying generation,…

The Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre 1905 – 1980 Totality of my possessions “To have is first to create. And the bond of ownership which is established then is a bond of continuous creation; the object possessed is inserted by me into the total form of my environment; its existence is determined by my situation and by its integration into that same situation. My lamp is not only that electric bulb, that shade, that wrought iron stand; it is a certain power of lighting this desk, these books, this table; it is a certain luminous nuance of my work at night … if isolated from my desk, from my work, and placed in a lot of objects on the floor of a salesroom, my lamp is radically extinguished; it is no…

What is your demon? There is more than one aspect of demonhood. Demon drinker: bad. Demon driver: good. I'm afraid of capitulation. But I often need to capitulate. My demon is doing what I need to do. What is the most important part of your education? I became a gambler – gambling taught me about luck, and the myth of success. The most headstone-friendly thing I’ve been forced to learn is: chance is liberating; it respects failure and limits the merit that devolves from success. If you could change one thing about the world, what would that be? Allow me to demonstrate. Which thinker has had the greatest influence on your life? Three parts. Aristotle indirectly: by asking the right questions and getting the wrong answers he kick-started doubt. Nassim…

An antidote to prejudice A sharecropper’s daughter in the American South stood up for a Ku Klux Klan leader and against all odds, they became enduring friends. newphilosopher.com/articles/ an-antidote-to-prejudice/ Fake news The world according to the bullshitter is whatever he wishes it to be. And ‘fake news’ is whatever people he disagrees with are saying. newphilosopher.com/ articles/fake-news/ New Philosopher online store Visit the online store for previous issues of New Philosopher magazine, subscriptions as well as gift ideas. newphilosopher.com/ products-page/magazines/ Laughing in Spanish Growing up I had heard my father laugh, but in Chile I heard something new: something honest, guttural, joyful. newphilosopher.com/articles/ laughing-in-spanish/ New Philosopher Writing Prize Entries are open for the New Philosopher Prize for Philosophical Writing. Enter now to…

I think I learned this from it: it didn’t matter what it was. All that mattered was that it was ours and it was on the African Lightning. Seventy years ago this year the 7,974 tonne cargo ship African Lightning was launched at Kearny Point, New Jersey, by the Federal Shipbuilding & Drydock Company. She was a cargo ship that looked like a cargo ship, back before mega-ships, before containers, back when, for all I know, a piano could have been hoisted into her like a haul of crab in a net. A ship on whose bridge Humphrey Bogart would have passed unnoticed, a ship with a low-slung black hull and an upright beige funnel like an aerosol can that pinned a clutch of white decks between cranes. She evoked…

Zan Boag: We live in a culture that is obsessed with stuff, yet it’s generally viewed as a negative to be materialistic. Why is this? Tim Kasser: I think this ambivalence reflects some competing tendencies in the human mind and in human culture. On the one hand, the very earliest writings in philosophy and religion and such – Socrates and Lao Tzu and the Bible and Mohammed and Buddhism – suggest to people that materialism is pretty problematic, that it will crowd out what it means to have a meaningful life, that it will crowd out spiritual strivings, and that it will crowd out authenticity. We can see that in lots of thought that is very, very deeply embedded – especially in Western thinking. At the same time, though, there…

If you’ve ever been tasked with breaking up the household of a deceased parent or sibling or friend, you’ll recognise a peculiar, muted outrage. Possessions tell the story of our lives, quite possibly better than we can. We regard our stuff as utilitarian, aesthetically pleasing, or – ideally – both. But over time the objects we accumulate take on emotional weight. They signify the places we’ve been, the deeds we’ve done, our values, and our histories. Our homes are filled with items we have chosen to acquire and retain. Language is a terrifically imperfect translation of experience. Any stated reason or motive, any labelled emotion is suspect. I may say that I adore this and despise that, but those words are approximations. Whatever I articulate is shaded by desire and…

A DOG, crossing a little rivulet, with a piece of flesh in his mouth, saw his own shadow represented in the clear mirror of the limpid stream; and believing it to be another Dog, who was carrying another piece of flesh, he could not forbear catching at it; but was so far from getting any thing by his greedy design, that he dropt the piece he had in his mouth, which immediately sunk to the bottom; and was irrecoverably lost. The application He that catches at more than belongs to him, justly deserves to lose what he has. Yet nothing is more common, at the same time more pernicious, than this selfish principle. It prevails, from the king to the peasant; and all orders and degrees of men are, more…

Ross McFarlane works at the Wellcome Collection, a museum library in London with one of the world’s largest collections of objects. The collection was created from an estimated 1,000,000 objects collected by Henry Wellcome during his lifetime, mostly from 1890 to 1930. It is also a collection that is being added to over time. Could you give a sense of what an incredible collector Henry Wellcome was? When I hear his name, I think of that scene at the beginning of Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane with all the amazing loot piled up that he’s collected from around the world. The camera pans and there’s just thousands and thousands of objects. Yes, that is such an interesting way to think of Wellcome; it’s a similar world and it’s a similar scale…

The High Price of Materialism Tim Kasser At the mall Newspaper headlines exalt the local lottery winner. Get-rich-quick books climb to the tops of best-seller lists. Multicolour ads flash on web pages. Celebrities on television hawk everything from sport utility vehicles to mascara. Although they differ in form, each of these messages essentially proclaims: “Happiness can be found at the mall, on the internet, or in the catalogue.” Empire of Things Frank Trentmann Boxes of stuff A typical German owns 10,000 objects. In Los Angeles, a middle-class garage often no longer houses a car but several hundred boxes of stuff. The United Kingdom in 2013 was home to six billion items of clothing, roughly a hundred per adult; a quarter of these never leave the wardrobe. Of course, people have…

How Humans Became ‘Consumers’: A History Until the 19th century, hardly anyone recognised the vital role that everyday buyers play in the world economy. Professor Frank Trentmann, author of Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, traces the growth in momentum and awareness of consumer culture. www.theatlantic.com/business/ archive/2016/11/ how-humans-became-consumers/508700/ The Psychology of Stuff and Things Stuff everywhere. Bags, books, clothes, cars, toys, jewellery, furniture, tablets. If we’re relatively affluent, we’ll consider a lot of it ours. More than mere tools, luxuries or junk, our possessions become extensions of the self. We use them to signal to ourselves, and others, who we want to be and where we want to belong. And long after we’re gone, they become our legacy. Some might even say…

DBC Pierre DBC Pierre won the Booker Prize for his debut novel Vernon God Little, which was also awarded the Whitbread First Novel Award in 2003 – the first time the two awards had been granted to the same book. Pierre is also the author of Ludmilla’s Broken English, Lights out in Wonderland, a book of short stories, and a novella, Breakfast with the Borgias. He was awarded the James Joyce Award from the Literary and Historical Society of University College Dublin. Nigel Warburton Nigel Warburton is a freelance philosopher, podcaster, writer, and the Editor-at-large of New Philosopher. Described as “one of the most-read popular philosophers of our time”, his books include A Little History of Philosophy, Thinking from A to Z, and Philosophy: The Classics. The interviewer for the…

According to Roy Morgan Research, 20 per cent of Australian women buy a new pair of shoes every four weeks, amounting to millions of new shoes in Australian cupboards each year. Eventually these shoes, alongside roughly 300 million shoes discarded globally each year, find their way into landfills where they take, on average, 50 years to decompose. While many podiatrists stress the importance of walking barefoot for muscle and ligament development, especially when it comes to children, the USD$2.3 trillion clothing and footwear industry continues to ramp up shoe manufacturing, recently hitting an annual figure of 23 billion pairs of shoes, which amounts to more than three shoes per person per year. Estimated total global household expenditure on clothing and footwear Spending on clothing and footwear by region “Almost 20%…

There are many warm and fuzzy sayings about owning your own home, not least of which is one by French philosopher Gaston Bachelard: “If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.” It’s this shelter for daydreaming, undisturbed by demands and jealousies, that makes us yearn for a home of our own. From the vantage point of the second storey window, I move the curtain aside. I breathe and take in the view, a perspective I could be seeing for the rest of my life. My eyes scan the backyard fence separating the house from the neighbour’s yard. I swivel hard, and point. “That house is… is……

A hallmark of the hoarder is that they have no real prospect of using the things they pile up... useful objects become pure matter, pure obstacle. My father was a practical man, not given to superstition. But he did have one little rule, more ironic I think than serious: we weren’t allowed to count his owls. He had started collecting them in his youth. Our mantelpiece was covered in owls of all shapes, sizes, styles, and materials, from thimble-sized painted wooden ones to a particularly imposing foot-tall metal statue. I don’t think Dad actually bought many owls himself; they were usually gifts, after he’d once told someone he liked owls and it snowballed from there. I don’t know how many he had. He told us it was bad luck to…

It’s an obvious truth – almost too obvious to need pointing out, really – that the world consists of two kinds of things: those with inner lives, and those without. Humans, plus presumably at least some animals, have thoughts, emotions, and intentions; cars, table lamps, and jars of peanut butter do not. What’s strange, given the obviousness of this fact, is how much of every day I seem to spend in denial of it, treating inanimate objects as if they had minds. I’m writing this on a computer I frequently suspect of plotting to sabotage my work; I get into aggressive disputes with hard-to-open packaging and recalcitrant bottles of ketchup; I have been known to plead with cars in an effort to dissuade them from stalling on steep hills. I…

“Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” William Morris “To compose our character is our duty… All other things – ruling, hoarding, building – are only little appendages and props, at most.” Michel de Montaigne “It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.” David Foster Wallace “The human animal is a beast that dies and if he’s got money he buys and buys and buys…” Tennessee Williams “Well, less is more, Lucrezia: I am judged.” Robert Browning “You can’t consume much if you sit still and read books.” Aldous Huxley “If I am what I have and if what I have is lost, who then am I?” Erich Fromm “Excess…

To be a refugee is to experience a series of profound losses. You lose your home, your country; perhaps your family, career, or language. I’d been sitting in John Gulzari’s living room for more than an hour when he suddenly jumped up and rushed from the room. John is a Hazara man who fled Afghanistan in 1999, and I had been interviewing him for a book of oral histories about people’s experiences in Australia’s immigration detention centres. John’s house was sparsely furnished, in the Afghan style, with no chairs or tables – we’d been sitting on cushions on the carpeted floor while John told me about fleeing from the Taliban, alone, in his teens. When John returned to the living room, he was holding an old cassette tape. It was,…

Zan Boag: Your book Snoop looks at how we form impressions of others based on their stuff. In your research, you literally looked through people’s stuff. You picked under beds, peered in closets, rifled through music collections. How did you go about your research and how did you get people to agree to let you do this? Sam Gosling: It was a weird thing, actually, that I found when talking about going through people’s stuff. We really wanted to look at real people’s stuff, not some contrived recreation of it, to see how people do leave their stuff. People have this intuition that you can learn a lot about people from their living spaces but until we studied it, we really had no idea if that was true and if…

A photograph of a half-eaten sandwich is buried deep within my camera roll. Every now and then it will pop up as I scroll through pictures or when I am uploading new ones. I stop and breathe a little differently for a moment. I know the date without looking: April 16, 2012. My best friend died two days before. A drunk driver killed her. I had to go to work on that Monday morning, and as I left I was hyper-aware of the thin wheat sandwich round on the stovetop. I know I had smeared a little peanut butter on the bread, taking bites as I went about my morning routine. A daily ritual. But not that day. That day the half-eaten breakfast called, Remember this. This is a moment.…

During the earlier stages of economic development, consumption of goods without stint, especially consumption of the better grades of goods – ideally all consumption in excess of the subsistence minimum – pertains normally to the leisure class. This restriction tends to disappear, at least formally, after the later peaceable stage has been reached, with private ownership of goods and an industrial system based on wage labour or on the petty household economy. But during the earlier quasi-peaceable stage, when so many of the traditions through which the institution of a leisure class has affected the economic life of later times were taking form and consistency, this principle has had the force of a conventional law. It has served as the norm to which consumption has tended to conform, and any…

Perth International Arts Festival Perth, Australia 9 February - 4 March 2018 The Perth International Arts Festival is the oldest annual international multi-arts festival in the southern hemisphere and is Western Australia’s premier cultural event. The first Perth Festival was in 1953 and it now offers the people of Western Australia some of the best international and contemporary drama, theatre, music, film, visual arts, street arts, literature, comedy, and free community events. Some other events in the festival include the Contemporary Culture program and the Perth Visual Arts Festival. www.perthfestival.com.au/ Brand New: Art and Commodity in the 1980s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC, USA 14 February – 13 May 2018 Brand New is the first museum exhibition to examine the artistic appropriation of commercial products in the late…

The contemporary designation of the body as ‘meat machine’ is merely the latest iteration of a long tradition of self-loathing. Blame Christianity, if you like. Better still, blame the Enlightenment. But western societies have, historically, been so skewed towards favouring the mind over the body, consciousness over mere matter, spirit over flesh, that we’ve practically forgotten what our bodies are for. A lot of the time we seem to desire to not have them at all. The transhumanist dream of leaving behind our cumbersome bodies in order to exist primarily online has been more or less realised, instrumentally, if not literally (the ultimate goal of transhumanists is to upload human consciousness to the cloud, doing away with materiality altogether), while the contemporary designation of the body as ‘meat machine’ is…