Volume 10, Number 3: January 15, 2004
Philosophy
Songs: In the Best Tradition from Thales to Dennett (Except for the Singing)
by V. Alan White,
University of Wisconsin-Manitowoc
From
Thales' ancient pratfall into a well because he was so distracted by contemplation
of the heavens to Wittgenstein's Three Stooges fireplace poker ad baculum
against Popper, philosophy always has seemed to marry sublimity of thought
with raucous absurdity. There seems to be more here than a marriage of
convenience, too. Often people create particularly well when some strong
emotion is in tow. Would Sylvia Plath be the same poet without her famous
pathos?1 Could Van
Fraassen really have sold erotetic explanation as well as he did without
the cute backhand slap of the chevalier ghost-story?2
(I refrain from drawing further conclusions about the natural
alliance of poetry with angst and philosophy with humor; the respective
counterexamples are Kenneth Koch and almost any 19th century Continental.)
In any case there is a rich tradition of tongue-in-cheek philosophizing
in the Western tradition, and today Daniel Dennett and I will continue
to do our best to see whose tongue prevails--though I already plead nolo
contendere on the philosophizing part.
But seriously, folks. Professors at least know that students are awake when they laugh, and that's one very practical reason to lace ponderous arguments with humor. It really does make for memorable learning. Besides, as I solemnly swear before every one of my Introduction to Philosophy classes, one of the most fundamental reasons to be highly educated is that you "get" better jokes. My own humorous tendencies have always skewed towards the musical. I can still sing Mad magazine parodies that I read in the 60's, which says something about the mnemonics of lyricism without having to actually dig up research on stuff like the educational psychology of Homeric legends. So when I went to grad school in the 70's and wished to set down philosophical ideas in a memorable way, of course I turned to song. 3 Many of those original tunes were admittedly more autobiographical than anything else, so "Solipsism's Painless" and "This PhD" (sung to "Suicide is Painless" and "This Diamond Ring"), for instance, tended more to vent about grad student life than to convey philosophy. Still, some real philosophy always sneaked in, as in "Poppycock" ("Rockytop, Tennessee"):
In the Fall of 1981 I was hired as an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Manitowoc. For the next 15 years I was consumed with teaching and writing and got away from singing philosophy when, in the mid-90's, the internet plopped itself down on every UW faculty desktop. Always something of a computer geek myself, having bought an Atari for my office in 1985, I eagerly plunged into this new digital medium. I learned HTML and decided that since my CV, as was once said of Rogers Albritton's, was as thick as Socrates', my niche was to sing for Sophia. I published my old songs first and posted crude a cappella clips of them in huge WAVS which only intrepid musical masochists could endure. Later, I mercifully added public-domain MIDIs of the songs I parodied so that Netters could punish themselves, karaoke fashion, rather than have me do it. Doing all this re-energized my muse (or curse), and I began to write more songs, now much less about me and more about philosophy. The first, "We Didn't Start Inquiry" ("We Didn't Start the Fire") surveyed the history of philosophy:
Many others followed: "Hume on the Brain" ("Home on the Range"), "Antinomy" 4 (Chimchiminey"), "Make a Talk on the Ryle Side" ("Take a Walk on the Wild Side"), "Ergo Sum" ("In My Room"), and so on. In recent years I learned how to combine tracks in an audio-editing program and started producing stereo MP3s complete with music, so now once again I am inflicting my at-times-marginal voice on willing victims. (You can even burn them on CD should you wish such torment to follow you into your car.) Something began to happen with the appearance of these new songs--emails of appreciation for them. From all over the world people thanked me for this or that song (not the singing mind you), and a few thanked me for an if-it-was-a-snake-it'd-have-bitten-me reason I'd never have anticipated. They used them in the classroom. To teach philosophy. "The Gad-Fly Athenaios" ("The Girl from Ipanema") to teach Socrates. "We Didn't Start Inquiry" for history surveys. "The Hook's a Bust" ("The Look of Love") for conditionals in formal logic. "Prehension" ("Suspicion") for Whitehead's process philosophy. "Supererogationisticextraobligation" (can you guess?) for discussion of morally required heroism. So--a bit belatedly, I sadly admit--I began to use them in the classroom too. And it does work remarkably well to reinforce ideas and as a mnemonic aid for rather complex ideas. Too bad that for so many years I couldn't see past the self-indulgence of it all to recall the lesson of Thales, the image of Wittgenstein trying to pop Popper, Van Fraassen's gotcha story, and the host of other liaisons of philosophical wit and wisdom that cried out the pedagogical utility of my little ditties. But I'm trying to make up for lost time, both in using my songs myself and producing more besides. The URL for the Philosophy
Songs Page is: http://www.manitowoc.uwc.edu/staff/awhite/phisong.htm,
but it is easier to
type "philosophy songs" into Google; my page is presently
the first listed. |
1 I boldly take this pedagogical opportunity to irrelevantly encapsulate The Bell Jar author's career poetically:
Plath's Path
Published.
Perished.
So much for the famous disjunctive correlation of print with tenure.
2 Bas Van Fraassen, The Scientific Image, Oxford University Press, 1980. I had to have a parallel footnote anyway.
3 An anecdote. In preparing for my doctoral prelims on metaethics I used the lyrics of Dave Mason's "We Just Disagree" to present classic emotivism (try it in introductory ethics). When I secured my present position in Wisconsin it turned out that the song's lyricist, Jim Krueger, grew up near here and was a good friend of some of my present colleagues, one of whom was present when Krueger actually began to compose the song. Little did I know I was preparing for a degree of separation in several senses when I was in Knoxville!
4 "Antinomy" will appear in Roy A. Sorenson, A Short History of Paradoxes, Oxford University Press, forthcoming. No kidding.