We finally get to the end of The Intimations Ode , after detours again through "Frost at Midnight" and the nature of nature in The Prelude and the relation of nature to death.
In which I try and fail to remember the form of a good paradox about loss aversion; some discussion about narratives and macguffins, and the two word summary of every exciting story with a happy ending: "loss, averted"
Echoes of Milton in Wordsworth. More of the Intimations Ode with a detour through Tintern Abbey . The shockingness of "O joy!"
MacGuffins in Hitchcock, as an intro to Ainslie. Why we like suspense fiction. Hitchcock on suspense. Rereading. Relation to the sublime vs. the beautiful as described by Smith and Kant.
We start on Ainslie -- hyperbolic vs. exponential discounting and we broach the question of what Ainslie calls "the management of longing."
More about the Prelude -- the skating scene, the boat-stealing scene, Wordsworth's later revisions for accuracy but against memory or wishful memory or the superpositions of memory. Shades of the prison house in the Intimations Ode. The child and its two worlds.
Money burning a hole in your pocket. Strategies of Commitment Lotteries as savings devices. Hyperbolic discounting.
We go back briefly to the intimations ode and to Montaigne's that philosophy is learning how to die -- intimations of mortality . All philosophy is. Then we knock around The Prelude -- recumbent o'er the surface of past time, the two consciousnesses, and some of the boat-stealing scene, with a digression on metaphor: sex as a vehicle in that scene about vehicles.
Poker. Common knowledge, where everyone's knowledge of what everyone else knows converges. The psychological components of games of skill. Turing tests and reverse Turing tests.
The difference between new money and old money. The value of old money, or of high culture -- its relation to value. The idea that that kind of value is related to the potlatch as a marker of status which precisely refuses monetization. Cultural capital in subcultures. (Essentially Bourdieu's ideas, though I don't explicitly cite him.)
Blake's view of Wordsworth, as reported by Henry Crabb Robinson in a letter to Dorothy Wordsworth and in his reminiscences. Robinson on Wordsworth's technical death in 1814: his indifference to tyranny after the fall of Napoleon. Return to the Intimations Ode and the subtle new start manifested in stanza 5.
This ended up being a class on common knowledge -- that is on games (and puzzles) with complete information.
We start with the Intimations Ode, which means we really start with "My Heart Leaps Up" -- and after the fourth stanza, which is where Wordsworth broke it off, we go to the glad preamble of The Prelude. Some attention to echoes between Coleridge and Wordsworth.
Since no one had read The Gambler , this class was a kind of summing up of thinking from Mandeville to Kant under the rubric of Mauss -- how credit, gratitude, obligation bring in other minds and differentiate our credit with them from the way money is a bookkeeping measure.
Basically a class where we rush through "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal," with a little reference to a couple of Shakespeare sonnets Wordsworth was probably thinking of -- 73 and 104.
In which we go over the answers to the midterm -- you don't need to read it, since I read the questions out. A little discussion Merchant of Venice : paying with all my heart, and of Ulysses : Leopold Bloom's joke advertising jingle, "Tell me where is fancy bread? At Burke's the Baker's, it is said."
Using the game show Golden Balls, we look at some Prisoner's Dilemma situations, and discuss Golden Balls as a more classic PD than it might seem at first (it's certainly at the least a modified PD). Episodes for watching are available here (an anthology) and here ("Weirdest split or steal every") . Different ways of valuing, different ways of strategizing....
Wordsworth on Gray in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads. Like Blake he channels Milton's view that poetry is something other than artifice, and like Blake he corrects the Miltonic example. Home at Grasmere vs. Paradise Lost .
Adam Smith on utility and beauty -- revealed preference as a tautology -- utilitarianism -- Smith on how preference isn't a tautology -- different from Mandeville. Smith on utility here. This will lead to Smith on self-command.
Mostly Wordsworth and the mysterious power of the absurdly great "We Are Seven," as well as a consideration of "Lines Written in Early Spring" and "Two April Mornings."
More about ballads and their relation to the supernatural, in a discussion of Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads . Some exemplary ballads. "Goody Blake and Harry Gill" as an example of an apparently supernatural ballad which isn't one. Beginning of "We are Seven," with Coleridge's collaborative first stanza.
A little more on Mandeville and the line that leads from him through Hutcheson (whom I didn't mention by name) to Hume and Smith. The nature of inflation, due to money's only having exchange value, and the nature of stimulus, as analyzed by Hume. A beginning of a discussion on the beauty of utility, according to Smith.
Mandeville's analysis of acting for reputation -- does it, can it, make sense, and if so how? Here's the fascinating passage we began looking at: The Soldiers, that were forc’d to fight, If they surviv’d, got Honour by’t; [p. 22, l. 1] [From Mandeville’s notes:] The Man of Manners picks not the best but rather takes the worst out of the Dish, and gets of every thing, unless it be forc’d upon him, always the most indifferent Share. By this Civility the Best remains for others, which being a Compl...
After a snow day, a special guest leads a class on Blake's Milton and the dynamics of the relations among the Immortals. We focus in particular on Milton himself and Urizen and how Milton overcomes his own spectre.
Some discussion of sunk costs and throwing good money after bad, poker strategy, the doubling cube, Talking Heads' "Once in a Lifetime" and more Mandeville.
Mandeville on the advantages of self-dealing and selfishness. Discussion of morality of plane flight, since that's all the rage these days, from a Kantian and from a game-theoretical point of view. Free riding and problems of collective action. Mandeville compared and to some extent contrasted with Rand.
We discuss Blake's mythology in general, then his America , fairly briefly, and then some of The Book of Urizen , in particular the coming into separate being of Urizen, the coming into being of Los as the allegory of Urizen's separation from him, and the binding of Orc with the chains of jealousy.
More on gift-giving and its manifest and latent content. Obligation and acceptance of obligation. The gift as pure use value -- at least manifestly. A bit more on The Merchant of Venice .
We try to sort out some preliminary confusions about who's who in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell . I try -- stumblingly -- to give an account of the Romantic idea that loss is (as Harold Bloom puts it) "shadowed gain."
Given the sheepish coughing you'll hear, by people acknowledging they weren't keeping up with the reading, this turned into an exposition mainly of Marcel Mauss's great work The Gift , along with some mention of Joel Waldfogel's notorious article "The Deadweight Loss of Christmas."
