Concrete-Bound

A realisation from Ayn Rand which has really helped me understand the psychology of others is the concept of being "concrete-bound" which took me a while to understand. When I would debate with my dad for example, he would often say things like "well there are very well researched people, as intelligent as you are, who disagree with you" - or (my favourite) "if you ask 100 people the vast majority would disagree" ; not realising these were not actually arguments - never mind valid or sound.

When I would make as obvious reductio ad absurdum like "Well if you asked 100 people if the world was flat in 1066 ..." he would say things like "I don't like your analogies..." as though my example had nothing whatsoever to do with what he said. Ayn Rand helped me realise he was "concrete-bound" he didn't know how to move from a specific example such as "if you ask 100 people they will disagree with you (on this issue)" to the underlying principle of the assertion (the truth is what the majority says it is.) Have you any experiences of interacting with the "concrete-bound" ?

I have found a method of intervening in a way that helps explain the leap but it requires a bit more patience.

You have to first make explicit the principle, "are you saying that if most people believe something then that something is true?" - Wait for them to respond. They are unlikely to say yes, if they say "no - but..." listen to what they have to say and then respond, "But you accept that just because the majority of people say something is true that doesn't mean it is true?" and proceed in the same fashion without hostility so avoid provoking defensiveness.

In other words: don't skip steps in your reasoning, and don't use hidden premises. Take people through the argument stage by stage.

Afterwards you can explain the concept of the particular logical fallacy

Why Government is Antithetical to Freedom

"When two people meet in a political discussion, regardless of the political affiliations, there are bound to be a number of issues that they agree on. For example, a socialist and a free-marketeer - despite having completely different opinions on how an economy should be run - are likely to agree on a dearth of issues including ending foreign military interventions, the war on drugs, reducing government surveillance into the private lives of citizens, and ending corporate welfare from the government to rich business issues. Nevertheless, under the political system which most people favour - parliamentary democracy of some description - both are almost completely powerless to fight back against these (real or perceived injustices) because they have to simply accept one of the "package deals" of policies offered by one of the parties that can win. If none of those parties offer the option of ceasing to sink state funds into nuclear weapons, for example, these supposed political enemies alike will both be forced to pay for them through the tax system - regardless of their personal values. It is the power to divest which is the real basis of political freedom. The power to say "no, I don't believe in this, I don't want to pay for it, and so I am going to spend my money elsewhere." That is the freedom that the non-state sectors of society (be they businesses, charities, cooperatives or other non-government organisations) offer, but the state does not, and fundamentally why the state is antithetical to freedom." - Antony Sammeroff

 I think if you use this argument when you get into political debates with statists, "even where we both agree - and there is lots of common ground - we are still powerless to make change under the system you support, which is parliamentary democracy" - the penny might drop.

It looks like this: "Both you and I agree on lots of issues, for example against the wars, against the war on drugs, against corporate welfare. But under the system you support, we are relatively powerless to change it because even if we vote - we can only vote for the package deals of party x or party y - if those issues are off the cards on both platforms, we will still have to pay for it whether we like it or not through the tax system - even if one is one platform, another one is not likely to be on the other platform. "

marriage

you know, my whole life I have taken it for granted that if I got married I would take the ladies name as well as her taking mine. So much so that the first time I realised it was when I mentioned a scenario that it was a feature of in passing to a flatmate around 6 years ago and rather than comment on the scenario he remarked that it was "very modern" of me to add a girls last name before my own. Isn't it weird? I never even regarded it as a thing, even although I knew that most people don't do that. Only problem is that if the tradition continues my descendants will have a massive long list of names.

Complaining

Complaining about what is without working towards what could be is immature.


Most people think changing the world is more about changing other peoples habits than their own, but most people who make a positive impact in the world lead by example.

What is the difference between Left and Right anarchism?

Left anarchism, which was the common usage of the term up until recently, is a political philosophy very closely related to communism, with the central socialist principle that workers should own the means of production. Having bosses run businesses or capitalists own the means of production is considered to be expploitative and hierarchical, wheras right anarchists see these relationships as acceptible so long as they are voluntary: if employees can agree to contractual terms, quit any time they like, unionise except where probhibited by voluntary agreements, etc. it is considered that the bosses are providing value by organising the work force, and capitalists are providing value by anticipating the market, organising production in terms of demand, and risking their investment (and also their property where uninsured, as the state would not exist to give them limited liability in the form of a Ltd. corporation  or Plc.) Right anarchists are not opposed to workers owning their own workplaces as long as this is organised by mutual agreements and voluntary interactions rather than imposed by violations of property rights (eg. workers getting a loan from the bank to buy out bosses and owners.)

Right anarchism is a more recent development but it can also be traced back to Baukunin who is seen as influential to both schools as an anarchist. It's more of an extension of American libertarianism, with the central principle being the NAP - ie. Thou shalt not initiate the use of force - no violence or theft, including taxation, as a rule, although levies for public goods could be extracted through a system of social pressure, ostracism, and refusal to engage in collective buying for people who did not pay their share (eg. If you don't pay your share for street lights you can expect to have to make your own arrangements for garbage collection as well.) Government regulation would similarly be be replaced by a system of insurance companies or cooperatives (often referred to as DROs - dispute resolution organisations) who were financially incentived to solve problems before they occurred instead of being called upon to respond after the fact (like police, government fines, universal sick care, fire fighters, climate taxes etc. and all government services which are called upon only when a problem has all ready arisen.) These companies would lose money through payouts when they failed to protect their clients from harm or loss of property, which would encourage them to develop preventative measures and disincentives to criminals which would be constantly optimised through competition on the free market - whichever organisation was most effective as preventing harm or loss would gain the greatest market share, if someone advanced on their developments they would become lucrative, and if any such company got "too big for its boots," or abused its authority, its clients would have the option to pick another service provider, rather than remain at the behest of a state monopoly for provision of this service.

Left anarchism tends to focus more on problems of capital and capitalism, much like state socialists do. Right anarchists tend to talk primarily about the problems of statism, those which are created or exacerbated by governemnt, and they therefor tend to have the most convincing arguments for the abolition of states.


Despite coming from different angles, both agree that the state is based on force or the threat of force for its existence, that the state is a tool wielded by the ruling class for unfair advantage over everyone else, and that corporations and corporatism are products of statism which allow the rich to privilege from privatizing gains and socialising losses, which is immoral.

All forms of anarchists acknowledge that where there are rulers there can be no rules, as rulers by their very nature, make themselves the exception to the rule. Anarchists are egalitarians, no special privileges for law-makers or corporations. If you kill, harm, steal, or damage someone else's property, you are to be held personally liable for it - not the state (tax payer) or corporation (consumer/share-holder) - you personally. There is to be no hiding behind institutions which are mere abstractions of the mind in anarchy. This implementation of this moral hazard for the privileged is meant to do away with much of the corruption, cronyism, and war crimes which are part and parcel of statist societies.

So some common ground between the two despite philosophical difference on very key points.

For example, left wing ideals such as workers running their workplaces are thought by some to be more likely under right anarchism that statism, since the public education system trains children for individualism and competition, but the evidence on how individuals learn best is in favour of a cooperative learning environment. Without the kind of schooling which is prevalent and imposed by the state (which right anarchists are strongly opposed to) children would be raised with lots of experience of cooperation and mutualism, and so would more likely to create workplaces that capitalised on those skills than top-down hierarchies which follow the prevalent pattern of schooling and parenting.

Preliminary thoughts for my dissertation

On some level we want to say that the great compositions of, say, Beethoven are in some way 'better' than those of say, Katy Perry whom we had a look at in MMA last year with Martin Dixon
(if you happen to think she's a great contemporary composer you may substitute some other name which fits the bill of simply composed/kitsch music.)

On one hand it's hard to say that it's an objective judgement of quality, because all aesthetic experiences fall into the subjective experience of the person receiving them. On the other hand we know we are making a distinction between we say music is 'bad' music versus music which is 'not my kind of thing.'

Personally I hate swing music. Despite liking something in almost every genre of music I've never been able to cultivate a taste for Swing. But I'm not willing to turn around and say that Quincy Jones was a ‘bad’ arranger when working with Frank Sinatra - he's clearly extremely competent. I just personally don’t like it.

On Sunday night I heard two folk singers sing a song together where each of their parts was incredibly sophisticated with little riffs and inventive harmonies – I was impressed by the counterpoint because I thought (“knew”?) it was qualitatively 'better' than if they'd just harmonised in thirds. Not that harmonising in thirds would be “bad” or “unpleasant” – I just felt like what I was hearing was superior.

While the lay patron could also notice a difference in complexity and might likely agree that the more sophisticated, sung by more practiced singers, was the “better”, it seems I've cultivated a taste that allows me to make more complicated value judgements than non-musicians. I can make a distinction here between say, Burt Bacharach, the composer of great pop tunes, and Burt Bacharach the extremely competent and innovative arranger/composer whose use of complex rhythmical phrasing which was rare in pop music, expressive chord changes and ingenious sequences tantalise my ear as a musician.

This impulse may sometimes lead those of us who know a bit about music hear a song and think - "that would be better if only..." [it included such and such an obviously missing vocal harmony, or they chose this note or that chord instead of the one, or they took]  ...

What are we saying? We're not just saying we'd prefer it, we're arguing that we have a qualified opinion on what would improve the piece of music.

But improve the music how? And to what ends? Is it because the pleasure of enjoying more sophisticated music is greater than enjoying pop on the cosmetic level?

As a theatre critic I have to make value judgments and try to offer feedback, which is hopefully useful - either to the company or the patrons. Both if possible. ("I particularly like the ones which, from beneath the veil of the plot, reveal to the experienced eye some subtle truth that will escape the common herd," - Voltaire in The White Bull.)  I have no doubt that the highest achievement the critic can manage is to point out some subtlety of genius that escapes 'the common herd' so that when they read my writing they have an “Ah!” moment – “Oh my god that is so true/observant.” This act of enlightenment forever changes the viewer and opens their eyes to watching out for similar phenomena in future aesthetic experiences. Their taste is more cultivated. Their standards have been permanently raised.

When it comes to giving negative criticism, much of what I write is all but ubiquitously noted by the audience, the lay person may notice and cringe. At other times I notice things most do not, but as far as I’m concerned they are extremely important, perhaps to the fidelity of the writing. A common example is that often the actors have not sufficiently noted what is said about their character by other characters in the script, and disregarded these hint in their portrayal. Such things may often escape the regular theatre goer because an actor’s performance can be internally consistent without while making this error, so in this way having a cultivated taste could be seen as a liability when it comes to gaining pleasure from an aesthetic experience. Then what nonsense does this make of striving to enlighten people just do they can enjoy theatre less? Surely we want them to enjoy poor theatre less so that they can enjoy good theatre more.

The companies may appreciate such feedback because they want to be 'better' - they appreciate there is somewhere to go. If not what would be the point in improving? Why strive to be capable of a Goldberg variation when any pleasant sounding two-part invention will do?

And then, sophistication isn’t synonymous with quality either. We often also appreciate “the beauty of simplicity.”

What is more, if some of the modernists are to be believed, pleasure is not necessarily even the critical point of the aesthetic experience.

I recall Martin Dixon saying, 'Is that all you want from music?' - paraphrasing the essential sentiment of Adorno as he did

My response is to say, as a thinker living in post-modern times, “may many flowers bloom.” Perhaps pleasure is not the critical point of the aesthetic experience in some cases, and in other cases it is.
While I could never “cultivate” a taste for swing, I once had no taste for Opera but developed a love for it. Most peoples experience of Schoenberg or, "worse still", the more impenetrable moderns is that some study plus considerable exposure is required to "get it".

Adorno commented on the relevance of the techniques used to the music at hand (I will cite an example in my essay most likely as I remember reading him comment on such and such a chord in chamber music being appropriate, but not in such and such another genre.) In this observation he is not alone. His remarks are actually very mainstream: in contemporary times the synths so synonymous with 80s pop music sound disastrously “cheesy” except in pastiche. The “choir” or “harpsichord” settings on your keyboard, anathema to a hard rock band, sounds perfectly appropriate and apt in the European “Viking” or “Gothic” metal genres. Simon Frith, in his essay on “bad music” refers to the kind of “genre confusion” involved with “getting this wrong” as ‘ridiculous music… the gap between what performers/producers think they are doing and what they actually achieve.” Certainly this makes a credible argument for calling music bad that does not draw upon the sophistication of the material – music can be both sophisticated technically and “bad” or “cheesy.”

Adorno’s argument that immanence through self-reference makes music better is extremely compelling, and yet it seems to be presented as self-evident and without argument, which makes it difficult to justify in under the Western analytic tradition. That is the problem I will face if I wish to make use of any of Adorno’s arguments for what is good or bad in music.

eBay don't pay all their taxes? Good!

Here's an interesting but controversial thought experiment.

In response to this article in the Guardian claiming that eBay has avoided some £50m in taxes, a friend of mine was asking around to see if there was any alternative she could use because she wanted to boycott them.

I asked her to expand on her reasons why, because I thought that the government would only spend the money on wars, corporate welfare, paying off the bankers and their cronies anyway, so what was the point?... She kindly responded:

"It would mean less of an excuse for austerity measures; if they're seen to be collecting the funds, and still cutting the welfare state. The government is very good at shifting the blame - but if places like Starbucks, IKEA, and eBay actually paid taxes, then the government has nowhere to hide."

My thought was that while those propositions may hold true in a socialist utopia, they are actually based on a basic misapprehension of economics which is quite common, particularly on the left, which is that it is actually possible for corporations to pay taxes. In truth, as the (very liberal) Senator, Mike Gravel, put in his book Citizen Power a Mandate for Change (2008) under the chapter which advocates for tax reform (in line the Fair Tax proposals):

"Liberals bristle at the thought of relieving corporations of income taxes. Unfortunately... fooled into thinking that by taxing corporations they shift the cost of government from the people to corporations. Corporations do not pay taxes; they merely collect taxes from their consumers for the government, In fact, a corporate tax is a disguised retail sales tax....

...they simply take the tax into account as an added cost of production… and adjust their prices accordingly... close examination of the tangled corporate tax structure shows it only serves to inflate the cost of goods and services to consumers... Obviously, if we eliminated all corporate taxes and subsidies, the ordinary tax payer would come out far ahead."

These words are not from a reactionary Republican or Thatcherite, but from one of the most liberal senators in the American political system, who became nationally known for his forceful but unsuccessful attempts to end the draft during the Vietnam War and for putting the Pentagon Papers into the public record in 1971 at risk to himself, and then throughout his career campaigned for direct democracy, an end to war, transparency in government, universal healthcare, social security, and all the other trappings of a left-of-centre Democrat.

That might be pretty hard to apprehend because it arouses our sense of injustice that the big boys can get around paying while small business owners and the rest of us tax cattle have to put in for stuff we don’t agree with (like the wars) but perhaps once we realise that this tax money is not being extracted from the bank accounts of rich CEOs, but us independent eBay users the case may becomes clear. We foot the bill.

Rich people don’t pay income tax the same way we do. They have these handy things called corporations. Private individuals earn, get taxed and live off what is left. Corporations earn, spend, and are taxed on what it’s left, check out this handy diagram from Rich Dad, Poor Dad (2000) Robert T. Kiyosaki:

Remember, the status of “Corporation” is a privilege granted to certain companies by the state rather than the free market. If you wanted to tax the receipts of "greedy capitalists" the option would be to place tax on share dividends, although perhaps even those could craftily be passed on to the consumer.

The truth is, if eBay were forced to pay their taxes, all that would likely happen is that they’d raise the price of listing products. The cost will be passed on to the consumer and be borne by buyers and sellers. It's certainly very unlikely to do any good in the world.

eBay is one of the biggest employers in the world, allowing around 350,000 people to work from home and have more leisure time. It facilitates recycling and ends wastage by putting people who want second hand products in touch with people who have those products and no longer need them. It even has a feedback system which allows people to indicate who is trust worthy to exchange with and who is not. There are punitive consequences for not honouring your word, much unlike in the political realm where those who don't keep campaign promises escape unscathed, and those guilty of far greater crimes and misdemeanours under the guise of foreign policy (or even domestic policy) seem to walk above the law.

eBay enriches the lives of millions of people, allowing them to afford things they couldn't otherwise or make a bit of money on the side instead of chucking things out.

To clarify the point, if we are talking about McDonald's who, we’ve been told, cut down the rainforest, or Coca Cola who are said to monopolise, discriminate and poison, or British Gas who are part of a state-granted cartel of the energy industry which continues to increase prices while enjoying higher profits, to the detriment of elderly customers who may freeze to death this winter... If such a company is dodging taxes, by all means go ahead, boycott them. I'd boycott them anyway on a moral principle, perhaps it will make them less competitive.

But eBay? eBay isn't only harmless, it's is a credit to society.

The state, on the other hand, is a non-voluntary institution which institutes corporate monopolies by regulating into place barriers to entry. It makes war, kills more people than all private individuals and corporations put together, provides corporate welfare to the rich, makes nuclear weapons, sells arms to foreign dictators and subsidises nuclear and unsustainable energy despite the risks. It forces people at gun point to pay for indoctrination camps where their children are forced to do what they are told when they are told, habituating them to living in a hierarchical society before they ever enter the work place, and then after 11-13 years of this state-led ‘education’ most come out with so few skills that are economically valuable that they cannot even find minimum wage job. It puts people in cages with violent criminals and rapists if they happen to have the wrong kind of vegetation in their pocket, and at great expense to the tax payer, despite all the reason and evidence showing that drug prohibition has never worked, does not work, will never work - that addiction should be treated as a public health issue rather than a criminal one - and that those countries who have moved in the direction of legalisation or even decriminalisation have had the most positive outcomes. The state spent the younger generation into 1 trillion pounds of debt before they were even born by the act of buying votes from the older generation by giving them public services that they were not paying for themselves with their own tax money, and by printing money which inflated and devalued the currency to the benefit of the elite and detriment of the poor. And then on top of all that, as though that were not enough, they had the cheek to sell the tax payer further down the river by bailing out the bankers who were largely responsible for the economic crisis to the tune of £500 billion pounds in 2008.

The government has the power to force you to pay for all these immoral things whether you agree with them or not. Whether you like them or not. You are bound to by law.
On the other hand, eBay can't force you to pay for a single thing your conscience disagrees with. Literally nothing. Ever.

And I’m supposed to believe that eBay dodging their taxes is the larger social issue at stake here?

Supposing one of us were put in charge of a real life award of fifty million pounds.

We were told that the other judges had narrowed down the decision to two anonymous candidates, and that they needed us to pick one of the two choices as a tie breaker.

All we were given to base our decision on was a brief summary of what each of these bodies had done, say, since eBay's inception in 1995. Those would include, on one side, the wars and expenses scandals for example, and on the other side a charge of infringing on patents (2000) and accusations of fleecing clients with an increase in charges (2008) to name a couple. Could either of us honestly say, given all the information in an essentially unbiased way - a way uncontaminated by the social-bias which says paying taxes is virtuous by its very nature, while avoiding them is necessarily vicious - that we would give the award to the more violent party?

I'm pretty sure I know who I'd give the money to, if I happened to have the choice, and it wouldn't be the institution that had all the guns.

My Reflection on Like The Greeks

Reflection on

 Like The Greeks

Inspiration for Like The Greeks

I undertook Like the Greeks, “A play for the artist and the philosopher in each of us”, after having a dream in which I was descending an ancient stone staircase at the side of a precipice, absolutely terrified. Finally I came to an alcove wherein there were the stone heads carved out of the rock, like the ancient depictions of Sophocles, Aristophanes and the great philosophers of Ancient Greece:

I knew that the stairs led down to Athens.

The Idea of the Great Man and the title.

I took the Ancient Greeks to symbolise a desire to be a historical figure who had an impact on the evolution of human thought and that prompted me to write on the subject. I thought a good start would be a struggling playwright who was trying to come to terms with his role in the world while simultaneously alienating it, or more specifically, those around him.

Throughout the play the idea of being a Great Man, an influential figure in the history of art or philosophy, is signified by the term of being “Like The Greeks.” It was interesting to work with this signifier as I had been reading on Hegel and his idea that there is "World Spirit" (Weltgeist) which guides humanities evolution through the spirits of Great Men who, through their actions, change the world and this fit rather excellently with the ideas I already had to work with. The fact that Hegel was a huge classicist and very much into “The Greeks” was a charming coincidence I was very pleased with, he did my work for me by referring to them in his own writing, and in turn Franz, the protagonist, decides to write a play based on Hegel’s (relatively famous) Master and Slave Dialectic in order to expiate his own feeling of powerlessness and desire to ‘rise up’ from his self-imposed slavery and achieve his potential.

In my dream, when I reached the bottom of the staircase I found myself in a venue where a rock band was playing a very intimate show. They were not on high above their audience. I text my then-girlfriend, “I’m in Athens! So now I can be a Greek like I always wanted!! Papa Roach are playing, I feel like it’s meant to be!”

In the morning when I messaged her to relay the dream she mentioned that she had been listening to the same band all day the day before. This seemed eerily like what the psychoanalyst Karl Jung, who was very into dream interpretation, would call a ‘synchronicity’ - the experience of events that are apparently causally unrelated and unlikely to occur together, occurring together by chance in seemingly a meaningful manner.

               In the final scene when Franz offers ex-partner Mary a part in a play he has written, he gives her character the name of Sophia, the Greek word for wisdom. The origin of the choice derives from Jungian psychology where the unconscious female aspect of a male, the anima, goes through four stages of evolution. Eve (as from genesis) deals with the emergence of a male's object of desire, Helen (as of Troy) is capable of worldly success and of being self-reliant, intelligent and insightful, but has lacks in internal qualities such as virtue, faith or imagination. Mary (as in the Virgin) who possesses virtue by the perceiving male, and ultimately Sophia, in which complete integration has occurred, allowing females to be seen and related to as particular individuals who possess both positive and negative qualities. Indeed when Franz bestows the part of Sophia upon Mary it is a symbol of his having gone from seeing her as merely someone virtuous, a means to his own ends, to a person in her own right.

               It is worthy of note that I was completely unaware of Jung’s theory when I chose the name Mary for her (she was named after Mary Shelly who was an inspiration to Percy Shelly and Byron) it was a mere matter of coincidence that Sophia turned out to be a Greek name and so I chose it for the character in the play that Franz would write as it gave me the needed link for last two lines of dialogue which I had delineated from the very beginning:

MARY. Like the Greeks?
FRANZ. Like the Greeks.

Exeunt.

               I see something of a parallel between Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious (the idea that below our unconscious there is a deeper level of mind which links all of consciousness) and Hegel’s belief in the Weltgeist. If we could ever conceive of such a supernatural force existing I would have to say I felt synchronicities were on my side in the process of writing. This idea found its own home within the play when Franz, a dedicated atheist, unexpectedly declares: “In the moment of creation it is as difficult for an artist to be an atheist as it is for a philosopher to believe in God,” referringhis feeling that, while in the element of writing, that there is something greater than oneself pushing things along.

Sunday in the Park with George

Not long after I had conceived of the concept of Like The Greeks I was working at The Edinburgh Fringe as a theatre critic where I saw the musical Sunday in the Park with George. I saw some parallels between it and my project, as it is about a painter who alienates his significant other by being grumpy, self-obsessed and blind to her needs, but I wanted to use my play as an opportunity to examine the psychological aspects of the characters involved and address some philosophical questions regarding art, and the relationship between oneself and the other.

It was not my aim to romanticise a difficult personality type or make excuses for it, but to expose it. Franz begins with severe writer’s block, unlike George, who paints prolifically. This is, in part, because Franz is extrinsically motivated, he cares that people will find his work insightful, masterful, ground-breakingly original, &c., while George simply feels the desire to paint and acts upon it. Indeed evidence shows that the imposition of external motivations leads to a decline in the ability to motivate oneself intrinsically (such as in Dweck, C. S. (1999) “Self-Theories – Their Role in Motivation, Personality and Development”, Columbia University.)

Art for Art’s Sake

An important theme within the play is the idea of Art as ‘ends-driven’ (by the desire for credibility, acclaim, fame, influence, &c.) versus the desire to pursue art purely as a means of self-expression. Franz describes himself as torn between two elements of his personality:

               “On one side of me is a poet who wants to create work of indescribably beauty and bliss. One who couldn’t give a rotten damn about what anyone else may think or say on it. On the other side of me is a philosopher. A great intellectual who wants to influence everyone he meets, startling them with revelation and epiphany. An innovator. A revolutionary - turning everything he touches into gold. I’m just a poet trying to play philosopher and playwright all in one breath, that’s the trouble.”

               ‘Like the Greeks,’ Franz wants to be a great man with his own place etched out in history, while Mary, his partner, prompts him to write whatever occurs to him while not assessing it too deeply at first glance and to prize quality over originality. Indeed it is when Franz decides that he should write for his own fulfillment that he finally finds it easy to achieve all that he wants, both artistically and philosophically. He places the poet first, but rather than abandon the philosopher he reconciles these two aspects of his personality by making philosophy the ally of art:

               “The poet designs clothes for the philosopher to wear, and if no one sees past their charm to what is truly being said, more fool them! He’s still all too glad for the attention.”

               At the last, the play is about Franz coming to see his creativity being worthy in its own right rather than an accessory  to his ego, and through that process also coming to see Mary as ‘Sophia,’ worthy in her own right.

Suffering for your Art

Throughout the play we see Franz constantly, as he puts it, “at war” with himself. Towards the end of the play he has a monologue which is the turning point of his character. He considers the fact that so many great artists (“great men”) suffered so greatly in their lives: Dostoevsky, Beethoven, Van Gough and Coleridge are some of his examples. He wonders whether their lives of suffering were worth creating some of the greatest works of all time and considers the fact that in some way their suffering makes the story of their lives more compelling. This is when he realises that all that remains is for him to ensure that he always acts in such a way that he can be proud of, as though he were the hero of his own story.

The Evolution of Mary and the Ethics of Like The Greeks

The character of Mary matures long before Franz does. The first step in the matter is realising that her relationship with Franz is unfulfilling to her and brings her more sorrow than joy. While Franz expresses the will to write about morality, she is interested in preserving her virtue in practical terms, and says:

“The saint who sacrifices self in the service of others becomes no longer worthy of the title of saint, for has he not spilled innocent blood though it be his own? Cultivating a bitterness in pursuit of a virtue leaves no virtue to speak of.”

When she breaks up with him reiterates the sentiment: “I have only so much good will to spare and I think its best we spent some time apart.” In other words she has realized that she does not like who she is becoming as a consequence of being together with him, she is unhealthily co-dependent and is substituting encouraging him for pursuit of her own aspirations, she wants to create a better life for herself, “I owe it to myself to consider how I’d like to spend my own future.”

She is being ignored at work and she's being ignored by Franz. She leaves him and would no doubt soon leave her job too.    While Franz is too self-involved to be aware of the needs of others, she manages to identify exactly what she thinks love is and would desire from a relationship, “Love isn’t just something you say you feel… it’s something you do! Love is attention. If you don’t give the correct attention your feeling is a bird without wing. Your love doesn’t nurture.”

Foreshadowing and self-reference within Like The Greeks

It was important to me to try to write something that was clever and worked on many levels. The continental philosopher Theodor Adorno believed that good art was constantly cognisant of the whole and worked with its own material immanently rather than evolving in a vacuum with no self-awareness. I agree deeply on this point and long before I was aware of those writings what impressed me in fiction was good foreshadowing, when themes that could have seemed of little significance when first occurring came to greater prominence later in the work or reoccurred in unexpected way. This approach is easily exemplified by “Chekov’s gun,” a literary technique whereby an apparently irrelevant element is introduced early in the story whose significance becomes clear later in the narrative.

There are a number of subtle examples of this within the script, but for brevity I will only discuss two. The first and most significant occurs at the beginning:

FRANZ. How’s the café been?

MARY. The same as ever really, people hear but don't listen. Now and then someone asks me to play the moonlight or sends over a drink, but only because they like the way I look. Were it otherwise they'd be as well to play recordings. I’d like to return to the stage but seems there’s little work open to an unestablished actress. Not in Paris anyway. Looks like I'm stuck behind the piano for the time being.

FRANZ. At least it’s nice for you to get paid for playing.

MARY. But it's dull being part of the furniture! You should really come in some time...

FRANZ. Perhaps I shall.

MARY. Perhaps.

In itself this passage shows Franz completely ignoring Mary’s aspirations; he is unable to pick up on her underlying feelings. All she wants is for him to show he cares by coming in to hear her play at work, and thus when she says “it’s dull being part of the furniture” it takes on a double meaning because she is heard but not listened to within his house as well.

This foreshadows the final scene play in which Franz finally does come into the café to hear her playing:

FRANZ. I always loved the way you played that Chopin étude.
MARY. Really? You never came in to hear it before, you always said perhaps.
FRANZ. Envious for the centre of attention no doubt.
MARY. Not that they pay any attention in here, I think you were overly optimistic.
FRANZ. Perhaps. Still, I'm sure you'd be sorely missed were you absent.
MARY. You think so?
FRANZ. I'm certain of it.

In a reversal of roles, Franz is now speaking of himself. He never paid her adequate attention when they were a couple but now that she’s gone the gap in his life is very apparent. Sometime during their separation Franz has become cognisant of Mary’s aspirations (as he mentions them for the first time in Scene 5) and the play ends with him offering her a role in one of his own plays, prompted (he says) by his director, although there is the suggestion that really she was really the original inspiration for the role.

Another, more subtle, example of self-reference within the script is that in the first scene Franz declares: “I’m simply unable to deliver under these conditions! No one cares what goes into it. No one cares how it works, just so long as it works.” Indeed, for Franz, creating is a difficult process involving much soul searching. Yet true to his prediction the Director of his plays has a strange faith in him demonstrated in this dialogue: 

FRANZ. I was always in awe of Da Ponte’s ability to structure a narrative, his use of multiple interweaving ironies in the libretto is most enviable...
DIRECTOR. Enviable? What nonsense my good fellow, that’s exactly the kind of level of complexity I can see you really getting a handle on in the following project.

The Director really means this as a compliment. He thinks Franz is a genius, but he hasn’t seen how difficult it was for Franz to produce the end product. His words only serve to compound the pressure which Franz is already placing upon himself to produce. Mary, on the other hand, when parting ways from Franz a second time, has the empathy to leave with the words, “Franz... your letters... I was dying when I read them…. And I knew you were dying when you wrote them... I just thought you should know.” Ultimately, she did know what went in to them.

A Play about doing what it does

        At heart, Like The Greeks is a play is about doing what the play itself does. Franz says of his own writing that the poet designs clothes for the philosopher to wear, and this play is to some degree philosophy dressed in theatre, as Sartre’s Nausea and Kierkegaard’s Either/Or were philosophy dressed in literature. For that reason it is written in a rather romantic vernacular (although notably I do not use dead language) because it seems more beautiful to me. I don’t think the play would have the same impact if it was written in common parlance rather than ‘backdated’ in this way.

               Franz practice describes my practice:

“… I just started writing. It was like going for a walk in a dark forest: I didn’t know exactly where I was going, but I came to recognise this familiar tree and the other. Each was a concept or view that had entered my mind at some point and left again... Gradually they came into clarity like a thousand single points of light beyond the darkest dark. And as I weaved those points together in prose like a nebula into a star they gained greater significance by taking upon themselves the tone of the characters who spoke them, for they were not [necessarily] my own  opinions but simply combinations of words and ideas which I found aesthetic.”

            And Mary’s advice to him describes my approach:

“When we dig deep and be honest – well – we uncover gems that are valuable to others, whether we are trying to please or not.”

I sincerely hope this proves to be the case.