Author: JH

I can think of at least three reasons why one wouldn’t have liked to live in antiquity: (i) You happen to be born not an owner of a couple of lavish villas, but a slave. (ii) You happen to be born the owner of a couple of lavish villas and a slaveholder. (Is (i) or (ii) better? A question I shall raise in the moral philosophy class I’ll audit in the fall.) (iii) You happen to be born an owner of a couple of lavish villas or a slave of such a person, but a volcano blows up in your neighborhood, covering both you and everything else with lava and volcanic ashes.

The fortunes of my own little life led me to Stabiae this past week, an archeological site near Pompeii. I loved it. Why would you print your images on paper, rather than paint them right on the walls? While not the focus of my stay, I made a couple of photos of these walls.

In various day jobs, I witnessed creatives giving presentations that included alternative solutions. Deadly mistake! Clients tend to mess up any idea, even excellent ones, in the eleventh hour. Why then invite them to make the wrong choice – as they inevitably will – right at the start? And from the client’s perspective, those with experience will probably think that if someone presents more than one idea, chances are none of them is quite there yet, and the presenter kind of knows that.

My only excuse for having four versions of the Empty Swimming Pool sketch below is that I started it as a kind of color study. Then someone saw them and wants to use one for a book cover. Well, that’s of course nice. I could live with black version on a cover – but still, I’m probably going to do a fifth one that may suit the purpose better.

I promised more from my Ethics class at Columbia. I needed to prepare a couple of sketches to illustrate what interests me most: some readings in the philosophy of action. A question that philosophers discuss, apparently since antiquity, is whether something about an action must look good to the agent for her to be motivated to act. This is the so-called Guise of the Good. Something appears in a good light to the agent.

Take this little mouse that I once met near the garage. When I saw her, I briefly contemplated putting up a mouse trap. I went to the house to get a nice chunk of cheese. But the mouse seemed such a great character, and I abandoned the idea of the mouse trap. As you see, I offered her the cheese anyway. I put it on the floor.

Now a little drama unfolded, for the mouse wanted the cheese, and wanted it very much, but there was a scary large creature (me) in the vicinity. I thought some more about what philosophers would refer to as her motivational conflict. One thing that doesn’t quite convince me in the texts we studied (Aristotle, Anscombe, Velleman) is the focus on what looks “good.” I would say, the cheese looked “tasty” and that doesn’t seem quite the same. I might also say that the cheese looked “beautiful” or “perfect” (a perfect little mouse meal).

And I’m not sure that, on the other hand, my presence just felt “bad.” For a hungry mouse it must be utterly “unpleasant” or even “nasty” to have to have a suspicious person like me hang around. The mouse definitely felt I was a nuisance. Anyway, there may be a philosophical paper here, but I’ll have to get someone else to write it. On to more drawings.