The Vices by Lawrence Douglas

Author:Lawrence Douglas [Douglas, Lawrence]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-59051-416-0
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2011-08-16T00:00:00+00:00

I couldn’t square this arid analytic work with Oliver’s lively and passionate journalistic pieces; it was as if they had been written by a different person altogether. I picked up Paradoxes of Self expecting to have my patience quickly exhausted. The book—no more than two hundred manuscript pages—addressed a pair of questions that had gripped philosophers from Hume and Leibniz to Frege and Bernard Williams: Is our identity stable over time and does it exist independent of our memories and perceptions? But instead of claiming to find a new way to split the split hairs of the problem, Oliver presented no definitive answers. His ambition, which was never explicitly stated, as the book had no introduction or conclusion, evidently was to expound a style of inquiry—organized as narrative and not as argument, and drawn from a broad range of literary, anthropological, and historical texts. Two warring epigraphs framed his project: the first, the ancient Greek adage, variously attributed to Heraclitus, Pythagoras, and Socrates: Know thyself; and the second, from Oedipus the King: God keep you from the knowledge of who you are! Quite ingeniously, Oliver managed to sustain this spirit of contradiction throughout, as the book’s form—its discretely numbered assemblage of debates, stories, readings, and reflections—came to complement, echo, and refract its subject. Only after Oliver’s disappearance, when I read Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, did I come to appreciate the debt that Paradoxes of Self owed to this work; but even if derivative, Oliver’s book gripped me, particularly its remarkable opening pages, which I offer here from the original manuscript that my friend thrust in my hands:

1. During my graduate studies at Harvard, I became acquainted with a fellow student in my department, whom I’ll call Thomas Trapp (the name, but not its cadence, is my invention). Persons often treated us as a pair; Quine liked to quip, Thomas Trapp and Oliver Vice, the Dickensian duo. Trapp had practiced law for several years before returning to Harvard to do philosophy. Although his face was nondescript, he had an extraordinary build, the product of years of dawn trips to the gym. Trapp exercised vigilant control over every aspect of his life. He never ate for pleasure—every morsel of food had to be screened for its caloric and nutritional suitability; he kept a diary in which he meticulously recorded his daily intake of food. May 14, 1993. Two eggs, scrambled; one glass orange juice, fresh-squeezed; two slices of organic sunflower seed bread … He never raised his voice—not in anger, not in excitement, not even to make himself heard. He laughed, but never spontaneously. Even his breathing was controlled, as he’d devoted years to studying Qigong techniques of breathing. He always looked me straight in the eye, but I felt that he was actually staring at the tiny reflection of himself in my cornea. I once found him in Widener Library, taking copious notes from a book on the philosophy of humor. When I asked him what he was doing, he said, I’m learning how to be funny.

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