I read Rob Horning’s New Inquiry essay on “Microfame” with over a decade’s worth of my own blogging and social media use flashing before my eyes. The essay is the kind of theory-laden, semi-aphoristic exposition of culture that it takes me a few reads to get my head around, and I might not have finished it had it not rung so true. (He sums up his argument in shorter form in this blog post.) Microfame names and defines something I’ve been living with for a while.

So what does Horning mean by “microfame”? He says that fame refers to “the risk and reward of our efforts to manage our visibility” andmicro has to do with “how the affect is parsed out in small doses, in microaffirmations—likes, retweets, reblogs, mentions, and so on.” I like the word “microaffirmations.” It’s a good term for the thing that brings me to my blog’s stats page, or to check Twitter before bed, just to see if any strangers thought I was funny today. Horning goes in some very interesting directions with this concept, but my thoughts are mainly about whether we take our measurements to be good representations of reality.

After all, the software used to measure website popularity is commonly Google Analytics, or something else built by another ad company, and the basic thing you see is which pages you’ve written that people have looked at the longest. Twitter and Facebook treat “likes” and “retweets” as unweighted, single units of affirmation. The illusion that we have worthwhile proxy measurements for the worth and influence of our text will eventually influence what we write. Or at least it has often done so for me.

But if I stop looking at these measurements just to avoid being implicated in the business of “microfame,” I’m not actually escaping anything — I’m still trying to manage my “personal brand”, but trying to have my brand be authentic. Is there a way to set the game aside?

Two notes: First, the movie under discussion is violent and profane; don’t see it unless you’re comfortable with that. Second, spoilers follow. I wish the statement “it comes very late in the movie” were enough to tip everyone off to that, but might as well follow Internet etiquette on this one.

There’s a scene from Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained that’s sticking with me. It comes very late in the movie. The plot to that point: King Schultz is a German bounty hunter working in the American South. As a German, he finds slavery distasteful and racism ridiculous, but he’s an ironist rather than a radical. He’s fond of casually comparing the violence of his job, which he does with skill and panache, with the violence of slavery. He and his ex-slave protege Django have spent the middle third of the movie infiltrating a horrifically corrupt plantation in order to buy and rescue Django’s wife; their plot involves pretending to be fully amoral slavers. Django, because of his great love, plays his role fully; Schultz finds it increasingly difficult to keep his poker face in the presence of cruelty. Eventually, Schultz and Django’s scheme fails, and the pair is exposed.

So here’s the scene: the furious plantation owner, Calvin Candie, has decided to humiliate the intruders by terrifying them into a financially ruinous deal, so that they’ll escape with their lives and little else. While Candie draws up the papers, Schultz stews in a sumptuous parlor. A harpist plays Fur Elise. Schultz sees memories flash before him of the day’s terrors. For the first time in the film, he loses his composure, lurching angrily toward the harpist. He can’t abide this refinement and beauty in a place just outside of which slaves can be murdered by dogs. “Stop playing Beethoven!”

Candie, noticing Schultz’s outburst, first shrugs it off as the bitterness of a man bested in intellectual combat. But it’s not shame, it’s moral contempt. And when Candie understands this, he decides to complete the humiliation, saying that the deal can’t conclude without a handshake. He offers his hand, so that Schultz must visibly signal accommodation with and hence submission to a system of racism and slavery that now disturbs him to the core. And Schultz has reached a point where he can no longer ironize his morality. He cannot cross this line. Some things are more important than survival. Schultz shoots Candie through the heart. For this he’s quickly shot down by a henchman, and… well, the movie is really Django’s story, and I won’t ruin any more of it.

For those of us that thought the meta-concerns of Inglorious Basterds blurred out the moral realities required for a consideration of Nazi Germany, this moment of moral clarity is a blessed relief, and a challenge. Which hands are we shaking? And must we refuse?

The movie’s not perfect. It’s troubling how what is “badass” crowds out what is good in so many American movies, and this line of thought applies to Django Unchained. But it should also be known that Tarantino’s taken the old trope of the out-for-only-himself gunslinger’s self-sacrificial awakening (see also: Han Solo) and deployed it more than just convincingly, with the special help of Christoph Waltz’s acting. I can’t get the scene out of my mind.

After some correspondence with philosophically educated friends, I can say that the first question that would pop into a mathematician’s mind — why not simply symbolize Aristotelian logic in a modern form? — is beside the point. The issue is the difference between the interpretations that tend to accompany the systems. They metaphysical concerns of logicians in the time of Aquinas were indeed different from those of many modern logicians, just as Kreeft says. And at a certain level, this is very important. I’m just not convinced that this level is the level of everyday use, or, if it is, then I suspect the effects are so diffuse that we should counteract them, not by rejecting a useful tool, but rather by robust metaphysical arguments and a sort of logical multilingualism.

But enough rehashing of my own position. What I’d really like to do is point readers to some resources I’ve had recommended to me and found helpful:

• The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s article on Aristotelian logic is fairly friendly to non-philosophers. (“It is hard to capture in modern English the underlying metaphysical force in Aristotle’s categorical statements.”)
• Reader “HT,” along with another friend, recommended an essay by Peter Geach called “A History of the Corruptions of Logic,” which is a rollicking good read.
• Martin Cothran is offering a more in-depth defense of traditional logic in a series of blog posts.
• There’s an example-laden defense of term logic in Fred Sommers’s introduction to George Englebretsen’s Something to Reckon With, though I’ve only been able to get my hands on an excerpt.

I’d like to close by recommending that any reader not acquainted with one or both of the logics try them out. In addition to the general benefits of logical thinking, symbolic logic will improve your SQL, and Aristotelian logic will unlock a wealth of Celarant- and Darii-based humor in old books and poems.

Now, I’m not a philosopher or a logician, but I do use symbolic logic almost daily to write little bits of computer code. I also find the story of symbolic logic in the twentieth century entrancing: It’s an intellectual adventure on a level with rocket science or genetics, and you can read about it in Logicomix. So at the outset I’d like to say that Kreeft drastically understates the aesthetic value of mathematics (“the more important the subject matter, the less useful mathematics seems to be”) and logic (“a computer can do symbolic logic”). Symbolic logic and mathematics speak of important things at least in the same manner as the great fugues, or anything else formally elegant. But the main weakness of the essay is that the mechanism by which symbolic logic undermines metaphysical realism and thereby destroys our culture is not made clear.

For one thing, it’s not clear to me what exactly Kreeft means by “symbolic logic.” Sometimes, Kreeft seems to be indicting the whole of analytic philosophy: “By the 1970s, most of the English-speaking establishment had cast in its lot with ‘analytic philosophy’ and the symbolic logic that was its methodological component.” At other times, it sounds like Kreeft is just talking about truth-functional propositional logic. “Symbolic logic is also called ‘propositional logic’ because it begins with propositions, not with terms.” “Symbolic logic has no way of knowing, and prevents us from saying, what anything is!” Now, this is clearly true for the very simple version of symbolic logic often taught to college freshmen, but it’s not at all clear to me that it’s true of symbolic logic as a whole. In particular, it seems that the basics of Aristotelian logic are simple to symbolize in a predicate calculus, as I’ll try to demonstrate below. If Aristotelian syllogisms are indeed expressible by means of modern symbolic methods, we may just have a pedagogical problem, which is to say that our current logic textbooks don’t do a good job of teaching everyday reasoning.

Let’s turn to something that Kreeft neglects to provide, namely, an example:

1. Aristotelian syllogism:

Premise 1: “All humans are mortal.”
Premise 2: “Adam is a human.”
Conclusion: “Adam is mortal.”
    Formal premises: “All S is P.” “A is S.”
Formal conclusion: “A is P.”

2. Propositional calculus:

Premise 1: If “Adam is a human”, then “Adam is a mortal.”
Premise 2: “Adam is a human.”
Conclusion: “Adam is mortal.”
Formal premises: P->Q, P
Formal conclusion – modus ponens: Q

3. Predicate calculus:

Premise 1: “If anything is a human, then it is mortal.”
Premise 2: “Adam is a human.”
Conclusion: “Adam is mortal.”
    Formal premises: For all x, H(x)->M(x). H(A).
Intermediate step – universal instantiation: H(A)->M(A)
Formal conclusion – modus ponens: M(A)

Notice that the propositional version (2) has all the weaknesses Kreeft mentions: We can’t get at the content of the propositions. We can’t say much about how or why they’re true; we just have symbols that we evaluate as true or false. But predicate calculus (3) seems to solve that problem: We have a way of representing some terms (“A,” or “Adam”) and things we say about those terms (“H(x),” or “x is a human”). However, perhaps you can see that the predicate calculus does draw the attention away from content and toward logical form, so the tool really might be too powerful for everyday reasoning. It does look to me as if the premises of the Aristotelian version (1) and those of the predicate calculus version (3) express much the same thing, in nearly the same level of detail. I would love to know if I’m missing something here.

How else could symbolic logic undermine metaphysical realism? It’s not clear to me whether Kreeft is arguing that metaphysical realism is inexpressible in symbolic logic or merely easy to avoid. “[The power of abstracting and understanding universals] is the thing that symbolic logic ignores or denies.” Well, does it ignore realism, or does it deny it? This is an important point. There’s a problem with the timeline, too. Symbolic logic was extensively theorized in the early 1900s, but (as Kreeft mentions) nominalism appeared in the 1300s. So it must have been possible to express nominalism by means of Aristotelian logic. There’s a historical question here: Was it difficult for nominalists to make themselves understood? Or can the Aristotelian framework be modified to be anti-realist? We can also ask how modern realists—and they do exist—manage to do their work in the context of symbolic logic. Do they simply avoid symbolization? Or can symbolic logic be used by realists?

And if the symbols themselves aren’t the problem, but rather the presence or absence of metaphysical or epistemological realism, why drag the symbols into this discussion?