Sunday 31 May 2020

Emergence


Emergence at the personal level interests me. How is creativity possible? How do new ideas emerge? How do we surpass ourselves, sublating, if you like, the previous level in a new synthesis? It doesn’t seem to arise out of data or experiments in a simplistic sense. It’s more the right sort of experiment or thought rather than more of the same standard efficient responses.

The satkaryavada theory of the non-difference of cause and effect appears to be a denial of emergence as pure novelty. Nothing comes to be which is not already there. What is not cannot act; it has no traction on reality. Plato following Parmenides in that view had to postulate the realm of ideas as being already there. They needed to be brought out or illuminated by the sun of nous. The creative solution often has an inevitability about it, once stated. Nagging Socrates was in effect saying – But you know, you know that you know. I must persuade you of that confidence. One more push.

Friday 29 May 2020

Borges Reading Hazlitt Reading Borges


Each and every day without fail I receive hits on my note on Hazlitt’s essay On the Feeling of Immortality in Early Youth.
immortality
They emanate from India only where Hazlitt is on an English Honours course and where relevance and relatability bow before a traditional curriculum. Unless it is a cozening feature of Google I am top of their hit parade or near it. Should Hazlitt be such an obscure figure that my marginal gloss persists for years? Jorge Luis Borges would have been surprised for Hazlitt, Stevenson and De Quincey that he read as a child were central to his imagination.

Consider this incitement to Pierre Menard:

‘What a pity’, said some one, ‘that Milton had not the pleasure of reading Paradise Lost! He could not read it, as we do, with the weight of impression that a hundred years of admiration have added to it — ‘a phoenix gazed by all’ — with the sense of the number of editions it has passed through with still increasing reputation, with the tone of solidity, time-proof, which it has received from the breath of cold, envious maligners, with the sound which the voice of Fame has lent to every line of it!

(from Is Genius Conscious of its Powers)

Borges gives that lateral nod of respect to Hazlitt in The Cult of the Phoenix:

That the members of the cult should, in a Jewish milieu, resemble Jews proves nothing, what cannot be denied is that they, like Hazlitt’s infinite Shakespeare, resemble every man in the world.

He further dedicates an essay to this myriad minded man:

Haunted, hounded, he began imagining other heroes, other tragic fables. Thus while his body, in whorehouses and taverns around London, lived its life as body, the soul that lived inside it would be Caesar, who ignores the admonition of the sibyl, and Juliet, who hates the lark, and Macbeth, who speaks on the moor with the witches who are also the Fates, the Three Weird Sisters. No one was as many men as that man—that man whose repertoire, like that of the Egyptian Proteus, was all the appearances of being. From time to time he would leave a confession in one corner or another of the work, certain that it would not be deciphered; Richard says that inside himself, he plays the part of many, and Iago says, with curious words, I am not what I am. The fundamental identity of living, dreaming, and performing inspired him to famous passages.
(from Everything and Nothing)

Hazlitt on Milton and Shakespeare:

The striking peculiarity of Shakspeare's mind was its generic quality, its power of communication with all other minds—so that it contained a universe of thought and feeling within itself, and had no one peculiar bias, or exclusive excellence more than another. He was just like any other man, but that he was like all other men. He was the least of an egotist that it was possible to be. He was nothing in himself; but he was all that others were, or that they could become. He not only had in himself the germs of every faculty and feeling, but he could follow them by anticipation, intuitively, into all their conceivable ramifications, through every change of fortune or conflict of passion, or turn of thought. He had "a mind reflecting ages past," and present:—all the people that ever lived are there. There was no respect of persons with him. His genius shone equally on the evil and on the good, on the wise and the foolish, the monarch and the beggar: "All corners of the earth, kings, queens, and states, maids, matrons, nay, the secrets of the grave," are hardly hid from his searching glance. He was like the genius of humanity, changing places with all of us at pleasure, and playing with our purposes as with his own. He turned the globe round for his amusement, and surveyed the generations of men, and the individuals as they passed, with their different concerns, passions, follies, vices, virtues, actions, and motives—as well those that they knew, as those which they did not know, or acknowledge to themselves. 


Thursday 21 May 2020

Borges Reports


In an afterword to Doctor Brodie's Report Borges writes about his creative process. It is clear that he holds to the older classical theory of having a genius which he leaves alone to her work. He does not attempt to guide her by a nagging intention.

Walking down the street or along the galleries of the National Library, I feel that something is about to take over in me. That something may be a tale or a poem. I do not tamper with it; I let it have its way. From afar, I sense it taking shape. I dimly see its end and beginning but not the dark gap in between. This middle, in my case, is given me gradually. If its discovery happens to be withheld by the gods, my conscious self has to intrude, and these unavoidable makeshifts are, I suspect, my weakest pages.

What then are we to say to the banal epiphany of the Brillo Box? At best I would describe it as craft work involving the careful application of paint and precise copying of a given model. We have forgotten that up to the 1950‘s whole studios were given over to the production of line drawings, illustrations and art work for mass media. Then and even now artisans known as monumental sculptors could knock out an angel reading in the book of life by hand in a few days. Socrates worked at that trade before he took up the contrarian gadfly business. In India long generations of artisans work at such crafts producing statuary in metal and stone for temples. They don’t claim to be artists though some of their ancient models have a refinement of form that is excellent.

I don’t claim to know much about art but I know what Arthur C. Danto likes. By sleight of definition he has brought respectability to the excesses of the exhibition catalog.



Astavakra says Abide, with Me, with Yourself, whatever.


Astavakra in his own way is quite Cartesian. He tends to ignore the great insoluble problems and remain, abide as he puts it, with the immediate data of consciousness. What is going on now? Is this awareness that I now have whether quiet in the artificial cocoon of meditation or in the normal engagement with the sensible; is this awareness, immediate and transparent? Even though the content is constantly changing this power remains as the single fixed aspect. Abide with that and let it lead you to the present moment.

He remarks in the chapter on Peace XVIII para.15:

He who sees the universe may try to deny it. What has the desireless to do? He sees not even though he sees.

A beguiling Advaitin suggestion: the universe is real as an appearance.

A final word:

He, indeed, controls himself who sees distraction in himself. But the great one is not distracted. Having nothing to accomplish, what does he do?
(from Astavakra Samhita trans. Swami Nityaswarupananda pub. Advaita Ashrama)


Wednesday 20 May 2020

The Transfiguration of the Commonplace by Arthur C. Danto with notes by Pierre Menard


When I first read The Transfiguration of the Commonplace by Arthur C. Danto it was as the paper of 1974. Not being aware then that there was book of the same name with the same theme in an expanded form I thought that Danto should have read Borges’s work Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote(pub.1941). This would perhaps have modified his position that a true interpretation follows an understanding of the intent of the author of the work. As those of you who keep up know, Danto does in fact enlist Menard in his book. Even if you think that intent plays a minor part in the production of great art the question must be asked – has Danto actually grasped the intent of Borges and if he hasn’t, isn’t therefore his interpretation faulty?

Reading the story a few times and it is a masterpiece which eludes the definitive, some observations will I think stand. The voice is that of an effete aesthete who for reasons which are unstated is performing a scalpel job on Menard. He seems a Prufrock (1915) with extra added resentment. This is evident from the catalogue of the works and pomps of Menard which are in short; futile, otiose and doomed. The Quixote project then is the crowning achievement of sublime idiocy. The sere bise of irony blows steadily.

To this third interpretation (which I judge to be irrefutable) I am not sure I dare to add a fourth, which concords very well with the almost divine modesty of Pierre Menard: his resigned or ironical habit of propagating ideas which were the strict reverse of those he preferred.

There is a semi truth, a Menardian truth, to the view that quotation is not just that thing that is quoted but has the sheen of intention hovering ectoplasmically over it. The Brillo Box is an emanation in a subtle medium neither cardboard nor indeed plywood.

Menard (perhaps without wanting to) has enriched, by means of a new technique, the halting and rudimentary art of reading: this new technique is that of the deliberate anachronism and the erroneous attribution. This technique, whose applications are infinite, prompts us to go through the Odyssey as if it were posterior to the Aeneid and the book Le jardin du Centaure of Madame Henri Bachelier as if it were by Madame Henri Bachelier. This technique fills the most placid works with adventure. To attribute the Imitatio Christi to Louis Ferdinand Céline or to James Joyce, is this not a sufficient renovation of its tenuous spiritual indications?
(James E. Irby trans.)

Saturday 16 May 2020

The Masters by C.P. Show (ii)


((continuing from previous post))
Snow in his prefatory note to the novel mentions the memoirs of Mark Pattison in which a similar situation of deadlock and treachery developed in the election of the head (Rector) of Lincoln College, Oxford with 9 fellows (electors) two of which were abroad, in 1851. I read it some time ago on the recommendation of A.C. Benson. Pattison was an early adaptor of Tractarianism very much influenced by Newman. Excellent short read with a sense of peering through a crack in time at the contortions of Victorian seriousness and ambition.
memoirs of Mark Pattison
(clean epub copy)

You can discern Pattison's influence readily:

Radford’s funeral took place on the 29th October. All the Fellows who were in England were present at it. William Kay junior and Bousfield were abroad. The 13th of November was fixed for the election, at which there would be nine electors, therefore five votes would be required to elect. The three junior Fellows, Perry, Andrew, Espin, voluntarily and heartily supported me, so with my own I had already four votes. My three supporters were all regular residents, and it was our four votes which had succeeded, in spite of the resistance of the old regime, in introducing all the reforms and improvements which had been established in the college and in totally changing its tone. The other five votes were Calcott and Gibbs, the rump of the old Lincoln of the days of degradation; Metcalfe, whom we had taken without knowing enough about him from Cambridge, and who had gradually gravitated towards the old set;

The electors in our novel divide on the basis of Science versus the Humanities. Paul Jago is the Senior Tutor and represents the emotional intuitive side of life. Crawford is cool, impersonal, highly competent and gifted as a scientist. He would seem the obvious choice for a college that wants to become more modern particularly as the endowment by a rich industrialist of four new fellows is dependent on three of them being in science. The two fellows who are trying to bring this about, Chrystal and Brown, are from the humanities side of the college and are for Jago. Excellently well drawn portraits here of two men, Brown in particular who has that curious British gravitas known as 'bottom'.

He was used to being thought of as just a nice old buffer. ‘Good old Brown’, the Master called him. ‘The worthy Brown’, said Winslow, with caustic dismissal: ‘Uncle Arthur’ was his nickname among the younger fellows. Yet he was actually the youngest of the powerful middle-aged block in the college. Jago was just over fifty; Chrystal, Brown’s constant friend and ally, was forty-eight, while Brown himself, though he had been elected a fellow before Chrystal, was still not quite forty-six. He was a historian by subject, and was Jago’s junior colleague as the second tutor.

We know of course because this is England and enthusiasm is frowned upon and wanting a job as Jago does is bad form likely to end in tears. Where is the manly reluctance of the natural leader? Jago is Anglo-Irish which is hybrid form that does not exactly run true. His wife is insecure, liable to feel slighted and a snob. The interplay of types is excellent and the tension is maintained right to the end. It's an insight into the workings of a system that has produced many excellent scholars and which by the way I was amazed to find out can run quite well without students due to the accretion of endowments over the centuries. They dine remarkably well but the heating system is primitive. Fires, drawing, being mended, gusting smoke into the room create an igloo of comfort in high ceilinged chambers with three foot thick walls.

This book is a classic of its kind. Good lockdown stuff.


Friday 15 May 2020

The Masters by C.P. Snow (pub.1951)


The dominant sense I had reading The Masters was the authorial underlying motto – 'I may be a scientist but I've got feelings, you know'. He tells us so frequently through the reminiscences of Lewis Elliot looking back from some future time on the election campaign for the mastership of a small Cambridge college. Eliot was a young man then yet his judgments of the fellows of the College, 13 of them, are those of the older man looking back. His assessments, this one is sound, that one is windy and so on seem middle-aged which is legitimate yet the active engagement of a 32 year old is neglected. A great novel has life which may be defined as lived immediacy. Just appending 'my feeling then' to an impossibly mature observation is a little too unreliable narratorish for an empiricist like Snow. Everything is accounted for causally and character really is destiny which leaves no room for the surpassing of the individuals fate by a creative leap whereby the facts of the case fall into a new pattern. As a scientist Snow would be aware –
(I am in the sitting room typing this and my gudewife has come and whispered into my shell like – “I'm doing a zoom at 11”. Sitting Zoom. Later then)

Wednesday 13 May 2020

Covidology IX


Hence, this thought will never attain to a vision of the real, that is at the same time complete and crystal-clear. It will have to resign itself to plodding along the tedious and painful path of abstraction and of discursive reasoning in order to throw a bit of light on the data of experience. Never is the ego of the man in the world and exclusively thinking ego, for it is not in his power to strip himself of the complex of his sensations. These latter too, go to make up an opaque image, which clouds the vision of the mind and resists perfectly transparent intellection.
(from The Philosophy of Being by Louis De Raeymaeker pub.1954)

Even the very intelligent are led from the righteous path of evidence based reasoning by the way they carve up the world. Bemused butchery is patent in this interview:
Dr. Cahill speaks out

Outside of the science which I am not qualified to asses there occur those wood notes wild of conspiracy theory which my lay ear can catch. She doubts the fact of excess deaths. So then we are supposed to believe that the pressing of an ice rink to serve as a morgue was a device to further the narrative and the array of freezer trucks sheer theatrical ebullience.. Dr. Cahill was fed the line that the focus on meat plants as centres of contagion and infection was part of a plan by Bill Gates to promote his cultured protein factories. She did not demur.

Lacing up our sensible shoes and tying a double knot we plod along 'the tedious and painful path of abstraction and of discursive reasoning'. I love the Gregorian chant cadence of Raeymaeker's prose as translated by Edmund H. Ziegelmeyer.

Tuesday 12 May 2020

The Muon and Me


There's a fear of moving outside of the materialist redoubts of your philosophical apprenticeship. The characterisation of panpsychism as a desperate answer arising out of bafflement is an example of the 'what are things coming to' panic. Were Bertrand Russell, A.N. Whitehead and Henri Bergson , for three, desperate men? Hardly. When Daniel Kaufman asks – does that mean that a muon is conscious and how is that not an empirical question – he is painting a bullseye around a haphazard arrow. The point about panpsychist consciousness is that it is not focussed on individual consciousness beings, this person, that muon, but on the steady increase towards the personal from rocks 'n gas. What is the nature of reality such that this is possible. That I would suggest is a metaphysical question. Daniel and Massimo flail at this unkillable monster here:
meaning of life

Monday 11 May 2020

Covidology VIII


Half of the covid deaths in Ireland have occurred in Nursing/Care Homes. It is not surprising that the Health Service should have neglected this vulnerable population given that they pay a doctor as much for a three minute trick as bringing a woman through a full pregnancy. That's the psychopathology of everyday Ireland. We forget what we don't want to remember..

Nursing homes have been hit worst by the pandemic, with figures up until Thurday showing 630 deaths in the sector which is included in the overall 735 people have passed away in community residential settings.
We revealed last week how 21 people had died at one nursing home alone — St Mary’s in the Phoenix Park in Dublin.
On March 6, Nursing Homes Ireland closed off residences to visitors, but days later the Department of Health said such a move was unnecessary.
Chief Medical Officer Dr Tony Holohan said it was too soon at that point to restrict visitors.
Since then, half of all Covid-19 deaths in Ireland have been in nursing homes.
(from Irish Sun 3/5/20)
health service defends record

Sunday 10 May 2020

Covidology VII


Our Text for Today:

With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion. The external world could take care of itself. In the meantime it was folly to grieve, or to think. The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure. There were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballet-dancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine. All these and security were within. Without was the “Red Death”.

(from Masque of the Red Death)

The improvisatori are the most numerous followed closely by the buffoons bladder whacking the populace with bi-orchid balloons.

Saturday 9 May 2020

The Amateur Philosopher and the Amateur of Philosophy


 Personally I like to think of myself as an amateur of philosophy or one who has a penchant for it. Perhaps I am wrong but I would ‘suspect’ that most teachers of philosophy might fear the hubris of claiming to be a philosopher as though their daemon might depart to stay with someone who knew nothing. In the same way claiming to be a poet is a dangerous challenge to your muse. She does not like to be taken for granted. No, on the one hand you may claim to think things through, get to the bottom of things or on the other write verse. Then it becomes a life and you shake off the weight of the identity. To be free in yourself is the goal. Then you might do good work.

Thursday 7 May 2020

Blue Bindu


I have taken the darshan of the blue flower, the gentian which is of the same colour as the 'blue bindu' which flashes on the inward eye in meditation. For me gone in a nano second. Swami Muktananda experienced the bindu as the minute container of universes. Richard Mann in his book The Light of Consciousness describes the yogi's journey towards the fullness of that experience.

blue bindu

Monday 4 May 2020

Macaulay on James Mill's Essay on Government

A good swingeing review fulfills the need for righteous indignation against that family of whited sepulchers the Mills, daddy James and son John Stuart. Mill père was the larger more slow moving target of young Thomas Babington Macaulay’s essay in the Edinburgh Review of 1829. The occasion for this birching was the publication of On Government. Whereas the book itself is worthless, the review is priceless and a model of sustained mockery and reductio.

But we do not see that, by reasoning a priori on such subjects as these, it is possible to advance one single step. We know that every man has some desires which he can gratify only by hurting his neighbours, and some which he can gratify only by pleasing them. Mr. Mill has chosen to look only at one-half of human nature, and to reason on the motives which impel men to oppress and despoil others, as if they were the only motives by which men could possibly be influenced. We have already shown that, by taking the other half of the human character, and reasoning on it as if it were the whole, we can bring out a result diametrically opposite to that at which Mr. Mill has arrived. We can, by such a process, easily prove that any form of government is good, or that all government is superfluous.

James did not reply which John Stuart thought a mistake and sought retrospective payback in the publication year of Macaulay’s volumes 3 & 4 History of England(1855). He referred to him as:

an intellectual dwarf—rounded off and stunted, full grown broad and short, without a germ of principle of further growth in his whole being.


That’s not nice. It causes harm unguided by principle and it’s hurtful and gives rise to mirth and a hope of a delightful literary feud. What Macaulay found objectionable and self contradictory in the Essay on Government was the universal emphasis on plunder being the chief desire and aim of all classes of society. That’s obvious nonsense of course but understandable when one remembers that Mill presided over India House the head office of the East India Company. With them the white man’s burden was all the swag they could carry. In later days the imperialist Macaulay worried that American democracy would enable the poor to plunder the rich and very likely bring the defense of property through a strong military government.

In his final paragraph on the Benthamite sect:
But, on the whole, they might have chosen worse. They may as well be Utilitarians as jockeys or dandies. And, though quibbling about self-interest and motives, and objects of desire, and the greatest happiness of the greatest number, is but a poor employment for a grown man, it certainly hurts the health less than hard drinking and the fortune less than high play; it is not much more laughable than phrenology, and is immeasurably more humane than cock-fighting.






Find the fun at:
Macaulay on Mill


Saturday 2 May 2020

Covidology VI


I was in the hospital on Thursday following through on the fastest appointment I’ll ever get. Everything fine no problem whatever. The usually crowded plastics department was empty, at a time when lawn mower accidents and hedge clipper events fill every chair. There was a general vibe of ‘phony war’. The car park was quarter capacity, likely staff cars mostly. So my question is: are we prepared or are we preparing to prepare? Can we be getting stuck in a frozen loop and moving towards complete stasis. Is there an entropic governor on society?

‘Doing’, said Dr. Johnson, ‘is the mother of doing’. If we were not preparing and I reject preparing to prepare as preparation, then what were we at? Here come the conspiracy theorists? Ah now lads don’t you know very well that we are all going to be chipped. It’s going to be on your card and you won’t be able to get on a plane or work in a shop without a clean sheet. We are all replicants now.

There are proposed 5 phases:
Phase one – 18 May
Phase two – 8 June
Phase three – 29 June
Phase four – 20 July
Phase five – 10 August

Details here:irish phased planThe insurgent voices ask and they have a point - how are you going to police all this? 'We’ll all be chipped', says Hanrahan, 'before the year is out'.

Friday 1 May 2020

Fact Blindness


Metaphysics concerns itself with the transcendental hypothesis namely how things must be at a fundamental level for things to appear as they do or for us to have the intuitions that we do. Some people feel that our intuition that chairs exist is something that needs to be justified. That is one concern and not very pressing to the majority of the populace. Is the corona virus a huge threat unless drastic action is taken is an empirically arguable proposition? Some people who feel very strongly that their liberties are unduly constrained are succumbing to a ‘besides’. One intelligent individual is holding that there are no excess deaths. He is saying this on the basis of statistics which other and more sophisticated statisticians say show 60% extra deaths in the relevant quarter. Who is right? I think that our friends animus against a government of moral imbeciles has caused momentary fact blindness – a treatable autogenic condition. Flash philosophy scotosis is more refractory. Do chairs exist? It all depends on what you mean by exist? And away we go.