William Hazlitt, Napoleon, and Slavery.

 ‘On the Feeling of Immortality in Youth’ (1827) displays the stubborn aspect of Hazlitt’s character both in the positive sense of determination and the negative one of adherence to an exploded position.  The necessity of the French Revolution and an acceptance of the Terror were never abandoned by him.

“The cant about the horrors of the French Revolution is mere cant - everybody knows it to be so; each party would have retaliated upon the other: it was a civil war, like that for a disputed succession; the general principle of the right or wrong of the change remained untouched.  Neither would these horrors have taken place, except from Prussian manifestoes, and treachery within: there were none in the American, and have been none in the Spanish Revolution.” (from the essay ‘Reason and the Imagination’ in Plain Speaker collection vol.7 of his Collected Works)

That is true of course as the United Irishmen of the 1798 rising were executed whereas their French allies were treated as prisoners of war.  All British wars of rebellion were dealt with in like manner.  Its an implicit threat that keeps the natives in line.

Why though did Hazlitt continue his veneration of Napoleon when the defender of the Revolution turned into an Emperor subduing and plundering the enemies of France.  Six million or more people died as a result of his campaigns. The defeat at Waterloo was a personal tragedy for Hazlitt and the general jubilation galled him.  His bitterness against those who had abandoned their support for the revolution in France extended to the whole Lakes gang, vile tergiversates all.

In his ‘Life of Napoleon’ he claims:

“The French Revolution might be described as a remote but inevitable result of the invention of printing.  The gift of speech, or the communication of thoughts by words, is that which distinguishes man from other animals.  But this faculty is limited and imperfect without the invention of books, which render the knowledge possessed by every one int eh community accessible to all.  There is no doubt, then, that the press (as it has existed in modern times) is the great organ of intellectual improvement and civilization.”

And Lies.

Hazlitt’s early hopes for the general spread of the Republican system were disappointed but he retained his loyalty to the ideal even ignoring Napoleon’s re-institution of slavery in 1804 (slavery had been abolished in 1794 ) to defray the costs of his campaigns. The sugar trade was very profitable.

In the same essay in which he descries the cant about ‘The Terror’ Hazlitt writes:

"Suppose, for instance, that in the discussions on the Slave-Trade, a description to the life was given of the horrors of theMiddle Passage (as it was termed), that you saw the manner in which thousands of wretches, year after year, were stowed together in the hold of a slave-ship, without air, without light, without food, without hope, so that what they suffered in reality was brought home to you in imagination, till you felt in sickness of heart as one of them, could it be said that this was a prejudging of the case, that your knowing the extent of the evil disqualified you from pronouncing sentence upon it, and that your disgust and abhorrence were the effects of a heated imagination? No. Those evils that inflame the imagination and make the heart sick, ought not to leave the head cool. This is the very test and measure of the degree of the enormity, that it involuntarily staggers and appals the mind.”

Further he adds:

“So with respect to the atrocities committed in the Slave-Trade, it could not be set up as a doubtful plea in their favour, that the actual and intolerable sufferings inflicted on the individuals were compensated by certain advantages in a commercial and political point of view—in a moral sense theycannot be compensated. They hurt the public mind: they harden and sear the natural feelings. The evil is monstrous and palpable; the pretended good is remote and contingent.”

The mirage of a Republican Utopia confounded his moral sense.  Ideology has that effect.  It even got into his prose.  The little bit of ‘The Life of Napoleon’ that I have read is poor stuff.

Borges: The Man in the Mirror & The Mirror of Ink

 The fictions of Borges are a metaphorical house of mirrors.  Even as his vision was fading light was doubled and trebled and multiplied to infinity.  There is even a mirror of ink.  One might say that all writing is a mirror of ink and even the novel in a dark drawer is seen by God and thereby takes its place in the furniture of the world.   To be then is to be perceived.  No doubt this is the ontological foundation of the shy proffering of a typescript ringed with tea mug stains and embedded with crumbs of the bitter bread of futility.

The mirror of ink is developed by the poltroon brother of Ibrahim for the tyrant Yaqub the Ailing in this fashion:

"My brother perished by the sword, on the blood-red skin of Justice, but I flung myself at the hated feet of the Ailing, telling him that I was a wizard, and that if he spared my life I would show him shapes and appearances still more wonderful than those of the magic lantern. The tyrant demanded an immediate proof. I asked for a reed pen, a pair of scissors, a large leaf of Venetian paper, an inkhorn, a chafing dish with some live coals in it, some coriander seeds, and an ounce of benzoin. I cut up the paper into six strips, wrote charms and invocation on the first five, and on the remaining one wrote the following words, taken from the glorious Koran: ‘And we have removed from thee thy veil; and thy sight today is piercing.’ Then I drew a magic square in the palm of Yaqub’s right hand, told him to make a hollow of it, and into the centre I poured a pool of ink. I asked him if he saw himself clearly reflected in it, and he answered that he did. I told him not to raise his head. I dropped the benzoin and coriander seeds into the chafing dish, and I burned the invocations upon the glowing coals. I next asked him to name the image he desired to see.”

Mirrors generally are a portent of shame, infamy and undesired conclusions.

“From along the corridor the mirror spied on us. We found out (inevitably at such an hour) that there is something unnatural about mirrors. Then Bioy recalled that one of Uqbar's heresiarchs had said that mirrors and copulation are abominable because they multiply the number of men”  (Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius)

Mirrors by their grasp are a danger to those with psyches in a crumbling state:

“In order to forge an intimacy with women, one often tells them about true or apocryphal things that happened in one's youth; I must have told her at some point about my horror of mirrors, and so in 1928 I must have planted the hallucination that was to flower in 1931. Now I have just learned that she has gone insane, and that in her room all the mirrors are covered, because she sees my reflection in them—usurping her own—and she trembles and cannot speak, and says that I am magically following her, watching her, stalking her.

What dreadful bondage, the bondage of my face—or one of my former faces. Its odious fate makes me odious as well, but I don't care anymore.”

Borges in an afterword offers the concept of the ‘fetch’:

"In England the double is called the fetch or, more literarily, the wraith of the living; in Germany it is known as the Doppelgänger. I suspect that one of its first aliases was the alter ego. This spectral apparition no doubt emerged from mirrors of metal or water, or simply from the memory, which makes each person both spectator and actor. “

This has its analogue in the ‘linga sarira’ (subtle body) of the Hindu which is the bridge between successive incarnations.  Continuity is required for sameness or illusory sameness of the adventure of the unravelling of the veil.  The Buddhist account of identity has no need of this karma janma (work/incarnation) catenary and thereby succumbs to the adventitious.

Ramana Maharishi and The Man in the Mirror

 The man in the mirror is your conventional self, the self defined by superimposition and a depthless self lacking the profound life of the realised sage.  Pure consciousness that vivifies flows into it from outside. and would be expected if given a form to be opposite to that trapped in the illusion.   Is that overextending the metaphor?  Possibly unless we take cognisance of the experience of the Maharishi (great sage) Ramana.

I have been saying all along that the Heart Centre is on the right side, even when learned men differed from me. I speak from experience. I knew it even in my home during my self-absorption. Again during the incident recorded in Self-Realization, I had a very clear vision and experience. All of a sudden a light came from one side erasing the world-vision. I felt that the heart on the left had stopped and the body became blue and inert. Vasudeva Sastri embraced the body and wept over my death, but I could not speak. All the time I was feeling that the Heart Centre on the right was working as well as ever. This state lasted fifteen or twenty minutes. Then suddenly something shot out from the right to the left like a rocket bursting into the sky. The blood resumed circulation and the normal condition of the body was restored.

 

The life force had subsided into the Hridaya but Ramana dissuaded others from dwelling on that as the ultimate reality.  Pure consciousness is beyond any focal point. 

He also writes of the Hridaya:

18. Between the two breasts, below the chest and above the stomach, there are six organs of various colours. Of these one, looking like a lily bud, is the Heart, two digits to the right (of the centre of the chest).

19. Its face is turned downwards. In the tiny hole within it there exists the dense darkness (of ignorance) together with desire and so on. All the major nerves are connected with it; it is the abode of breath, the mind and the light (of consciousness).

Sankara and The Man in the Mirror - 'Thou art That'

 Who is the man in the mirror?  You are.  You are reflected and refracted by the multiple projections of your personality coming from your self and others.  Like a nebula falling through space and time a personal identity holds it all together like gravity.  Is your identity anything more than  this continuing event?  The analogy of the mirror is regarded as a tantra.  No babies, not the one on the ceiling, in this use tantra is the weaving together of apparently contrary elements.  ‘Thou are That’ is chapter XVIII of Upadesa Sahasri and it is the mahavaka (great saying) of the upanishads that embodies that coincidenta oppositorum.  Shankara uses the notion of reflection as a compendium of advaita.  He writes:

“As it imitates the mirror the reflection of a face is different from the face.  The face which does not depend on the mirror (for its existence) is also  different from its reflection.  Similarly, the reflection of the Self in the ego is alsoregarded (as different from the pure Self) like that of the face which is different from the face.  The pure Self is considered to be different from its reflection like the face (which is different from its own).  In fact, however, the Self and Its reflection are free from real distinction between each other like the face and its reflection. “  #32/33 Upadesa Sahasri by Sri Sankaracarya trans. by Swami Jagadananda

Consciousness itself which is never sublated or eliminated is the single continuing changeless element.  It pervades the body/mind (the jiva)  which in advaita is jada (inert).

“The intellect has no consciousness and the Self no action.  The word ‘knows’ can, therefore, reasonably be applied to neither of them.” (# 54)

That is a shocking observation for most of  Western philosophy in which mind and consciousness are interchangeable.   I have said most because there is a strain of panpsychism in Sophia which  runs contrary to the dualism of body and mind.  Physicalism is its opposite number and monistic in intent.

Here is Yeats giving us his own mighty word:

(from ‘The Tower’ section III)

It is time that I wrote my will;

I choose upstanding men

That climb the streams until

The fountain leap, and at dawn

Drop their cast at the side

Of dripping stone; I declare

They shall inherit my pride,

The pride of people that were

Bound neither to Cause nor to State,

Neither to slaves that were spat on,

Nor to the tyrants that spat,

The people of Burke and of Grattan

That gave, though free to refuse –

Pride, like that of the morn,

When the headlong light is loose,

Or that of the fabulous horn,

Or that of the sudden shower

When all streams are dry,

Or that of the hour

When the swan must fix his eye

Upon a fading gleam,

Float out upon a long

Last reach of glittering stream

And there sing his last song.

And I declare my faith:

I mock Plotinus' thought

And cry in Plato's teeth,

Death and life were not

Till man made up the whole,

Made lock, stock and barrel

Out of his bitter soul,

Aye, sun and moon and star, all,

And further add to that

That, being dead, we rise,

Dream and so create

Translunar Paradise.

I have prepared my peace

With learned Italian things 

And the proud stones of Greece, 

Poet's imaginings 

And memories of love, 

Memories of the words of women, 

All those things whereof 

Man makes a superhuman 

Mirror-resembling dream.

'A Severed Head' by Iris Murdoch

There are hours that you won’t get back.  ‘A Severed Head’ owes me several but her credit is good.  How interesting can utterly morally labile characters be is a question.  If there is no personal center there is no interest in their predicaments, their confusion, their attachments or passions.  Philosophically we are presented attributes without a substance.  It’s a farce with houses instead of doors and initially it seemed to promise mockery of psychoanalysis when a wife and her analyst lover engage in the emotional healing of the cuckold.  Then it fades away into musical beds in which all the dramatis personae permute polyamourously.

Don’t bother. 

Professor Murphy's Covidology Class

What was that movie that where there was a crowd standing round a man stricken by god knows what lying on the ground?   Then a fellow bustles through saying - make way please I’m a doctor.  He bends down before the man loosens his collar and calls for brandy please or whiskey.  Somebody hands him a flask out of a back pocket.  Our doctor takes a swig out of it and declares - ‘He’s dead’.

Such allopathy is a great way of steadying the nerves in a time of crisis and Richard Murphy is the doctor.  cf. :

covid's question, do we want to survive

Murphy is not a useful idiot for the Great Reset, his inutility is far more comprehensive than that though there is something of the same do re me about it with gentle grace notes of Marxist curse of capitalism, and pale Greenery in addition.  Covidology is an incipient science and you might say marks the alchemy stage preceding the full bloom of pseudo-scientific fatuity.  Mark this and you didn’t hear it first from me, society at large is coming to its senses after a period of enchantment.   The mixed messages that are coming from the bustling docs are being seen for what they are - decerebrate flailing.

Professor Murphy is an Englishman but his response is no different from that of our unique public intellectual Fintan O’Toole of the Irish Times.  With Gramsci sprinkles.  Society is to be remade and AC (after Covid) we will own nothing and we will be happy.  Sorry, that’s the other movie.

How many extra ICU beds did we get in Ireland?  Are there enough to deal with the ordinary flu in an ordinary flu season.  In 2009 the Health Service said 579 were needed, in September 2020 (last figures I can find) there were 280.  This was in answer to a parliamentary question and not one from the media who are now generally seen as the psi-ops division of the current administration.  Never mind, in a couple of years the present coalition will be gone and Sinn Fein will be along with their brand of fantasy politics.  Don’t cry for me Venezuela!

Biopsychism or I know where everything is with Brown and Thompson

 Passing by the house of the mathematician, a lecturer at the university, we could see into his living room.  The bungalow was down an incline and the arrangement of chairs about the single arm chair had each its load of papers and books.  It’s a natural organization and one that is missing entirely from the zoom room.  Clean well lighted places without the incipient entropy, pace Hemingway, were the rooms of Richard Brown and Evan Thompson as they discussed mind and consciousness.  Evan shied from the term panpsychist preferring biopsychist as more amenable to naturalism which is true up to a point though it staves off the bitter hour when the harder question must be faced.  How did consciousness arrive from the big bang?  Shunting that up the siding and considering the movement of the simple organism, if indeed it be an organism, towards the sweet side of the petri dish is certainly more scrutable than the nous sphere.

Both men were intrigued by the rise of panpsychism.  Brown offered the idea of clever forests but both I think saw that as verging on Gaiaism or something.  Transcendentalism in the philosophic sense or how things must fundamentally be for things to appear as they do was approved by Thompson.  Could it be that life was sustained by a sea of monads, all those myriad switches that contribute their morsel of information till it erupts as a thought - we’re out of milk or hydrate now?  Why does the combination problem clear the room?  Is it too obvious?

Zombies received the head shot.  Very stimulating conversation.  Brown had a bad cold at the phlegm softening stage.  He was in his office or what appeared to be an office in epistemic terms.  Thompson was in a living room, a very nice one with a Shiva nataraja in the background and a fine mahogany desk.

View at:   Brown & Thompson

Sankara and Colin McGinn on Existence and Possibility

 It’s analogous to the long cycle on the dishwasher, the one I never use.  Philosophy has its long cycles which never get things quite clear.

"If seven maids with seven mops

     Swept it for half a year,

Do you suppose,' the Walrus said,

      That they could get it clear?'

I doubt it,' said the Carpenter,

      And shed a bitter tear.

Ex nihilo nihil fit as the panpsychist motto, the impossibility of change of Parmenides, sat and asatkaryavada (non-difference of cause and effect and v.v.) and now from Colin McGinn:

is existence possible

The vanes of my brain are spinning.

McGinn’s tourbillon comes from the chilling quarter of paradox.  Existence is not possible because ..... Here I must recommend reading it for it is certain that my understanding of it is flawed.  He pauses on the brink of radical contingency, looks into that abyss and spies William Blake having tea with Nobodaddy.

To Nobodaddy

Why art thou silent & invisible,
Father of Jealousy?
Why dost thou hide thyself in clouds
From every searching Eye?

Why darkness & obscurity
In all thy works & laws,
That none dare eat the fruit but from
Thy wily serpent's jaws?
Or is it because Secrecy
Gains females' loud applause?

  He questions the endless series of entities that spawn each other:

"The first is that these entities come from nothing at all: they simply spring into existence de novo. Not even God plays a role, since he is an existent being (allegedly) for whom the same question arises: what explains God’s existence?

Introduce the Ontological argument into the cycle and we will never have a clean plate.  Just:

“O good looking one, in the beginning this was Existence alone, One only without a second.  With regard to that some say, “In the beginning this was non-existence alone, one only, without a second.  From that non-existence issued existence." ‘

He said, ‘O good looking one, by what logic can existence verily come out of non-existence?  But surely, O good looking one, in the beginning all this was Existence, One only, without a second.’ Chandogya Upanisad VI.2.1/2

McGinn writes:

“The first is that the same question will arise for the antecedent realm of existence: where do these possibilities come from? If possible worlds really exist, where do they come from—do they pop into existence from nothing? But second, and more decisive, possibilities have no tendency to turn into actualities; so they cannot play the role of existence generators.”

The word ‘pop’, if I’m not being captious, is an indication of the missing factor: time.  The acorn does not pop into an oak.   A possibility is not an actuality it is part of the process or a power.  The acorn falls on the ground.  Add time and the cosmos.  Voila!

Sankara’s commentary on the Chandogya text cited is suggestive:

“As in the world someone, who in the forenoon had seen a lump of earth spread by a potter desirous of making pot, plate etc., he, on perceiving in that very place different products like pot, plate, etc. while returning in the afternoon after visiting a village would say, ‘those pots, plates, etc. were but earth in the forenoon’, so also it is said even here, ' In the beginning this was Existence alone.’

That existence is existence now dense with duration a la Bergson.  McGinn discusses eternal elementary particles:

“Let’s assume they exist eternally: we still need to know why they exist at all, given that they don’t have to. Is their existence simply a brute fact with no explanation? But why these entities and not others—why the particular types of particles that populate our universe?”

That doesn’t quite work for him.  Interesting discussions on this and other topics on his blog.