Sonya's Uncle

Is Vanya which makes her the other half of the moral centre of the play, if a centre can have a half. She represents the freshness, the dew on the opening bud, idealism not yet spoiled by the treason of time. Here she is relating the beauty of renewed forests:

No, it’s extremely interesting. Mikhail Lvovich plants new forests every year, and he’s already received a bronze medal and a diploma. He works to keep the old forests from being destroyed. If you hear him out, you’ll agree with him completely. He says that forests adorn the earth, that they teach man to understand beauty and inspire a lofty feeling in him. Forests make a harsh climate milder. In countries with a mild climate less effort is spent in the struggle with nature, and therefore human beings are more mild and gentle there; people there are beautiful, supple, responsive; their speech is refined, their movements are graceful. With them learning and the arts flourish, their philosophy is not gloomy, their relations with women are refined and noble …

She is drawn to Dr. Astrov (Lvovich) for his practical idealism. Sadly he doesn’t notice her or it may be fortunate when one considers her counterpart Elena who married a great mind whom Vanya traduces as :

 

He’d do better to write his autobiography. There’s a superlative subject! A retired professor, you see, an old crust, an educated codfish … Gout, rheumatism, migraine, liver bloated with jealousy and envy … This dried codfish lives on his first wife’s estate, is forced to live here, because he can’t afford to live in town. He complains eternally about his bad luck, though in fact he’s been incredibly lucky. 

 Astrov likewise could become a bitter drunk, even is one, or is he in need of the love of a good woman? He aspires to an adventure with Elena as does Vanya. Two versions of this drama are on youtube one by the BBC and the other a Mosfilm production. In neither is Sonya plain. The English declaim more; this is a classic and this is how we do the classic. Russians know the boredom of despair, its unremittent diuternality and we may as well get on with it. Have you a better idea?

Professor Chantal Delsol on Reversion to Paganism

It used to be said that the bad things that were happening in the world were due to its being on the cusp of the Kali Yuga. The Kali Yuga is the iron age of mechanism, materialism and lack of religion and dharma generally. I think we have a long way to go before a cusp is reached. Prof. Chantal Delsol concurs. Her central point in this essay and youtube talk is that Christendom has given way to a new paganism: reversion youtube She likens it to the opposite event that happened when the pagan culture that accepted as licit abortion, infanticide, easy divorce etc was replaced by a Christian view of those practices as deeply sinful. Pius Aeneas was no longer pious and that Roman bafflement is the modern sentiment of Christian nostalgia. It’s time to hit the catacombs again. Reversion is simplistic would be the counter. The Greeks and Romans alike believed in Gods which our moderns repudiate for crystals and Climate. Is it true that the classical chattering classes believed in gods? The paper of Paul Veyne on this topic (did the Greeks believe in their myths) doubts it. By parity of reasoning we might ask whether Christianity in its rigorous form was ever popular? Yes we are all sinners or mired in maya and so on but the fact remains, Christ happened, the avatars happened. We become divinised by meditation on their presence; the truth which is the core of the eternal dharma (sanathana dharma) and beyond civilisational crisis. �

G.K. Chesterton on the American Episode in 'Martin Chuzzlewit'.

G.K. Chesterton’s notes on the novels of Dickens were collected introductions to the Everyman editions. He claims against the general critical judgment that the American section of ‘Chuzzlewit’ was a satiric triumph. That would be his reaching after paradox tic I think. My feeling is that we had reportage with extra added acerbity and quite close to the maundering cant that is a continuing tradition. Even the intelligentsia's call to repentance has a note of triumph these days. See how we beat our breasts and rend our garments! It doesn’t fit, it’s out of tune with the sublime comedy of the rest of the book - the ‘gravy’ that has added 20 years to Mrs. Todgers life, the imperturbable recoveries of Pecksniff, Mark Tapley’s seeking creditable jolliness. The quality of invention is not there in the American episode. �

Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens (1844)

There’s that time for a prolific writer when he’s moving from the utter facility of his juvenalia to the deeper levels of his art that are more difficult to attain. Martin Chuzzlewit has that early abounding vitality as well as intimations of the more profound themes to come. How can we change our characters and revise our prejudices? Must we suffer in order to grow in wisdom? It might be that his blacking factory abandonment fixed a permanent insecurity that did not allow Dickens to settle into a state of being Charles Dickens writing Charles Dickens’s novels. Of course there are plot devices that recur. In episodic publication there have to be doors to other rooms. Simulation and dissimulation are features, comic drunkards, transparent machinations of the addlepated and chuckleheaded and the flagrant coincidences that hardly micro mesh the plot. That’s Dickens but and you will come to love and expect the sudden emergence of a character that you presumed had served his purpose. As I was getting on in the book some several hundred pages had passed and Chivy Slyme had vanished even though Montague Tigg his confederate has put on the gaudy plumage of a nabob. You’ll be back for sure I thought. Hello again Chivy, I expect you were in the neighbourhood and thought it rude to pass. And in a surprising role. What can you say about a novel that has Mr. Pecksniff, Mrs. Gamp, Young Bailey, the frightful daughters Pecksniff, Charity and Mercy, Mark Tapley, Mrs. Todgers, Montague Tigg and The Anglo-Bengalee Disinterested Loan and Life Assurance Company. All characters whatever are given the full Dickens to the distress of American readers who objected to the satirical treatment of their great democracy. Dickens said that it was mere reportage. The book is full of crooks but there’s only one psychopath, Jonas Chuzzlewit. This is an unsettling portrait of a wicked man whose delight in his ruthlessness leaves him subject to manipulation by arch scoundrel Tigg. Jonas’s tracking of him by coach and foot has a macabre inevitability because we are told beforehand how it will culminate. It’s a comic masterpiece with an undercurrent of dread. Insipid females do no impinge on the story in a significant way which rushes along, by coach generally.

Modern Moral Philosophy by Elizabeth Anscombe

 I’ve read that this paper is important and I suppose that it is though I have noticed that judicious context elision can negate what is its main purport: to be an engine of stultification. All modern ethical theories are rendered foolish by their unwitting divorce from a philosophical psychology of the person.  The ‘is’ of their oughts is missing in action.  It is this which gives the force to the quotable:

This word ‘ought’ having become a word of mere mesmeric force, could not, in the character of having that force, be inferred from anything whatever.

Anscombe having a Catholic Christian view of morality would be committed to a virtually instinctual grasp of good and evil.  The following through of that impetus leads to a connaturality with the good in the Aristotelian/Thomistic sense of that term.  ‘What the good man deems to be good is good’ (Aristotle iirc)

From 2018:

ethics without god

describes a argumentative trajectory which culminates in a position contrary to that which he first starts out with. Is this an indication of retrocausality in action whereby a power acts from the future on a present situation? The ineluctable power of the truth that is yet to be assented to mitigates the contemporary confusion.

It begins, as American reflections often do, with a story. A student is shocked by Prof. Troy’s admission that he has no religious beliefs. This evokes his comment:

 ‘But Professor Jollimore,’ he stammered, ‘how can you not believe in God? You teach ethics for a living!’

The series of lectures in contemporary Ethics that was being taught made no mention of “the scaffolding of any faith or religious tradition”(T.Jo.) which in itself is a questionable choice. Leaving out the whole history of moralizing up to comparatively recent times is an example of bias and egregious leading. In any case the spontaneous reaction of a student is not a serious basis for a generalisation. I call that a ‘straw boy’. There’s nearly enough of them in the essay to make a full complement of mummers like the Straw Boys of Wexford that go out with the wren on St.Stephen’s Day.

His argument against divine rule is summarized:

Adding God would give us divine rewards and punishments, but that’s only to add self-interested reasons to be ethical, not genuinely moral reasons.

We’re not very far down the page when that hedging locution ‘suspect’ comes on the pitch:

 I suspect that something else is going on, and that in most cases these arguments are just rationalisations for the belief that morality depends on faith in God. The actual explanation, I believe, is something else.

This lateral thought sends him in a direction which subverts his original thesis. Religion is fixed on the personal not the theoretical. There are no impossible computations about universal felicity.

This emphasis on being attentive to concrete reality tallies with the idea that it is the emotions (compassion and sympathy in particular), rather than abstract rational principles, that are doing the motivating when it comes to ethical behaviour.

It is wisdom that enables discernment:

Wisdom, as opposed to knowledge, might seem a somewhat quaint notion in the contemporary world. (Indeed at this point even the word ‘knowledge’ sounds quaint to many people, who prefer to talk about ‘data’ or ‘information.’)

Professor Jollimore quotes that section of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics on connaturality that I have referenced a few times in posts:

‘Actions, then,’ Aristotle taught, ‘are called just and temperate when they are such as the just or the temperate man would do; but it is not the man who does these that is just and temperate, but the man who also does them as just and temperate men do them.’

It would be impertinent of me to remind the professor that for Aristotle the highest form of happiness lies in contemplation. It is divine because the divine nous is absorbed in self awareness as its highest condition. It thinks itself. (cf. Lambda 9 Metaphysics) We become aligned to the divine in following that path.

It is in the summation to his essay that the strange turn occurs:

The idea that morality stems from strong character rather than from obedience to a strict set of rules, for instance, is very much in line with the moral reorientation proposed by Christ in the New Testament, from a view centered on obedience to God’s commandments to one in which love and compassion take centre stage.

We need to:

.....teach ourselves to stop looking at morality as an abstract and isolated set of requirements and demands — an external authority that stands apart from and sets limits on human existence — and see it instead as a set of commitments, enthusiasms, and passions that are woven into the very fabric of our lives.

An exemplar that generates enthusiasm (en theos - god within) is the only force that can draw us out an in-group morality based on obligation to a universal one based on love. Such are the great saints and sages of world religions.

Hey Troy, you’re nearly there.

 

Realism jottings

Realism may be structural/ontological but it is confounded by the psychological. To put it in Platonic terms; the ideas are there but the refractive medium of the mind creates adumbration which needs the maieutic work to bring clarity. But is it right to say that the bridge between the first and second orders is broken down if indeed it ever existed? Are contingency, necessity, probability, identity, non-contradiction pontoons to the ‘other side’? To add ‘as such’ to those topics may be deemed pleonastic but it’s a tic that comes on under pressure from materialism.

Was Hume really a metaphysican looking for first order justification of induction and causality amongst the debris of the second order? Not to be had Davey lad. Ay!

The Vedanta people with their valid means of knowledge (pramanas) take perceptual realism as the default. Doubt arises as the result of new evidence and is not a sceptical position. The coin that we spotted turned out to be silver foil when we picked it up. There are no red barns to hide in, as it were.

Here’s the thing: is this supposed breach between the metaphysical and the everyday scientific a mere sophism? To use an expression of the Tantra: ‘what is here is there, what is not here is not anywhere’.