I blame the British Empiricists.

I bang on like an untethered gate about Idealism and Realism but I take consolation in the fact that I am in good company. Practically all philosophers have spurned Idealism even if like a mutating virus it comes on in waves weakening as they put about their noxious fumes. Even so, some philosophers share Kant’s dismay at the lack of proof for an external world and take pains to work abstruse demonstrations which commit the usual error. They attempt to move from an inner conviction to an outer reality. That can be about God for Descartes and Berkeley. Like the writer to the editor ‘I blame the parents’ or The British Empiricists in the case of the inner turning to found an outer reality. Following them one is balked from the world by the direct acquaintance with our sensations merely and their cause devolves into an inference. Occasional error damns us as though not knowing everything were to condemn to universal ignorance. My philosophic chums of the moment are Etienne Gilson and Thomas Reid, champions of common sense. Can you prove causality? Can you prove the excluded middle? Are there limits to demonstration? For them common sense is not folk epistemology though it may require work to show its depth. Guided by Gilson’s ‘Thomist Realism’ I and Reid’s ‘Intellectual Powers’ I follow that trail. Sankara the advaitin has words on that topic addressing the Buddhist vijnanavadin (subjective idealist).

“So also it has to be admitted that the regularity in the simultaneous appearance of the cognition and its object is owing to the relation of causality between them and not owing to their identity.” (B.S.Bh - commentary on the Vedanta Sutras)

There is much more to say on this but why is it important? In a nutshell: de-incarnation is a very subtle and powerful mind virus.

Iran shows its wares to three airforces.

 Reading the commentary on twitter and elsewhere the significance , it seems to me, is missed,  of the Iranian show of force.  They are demonstrating the palette of weaponry like arms salesment.  We are giving you a small selection of what we have and telling you in advance what they are so that you can be prepared. Today the Israelies will be reflecting that this sample took the airforces of three countries to shoot down which is o.k.as long as they remain willing to continue to do so.  Will their allies stick around?  Genocide is not a good look and the grabbing actions of the settlers alienates.  The Americans will dump them just as they did the Vietnamese, the Afghanies, Iraqis, and so forth.  Consider the cooling of ardour for the Ukraine.  They are not reliable long term allies, AIPAC or not.  The Palestinians will not quit any more than the North Vietnamese did.  Israel is no longer a safe place to ignore the demands of justice.  They should make an equitable peace now or risk losing everything.

Dexter, Ripley and other advocates of the quick and dirty fix

 

There are different sorts of multiple killers that we meet in literature, some who turn it into a avocation which gives life meaning and then those types that stumble into it and find it a useful quick and dirty fix for the grit in the machinery of their lives.  It’s like the WD 40 of locked up nuts or stuck pistons.  I’ve looked at Dexter but not read any of the books which may carry on the satirical aspect of the code of Harry.  He’s the singular and more prolific  assassin than the earlier group of vigilantes ‘The Four Just Men’ of Edgar Wallace which I may or may not have read some time ago.  What Dexter has over them is the police procedural element, the forensic science, blood spatter analysis that give verisimilitude to the gruesome.  De Quincey started it all with ‘The Fine Art of Murder’.  His pedantic footnotes set a style of high toned persiflage which persists in the English essay and perhaps has  influenced such eschatologists as William T. Vollman.

The Gorse series by Patrick Hamilton follows the trail of bodies that the protagonist despatches without a trace of remorse or a scintilla of finesse.  You have money, I want it, therefore I must take it and if you threaten me it’s your own fault if I erase you.  Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley is that sort of problem solver, an impetuous boy that regards being slighted as a capital offence.  How close he comes to being caught is part of the tension that is created around this classic sociopath.   I am reading ‘Ripley’s Game’ again and I am pleasantly surprised by how good it is and how much of the plot I’d forgotten.

I’m paused at episode three of ‘Ripley’ on Netflix.  A very stylish version of book one in the series, more low key and real than the glam Damon, Law, Paltrow trio in a previous film which was as much about knitwear and slacks as murder and impersonation.  Andrew Scott is a grim, sullen, resentful man who takes passive aggression into an active mode.  He seems to be able to create a perceptible void about himself, like an aura of emptiness.

Ireland’s own forensic pathologist Dr. Marie Cassidy has created a stylish elegant persona  walking into crime scenes in high class tailoring not quite saying ‘what have you got for me?’.  Her observation "It’s the man in your bed you should be worried about, not the man under your bed"has become a feminist proverb.  Shes Scottish so her pronunciation of 'murder' has the Macbeth ring. '  Ay, my good lord, safe in a ditch he bides,. With twenty trenched gashes on his head —. The least a death to nature.   She has taken to writing novels in her retirement, ‘The Body of Truth’ was her first.  No seriality, just one offs. Must take a look.

James Beattie: Selected Philosophical Writings (ed. James A. Harris)

 

I proceed, in the second place, to take notice of some of the more remarkable phenomena of Memory.

This is a faculty, which, if it were less common, and we equally qualified to judge of it, would strike us with astonishment. That we should have it in our power to recall past sensations and thoughts, and make them again present, as it were: that a circumstance of our former life should, in respect of us, be no more; and yet occur to us, from time to time, dressed out in colours so lively, as to enable us to examine it, and judge of it, as if it were still an object of sense: - these are facts, whereof we every day have experience, and which, therefore, we overlook as things of course. But, surely, nothing is more wonderful, or more inexplicable. (Beattie on Memory taken from ‘Selected Philosophical Writings’ ed. James A.Harris)

James Beattie (1735 - 1803)is less famous that his two near contemporaries Thomas Reid (1710 - 1796) and David Hume (1711 - 1776).  Both Beattie and Reid were opposed to the sceptical Hume particularly on consciousness and memory.

Thomas Reid:

Why sensation should compel our belief of the present existence of the thing, memory a belief of the past existence, and imagination no belief at all, I believe no philosopher can give a shadow of reason, but that such is the nature of these operations. They are all simple and original, and therefore inexplicable acts of the mind.

Further down:

Philosophers indeed tell me, that this immediate object of my memory and imagination in this case, is not the past sensation, but an idea of it, an image, phantasm, or species of the odour I smelled; that this idea now exists in my mind or in my sensorium; and the mind contemplating this present idea, finds it a representation of what is past, of what my exist, and accordingly call it memory, or imagination.

(from An Inquiry into the Human Mind, on the Principles of Common Sense by Thomas Reid)

Specifically on the odd idea that memory and imagination were distinguished by vivacity James Beattie writes:

Some philosophers refer to memory all our livelier thoughts, and our fainter ones to imagination: and so will have it, that the former faculty is distinguished from the latter by its superior vivacity. We believe, say they, in memory; we believe not in imagination: now we never believe any thing, but what we distinctly comprehend; and that, of which our comprehension is indistinct, we disbelieve. - But this is altogether false. The suggestions of imagination are often so lively, in dreaming, and in some intellectual disorders, as to be mistaken for real things; and therefore cannot be said to be essentially fainter than the informations of memory. (op.cit)

Beattie’s further ruminations on the difference between the two are closely observed  and follow the rubric of common sense realism that holds that we experience the world before we begin to reason about it and focusing on the ideas we have leaves us marooned on the desert island of solipsism castaway by the shipwreck of idealism.

It is interesting that among the moderns Margaret Anscombe is taken by the irreducibility of memory.

Writing in her essay on Memory and the Past Elizabeth Anscombe:

Then what makes my state or act of consciousness memory of the thing. Is it the mere fact that the thing happened and that I witnessed it? In that case there is nothing in the memory itself that makes it refer to the actual past event. And if so, why should the experience of memory have anything to do with actual past events or show one what it means for something to have happened?

She then in her consideration of the phenomenon of memory examines the present experience of which memory is supposed to be.

 

 But if I consider some present thing (which can, if you like, be a state of mind) and my future ability to speak of it, it is brought out more clearly how difficult it is to make out that anything I may attribute to my future mental state will make what I say refer to this.

Beattie is exceptionally readable.  The 18th.Century was one of prose as Matthew Arnold remarks in his essay on Thomas Grey.  There  is a fine handling of the long sentence with numerous parentheses which are immediately intelligible.  His remarks on the location of memories remind one of the fact that Neuroscience and its accomplices in Philosophy have not moved past the problems that he identified:

The human brain is a bodily substance; and sensible and permanent impressions made upon it must so far resemble those made on sand by the foot, or on wax by the seal, as to have a certain shape, length, breadth, and deepness. Now such an impression can only be made by that, which has solidity, magnitude, and figure. If then we remember thoughts, feelings, and sounds, as well as things visible and tangible, which will hardly be denied; those sounds, thoughts, and feelings, must have body, and, consequently, shape, size, and weight. What then is the size or weight of a sound? Is it an inch long, or half an inch? Does it weigh an ounce, or a grain? Does the roar of a cannon bear any resemblance to the ball, or to the powder, in shape, in weight, or in magnitude? What figure has the pain of the toothache, and our remembrance of that pain? Is it triangular, or circular, or a square form? The bare mention of these consequences may prove the absurdity of the theories that lead to them.

The Jade Cabinet by Rikki Ducornet

 

So ‘Rikki don’t lose that number’ song from 1974 (Steely Dan) is about Rikki Ducornet whose book ‘The Jade Cabinet’ I have been reading having being steered there by my instructor in the avant garde, the youtube book blogger ‘Leaf by Leaf’.  I need help in that region.  I don’t keep up.  What really took me to the book was his inclusion of it in a post on great openings.

“Memory, wrote Mr. Beattie, presents us with thoughts of what is past accompanied with a persuasion that they were once real.”

Oddly enough Google can’t find that quote from Beattie nor is to be found where you might expect it in his ‘Dissertations Moral and Critical’ which has a section on Memory which proves perhaps the fallibility of Memory the presenter of this text. She is a daughter of Angus Sphery.  His other daughter is Etheria a creature of air and ethereal beauty.  “She grew up speechless and yet for all that tremendously clever.”  This is in contrast to Father’s quest for the proto language which would be divine is conjuring up the real.  I have posted on the Vedic words theory of Shankara or the power which underlies mantra to cause to irrupt from the noumenal that which it mentions.vedic words

Adam and Eve thought Angus:

“stumbling from Eden as dumb as stones, had tediously to reconstruct a language which, in fact, could only be a pale copy, a simpleton’s stuttering - compared to the Divine Original which Father claimed was so powerful as toconjure the world of things.  All of Adam and Eve’s needs were seen to by this language of languages which was also a species of magic.”

Intimations of this perfect language might be found in the secret scripture of nature -

“the shells of winkles, on the hides of panthers, tigers, zebras, llamas and giraffes at the London Zoo, goats and cows of the field, cats in kitchens, dogs in alleys, turtles sleeping in gardens.  ........the Primal Language was spelled out phonetically by the planets.”

In this novel esoteric lore ebulliates and not always to the furtherance of the central narrative viz. the fraught relationship between Radulph Tubbs and the airy Etheria.  I would consider the Egyptian interlude might well have been volatilised, fractioned off by the alembic of Ducornet’s mind leaving a pure essence of obsessive lust that destroys the monster of vulgarity, Tubbs.

That rabbit hole she should have filled in and speaking of which Charles Dodgson aka Lewis Carroll is one of the dramatis personae which bring to our attention the striving between the two hebephiles.  When Tubbs first spots Etheria she is but ten years old so he must wait for seven long years to consummate his febrile lusts.  Angus Sphery’s love of jade is the engine of this consummation. Tubbs has a very fine collection:

“The cabinet was Ming and of sober elegance, and the jade of such rare perfection that as he fingered them our father trembled.  Again and again he returned to a piece that Radulph disliked particularly, and although he really could not have cared less, Angus Sphery  informed him that the jade represented an insect, a cidada.”

Angus admires unto ownership and lays thereby a path to the construpation of his beautiful daughter. The invitation to dinner as the fee for the jade piece is the start of Radulph’s courtship.  Etheria is now thirteen.  Another friend of Dodgson was the future Archbishop of Canterbury, Edward White Benson.  Mary Sidgwick, sister of Henry the Ethics man, was eleven, proposed to at twelve, married at eighteen.

The mother as ever has to be won over if the daughter is to be transferred to Tubs and the problem is that she despises this dragon of industry, this myrmidon of mammon and his factories which grind to dust hapless orphans.  Having invited her to his Grimswick manufactury he now must bring it up to a sanitary condition.  However the cucumber sandwich and the strawberry tart which she accepted from the matron must have had lurking germs of the cholera that lately had eliminated a third of the orphans.  “I believe her appetite proved ruinous."(Memory) Fine acerbic satire in this Potemkin factory sanitation passage.

Interspersed in the novel are the memoirs of Tubbs who relates how he fails to answer a riddle set by Etheria who demands as forfeit whatever she wants. The chimera and her pup two priceless pieces of jade that he does not even know that he posses he gladly surrenders.

“She shall have it.”

 “It’s not for her!  The precocious brat bounced up and down in her chair with excitement.  “But for Papa!  It is to be his birthday, Saturday.  He wants it badly.”

The frightful Tubbs gets his prey but of course it is elusive for who can hold the subtle air.

There are many fine things in this book and a certain amount of dross which for me stands out more in a very short book which a longer one might have absorbed.  It's beautifully written, She is a superb stylist and manages the idiom of Victorian English literature beautifully which is not an easy thing to do.   A very good read and I shall revisit her book cabinet again.