'The Brothers Karamazov' by Fyodor Dostoevsky

 

I’ve read ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ a few times and in various translations even the one called ‘The Karamazov Brothers’.  It’s a great book quite resistant to the vagaries of the rendering of idiom.  I was reading the Garnett but when it came to The Grand Inquisitor the ‘thous’ and the ‘shalts’ put me off this time and I switched to the Pevear and Volokhonsky which is excellent.  Perhaps Garnett was attempting to give a rendition of High Church Slavonic and that might be justifiable but it seemed to me to be a distraction from the real theme of faith, freedom, and belief.

This time reading the latter parts of the book struck me more than before particularly the trial and the speeches of the prosecution and the defence.  Though what must happen is fated I still was annoyed at the lack of investigation by the star lawyer for the defence.  What about the money, ask about the money.  Was any note taken of the numbers of the notes, in Russian books, always rainbow coloured.  These are large amounts and were paid out by the banks.  Surely Fyodor Pavlovich would want new notes to give to Grushenka.  There was an envelope with a seal, new clothes for the hoped for tryst, codes, and you mean to say she was to be given dirty money.  No this cannot be.  Ivan Fyodorvich’s 15 G from cashing out bonds sounds like new money with noted numbers for security purposes.  Compare the two sets.  Are they the same?

That’s mad of course but what we were offered by Fetyukovich was ‘Papa Karamazov was a bad daddy and needed killing’.  Not an unknown defence in America but not fine forensic logic either.

The boys funeral moved me very much.  The captain his father clinging to the coffin, weeping at the sight of his little broken boots at the door that will never again be filled.  I’m filling up thinking about it and as always in Dostoevsky the hysteria, the dark atrabilious comedy, the naive yet effective speech to the boys by Aloshya, those elements of genius that we only accept from genius because all that has gone before has prepared us for it.  We say ‘only you could make me believe this’.

'Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A life of David Foster Wallace by D.T. Max

 

I’m dipping into ‘Infinite Jest’ by D.F. Wallace and at the same time reading ‘Every Love Story is a Ghost Story’  the bio by D.T. Max.  Of the two I like the latter more which is paradoxical given that it is the writing fame that evokes the bio, that makes the man biographable.  Everybody is that of course, that’s the one true story or based on a true story story.  With Wallace the disjunction between the knowing author persona and the man is startling.  So far in the book only one Eng. Lit. colleague  has offered a clue to his personality which struck me as correct. He was a high functioning Aspergers. His parents particularly his mother also veered that way.  His obsessiveness, his anxiety, the inability to sustain relationships, the multiple addictions all feed into the novel and makes it work where it works and cause it to splutter and die where they don’t.  The jokes he runs into the ground that make your fingers itch to skip or to hurl are balanced by the truth of the ruin of addiction coming out in the rehab clinic details.

As the biography goes one I sense Max getting laconic ironic.  There was trouble with the dogs and the woman he was living with, separately and together.  They went to couple counselling.  I wonder if they broke it down logically, woman and DFW; DFW and Dogs; woman and dogs; DFW, woman, and dogs, dog 1 and dog 2, the Alpha and Beta and interspecies ramifications.  I think I’ve just made that up.  It’s the sort of thing Wallace did so it must be contagious.

The biography is excellent.  I recommend it. The novel: ‘I can’t go one, I’ll go on.’

The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Tolstoy

 

After the rosary we always prayed for the grace of a happy death.  If you want to pray for anything that the very act of praying for it might make happen that is a candidate. The Ivan Ilyich household must have neglected this petition for what the novella depicts is a deeply unhappy, protracted, painful and unresigned death.  Why be resigned, why not cry out ‘de profundis clamavi’, why me?  The bad news is that there never will be a rescue.  You are manacled to the tracks and the train has set out.   Ivan when he reviews his glory days as a lawyer, the obiter dicta of a fine forensic mind grinding out judgements, the respect of his peers, the difficult decisions about curtains and sofas, these important events in the life of a man who has attained to a respected position in society are nugatory, trivial and not a fit preparation for the final examination.  Eschatology is one of those subjects that one must mug up daily.  

Tolstoy first did the death then he did the dying which inverts the normal procedure allowing him to demonstrate how the passing of a personage can cause difficulty for a bridge evening.  As soon as the wife has sounded a colleague about whether there might be additions to pension entitlements the mourner can slip away after the service in the room where Ivan is laid out.   

The dying as related by Tolstoy and God ought to induce recollection in the religious or, in that charmingly deflecting locution, mortality salience, in the secular humanist.  Terrifying or bracing, death is there and is waiting.

Rene McGinn and Colin Descartes

 

Leaving Descartes is hard.  If you pose the body/mind problem according to a consequence of his view then you will arrive at an analogous position.  The connection between the brain (material) and the immaterial (consciousness) is like that between the extended and the unextended. The property P of the brain that is expected to account for consciousness was taken by the pineal gland. The part taken by god in guaranteeing that we are not ensorcelled  by a demon is taken by a refusal to offer any sort of reason for the reality of the ‘external’ world. Mystery and God are convertible as any theologian will tell you.

When you pose the problem according to the Cartesian rubric your excogitation will have that shape.

McGinn and the Presence of a Sage

 When I use the expression ‘pervade’ of the inert body/mind that is pervaded by consciousness I do not wish to imply that consciousness is an external force that lights up the inert.  The being of things is consciousness.  To be is to be conscious.

This is counter to the idea of consciousness as an emerging power.  What is of its nature conscious has nothing but complexity of structure added to it to gain in awareness.  The self luminous awareness of man is the pinnacle of this evolution.  

Going back to McGinn it must be admitted that this is also a mystery overcast by the cloud of unknowing.  All that the seeker can do is put themselves in that luminous darkness which he realises by his being but which he cannot know in an objective sense.  The comprehension is rather transformative and not apodeictic.  Put yourself in the presence of a sage.  That helps. 

Can we solve the Mind-Body problem? with Colin McGinn (1983)

If you want to feel the force of the body/mind problem as classically posed Colin McGinn is your only man. He’s the mystery man and though he elaborates his central insight into many pages of very clear and distinct prose it may be expressed as the insuperable difficulty of discovering the property that turns the cerebral events into concomitant consciousness. Unless that property is available as data then all the clever hypotheses such as identity, consciousness as epiphenomenal, as divinely tuned, etc cannot be tested. We are beached on this island of consciousness and we cannot discover how the extended and the unextended interact. This is a brute fact and there is no getting away from it. What he presents (Can we solve the Body/Mind problem ‘1983) is a problem that arises out of a classic Cartesian presentation i.e. Causal closure between the extended and the unextended). Other non-dualistic ways of cutting this knot are dismissed. In a typical footnote:

“I would also classify panpsychism as a constructive solution, since it attempts to explain consciousness in terms of properties of the brain that are as natural as consciousness itself. Attributing specks of proto-consciousness to the constituents of matter is not supernatural in the way postulating immaterial substances or divine interventions is; it is merely extravagant. I shall here be assuming that panpsychism, like all other extant constructive solutions, is inadequate as an answer to the mind-body problem-as (of course) are the supernatural 'solutions'. “

The mystery slays all solutions. Yes fine but there are data points from which to throw out the putlocks to support a transcendental hypothesis. First: we all come from rocks and gas. Second: increase is complexity and diverse capacity of the brain is linked to the evolution of the human mind. Let me just state my point in a nutshell: The human being can talk into his own ear. That is what allows one to raise the problem of the self, the mind and the body. The advaitins cut through what they call the chit jada granthi or the knot between the conscious and the inert by suggesting that the mind is itself inert and that instead of a yoked mind and body we have a bodymind that is pervaded by consciousness. The effect of this pervasion is to give us awareness that is reflective of the level of complexity of the bodymind. The interaction conundrum is obviated and awareness is somatically distributed. Vestigial centres of awareness are the relics of evolutionary development. We are aware in our guts etc because in our passage to our present refined state it was the chief organ connecting us to the world. Find this classic paper here

mystery

Note on A.N. Whitehead's 'Science and the Modern World'.

When you are on a topic everything seems to feed into it. A journalist that reports on the government’s ‘most substantive meeting’ gets you pondering whether there can be a superlative of ‘substantive’. A substance is a free standing thing of which things are said. The expression noun substantive preserves this meaning but I will not bore you with a discussion of the Aristotelian implications of what H.W. Fowler calls a genteelism:

By genteelism is here to be understood the rejecting of the ordinary natural word that first suggests itself to the mind, and the substitution of a synonym that is thought to be less soiled by the lips of the common herd, less familiar, less plebeian, less vulgar, less improper, less apt to come unhandsomely betwixt the wind and our nobility. (Modern English Usage - 1966 ed.)

A. N. Whitehead avoided words that were polluted by a history of discussion that tended to draw the mind down dead ends:

“These transcendent entities have been termed ‘universals.' I prefer to use the term ‘eternal objects’ in order to disengage myself from presuppositions which cling to the former term owing to a prolonged philosophical history. Eternal objects are thus, in their nature, abstract.”

What Whitehead is at here is moving away from that solid thing substance to the realm of the possible which may or may not issue as an entity that is manifest. When they do the eternal objects are evident as ‘actual occasions’. His emphasis is on the nature of the universe as a monistic holistic pattern of interactions which can themselves be ‘eternal objects’. His breaks down mind/body dualism into a dyad of dual aspect:

“Thus the mental cognition is seen as the reflective experience of a totality, reporting for itself what it is in itself as one unit occurrence. This unit is the integration of the sum of its partial happenings, but it is not their numerical aggregate. It has its own unity as an event. This total unity, considered as an entity for its own sake, is the prehension into unity of the patterned aspects of the universe of events.” (from Science and the Modern World)

It is as though we then graft on to that totalising moving through events an ontology of subject and objects.

“The private psychological field is merely the event considered from its own standpoint. The unity of this field is the unity of the event. But it is the event as one entity, and not the event as a sum of parts. The relations of the parts, to each other and to the whole, are their aspects, each in the other.”

How this relates to my understanding of the theory of superimposition in Advaitic Vedanta is a topic for another occasion. �