After the flood

 

The same. The same. then once, in a flash, fresh ground,... black, grey, green, and blue water, stone, grass and sky and each unique set stone! --R.Lowell Not things but a web of connections, "indirect words, which constantly efface themselves in a complementary silence" (on Monet).

~~~

On how silence works:

"I find the here-and-now of vital [but not ultimate] importance. It’s important because it is ephemeral; this moment is here and gone. How I respond to it is the vital question. Do I respond to it from my deepest values? That’s the reality of my faith."

~

On consolation:

Consolation without faith, salvation, grace? İf this is part two of The Needs of Strangers then I'm looking forward to it! Can it, must it, now only come through art, music and texts? Not touching but to be touched. Can there ever be a complete acceptance of pure randomness if we are, in reality, sense-making creatures always searching for meaning?

Perhaps we humans have wanted God most as witness to acts of choice made in solitude. Acts of memory,of sacrifice. --Denise Levertov

Are secular forms of redemption/hope destined to fail- or worse, turn into nightmares? Capitalist modernity's freedom from nature brings forth and perhaps always contained the seeds of climate catastrophe; Marxist utopia results in hopeless architectural brutalism and hell on earth. The structure of redemption narratives (just barely) remains but the substance seems hollowed out.

Realism

   Capitalist realism:
Emptiness filled with delusions (Empire, purity, abundance).The endless desire for more, bloated self-importance. Mechanical thinking. The only realities left: bodily and virtual ones.

Soviet realism:

“..the spirit of a people released; of a people free, at length, to warm itself at the hearth of human peace and comradeship and simple, spontaneous happiness.”

Realism: “Tranquility is a principle of inner order. Piero understood that excess movement and expression both destroy the visual painted space and compress the painting’s time to a momentary scene, a flash of existence. His stoic heroes are constrained and impassive. The stilled leaves, the hue of the first earthly dawn, the unstruck hour, give the things Piero created an ontological indestructibility."

—Z. Herbert.

A Time to Keep Silence?

A glorious early morning. No-one is around and the light is frail, perfect, the sun and earth having found an equilibrium. You sit outside on a bench like an old man, a young man, and read whatever takes your fancy. What utter freedom: warmth of old sun on your hands, old words from fingertip to eye.

Tea. Custard cream biscuits. Harry Frankfurt's Reasons of Love- which I'm unsure of right now. Love is a mode of care. What do we care about? For Frankfurt the fact that we care at all seems more important than what we care about. Can we, then, ask: what ought I to care about?  

Care is like a second-order desire/preference, a way of evaluating our primary wants/desires according to whether we identify with them or not. But-and this is where I start to become unsure- we love what we love. Love itself gives us the reason to do something (love/care is something that moves us and is essentially volitional, not cognitive or affective). I do not, for example, love someone or something because I know it/her is of value. I'm simply drawn to the beloved because that's the type of creatures we are. Is that biological argument? 

There is no independent reason here that allows me to evaluate the thing or person prior to me loving it/her. Love creates its own reasons.

All of this is, of course, deeply appealing. I do not love my children because they have specific characteristics which I think makes them worthy of my love. Is one ever worthy of love, of being loved?

On the other hand, if love has nothing to do with the characteristics of the beloved or the particular objects - and they are always particular, not derivative of some universal 'value'- then might I not care for anything? I care for this old handkerchief. It means a great deal to me because I love it. What, ultimately, is the difference from such an attitude and the economist's 'taste model' which maintains that because something is desirable it is good. Perhaps we have moved beyond even that: the desire, the freedom to desire, is the real thing of importance (not the object of one's desire).

So, it would seem, we are not drawn to the beautiful or the good (or specific instances of them), as if to say that those things were, by their very nature desirable. Does everything start in the subject, then? Hmm.

More lemon custard biscuits. Close the book. Two chapatis and bitter gourd. Sleep like a log for one hour under the fan. Drift, drift...The desire for sleep, said Knulp, overcomes all other desires. 

~~~

Rowan Williams's Augustine -only just started-is a profound book.

R.W. on Merton: the desire to be unknown, to be transparent to God. When we are silent then God 'reads' us. One of my favourite books in recent years-recommended by the remarkable anton- was Paradiso. Aware of things beyond your understanding. The best books read you.         

.

The other Foot

"Human nature is a complex thing, and understanding it will take all the resources of the sciences – natural and social – as well as history. But the significance of those enquiries will lie ultimately in what they can say about the kinds of lives that might be good for us. And to know that, we must ask: who are we? What do we need – for ourselves, and from each other? And what must we be like to get it?"

From a lovely short piece on Philippa Foot (aeon).

This was from an excerpt from Mary Midgley's memoir:

Rings and Books’ focuses on bachelorhood and the concept of adolescence, but her real concern is with the kind of isolation from close community with others that has been a feature of many philosophers’ lives. Such isolation, she suggests, generates philosophy which is egoistic, fantastic and solipsistic – ‘flight from the world’ is typical of adolescence but usually people are forced to, or choose to, return to the world through the close relationships, friendships and community they form with others. In such a context, she suggests, the unreality of adolescent thought might give way to a more practical, imaginative and realistic way of thinking.

Now, there's something I'd really like to think about here: women writers/thinkers...

From a Guardian article, 2005, she writes,

"I am not saying that the PhD training isn't useful. It provides the indispensable skills of the lawyer. It shows you how to deal with difficult arguments, which is necessary in dealing with hard subjects. But that close work doesn't help you to grasp the big questions that provide its context - the background issues out of which the small problems arose. I think there ought to be a corrective course after the PhD - a course in bypassing details to look at the whole landscape. It's hard to do this on your own. Today's academic system, which forces people to write articles without having time to think properly about them, makes this harder."

Against dryness

Annette Baier, wise as ever: 

The villain "is the rationalist, law-fixated tradition in moral philosophy, which, given freedom from its religious base breeds multiple and in the end frivolous systems.."

The great danger of the theorizing impulse is that when it alights on the wrong 'object' it ends up tarnishing both it and the human gaze. Theoria, as contemplation of a higher order, took its model from religion. But you doubt if it ever meant that contemplation was possible without understanding, without certain virtues (as if to say that thinking, 'right thinking,' was a mere mechanism of the mind or a movement of disembodied consciousness).

Economics, which pretends to be a science, posits an "ideal world" of perfect competition that is not falsifiable since it is based on certain axioms. It does not claim that this is what the real world is actually like, nor does it say anything about the degree to which the real world approximates the ideal; all it claims is that the construct represents the best of all possible worlds. Of course,that's not the end of it because it also has a strong normative basis to it: this is what the world should be like. Policies and institutions are centred around the notion that people behave in a narrowly predictable way within this model of reality. As a result we grow into the picture we form of ourselves. Which is another way of saying that structuring axioms can have real-world effects. 

The word "best" already hints at that normative pull. For example, to say that economic agents act in a rational way is it once a description of action and at the same time a normative claim: people ought to act in this way. Of course, there can be no further questioning here since there is a circularity to reason: why should we act according to (this particular understanding of) reason? Are there limits to language (and thought)?

The perfectly self-enclosed world of economic theory, then, has had pernicious real-world effects ("he who would play the angel ends up playing the beast"). In a similar vein, utilitarianism, as a theory, has favoured a level of abstraction that many people find unreasonable (if followed to its logical conclusion). It fails to take into account the level of concern we have and it misunderstands the relation we have to the welfare or well-being of other people (this is to put to one side the question of whether utility is the right "evaluative space" in the first place, the right way of thinking about goodness). The distinctness of persons is glossed over, as are specific moral obligations and duties. 

It is not surprising, therefore, that the horrors of communism and state planning can be thought of as modern forms of utilitarianism. (For a view opposed to state planning, thinking like a state, see Jame C. Scott on anarchism and, of course, the indispensable Ivan Illich).

I've said it before, but haven't really given sufficient thought to it: what is it about women thinkers/philosophers that so appeals to you? Is it, actually, something specifically to do with gender and its influence on a style of thinking? Does it have something to do with 'relationality', conversation? The ideal thinker in the western tradition is a man who has isolated himself-from the world, other people, and thinks alone. (A. Baier again: commons of the mind) 

Iris M:

"We no longer see man against a background of values, realities, which transcend him. We picture man as a brave naked will.."

We have never had a "Liberal theory of personality, a theory of man as free and separate and related to a rich and complicated world from which, as a moral being, he has much to learn".

A brave naked will. It is hard not to read into that a kind of masculine invulnerability, a lack of any sense of 'connectedness' to the world and other people ("Hell is other people"). The romantic, existentialist hero. Me against the world, my mother, my father, time itself..anything and everything. The world as something that must ultimately be dominated, brought under control, is a stance that relies on and justifies an excessive rationalization, quantification and mathematization. 

And this line, for its startling juxtaposition:

"..a picture of the individual as stripped and solitary: a conception which since Hitler.

~

Roxana drew me to a nice article by Monk...

Is there any other form of understanding apart from the scientific? What type of questions-and what type of answers-do music, friendship, love and art propose?

You suspect a kind of Gnosticism in all this: an impenetrable and isolated self, a brief spark of light in the dark universe of matter. Everything else is 'dead' and follows deterministic laws whilst the ego is a pinpoint of freedom. But even that is rapidly vanishing, now thought to be a mere dream, an illusion, devoid of any real stability, an epiphenomenon of the movement of matter.  

'A soul rich with intuition'

It sometimes surprises you that people set such great store in the powers of human reason. There is a kind of latent (or explicit) fanaticism, a dryness of soul, when reason is held to be the all in all...one of Pascal's two "extravagances". If there are 'good reasons' to do something then are there bad ones as well? The old problem stems, perhaps, from an overblown conception of the capacity of human beings to make sense of it all, believing we could somehow see-through magical thinking-everything sub specie aetrerni. Is there some deep theoretical/aesthetic/religious impulse that wants to arrest time, to "spatialize" it? (Is this not just a version of the old 'tree of life, tree of knowledge'?).

From where does this fanaticism of rationality come? Is it that when we lose the sense of first principles, final ends, what remains is a shadow of authentic reason, a purely mechanical and abstract version of thinking? I'm sure the firebombing of Tokyo or Hiroshima were both, in some sense, rationally planned. And it shudders to make one think-and this is Bettelheim's point-that the deployment of reason in the Camps was far from being a throwback to 'medieval irrationality' but, instead, a modern version of bureaucratic rationality taken to the extreme. 

At a more mundane level, the reason one sees in the academy is more often than not awfully one-sided and shallow. And it is accompanied by the most insufferable pettiness and arrogance. Theoria, Jonas informs us, used to be thought in relation to "higher things"; now, just about anything can be brought within the circumference of the theoretical cast of mind. You have to ask yourself again: if this counts as intelligence then what of ignorance!
Can one really know something without loving it (Wendell Berry's acute question)?

If rationality becomes reduced to mere 'requirements'-such as logical consistency-then not only is it a very poor cousin of Reason; more: it is a dangerous, unmoored 'tool' in the hands of political demagogues. Goya: "The sleep of reason..." which can, undoubtedly, be read in two ways. One way lie the Gulags, the Camps, the great clearings of human settlements. 

This is something of a caricature but to the extent that it is true there is much merit to it: The French follow Reason; the British follow, tentatively, the path of reasonableness. 

There is a particular religious approach that dovetails with this set of attitudes, even thought it comes to it from a vastly different perspective. That approach, somewhat sceptical, mindful of our partial sight and limited capacities, must also embody humility: I do not know, I cannot know everything-and knowing isn't everything! In Muslim circles this is  recognized by the well know refrain: "But God knows best". 

Bellow has a nice line, too: Not the search for perfection (which is to follow Descartes); but an acceptance of an imperfect understanding, which is Jewish. I love that line. It reminds you immediately of his wonderful story, A Silver Dish...  

'And it is in abstraction that Goethe saw the fatal loophole through which reason could escape into an illusory freedom from its commitments to what is of the senses, of feeling, of the will.'

This emancipation of reason from the totality of the human person. 

What is our relation to the world, to nature, to other beings when reason becomes excessive, a "plaything for mathematics"? Does it dim our ability to attend with "spontaneous care to the duty of the day"?

"The living revelation of the unfathomable in the particular."

{Quotes from Heller's Disinherited Mind}  

Mirror, mirror

'There is no royal road from anatta to agape.'

---S. Blackburn.

Then what kind of road is there?

'We find ourselves in our world.'

To find yourself, be found, in the time and space in which you exist. There is no 'I' without the other..the 'I' itself is a mirror...There is no 'I' in itself (except a small one). The small 'i' of islam is a way, shared by others. The large 'I' is crystallization, an oasis, a place of determination and settled natures. The small way carries with it the sense of loss, of being lost, signals second chances. The rose is a brief flame and would not be a rose otherwise. What you hold on to is the memory of red, and he pointed to her. "And you, black crow?" And she pointed to him.

One does not talk of roads in the desert...

Clarification is not negation. Distillation is not "purity".

|||

'Man has a responsibility to find himself where he is, in his own proper time and place, in the history to which he belongs.' 

---Thomas Merton.

||

“A leftwing vision of the world requires you to imagine a future utopia, but one doesn’t have the right to forget that the most important thing for every human being is the life they lead now,”

“All we are doing is recognising something as old as humanity,” Mujica said. “The best thing is that people can live as they want to live.”

“I don’t think it inevitable that the world should live in capitalism. That is the same as not believing in man, and man is an animal with many defects but also with startling capabilities.”

|

The small world you inhabit is not really a world to most people (the world of big money, politics, false mirrors, staged (guest) appearances..) but it is the world to me. We find ourselves in our world. Of course, the kind of continuity now available is likely to be supplied by memory and a few dearly cherished individuals rather than anything material. Work , for example, is you imagine very rarely anything like Wendell Berry's description here

Recognition (or the clearing of the clearing)

“There are the things that are out in the open and then there are the things that are hidden, and life has more to do, the real world has more to do with what is hidden, maybe."
---Saul Leiter.

Return to your pure white room, board it up, darken the windows, block out all sound, discard any memories,...and think!

What would it mean to think of other people, or think for them (as in: look out for them)?; think with other people in real time, not in an abstract way?

Everything must be doubted, the real world around you, for instance. Red is only secondary, the mind and the eye are only passive receivers of "information". Clear the ground, drum roll if you please..make way, make way for the arrival of the spectacular 'I'.

Once you start down that road then does it necessary follow that it's 'I' against the world, me against you? The beginning of the modern west, M. Sahlins says, holds this notion of conflict to be central, fundamental. 

Right from the very start there is war, us against them, a life that is nasty, brutish and short. Under such circumstances the social-which is artificial, not being part of our "nature",-is the only way to reign us in. The social, the state or the moral are all on the side of civilization against our instincts, our true despicable selves and they can only function by repressing the individual. Against this is the economics hypothesis: the pursuit of self-interest actually leads to everyone being better off and produces a kind of order or equilibrium. But both, you note, start off with the simple idea that the individual is the locus of all truth and that "the common good" is really only the convergence of private goods or interests.

Clear the ground. There are no "Palestinians" here, or if they are here then they're not really a people. There is only a wilderness here, full of savages (like the Red Man). Hell is other people. It is only our weakness that requires us to interact with others, to even think about them in our schemes. Strategic thinking requires little else than thinking of everyone else as a means to your ends.

Another person must be submit or be defeated or collaborate. 

"He talked about everything. One night we had a long conversation about anal sex. He said unless you’ve had anal sex with a girl she hasn’t really submitted to you."

de Sade. Master/Slave.

Sen and the Prisoners' Dilemma (to continue the Nash theme)...what get's us into this mess is, one might argue, the narrow definition of identity that us built into the game. If I'm always looking to be sharp, and you are too, then we can both end up in a worse situation. What is required here is something like commitment or thinking that runs along the lines: "what is good for us?".  Note: no retreat into a clearing but a recognition, an acknowledgment of the other person's goals and objectives.  The highest wisdom remains:

Amo: volo ut sis

This line from Todorov blew me away because it gets, maybe, to the heart of it:

"If the account of the origin of the species has been systematically preferred over that of the origin of the individual ..., it is without doubt in part due to to the fact that the authors of these accounts are men, not women..."

So, to take up a line of thought from Macintyre: what would mean to think of ourselves as dependent animals? Is it not possible to think of the parent/child or the mother/child relation as a loving, caring one, not tainted by "interests" or hatreds or rivalries (if that's what the view of human beings is, post-Freud, then it's a pretty crap one). In this sense 'the east' remains largely naive and, therefore, blissfully immune from such corrupting tosh (which is not the same thing as saying misogyny and abuse do not exist but only to say that self-conceptions are less mean-spirited).

~~~

But in this clearing process the 'I', too, must disappear-for what is an individual without God or other people or the world? It is not "I think, therefore..." but "it thinks,.." or "there is thinking, therefore..."

And if the slave is truly a slave then what power does the Master have? Power only resides in making someone a slave, surely?

The strange disappearance of the individual. If there is only flux, sovereign becoming, an instinctive life, or the world of facts, then what of the 'I'? This 'I' which was so dependent on the outer world, resembling only a shadow of it, was understood only vaguely, outwardly, or publicly in its behaviour and patterns.  But if that solid world has vanished in a puff of smoke and if reason, society and history are merely fictions, then is the individual only a shimmering reality as well?

Denise: we seek a witness...

There is no clear space, as if the 'I' could exist before the world, which in its turn is then supposedly constituted. Each of us is already born into a world and learns to be human. Is that really possible without other people? 

The Wonder Years

My education is a kind of uprooting, a turning away from the lives I could have led, the loss of a sense of home (but not homecoming). The year ends, there is more bewilderment and strangeness  It is not too unlike previous years. 

Your life, the working out of a philosophical problem, carries on largely unnoticed. Faith in the public square is replaced by faith in the squares of the mind. A tendency to be drawn to writings of low-key humanity, words in lower case, with some things forgotten, many more remembered.

What is the use of thoughts and ideas if one feels, as I do, that one doesn't know what to do with them?

---Walser.

If one can have sound reasoning or faulty reasoning then who is this person that takes a step back, so to speak, so to speak? More: what is this process by which we can disentangle ourselves so, what name do we give to the ability to observe and judge our thoughts? Does this set up an infinite regress or does faith leap in to overcome doubt? Is there a final address, a "home" from which all further thoughts proceed or is the shadow of home always with us, so that what we see is already tinged with memories?

G. Ryle's Aristotelian address...

Faith in the squares of the mind is replaced by faith in the public square. No, not quite. That's not it. It is replaced by a nameless and small faith. Crumbs! Man shall not live (by bread) alone.

Get a call from ambs at 12. Could I introudce tim Williamson and organize the discussion with the students over Skype.

Yes, sure. When is it?

Three hours.

Bugger!
~~~

Williamson has written six books, 180 articles, taught at Oxfrord since 2000 and is a visiting Professor at MIT, Michigan, ...

First impressions: something of a boffin, one of those intensely private people, the sort of academic's academic.

The philosophy of philosophy.

Given science is the dominant paradigm how can philosophy justify it's own approach, and what is distinct about the philosophy of philosophy? Why not rely on the sciences (pure or linguisitcs or sociology) to understand life, the world?

Why should philosophers be content with sitting in their armchairs, thinking they can grasp some truth without engaging with the world, without subjecting their theories to the possibility of refutation? One response to that is to say that they do require 'verification' from other people in the world. The meaning of the words they employ, for example, only make sense in relation to their association with public rules, public understanding of the concepts. There are no private definitions. But if that's true, then why not just stick with linguistics? What is distinct about philosophy?

Thought experiments. Through a simple (not necessarily extreme) case or situation, one can derive quite a lot, get quite far in our understanding of the internal relations between concepts.

For example, a simple definition of a man: a non-feathered bi-ped. But one could, presumably, pluck the feathers of a chicken and yet that would not be Man (and why bother with the act..one could imagine doing so and conclude: this is not Man). So, logic and consistency can get us some way, remove illusions, help us see more clearly. Isn't that what philosophy is about?

Williamson's other example: in a society of masochists a great amount of pleasure might come about by seeing a man tortured on television-more overall pleasure, that is, than the tortured person's displeasure. And, again, through this thought experiment we might plainly see that Utilitarianism is problematic.

Intution and reason:
...


~~~

Don't think T.W. really gave a good answer to my question. Whilst logic or reason might give us some sort of rough defintion of a human being (by ruling out certain features) it doesn't help very much if we want a positive or drawn out picture of what she is, what we are. For example, to get any idea of what a human response to the torture example might be, we surely need a deeper understanding of humanity than that which is provided by science?

Can one really see clearly by just examining the facts, as it were, and then making a decision, or do values come in much earlier: in the way we pay attention to certain features of a situation in the first place, or how our sense of 'higher' and 'lower' structures our ongoing reflections?

~~~

The temptation to withdraw from the human world has always been a part, paradoxically, of the human world itself. The means may change over the years but the impulse remains the same. Academics-the one's who haven't been enamoured with notions of 'success'-are really just modern gnostics or monks/nuns.

Boredom: could our parents' generation even contemplate such a thing? I somehow doubt it. And yet there was so little to 'do' in those days!

There is time when one wants to be alone with one's thoughts; but there is also a time when one wants to be alone, away from one's thoughts. There is a negative way of reaching that emptiness: through hate, drugs... 

A Common Mind

The water is wide, I cannot get o'er
and neither do I have wings to fly
Give me a boat that can carry two
And both will row, my love and I.
---Elizabethan song.

The Dougal finally found my copy of 'Commons'. But first, perhaps, I should go back to Annette's lovely, lovely Tanner lectures on Trust.

Trust, an acceptance of our vulnerability, our dependency on others.

Rest in peace.  

~~~

tea for two and me for you...

I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea.

---D.

I asked four people Scheffler's question; three were economists and all are my good friends so I was a bit surprised that their answers seemed to give greater weight to the former fact than the latter (or at least that's what I'd somehow tricked myself into believing...that friends somehow reflect and enliven our own deepest understanding of life). The fourth friend, a philosopher, didn't see how this dented consequentalism. I guess one should be thankful for such a response, but a part of me couldn't but help want a human response, one not so abstract.

I don't really believe-as some have suggested-that a training in economics makes one more prone to believe that "self-interest is the first principle" (Edgeworth).

Scheffler's question raises the question of how or why we value something. Firstly, it is unlikely that someone is going to be indifferent to the question; secondly, they are unlikely to think on the lines of an elaborate cost-benefit analysis, carefully weighing up all the bad and good consequences (no more suffering in the world, no more people able to listen to Bach, discover and create new and beautiful music, art, friendships). What is more likely is a sense of sorrow or even dismay. These feelings may be overwhelming when one thinks that loved ones will not get the chance to live wonderful lives (we commonly refer to the "premature" death of someone and are quite comfortable with commenting on how tragic that is). So, it makes sense to believe that we could think the end of a way of life, and of particular individual lives, will distress us.

This points us to the idea that we can value things without experiencing them and that consequentalism (and therefore utilitarianism) has its flaws. If it is argued that we do experience fear, sorrow, etc. that misses the point: that feeling is only derivative of an event in the future that we care about, that is important to us. Also, that we may not take into account all the consequences, may not view life from the viewpoint of the universe, suggests that a different type of thinking is going on here, one that is inextricably linked to our relationships. Value, or valuing something, then, can be for a different type of reason (if one wants to use that word). 'Valuing' is the meeting of subjective desire with "things"with objective qualities.

I desire tea. I desire tea not just for the taste of it but for, at least in part, the social dimension it has; I desire tea for two; I desire that you drink tea and desire it too and, even more, that maybe you do not like it but drink with me (not necessarily for me)... volo ut sis...or is it, perhaps, my desire for tea is really a reflection of a higher-order desire. I do not even like tea: I desire you. A new cogito: I think of tea, and I am. I sip tea with her, and am not.

What would it mean to lose the sense of continuity, of things carrying on? Radical Hope, as Plenty Coups might say. What if there is no north, north of the future? Not in the overtly religious sense but more in terms of an afterlife..a life after ours?

Scheffler's question is, for me, a question of what it means to be an individual, a question of our relation to time, of our appreciation of the fact that we find ourselves in a web of relations and dependencies and obligations that cannot be reduced to calculation or rationality. A love of place, of people, of life itself...perhaps our sense of the prospect of it perishing would enhance, in a not ambivalent way, the things we have come to love?

~~~

snakes lane east

Once, just past Saint Barnabas's Church, on a bright day, an old man walking in front of me stopped in his tracks as a hearse passed us by on Snakes Lane East. I still remember his gesture to this day: a simple and elegant doffing of his hat (or was it a cap?). But the essential gesture...

Now, what motivated this person to do such a thing? This already sounds like an odd way to put it and smacks of bad faith or as if one was trying to explain something to someone who was from a  foreign land and who didn't understand the norms of the society he or she was in.. What reason did this person have to act in that way, in what we all recognize as a moral way? You're inclined to say out of some sense of duty but then you might think that such considerations appear to be 'mechanical', as if imposed from the outside, as it were (aside: criticisms of Judaism or Islam as being too ritualistic, too bound by the law, also seem to stem from the view that there's a radical disjunction between the "inner" self and the body, the act, the world).

If not that, then might we temper our view a bit and say: as a mark of respect? But how, it might be asked, can there be respect for someone who isn't really a 'person' any more and not someone you may even know? An impartial notion of respect does sound a bit weak.

We can dismiss at once the notion that he did this because it made him feel better or happier. Can pleasure ever be a reason? Yes, of course! But it seems mighty odd to conclude from that that it is always the only reason or that it always trumps other reasons? In fact, pursuing this line of thought, there's something not quite right about thinking that the reason the old man doffed his cap outweighed other considerations, other reasons to act (for example, he may have been in a hurry to buy some food for his granddaughter). Doesn't the reason we're after rule out the possibility of weighing up reasons? Is it not the case that that the man did not even think that the other things were reasons at all! Which is not to say that he was just forgetful or thoughtless, or lazy in his reasoning. But by excluding other reasons to act from consideration, things that wouldn't even have crossed his mind, was he merely acting out of instinct? Are we wrong to attribute reason to his actions in the first place or is that being unreasonable?

Was the old man really just repeating an action he'd seen his father, grandfather doing, all those years ago, when it was more likely that the dead body would be pulled by a horse rather than a car? How important is memory here? To learn something off by heart. Was he, by doing this act, placing himself in the web of connections that have defined him, his community, his traditions? Why should we think of this as an individual act independent of the world he lives in, distinct from the relations to other people, dead, alive and unborn? What, after all, is the normative force to his action? Why do we approve of his action if we're not at the same time convinced that this is how he (and we) ought to act? What is the pull of morality and why does it come across as a requirement, a demand, as a lack of choice?

what is a liberal?

'Man has a responsibility to find himself where he is, in his own proper time and place, in the history to which he belongs.' 
---Thomas Merton.

I think this is true. But isn't there a concomitant responsibility to find oneself standing against the times one lives in, to not belong? Doesn't one need time, 'place', history for something that is not of time to emerge? This double image seems to be the root of it: to be named and not to be named; the wild man of the forests, the city-dweller; the northern light that isolates, the southern that enfolds, brings within its own circle of understanding. Protestantism & Catholicism, desert and city, order & chaos, the tree of knowledge..


One finds oneself in the world; one finds oneself lost in the world. 


~~~


Atomism vs holism. Really must get down to reading Gellner. Who am I? What am I? Only God can answer that. (Hannah).


Would you not that things had been different, that you had not been allotted this particular arc of history-or at least not gone along with it all the along (Remains of the Day), instead of side-stepping out of the way, veering off to God knows where? That other song, that hums in you, whose tune you know, but whose words you've forgotten, that image that you who hold within you like a relic, worn down by the hand's devotions?

Summertime approaches, the lost hours of summer widening into stillness, the earth steaming, windows open in the evening, sucking in cool air. Even the black sun's heart grows light, losing its former radiance. 


Appiah: brilliant stylist. 
...What is a liberal?
Answer: a kaffirOnly joking.

Perhaps a question that is not wholly without use or importance given that it offers an opportunity to set out a sort of list of desirable attributes that you aspire to.

Firstly, a liberal is someone who doesn't think too much about what is useful or useless. Uselessness is useful for denting the shallow instrumentality, productivity, and functionality that casts its web over our lives. Russell's 'useless knowledge', for example. But that doesn't mean that she has wanton preferences either. There is a balance between the reasons to value something and the freedom to value it. The old question: does desire come before the good?

Secondly, the liberal doesn't care too much about first or second. Everything can trump something else. Sometimes happiness, sometimes darkness; sometimes utility, sometimes rights. Life is not a system, and we are not just calculating machines. Sen, again: evaluation is not calculation. Doesn't care too much, doesn't think too much. That is not the same as 'doesn't think', but nor is it the same as 'only thinks'.

Nabs, that great follower of Russell, or the follower of the great Russell-which means that he doesn't need to be a follower any more, points me to:

Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion

The liberal, is only semi-aware that she is a liberal and doesn't set too much store by such categories. Doesn't rule out conservatism or a whole hotch-potch of ideas. Taste, and see.

A liberal does not simply have liberal ideas but actually attempts to live by them. Can let things go, knows when to bite his tongue, even though it hurts!

always returning, always going

hold. the bright pieces in your hand. bright and clear, the last light of the sun still on them. a rabbi had once said, 'no heart is as whole as a broken heart'. who will think of you on empty pages. at the given hour, which way will you look? oh, how we come and go...

metaphor comes under suspicion at the hour of death.

we have our suspicions. that autumn was not a season, that fish lives on without the Tigris, that your silence was a kind of last word. to be religious is to think in images. your picture fades, the colours drained of strength by the hour, becoming softer, greyer, yellowing and curling at the edges like dying leaves.

'light is supposed to be fast

but it doesn't reach me'

the light within falters, fails. the eye forgetting its time-honoured role. so you take a step towards. what? in some direction. does it matter when in the mirror your face darkens, finds its final form, when your late-summer soul flourishes, ripens into a likeness unbeknown, when hands that would know your face fall...

'seeing in that mirror

a water without the life of water,

a face aging

to less generosity than it had'

today. no verb for tomorrow. rooted, for a while, that's true. but as nomadic as yesterday's vanishing snow. what sad clowns we are. and, after all, why should a jester mimic weakness, frailty, unreliable memory?

'we are things thrown in the air

alive in flight...

our rust the colour of the chameleon'

it wasn't always this way. do you remember when we were like children, when

'we could see clearly

before the glass hurt'?

(from Robert Lowell)

~~~

Why ought I to be moral? Does anyone really ask that question? We might want to know what could constitute an answer to such a question. But we might simply avoid the question altogether.

1. To think that one must first have reasons for acting morally strikes us as slightly odd. What purpose do reasons or theory serve here? To bind us, oblige us, to act morally, I guess. Otherwise, is the right act contingent on all sorts of details: the degree of sympathy one feels with the other person, the intensity of our identification with his or her plight, the conflicts with our own interests ...The vagaries of the emotions, the lack of imagination, all that means we far too often close our hands to our brother.

2. What guarantees can there be? Religion, reason? The 'face' of the other may not elicit a response if we're not attentive.

3. Is it a 'moral act' or moral character we're talking about? The need to move away from the notion of choice and the isolated acts of the will. What is the background fabric, so to speak, which allows us and encourages us to act morally, to refine our intentions through self-understanding during our lives?

4. Do we really seek the 'grounds' of morality or the specific content of it: how should one act, not why?

5. A life without rituals, sustained practices, the time and space for self-reflection leaves us with what? Abstract principles, rules, do not engage us unless they're already intuitively grasped-and how can they be unless they're-at least at some level-already lived. In any case, their appeal sounds too distant and too dry to our modern ears. We want to work things out for ourselves.

6. So, here we are, without any coherent picture of ourselves, or any central notion of human nature or our place in the universe. We stumble along.

This is fine. Only this groping for certainty is to be avoided...and can only be avoided if one is already in good health.

The remarkable thing. We do get on by. Each child that is born is another opening up of hope, a new, bright, fresh angle onto the world. A child extends her hand, and it is taken up. In some sense that is all that matters. We, the wise children, understand all that follows and precedes such 'acts'. The act is not mere outward behaviour, an empty gesture, but nor is it an "expression" of thought or one's intentions. It is an inscrutable bundle of all three, something that one learns and understands over time.

Finally, the eye sees what the hand did, and the human heart follows its trackless way...

without title

acquiescentia in se ipso.
---Spinoza.

Being the person one just wants to be. Not wanting, being. Not the pleasure one derives from that harmony,or not just the pleasure, but the life itself (of which pleasure is a part). In silence. But not a resignation to the satisfaction of desires, motivations, goals we just happen to have. One notion of freedom lies that way, no doubt, and the alternative view of freedom, 'objective' or impersonal, can also be paternalistic: freedom structured or ordered by reason.

But no, being the person one wants to be.

A freedom from titles, names; to find a good that is not so tightly linked to them. On the other hand, a good that is expressed in the things you do in your life. 'The quality of our attachments is the quality of our understanding.'The loved one has many names, is nameless.

'too much, not enough'

Since the receipt of the missive in the morning, B__ had felt the symmetry of his existence to be slowly getting distorted in the direction of an ideal passion. The disturbance was as the first floating weed to Columbus — the contemptibly little suggesting possibilities of the infinitely great...Her mouth — were the lips red or pale, plump or creased? — had curved itself to a certain expression...

B___, of course, did not know. And such an explanation did not strike him as a possibility even. It is foreign to a mystified condition of mind to realize of the mystifier that the processes of approving a course suggested by circumstance, and of striking out a course from inner impulse, would look the same in the result. The vast difference between starting a train of events, and directing into a particular groove a series already started, is rarely apparent to the person confounded by the issue.

----fftmc.

~~~

Strings:

Talking to A.I., a string theorist. It seems the latest thing is that the world (universe) is the way it is because that's the way it is. Perfect symmetry already contains chaos. It doesn't matter which way you put it. And there's no real explanation (don't ask for one!). It had to be. Or else there wouldn't be individuals like us, right now, at this very moment, asking: why does it have to be?

What little I understand:

If the sun were a degree closer we'd be consumed by its fire, light...disappear in her flames; if it was a centimeter further away we'd be frozen, our souls hardening, forgetting, our thick fingers fumbling in deep pockets, a quick death due to the lack of heat, light. A word, an image; part of you becomes hard, another softens, melts. There are no more questions.

On earth there are always reminders of this precarious balance: too much, not enough. Some things are infinitely far from us, and at the same time infinitely close.

The world is the world. What sense is in this. One might as well say the queen is the queen!

~~~

There's something animal-like in Boldwood's response. That always struck you. The red seal matching the red of his bleary eyes. Red was everywhere. And he's hooked to it. Why this effect on the Puritan soul? His resistance breaking down by the mere mention of a few words, sent only casually. Later, she will wish that the words could be erased, wiped away, but it's too late..they've already lodged deeply in his flesh.

In praise of folly

Whisked from the Bourgeois' pointy head hat flies,
Throughout the heavens, reverberating screams,
Down tumble roofers, shattered 'cross roof
And on the coast - one reads - floodwaters rise

The storm is here, rough seas come merrily skipping
Upon the land, thick dams to rudely crush.
Most people suffer colds, their noses dripping
While railroad trains from bridges headlong rush.
-----Van Hoddis.

Comedy has a built-in factor of disunity, a return to the contingent, an appeal to individual experience and common-sense. In laughing, we turn to our friends.
-----Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals.

There is a curious relationship between the imperial function and the part played by the court jester, and this relationship seems to be associated with the fact that the costume of the jester, as well as that of certain emperors, was adorned with little bells, like the sacred robes of the High Priest. The role of the jester was originally of saying in public what nobody else could himself to say, thus introducing an element of truth into a world constrained by unavoidable conventions....in its own way it shatters "forms" in the name of the spirit that "bloweth where it listeth". Folly alone can allow itself to touch idols, precisely because it stands apart from certain human relationships, and this proves that, in this world of theatrical artificiality which is society, the pure and simple truth is madness.
-----Frithjof Schuon, Light on the Ancient Worlds.

A time that is set aside for the entry of "chaos" into the regular turning, the settled patterns of the world. The world turned upside down, topsy-turvy. Spontaneity and fluidity against the world's stillness and fixations.

Someone else's words, speech, makes it possible to generate our own: ethics, law, depend on quotes, authoritative statements and our response to them: dia-logue. In the beginning was the word, something that is there. But the word also initiates us into beginnings.

Carnival is purposeful heteroglossia and a multiplicity of styles. A new relation between people, and between people and the world; an 'unmasking' of what gives gravitas to all ceremony and rank.

Rashi: to be an errant, in error, on the way, never 'there'...a commitment to transience, to take delight in the most fleeting of things, to see the absurd in solemn pieties.

I've always believed in ambiguity, ambivalence, in-betweenness, imprecision or, to be more definitive, consistent, and /or precise, I should say that I have occasionally felt that way. No, the first formulation was correct, I think and at least better for all (some of ) its contradictoriness. Perhaps.

Even if God reveals His Face I'll still take "perhaps " and "maybe"
-------Allama Iqbal

A Variety Show: never play the same person twice...all personas, all activities are equally valid.

Bakhtin:
The clown in medieval times brings the level of conversation down from its lofty heights, looks askance at language's metaphysical claims and howls with laughter...the clown is an iconoclast of sorts, shattering the certainties of the feudal or the bourgeois world; he brings things back to the earthy, the bodily level and is a corrective to idealistic and spiritual pretense.

To 'degrade' is an act of toppling, a seeing through the flimsiness of hierarchies, of all that appears to be solid but is in reality nothing short of a mirage...the trick of Maya is to convince those in it that it isn't an illusion. If we do not do the toppling then nature will...

A monarch knows; a Socratic monarch does not. The jester's laugh is a form of disrobing of the emperor, an uncrowning; but it is done so that regeneration is possible and an equilibrium is restored...but that balance is an open one, and one that includes the "impure". The jester embodies the 'idea' of a permanent revolution.

Grotesque realism:

metamorphosis and ambivalence..."monstrous": contradictory, incomplete compared to the classical, completed, self-sufficient, 'official' self. To liberate oneself from one-self; from conventions, caricatures and cliches and the usual way of viewing the world: at the extreme: relativity, madness.Is laughter our first or second nature? The whole world a stage, foreplay, change and fluidity.The carnival is a feast (food for thought) that suggests a utopian freedom that looks toward a non-feudal, an unofficial, ephemeral truth.

Herzen: "laughter contains something revolutionary...only equals laugh."Seriousness terrorizes with its single truth, meaning.

Think about those last lines again...from a white male...are they true? Apart from laughing at oneself, is laughter fundamentally about inequality, about laughing at those who cannot answer back or is it about those who laugh at the seriousness of the men in pointed hats? Should we, then, talk about "appropriate" laughter, for surely we all recognize-at least on reflection, if not immediately- that sometimes laughter is in bad taste?

Folly: St. Paul? The world's seriousness...asceticism, like worldliness, is far too serious a matter. Is there, then, a 'proper' love of the world?

What sense is there in a 'sense of humour'?