I just finished listening to Wolf: The Lives of Jack London by James L. Haley on my commute. I had known nothing about London except that he was pretty outdoorsy. Turns out he was an ardent and outspoken socialist, too. He had grown up amidst the unspeakable hardships of the lower class in San Francisco, taking on ever greater risks to eke out a living among sailors and, in Alaska, prospectors. Driven by a sense of justice, he went so far as to live and work for a spell in London’s East End, workhouses and all, in order to get the first person view of the lower classes there. He lived hard and drank hard, declining already in his thirties and ultimately succumbing to a self-administered morphine overdose. The description of working class San Francisco in the 19th century alone would have made the book worthwhile.
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Here's a project I'd like to undertake sometime, given unlimited resources of leisure: go through the New Atheist corpus, organize their arguments taxonomically, and attempt a response to each. (The taxonomic structure, as I envision it, would allow me to deal with multiple "child nodes" by addressing their common parent.) It would be a large task, but one that would force me to better articulate and pronounce on matters theological and metaphysical. Now if Edward Feser's The Last Superstition is any indication, the emphasis would be metaphysical as the primary target of the New Atheists is the religion of voluntarists and fideists.
Many of us who were assigned Foucault somewhere in our college days were taught to dread the Panopticon, Jeremy Bentham's maximally surveillant prison design. In some of us it may evoke the image of the police state and the sound of jackboots in the alley. In others, who perhaps read the text a little more carefully, it stands for more insidious forms of coercion and uniformity that, gulling the population under control, masquerade as higher forms of social progress and even freedom.
Dismal, from dies malus: evil day. I have this from Wheelock’s Latin, which I am laboring through once and for all. It is rainy, and the thermometer has plummeted again.
You know when you’re reading real metaphysics when your pace grinds to three pages an hour and you give up any hopes of finishing the book soon. And when the only chance of getting something out of this laborious effort is to get your pencil out and try to summarize whatever argument you’re in the midst of. This usually opens the door to a world of questions. If only you work up the gumption, and are willing to forgo breezier titles the while. Such is my predicament with Oderberg’s Real Essentialism. Another reason to think on dismal, and another reason to get the cover for that gadget as soon as you buy it: Papa reads late. Papa drifts off. Tablet slips to mattress. Child crawls under covers in the middle of the night. Then another. Both potty trained, but prone to relapse… Dismal again: configuration blues. My application can’t find the very .so file I am looking at with my own eyes. Path variable looks good. Tried rebooting and reinstalling. Several times. Hate to pop the hood on these things. Google gives dies mali as the origin of dismal - evil days - by way of something called Anglo-Norman French. And shows that it has dropped in popularity (i.e. in written texts, extant and determined scanworthy by Google) since 1800. Does this make me a holdout?
I scarcely imagine it possible that 1500 years of readership failed to draw this connection, but here’s what I’ve got:
Athens was the cultural center of the world in Plato’s time; Rome in Augustine’s. The Piraeus is the port town of Athens (9 km, says Google); Ostia of Rome (26 km). In the Piraeus Socrates gives his Allegory of the Cave (Republic, VII) narrating the soul’s metaphysical ascent from appearance to reality; in Ostia Augustine and Monica join in a mystical ascent (Confessions, IX). I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine how conscious Augustine himself might have been of the Piraeus-Ostia connection and whether he then wittingly or unwittingly uses it to compare/contrast pagan and Christian metaphysics. And indeed what many things the compare/contrast yields - as a poetic evocation, I imagine there is no limit. To get things started, I throw in my own observation of what I see as a primary, if not the primary, distinction: For Augustine and Monica the ascent was one of truth and communion, whereas with Plato’s cave (forget for a moment dialogical direction of the Phaedrus and the Seventh Letter), a truth achieved is achieved alone. I mention this by way of introduction Huysman’s En Route, which as a conversion narrative naturally enough invites comparison with Augustine. The overall difference: the one talks with God; the other with himself, and I submit that this has everything to do with why we have a St. Augustine and not a St. Joris-Karl. For the first time since July I have music in my car. For $25 I ordered a car stereo to replace my defunct unit. I spent some time just figuring how to get into the dashboard to remove the old one. Then came hooking up wires to the new unit - there were some 12 in all, each with a different color, and I had to have my 7 year old help me splice as he is color-sighted in ways I am not. And, behold, there were four wires left over with no color match. So I hooked up what I could, turned on the radio, and tapped the loose ends together to see what belonged where. Putting it all back together turned out to be the hard part, but with some judicious omission of screws and some pounding here and there everything went into place, looking and functioning as it ought.
The result is that I my Kindle frenzy is becoming an Audible frenzy, too (I joined). Right now I am listening to William Manchester's The Glory and the Dream, a book that makes me wish my commute were longer.
Shoe factory workers, meat processors… let’s go with coal miners. Say that coal miners, merely by virtue of going down the shaft, that is, of doing precisely that which makes them coal miners, all but inevitably expose themselves to a certain kind of sickness. An incurable one, say, and highly contagious. Now throw in some recurring symptoms: headaches, fever, blisters maybe. Interruption of normal reproductive function. Now say this were to come to light. Again, it could just as easily be tuna canning, I don’t care. But wouldn’t it be reasonable to expect that the public outrage would run down the covers of the Washington Post for weeks? Worker exploitation is indeed a loathsome thing.
But here’s an entire dimension missing in David Foster Wallace’s “Big Red Son”, his journalistic foray into the AVN awards, and the first entry in his Consider the Lobster and Other Essays. I call attention to its absence in order to throw the purview of his writing into high relief, and consider how it is that he summons such force in this piece. For the essay runs precisely on what it omits. Much more so than its high virtuosity and clammy voyeurism, mooks and all, it is the post-moralistic tone that provides the power. Now Wallace actually does mention that the purveyors of these goods have herpes basically without exception. Hence the thought experiment above. And that the industry is twice the size of Hollywood, with a lobby all its own - and this in 1998! But these are brief asides in the narrative flow of near-bionics and awkward fascination. His silence on these matters insists - aggressively - that the post-moral view is the new norm. Once the domain of moral hunchbacks, these human commodities have emerged from the twilight of past taboo, and we behold the spectacle in all its surreality. They take their place, publicly and matter-of-factly, in the artificial light of a major convention center where so many gadgetfests are held. With three clicks, even in those days, we knew them and their deeds. Look beyond the spinning wheel and see the sparks shoot forth! Where did the moral outrage of yesteryear go, the invocations of “filth” and “perversion”? To the grave, with those gone generations? Did we ever have a debate? Was it another case of “they have the guns but we have the numbers”? Wasn’t there a time when feminists, too, decried such objectification? Has moralism been exposed as another face of jingoism? Or is this post-hoc justification for what we naturally slipped into somewhere in youth? Do we fear a charge of hypocrisy more than having our weakness exploited? What of human trafficking and work conditions? Is the body so alienable? And by the way: what exactly does it look like when a member of said lobby approaches the senator of, say, California?
A friend has pointed out that “frenzy” has its roots in the Greek word phren, which can mean all sorts of things related to thought. Ask your local philologist for its many shades of meaning and how they compare to the similar Greek word nous. Or better yet, watch the two in action in the celebrated Fragment (#25) of Xenophanes:
ἀπάνευθε πόνοιο νόου φρενὶ πάντα κραδαίνει which McKirahan renders: But without effort he shakes all things by the thought of his mind. Which would count as a pretty dreamy review for any blogger, wouldn’t you say? So King Pelias said, but Jason, looking to the king from his father's stricken eyes, saw that he had been led by the king into the acceptance of the voyage so that he might fare far from Iolcus, and perhaps lose his life in striving to gain the wonder that King Æetes kept guarded. Since my last entry I have been giving some thought as to whether I have done Nietzsche injustice. In one sense I certainly have. Being too hasty in associating him with Heracleitus I neglected to draw out the full richness his image of philosophical polyphony. For his aim is not at all to dwell on just the two figures of Parmenides and Heracleitus, as Aristotelians are wont to do, but on three others as well: Thales, Anaximander and Anaxagoras.
Now this specific choice of five voices is significant. Those familiar with music of the late North German Baroque, as Nietzsche himself was (let's not forget that he was a composer of some ability in his student years, and that this was in the wake of the great Bach revival) know that fugues typically involve three to five voices, with the five-voice fugue marking the upper limit of the composer's technical ability, the performer's technical ability (if a keyboard work), and the ear's ability to process it all. The five voice fugue is the richest species of the genre. Many marvel, for instance, at the five-voice fugato Mozart throws into the concluding movement of his Jupiter Symphony, No. 41, that in the final specimen of the classical symphony he had spent a career perfecting he should weave in a summary example of the very style it had displaced. (Not that this was Mozart's only fugue at all: the overture to the Magic Flute, the Kyrie of the Great Mass in C minor, and the Kyrie of the Requiem immediately come to mind.) And so here with Nietzsche's selection of Pre-Socratic philosophers we have five voices woven together in a maximally rich philosophical fugue, five thinkers whose apparent independence of motion bespeak an underlying harmony, and to pursue the fugue image yet further, a general telos underlying that harmony: through its alternating sequence of subject statements and episodes, the ideal fugue builds to form a coherent whole. Without too much effort, then, we can thus unpack Nietzsche's choice of polyphony to further show how much Nietzsche's sensibilities align with those of Heracleitus: not only do opposite tensions give rise to harmony, but together they manifest the One. DK fragment 10 thus completes fragment 51: συνάψιες ὅλα καὶ οὐχ ὅλα, συμφερόμενον διαφερόμενον, συνᾷδον διᾷδον, καὶ ἐκ πάντων ἓν καὶ ἐξ ἑνὸς πάντα. Couples are things whole and not whole, what is drawn together and what is drawn asunder, the harmonious and discordant. The one is made up of all things, and all things issue from the one. There are two points I'd like to make concerning all of this. First, as I have indicated, there appears to be some deception going on here on Nietzsche's part. He presents existing schools of thought in what appears to be a new synthesis but which on closer observation resolves into one of the old schools of thought. This also happens, if I recall correctly, in a passage of Beyond Good and Evil, where he proposes to replace the free-will/determinism dichotomy with the opposition of strength of will and weakness of will: those who would subscribe to determinism do so because they are weak-willed. A dramatic move, assimilating the ontological into the psychological. But nothing has changed, really. The opposition of freedom and determinism holds just as before, with Nietzsche casting his vote for the former. Another false sublation. The second point: how do you reconcile (a) that these various systems harmonize with (b) the suggestion that one is superior? It is doubtful that Heracleitus (or Nietzsche for that matter) would have ever set pen to paper if he really felt that all instances of conflict, including philosophical conflict, ultimately harmonize. Why bother uttering anything at all if it's all the same in the end? But he does, and moreover he singles out Xenophanes (check out DK fragment 40) as a thinker of the lesser variety, as one blinded by too much learning: polymathy eclipses nous, or real understanding. Clearly then it's better to put aside polymathy and behold the logos in which all oppositions unite. But then polymathy and logos themselves form opposite poles, requiring a yet higher unification, a super-logos, which then in turn stands opposite both polymathy and logos. And so on forever, in the manner of the Third Man problem of separate platonic universals. Or is the fact that I fail to understand this only evidence that I myself have yet to ascend the summit of the flux-inclined philosopher? "Thou art Pelias, but I do not salute thee as king. Know that I am Jason, the son of Æson from whom thou hast taken the throne and scepter that were rightfully his." I could no longer hold myself back. For all the disarray of my current reading projects I dropped an alarming amount of money ($39, my other Kindle books costing rarely more than $3 and never more than $12 - antiquarianism has its advantages) and bought David Oderberg's Real Essentialism. And given a moment I shall rave about it. But first a pat on the back, because I have managed to finish some things:
What does Nietzsche want with the Pre-Socratics? “…die Polyphonie der griechischen Natur endlich einmal wiedererklingen zu lassen…”, or, to improve on Mügge, “to finally let the polyphony of Greek nature resound again…” As Nietzsche says, neither he nor anyone else has any use for philosophical systems. What he is after is the the great men standing behind those systems, whose way of being shines through those works. For the great man, unlike whatever systems he might produce, is “irrefutable”. And as with the great man, so with the great culture: in Nietzsche’s philhellenic imagination the Greeks, die wahrhaft gesunden, were such to give rise to the only type of philosophy worth having. It grew “im Glück, in einer reifen Mannbarkeit, mitten heraus aus der feurigen Heiterkeit des tapferen und siegreichen Mannesalters.” (Mügge, improved: “in good fortune, in mature manhood, out of the midst of the fervent joyfulness of the prime of life, brave and victorious.”) If philosophy is to do anything at all, it is to adorn the health of a nation. Returning to Nietzsche’s evocation of polyphony, he seems to say: consider the two poles of early Greek thought - those of Parmenides and Heracleitus (he doesn’t single them out in the preface, but the conclusion suggests itself). Once we rid ourselves of metaphysical delusions (viz., that the antinomy of radical monism and total flux demands a coherent solution such as the real distinction of potentiality and actuality), these two extremes are not irreconcilable at all but are, as it were, subject and countersubject in the sturdy composition of Greek life. The opposites, as opposites, harmonize. But something is tickling my memory. Haven’t I heard this somewhere before? Indeed: οὐ ξυνιᾶσιν ὅκως διαφερόμενον ἑωυτῷ ὁμολογέει· παλίντροπος ἁρμονίη ὅκωσπερ τόξου καὶ λύρης Men do not know how what is at variance agrees with itself. It is an attunement of opposite tension, like that of the bow and the lyre. (Burnet, but I'll go with it.) Yes, that’s DK fragment 51 of Heracleitus, one of several on a central theme of his, pointing out the hidden, and even superior, unity underlying what turns out to be merely superficial war and strife. In effect, is Nietzche not really saying: given a choice of Parmenides, Heracleitus, or some attempted resolution of the two, I’m going with, well, Heracleitus! Or perhaps: the systems of these various Pre-Socratics, being systems, don't have any value, so I am picking that of Heracleitus. That is, Nietzsche's project of overcoming philosophy itself results in a philosophy, and that in import ways repeats one of the very first philosophies we have on record. Overcoming philosophy - this calls to mind Garrigou-Lagrange’s characterization of Heracleitus: "The arguments of Parmenides who, invoking the principle of identity, denies multiplicity and change, become from Heraclitus’ point of view, a mere play of abstract concepts, without objective foundation, and the principle of contradiction a mere law of language and of inferior discursive reason, which employs these more or less conventional abstractions. Superior reason, intuitive intelligence, rises above these artificial abstractions, and reaches intuition of the fundamental reality, which is a perpetual becoming, wherein being and non-being are identified, since that which is in the process of becoming is not as yet, but still is not mere nothing." (Reality: A Synthesis of Thomistic Thought (Kindle Locations 10468-10469). Kindle Edition. My italics.) The original, higher reasoning that does not fall back on the falsification of concepts - this is also the Heideggerian line, isn’t it? More on this perhaps some other time… (And, yes, I concur that there is a lot more to Parmenides and Heracleitus than "the tradition" would have it. As far as Parmenides is concerned, there's been lots of great work lately by the likes of Patricia Curd and Alexander Mourelatos.) |
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