Thoughts 21 Jan. 22

 

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

An algorithm is what the left hemisphere wants; the recognition that it’s got to be free of any algorithm, yet not at all random, is characteristic of the understanding of the right hemisphere. We can specify what is not jazz, but not what is. Our knowledge of anything unique is similarly apophatic.

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

Just as ‘and’ is not merely additive, ‘not’ is not merely negative. Both are creative. Indeed resistance – ‘not-ness’ – is an absolute necessity for creation, another apparent paradox that will become clearer as this book unfolds.

Lost Knowledge of the Imagination

Gary Lachman

This is what is known as the ’âlam al-mithâl, or, as Corbin calls it, the mundus imaginalis, or ‘Imaginal World’. As Corbin writes, this is ‘a very precise order of reality, which corresponds to a precise mode of perception’. This ‘order of reality’ and ‘mode of perception’ is based on a ‘visionary spiritual experience’ that Suhrawardi believed was ‘as fully relevant as the observations of Hipparchus and Ptolemy are considered to be relevant to astronomy’.

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

As for the power of reason, it is the servant of what today we call confirmation bias, an idea Montaigne impressively anticipated. “Men’s opinions are accepted in the train of ancient beliefs, by authority and on credit, as if they were religion and law. They accept as by rote what is commonly held about it.… On the contrary, everyone competes in plastering up and confirming this accepted belief, with all the power of their reason, which is a supple tool, pliable, and adaptable to any form. Thus the world is filled and soaked with twaddle and lies.”

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

For sure, self-censorship is part of living together (we call it “courtesy”)—but not when it impedes honest conversation and criticism in university intellectual life, where honest conversation and criticism are the whole point of being there.

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

“Demoralization,” I tell Theaetetus, “denies your agency. It makes you feel helpless. Don’t let them do that. You are not helpless.”

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

The error is to think of radicals as political types or of radicalism as a set of ideas. The terms “radical” and “moderate” are not substantive but adverbial. Radicalism and moderation bear on pace, posture, and style, not content. The difference turns on how aims are held and acted on: rigidly or flexibly, zealously or temperately, in attacking thrusts or defensively dug in, bent on annihilating opposition or allowing for compromise, unable to live without conquest or able to survive defeat and failure.

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

This old standard argument of the opponents of democracy was supported there by an unusually strong tradition of political passivity and by a no less unusually strong tradition of work and pure production. Taken together, these traditions made appear quite plausible a curious equating of purely technical capability with purely human activity, the latter of which has always had to do with questions of right and wrong. Once the moral basis of the knowledge of right and wrong, unarticulated as it was, began to crumble, the next step was to measure social and political actions by technical and work-oriented standards that were inherently alien to these larger spheres of human activity.

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt 

Thinking, no doubt, plays an enormous role in every scientific enterprise, but it is the role of a means to an end; the end is determined by a decision about what is worthwhile knowing, and this decision cannot be scientific.

Be Here Now

Ram Dass

“Early in the journey   you wonder how long the journey will take and whether you will make it in this lifetime. Later you will see that where you are going is HERE and you will arrive NOW...so you stop asking.”

The Case for Keto

Gary Taubes

One reason I and others promote the idea that eating saturated fat from animal products is most likely benign is that we’ve been consuming these fats as a species for as long as humans have been a species. The evidence isn’t compelling enough to convince us that this assumption is likely to be wrong. We may or may not have been consuming as much of these saturated fats, but we can presume we are genetically adapted to eating them.

Time of the Magicians

Wolfram Eilenberger

Where Heidegger places his Dasein-redeeming confidence in primal anxiety, Benjamin places it in the rapture of different kinds of artificial paradise; the wild roar of rush-hour traffic replaces the experience of the storm high in the Black Forest; aimless flâneuring replaces the ski slope down to the abyss; absorption in outward things replaces the retreat into the interior; apparently random distraction occupies the space of contemplative concentration; the deracinated, disenfranchised masses of the international proletariat replace those people rooted in their homeland . . . Both Benjamin and Heidegger longed for revolutionary change, in everything that they were and had.

Thoughts for the Day: 25 August 2021

 

But first, a few words from Pope Francis: 

Even as the quality of available water is constantly diminishing, in some places there is a growing tendency, despite its scarcity, to privatize this resource, turning it into a commodity subject to the laws of the market. Yet access to safe drinkable water is a basic and universal human right, since it is essential to human survival and, as such, is a condition for the exercise of other human rights. Our world has a grave social debt towards the poor who lack access to drinking water, because they are denied the right to a life consistent with their inalienable dignity. This debt can be paid partly by an increase...

(Location 461)

The earth’s resources are also being plundered because of short-sighted approaches to the economy, commerce and production. The loss of forests and woodlands entails the loss of species which may constitute extremely important resources in the future, not only for food but also for curing disease and other uses.

(Location 473)

We seem to think that we can substitute an irreplaceable and irretrievable beauty with something which we have created ourselves.

(Location 490)

Now for some other voices: 

Age of Anger

Pankaj Mishra

The Pope’s encyclical about climate change is arguably the most important piece of intellectual criticism in our time. See Pope Francis, Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home (London, 2015).

Age of Anger

Pankaj Mishra

To understand their promptings, and the perils they pose, we have to examine the specific conditions – inequality, the sense of blocked horizons, the absence of mediating institutions, general political hopelessness – in which an experience of meaninglessness converted quickly into anarchist ideology; and we have to return to the man [Mikhail Bakunin] from a backward country [Russia] who gave political revolt its existential and international dimension.

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

The problem of truth, Montaigne hinted, is a social problem: a problem about reaching, or failing to reach, a working consensus. The knowledge problem centers not on what you know or what I know, but on what we know.

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

There’s nothing wrong with the economic principles behind the idea of internalizing costs. Still, when we come to implementing these principles, many devils haunt the details.

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Aren’t some worldviews more “true”— more accurate reflections of the world’s underlying reality— than others? Undoubtedly, yes. But no worldview is true in any final sense. And many aspects of our worldviews are matters of judgment and value, about which there is, ultimately, no final truth.

Thoughts for the Day: Wednesday 7 July 2021

 

Book of the day, you may say

N.B. Today is a variation from my normal format in that I'm taking quotes only from a single work instead of my computer-generated random selections from books that I've read. I do this because I'm writing a review of The Constitution of Knowledge and in reviewing my highlights I found so many insightful and provocative quotes that I decided to share a bunch of them in lieu of the normal potpourri. Enjoy. 

As for the power of reason, it is the servant of what today we call confirmation bias, an idea Montaigne impressively anticipated. “Men’s opinions are accepted in the train of ancient beliefs, by authority and on credit, as if they were religion and law. They accept as by rote what is commonly held about it.… On the contrary, everyone competes in plastering up and confirming this accepted belief, with all the power of their reason, which is a supple tool, pliable, and adaptable to any form. Thus the world is filled and soaked with twaddle and lies.”

. . . .

“Not that it is impossible that some true knowledge may dwell in us: but if it does, it does so by accident. And since by the same road, the same manner and process, errors are received into our soul, it has no way to distinguish them or to pick out truth from falsehood.” [Montaigne]

. . . .

“We would need someone exempt from all these qualities [of bias and passion], so that with an unprejudiced judgment he might judge of these propositions as of things indifferent to him; and by that score we would need a judge that never was.” [Montaigne]

The knowledge problem centers not on what you know or what I know, but on what we know.

“Nothing can be so dangerous as principles thus taken up without questioning or examination; especially if they be such as concern morality, which influence men’s lives, and give a bias to all their actions.” [John Locke]

Epistemic rights, like political rights, belong to all of us; empiricism is the duty of all of us. No exceptions for priests, princes, or partisans.

In the nineteenth century, skepticism—the idea that if certainty is impossible, knowledge must be impossible—was elbowed aside by a related but quite different idea, that of fallibilism, a term coined by the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. “On the whole,” he wrote, “we cannot in any way reach perfect certitude nor exactitude. We can never be absolutely sure of anything,” at least when any matter involves facts and statements about objective reality. “The scientific spirit,” said Peirce, “requires a man to be at all times ready to dump his whole cartload of beliefs, the moment experience is against them.”

[Karl] Popper said, knowledge in all its glory, like the biosphere in all its glory, comes from that most unglamorous of all methods: trial and error. Science’s genius is its ability to both make errors quickly and find errors quickly. It kicks the evolution of knowledge into warp drive.

Perhaps his [Charles Sander Pierce's] most impressive contribution, however, was to lay the groundwork for network epistemology, which conceptualizes scientific knowledge not merely as the product of individual or even group effort but as an emergent property of interactions across a social network. His insights were so far ahead of his time. . . . [H]e saw more clearly than anyone before him, and also more clearly than almost everyone today, that the concept of objective knowledge is inherently social. “It will appear,” he wrote, “that individualism and falsity are one and the same. Meantime, we know that man is not whole as long as he is single, that he is essentially a possible member of society. Especially, one man’s experience is nothing if it stands alone. If he sees what others cannot, we call it hallucination. It is not ‘my’ experience but ‘our’ experience that has to be thought of; and this ‘us’ has indefinite possibilities.”

“Unless truth be recognized as public—as that of which any person would come to be convinced if he carried his inquiry, his sincere search for immovable belief, far enough—then there will be nothing to prevent each one of us from adopting an utterly futile belief of his own which all the rest will disbelieve. . . .” [Charles Sanders Pierce]

“The real, then,” explained Peirce, “is that which, sooner or later, information and reasoning would finally result in, and which is therefore independent of the vagaries of me and you. Thus, the very origin of the conception of reality shows that this conception essentially involves the notion of a COMMUNITY, without definite limits, and capable of a definite increase of knowledge.”

Thoughts of the Day: Thursday 9 September 2020

 “The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.”

― Michel de Montaigne 

 

​“Action without a name, a 'who' attached to it, is meaningless.”​

--Hannah Arendt

Why Liberalism Failed

Patrick J. Deneen

There has always been, and probably always will be, economic inequality, but few civilizations appear to have so extensively perfected the separation of winners from losers or created such a massive apparatus to winnow those who will succeed from those who will fail.

The 33 Strategies of War

Robert Greene

Enemies also give you a standard by which to judge yourself, both personally and socially.

Rationality

Eliezer Yudkowsky

To do better, ask yourself straight out: If I saw that there was a superior alternative to my current policy, would I be glad in the depths of my heart, or would I feel a tiny flash of reluctance before I let go? If the answers are “no” and “yes,” beware that you may not have searched for a Third Alternative.

The World Beyond Your Head

Matthew B. Crawford

The image of human excellence I would like to offer as a counterweight to freedom thus understood is that of a powerful, independent mind working at full song. Such independence is won through disciplined attention, in the kind of action that joins us to the world. And-this is important-it is precisely those constraining circumstances that provide the discipline.

Words of Insight from Montaigne

The author & his essays

Others form man; I describe him, and portray a particular, very ill-made one, who, if I had to fashion him anew, should indeed be very different from what he is. But now it is done. Now the features of my painting do not err, although they change and vary. The world is but a perennial see-saw. All things in it are incessantly on the swing, the earth, the rocks of the Caucasus, the Egyptian pyramids, both with the common movement and their own particular movement. Even fixedness is nothing but a more sluggish motion. I cannot fix my object; it is befogged, and reels with a natural intoxication. I seize it at this point, as it is at the moment when I beguile myself with it. I do not portray the thing in itself. I portray the passage; not a passing from one age to another, or, as the people put it, from seven years to seven years, but from day to day, from minute to minute. I must adapt my history to the moment. I may presently change, not only by chance, but also by intention. It is a record of diverse and changeable events, of undecided, and, when the occasion arises, contradictory ideas ; whether it be that I am another self, or that I grasp a subject in different circumstances and see it from a different point of view. So it may be that I contradict myself, but, as Demades said, the truth I never contradict. If my mind could find a firm footing, I should not speak tentatively, I should decide; it is always in a state of apprenticeship, and on trial. 

I am holding up to view a humble and lustreless life; that is all one. Moral philosophy, in any degree, may apply to an ordinary and secluded life as well as to one of richer stuff; every man carries within him the entire form of the human constitution. Authors communicate themselves to the world by some special and extrinsic mark; I am the first to do so by my general being, as Michel de Montaigne, not as a grammarian or a poet or a lawyer. If the world finds fault with me for speaking too much of myself, I find fault with the world for not even thinking of itself. But is it reasonable that I, who am so retired in actual life, should aspire to make myself known to the public? And is it reasonable that I should show up to the world, where artifice and ceremony enjoy so much credit and authority, the crude and simple results of nature, and of a nature besides very feeble? Is it not like making a wall without stone or a similar material, thus to build a book without learning or art? The ideas of music are guided by art, mine by chance. This I have at least in conformity with rules, that no man ever treated of a subject that he knew and understood better than I do this that I have taken up; and that in this I am the most learned man alive. Secondly, that no man ever penetrated more deeply into his matter, nor more minutely analyzed its parts and consequences, nor more fully and exactly reached the goal he had made it his business to set up. To accomplish it I need only bring fidelity to it; and that is here, as pure and sincere as may be found. I speak the truth, not enough to satisfy myself, but as much as I dare to speak. And I become a little more daring as I grow older; for it would seem that custom allows this age more freedom to prate, and more indiscretion in speaking of oneself. It cannot be the case here, as I often see elsewhere, that the craftsman and his work contradict each other. … A learned man is not learned in all things; but the accomplished man is accomplished in all things, even in ignorance. Here, my book and I go hand in hand together, and keep one pace. In other cases we may commend or censure the work apart from the workman; not so here. Who touches the one touches the other.

The Essays of Montaigne. Translated by E. J. Trechmann, Oxford University Press, 1927, cited in Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton Classics) (pp. 286-288). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

Reviews of "To Show and To Tell" by Phillip Lopate, "The Made-Up Self" by Carl Klaus, and "A Room of One's Own" by Virginia Woolf

As challenging as it often is, being a writer (not a Writer) is a rewarding calling. Professionally, much of a lawyer’s work consists of writing. This sometimes creates mountains of god-awful legal prose, but it can be done better—much better. Demand letters and briefs are especially fun challenges, and I enjoyed refining my skills as a legal writer. In addition, from my days as a Young Republican essayist (we’re talking junior high-- gimme a break!) writing about the value of the two-party system (good for second place among three contenders), I've felt compelled to say things on paper. After years of journals (C: “Why do you keep these? What are you going to do with them?” A: “Don’t know, except keep them”) and letters to congressional representatives and newspaper editors, I came upon blogging. 

I wish that I could say something profound and insightful about why I blog, but the plain truth is I sincerely believe that everyone should experience the value and pleasure of knowing my opinions about this or that. It’s just another form of narcissism, I fear, but to keep my head from getting too big, I occasionally look at the number of persons who read my posts and then rest my worry that the circle of those who know of my ranting hasn’t much expanded beyond those on whom I would have inflicted it anyway. 

So why did I just read two books on the essay and Virginia Woolf’s classic essay “A Room of One’s Own”? Well, with more time on my hands than in the past, with a new position that involves teaching how to write well, and with thoughts of future ventures, refining my writing seems the thing to do as a practical matter. Then, too, there is this pretension that maybe some blog post might prove worthy of the shadow of those who made the essay an intriguing and vital part of our literature. 

Phillip Lopate and Carl Klaus are two of the best-known scholars of the essay, and both practice the art that they teach, which makes reading their works a double-treat. Lopate’s book, To Show and To Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction, which I read first, had me with the title. Well, I love to tell people things: how else will they receive the benefit of my knowledge and wisdom? Further, just “showing” can hide the forest for the trees. But the book does more than puncture a hole in the current wisdom. Instead, Lopate reviews the art of the essay from the time of its founding Aeneas, Montaigne, to the best of those writing today, including himself and this very book. In writing about various issues that essayists have addressed from the time of Montaigne to the present, Lopate—in essay chapters—discusses the many variations and challenges that have been raised and addressed by the essay and “literary nonfiction” in general. 

Klaus’s book, The Made-Up Self: Impersonation in the Personal Essay addresses one of the ongoing challenges presented by the essay from Montaigne down to his own efforts. Quoting Virginia Woolf’s aphorism: “Never to be yourself, and yet always”, Klaus, starting from the fountainhead (Montaigne, of course), explores the different ways that the self is presented and sometimes hidden by the essayist. By concentrating on the personal essay, one that drags you in because it’s written in the first-person and because you have a sense of the someone who’s written this—of someone  having lived this—you have the challenges of wondering what has been left in and what left out. It’s an opportunity to look into the life and experiences and observations of another, and when well written, it proves delightful, or at least intriguing. 

In fact, while I greatly appreciated Klaus’s knowledgeable and insightful consideration of Montaigne, Lamb, Woolf, E.B. White, and Orwell, among others, it’s his own personal reflections in the final chapter that provided me with the most pleasure and insight. Klaus reports that in the mid-1990s he decided to write an entry each day for the weather, about 500 words. And a very important fact: he lives in Iowa City, where he taught at the University since the 1960s. * Now, such an idea might fall flat here in Rajasthan (typical entries: hot and dry, very hot and dry, extremely hot and dry), but in Iowa, he has subject-matter that changes, sometimes violently. He set out to describe “what it looked like and felt like each day on my hillside lot in Iowa City—a place where I'd spent twenty-five years witnessing the flow (and sometimes the clash) of arctic- and gulf-born weather systems.” This seemingly mundane task (discouraged by some colleagues)  becomes a larger meditation on change and life, as concerns for the health of his wife and his pets, among other things, impinge upon a simple weather report. He finds himself, like Iowa weather, changing at times unexpectedly and uncertainly. So with the self and its concerns. 

Finally, between these two works, I read Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own”, and I greatly enjoyed my time with it. In addressing women and fiction as a given theme, Wolf meanders through the centuries to address the topic, weaving her way through history as if providing a leisurely pointed tour of the past, and in particular, the burdens and challenges endured by women who wanted to write . Careful phrasing, an authoritative but friendly voice, and a careful choice of topics made this a very enjoyable read. A tract of feminism, and a fine one, yes; but its pleasure proves much greater than that of a political tract or polemic. It’s a tour, and one to savor, as if in the company of a gifted docent.

* I don’t believe that I’ve ever met Mr. Klaus. I know that I didn’t take a class from him (if only I knew), but he gives a shout out to Jackie Blank, our friend and realtor at the beginning of the book, so that provided some extra fun in reading this.   

Montaigne: Words of Insight

I’m dipping back in a Montaigne again (much too large a body of work to cross in a single attempt), and because this sage can’t be improved upon by me, I’ll share a bit from his essay “Defense of Seneca and Plutarch” (Frame translation).

“For my part, I consider some men very far above me, especially among the ancients; and although I clearly recognize my inability to follow them with my steps, I do not fail to follow them with my eyes and judge the powers that raise them so high, of which I perceived in some degree the seeds in me, as I do also of the extreme baseness of some minds, which does not astonish me and which I do not disbelieve either. I well see the method which the great souls use to raise themselves, and I wonder at their greatness. And the flights that I find very beautiful, I embrace; and if my powers to no reach them, at last my judgment applies itself to them very gladly.” (Frame, Every Man Library Edition, p. 665-666.)

How magnificent! More to follow later, as I’ve embarked on “Of husbanding your will”.