Thoughts 30 Jan 2022

 

Apologies to the Grandchldren

William Ophuls

Civilization is, by its very nature, a long-running Ponzi scheme. It lives by robbing nature and borrowing from the future, exploiting its hinterland until there is nothing left to exploit, after which it implodes. While it still lives, it generates a temporary and fictitious surplus that it uses to enrich and empower the few and to dispossess and dominate the many. Industrial civilization is the apotheosis and quintessence of this fatal course. A fortunate minority gains luxuries and freedoms galore, but only by slaughtering, poisoning, and exhausting creation. So we bequeath you a ruined planet that dooms you to a hardscrabble existence, or perhaps none at all.

In addition to my stroll through McGilchrist's The Matter with Things (the most recent installment below), I'm going to add a stroll through Ophuls's Apologies to the Grandchildren: Reflections on Our Ecological Predicament, Its Deeper Causes, & Its Political Consequences. It consists of strong words from a wise elder. I think we ignore his warnings at our peril.

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

The narrow-beam, precisely focussed, piecemeal attention of the left hemisphere, aimed at a particular object of interest, is, as we have seen, the kind paid by an animal locking onto its prey. In humans the left hemisphere is designed for grasping, controls the right hand with which we grasp (as well as those aspects of language which enable us to say we have ‘grasped’ something – pinned it down) and helps us manipulate, rather than understand, the world. It sees little, but what it does see seems clear. It is confident, tends to be black and white in its judgments, and jumps to conclusions. Since it is serving the predator in us, it has to if it is to succeed. It sees a linear relationship between the doer and the ‘done to’, between arrow and target.

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

There is nothing about the hemispheres that is symmetrical. . . . [T]he idea that there is no significant difference is simply a non-starter. It’s just a question of what the differences are – and why they are there.

The Wedge

Scott Carney

Your Life claimed that the secret to longevity rested in breathing through the nose as well as a healthy dose of temperature variation. [19th-century explorer of the American West & native Indian culture, George] Catlin encouraged people to train themselves to sleep with their mouths closed, arguing that the nose is a natural filter of pathogens.

Time and Narrative, Volume 1

Paul Ricoeur

We have, in fact, a proposal for three schemas of historical explanation, without having been shown how the first two are incorporated into the third one. Moreover, an important scattering factor appears on the causal level. In a properly analytic approach, we are led to distinguish between “external” factors (climate, technology, etc.) and “internal” ones (motives, reasons, etc.), without being able to say which are “causes” and which are “effects.” An integrating factor appears to be lacking here, whose importance and perhaps unavoidability are indicated by ideologies.

Ricoeur should have read his Collingwood more carefully. Collingwood recognizes--indeed emphasizes--the distinction between "external" & "internal" factors (between "events" and "actions" in Collingwood's parlance). Collingwood argues that by "re-enacting" the thought behind the acts (i.e., the thoughts that guide and prompt the actions), we know the causes.

Thoughts 23 Jan 2022

 

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

But truth, like reality, is an encounter. It is in the nature of an encounter that more than one element is involved. And what I find in whatever-it-is does not pre-exist my encounter with it. There must be a potential, true enough, but it is actualised only in my encounter with it. The encounter is genuinely creative. The whole universe is constantly creative – but not out of nowhere.

Encyclical on Climate Change and Inequality

Pope Francis

[T]his culture of care must include not just those of us alive today, but also future generations—a point the pope makes more than once, in both economic and moral terms. Our current economic models literally dis-count the future, insofar as damage in the future is counted as costing less than damage today, but what sort of a calculus is it that concludes that our needs are greater than our children’s? The notion of the common good, the pope concludes, also extends to future generations: “We can no longer speak of sustainable development apart from intergenerational solidarity …" [Naomi Oreskes writing in the Introduction.]

Shutdown

Adam Tooze

In general, the net effect of tax and welfare systems in all countries is to reduce inequality at least to some degree. However, welfare can also serve a conservative function. Indeed, the historic purpose of the welfare state as it emerged in Bismarckian Germany in the 1880s was precisely that—to preserve the social status hierarchy across the vicissitudes of sickness, old age, and, eventually, unemployment.34 That was the principal logic of spending in 2020. The crisis affected the entire economy. No one was to blame. Everyone should be made whole. So the range of potential claimants on state support exploded.

The Wedge

Scott Carney

Our minds don’t have direct control over every autonomic process. We can’t just think the word “adrenaline” and trigger the hormonal release we want. But we can put ourselves in situations that trigger that same predictable hormonal release. When we choose stressors, we choose our biological reactions. The same goes for the immune system: We can’t think it into action, but we can certainly change the environment that the immune system responds and reacts to.

Prometheus Rising

Robert Anton Wilson

The meta-programming circuit — known as the “soul” in Gnosticism, the “no-mind” (wu-hsin) in China, the White Light of the Void in Tibetan Buddhism, Shiva-darshana in Hinduism, the True Intellectual Center in Gurdjieff — simply represents the brain becoming aware of itself.

Time and Narrative, Volume 3

Paul Ricoeur, trans. by Kathleen Blamey, and David Pellauer

[F]rom an Augustinian point of view, the future and the past exist only in relation to a present, that is, to an instant indicated by the utterance designating it. The past is before and the future after only with respect to this present possessing the relation of self-reference, attested to by the very act of uttering something.

Immoderate Greatness

William Ophuls

Unfortunately, although naturally clever, human beings are not innately wise, especially in crowds.

The Force of Character

James Hillman

Emerson begins his essay “Character” with four paragraphs on morals, three of them opening with that very word. “The will constitutes the man,” he writes. In this Emerson is little different from the most influential of all Victorian philosophers, John Stuart Mill: “A character is a completely fashioned will.”

Thoughts for the Day: Tuesday 29 June 2021

 

The Soul's Code

James Hillman

Absolute certainty, utter conviction—these, then, are signs of the demonic.

. . . .

We begin to see how power corrupts as the guiding whisper becomes a demonic voice obliterating all others. The seed comes with sure and uncanny knowledge. But while a god is omniscient, a human becomes a know-it-all, and so Hitler had no use for exchange with others. There was nothing they could teach him.

. . . .

To show this omniscience he [Hitler] memorized masses of facts—locations of regiments and reserves, displacement and armature of ships, kinds of vehicles—all of which he used to overpower his questioners and embarrass his commanders. This information “proved” his transcendence and disguised his lack of thought and reflection and his inability to hold a conversation.The demonic does not engage; rather, it smothers with details and jargon any possibility of depth.

Plato's Revenge

William Ophuls

Beyond underlining the critical importance of Eros for the future of civilization, this metaphor (along with the marriage of the Virgin and the Dynamo in the previous chapter) contains an implicit politics. Being a loving spouse implies caring, respect, mutuality, reciprocity, and interdependence.

Time and Narrative, Volume 1

Paul Ricoeur

As a narrative, all history has to do with “some major achievement or failure of men living and working together, in societies or nations or any other lastingly organized groups”

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

Fareed Zakaria

Looking at the shape of international politics in the future, it’s clear—bipolarity is inevitable. A cold war is a choice.

A Thousand Small Sanities

Adam Gopnik

There is a tragic rule of twenty-first-century life, a rule of double amnesia: the right tends to act as though the nineteenth century never happened, while the left tends to act as though the twentieth century never took place.

Thoughts for the Day: 26 June 2021

 

Beyond the Robot

Gary Lachman

Simply put, immediacy perception gives us the bare facts of experience, the discrete bits and pieces that enter our awareness. Meaning perception is a kind of glue that holds these pieces together and makes them a whole.

Time and Narrative, Volume 1

Paul Ricoeur

“An intention,” we are told in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (section 337), “is embedded in its situation, in human customs and institutions.”

The Master and His Emissary

Iain McGilchrist

For Merleau-Ponty the ‘object’ of perception cannot be viewed in isolation, because is in reality embedded in a context, the nexus of relations among existing things which gives it meaning within the world. Thus no one object exists independently of others, but reflects a part of whatever else it co-exists with, and in turn is itself similarly reflected there.

The Principles of Art

R. G. Collingwood

There is nothing in the case of feeling to correspond with what, in the case of thinking, may be called mis-thinking or thinking wrong. The most general name for this thing is failure. Failure and its opposite, success, imply that the activity which fails or succeeds is not only a ‘doing something’ but a ‘trying to do something’, where the word ‘trying’ refers not to what is called ‘conation’, but to an activity which sets itself definite tasks, and judges itself as having succeeded or failed by reference to the standards or criteria which it thereby imposes on itself.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

Strauss said that “a tribal community may possess a culture, i.e., produce and enjoy hymns, songs, ornament of their clothes, of their weapons and pottery, and enjoy fairy tales and what not; it cannot however be civilized.” For that, you needed the “conscious culture of humanity,” to be found in the works of writers like Plato and Aristotle, Spinoza and Nietzsche.

The Science of Conjecture

James Franklin

“Ignorance of the law is no excuse,” according to a universal legal maxim. It is asking a great deal, both of legal insiders and of those without. It demands that ordinary persons have a general understanding of legal principles, at least as far as their own affairs are concerned. The Digest [Roman legal precepts] and the Talmud are huge storehouses of concepts, and to be required to have even a sketchy idea of them is a powerful stimulus to learning abstractions. What is less obvious, but equally important, is that the maxim imposes a heavy burden on the law itself. Legal concepts must be, in some sense, comprehensible at large. No formulas, no flow charts, no diagrams. Despite a common impression to the contrary, the law cannot possibly be a tangle of esoteric rules that invariably need resort to a lawyer to understand or to have understood on one’s behalf. Since the point of the law is to order ordinary affairs, the language in which the rules are expressed must be substantially that of ordinary life.

Thoughts fo r the Day: Sunday 25 October 2020

 

The Future of History

John Lukacs

But in speaking as well as in writing, the choice of every word is not only an esthetic or a technical but a moral choice.

Apologies to the Grandchldren

William Ophuls

An upsurge of irrationality is a mortal threat to democratic polity. Political truth is always biased to some extent, but there is a profound and crucial difference between limited rationality and complete irrationality, relative objectivity and pure fantasy, demonstrable facts and blatant lies. A sane information environment is a precondition for a workable democracy. Once reality has been hijacked, there can be no reasonable basis for either voting or legislating.

Prometheus Rising

Robert Anton Wilson

Beethoven, to cite him one more time, said “Anybody who understands my music will never be unhappy again.” That is because his music is the song of the Sixth Circuit, of Gaia, the Life Spirit, becoming conscious of Herself, of Her powers, of Her own capacities for infinite progress.

Collingwood's the Idea of History

Peter Johnson

Content in both history and fiction comes from what is necessary to the story and ‘the judge of necessity’, as Collingwood says (IH 246), is the imagination itself.

Time and Narrative, Volume 1

Paul Ricoeur

The problem posed by narrativity is, in fact, both more simple and more complicated than the one posed by lyric poetry. More simple, because the world, here, is apprehended from the angle of human praxis rather than from that of cosmic pathos. What is resignified by narrative is what was already presignified at the level of human acting.

The Soul's Code

James Hillman

The acorn theory states that each of us is singled out. The very fact of eachness presumes a unique acorn that characterizes each person. Sun or shade, each has a character.

Thoughts for the Day: Sunday 18 October 2020

 

Beyond the Robot

Gary Lachman

[Ernest] Becker’s book is really an elaboration on the psychology of self-esteem; death is the final blow to that and this is why we deny it. It also relates very closely to the idea of the Right Man. As mentioned, the Right Man is an idea developed by the science-fiction writer A. E. van Vogt. It describes a type of person—there are Right Women too—who under no circumstances can accept that he is wrong. His need for self-esteem is so great and his grasp of it is so tenuous that the slightest contradiction sends him into a rage. His belief in the absolute correctness of all of his actions is so unshakable—like the pope, he enjoys infallibility—that he treats any question of it as a personal betrayal.

SNG: Rings a bell? P.S. My review of this book.

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Most people believe the mind to be a mirror, more or less accurately reflecting the world outside them, not realizing on the contrary that the mind is itself the principal element of creation. --Rabindranath Tagore

My review of this book.

Time and Narrative, Volume 1

Paul Ricoeur

As the definite article indicates in the French Revolution, historians do not proceed from the classificatory term toward the general law but from the classificatory term toward the explanation of differences.

The Principles of Art

R. G. Collingwood

And by reflecting on it we can perhaps detect one more characteristic which art must have, if it is to forgo both, entertainment-value and magical value, and draw a subject-matter from its audience themselves. It must be prophetic.

My review of this book.

In Europe's Shadow

Robert D. Kaplan

Real conversations require utter concentration, not texting on the side when you are in a café with someone. That is because travel is linear—it is about one place or singular perception or book at a time, each one etched deep into memory, so as to change your life forever.

My review of this book.

Time and Narrative, vol. 1 by Paul Ricoeur

I recall the first time that I read a complete book by Hannah Arendt. I was on a break from college. Reading Between Past and Future, I was awed. And more often, overawed. I felt that I gained insights from her only in glimpses, reading by lightning flashes—moments of insight followed by darkness and confusion. With time—that is, with multiple readings of her works, I gained some comprehension of what she intended to convey. When a reader confronts a dense, challenging text, if you can see lightning bolts of insight, those sentences or even phrases that we feel compelled to highlight or about which we utter a silent “yes!”, then you can feel confident that what you’re reading isn’t gibberish or pretentious baloney. The challenge comes from stretching your mind, not from poor writing or garbled thinking. So with this work of Ricoeur. I’ve read Ricoeur in limited doses before, but this is my second book- length dive into his work. (I read The Symbolism of Evil some years ago. All I can recall of it was that I was impressed, but I’m now hard-pressed to recount its argument.) This book proved just as challenging and intellectually bracing. With this review, I hope that I can provide a glimpse of what Ricoeur does in this project.

In this first of three volumes on the subject of time and narrative, Ricoeur opens with a consideration of St. Augustine’s meditations on time and its three-fold nature. Memory is a key concept for Augustine, and Ricoeur considers Augustine’s scheme of the past recollected now, the now, and the now-imagined future (or memory, direct perception, and expectation). (Augustine perhaps the quintessential Trinitarian.) After laying this marker with Augustine and establishing the notion of time, he shifts to Aristotle’s Poetics to consider the Philosopher’s use of muthos (plot, story, account—narrative?). In the finale of his account of the “circle of narrative and temporality”, Ricoeur explores how time and narrative mesh through the several senses of mimesis (the representation or imitation of reality in literature and art) that he identifies. Ricoeur, by the way, makes his own three-fold division of mimesis. 

From this starting point, Ricoeur begins his consideration of history as a form of narrative, which provides my primary interest for reading this book. How does history deal with these issues of time and narrative? Is narrative an essential ingredient of history or an impediment to a more analytical understanding? Here I’m going to drop any pretense of summarizing Ricoeur’s argument. It’s long and complex, but I will share the course of dealing with these issues, the works of Ferdnand Braudel, Paul Veyne, Raymond Aron, Max Weber, R. G. Collingwood (far too briefly), William Dray, Carl Hempel, Arthur C. Danto, and Hayden White (among others) all receive consideration. The depth and breadth of Ricoeur’s learning is impressive. While I name-drop, Ricoeur engages.  

In the end, Ricoeur, by deeply engaging with Braudel and Hempel on various issues, preserves and celebrates the role of narrative in history without negating the value of Braudel’s long-duree or Hempel’s covering laws. 

I will not attempt further at this point because I can’t yet do full justice to the diverse and complex arguments and explorations of this book, and I’ve already started volume 2. This is just a teaser for the reader and for me. To grasp and appreciate Ricoeur will take more than a single reading, so I intend to write more about this impressive foray into history, narrative, and time.