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.

The Price of Peace by Zachary Carter & The Time of the Magicians by Wolfram Eilenberger

One of the best books of 2020

 Normally I don't review two books in the same article. And on the face of it, these two books would seem to create an odd tandem. The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy and the Life of John Maynard Keynes centers on the life and work of John Maynard Keynes and his intellectual progeny in economics, while The Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade that Reinvented Philosophy deals with the work of four German-speaking philosophers during the period from 1919 to 1929: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, and Ernst Cassirer. There is some overlap of personages: Keynes, as a Cambridge intellectual and would-be philosopher makes an appearance in The Time of the Magicians as an acquaintance of Wittgenstein via their shared Cambridge connections and Keynes was scared off (as it were) from philosophy by his encounter with Wittgenstein's Tractatus logico-philosophicus, published in 1922, after Keynes has served as a courier to get the draft into the hands of Bertrand Russell for publication in Britain. The other common figure is (at least to me) a little known Italian economist named Piero Sraffa, who collaborated with Keynes for many years and who also understood Wittgenstein--according to Wittgenstein--and who influenced the shift in Wittgenstein's thinking from that of the Tractatus to that of his Philosophical Investigations. But other than these coincidental overlaps, what ties these two books together in my mind? 

In short, both books begin at the end of the First World War--the Great War. Carter does begin his portrait with Keynes with the financial panic in Britain at the outbreak of the war and with Keynes's life as a Cambridge Apostle and then as a charter member of the Bloomsbury group that focused on aesthetics and---by the standards of the time--uncommon sexual mores. But it's not until his participation in the Versailles Conference and his subsequent appraisal of the Conference in his book The Economic Consequences of the Peace, that Keynes hits his stride as a public intellectual and as an influential (although often ignored) influence on government policy. Keynes and his intellectual legacy arose during the inter-war period that was so marked by economic and political turmoil. Keynes became an economist dedicated to preserving the liberal, market-oriented democracies. His focus becomes overwhelmingly practical, even when he delves into more esoteric topics, like theories of probability or ancient monetary regimes. 

Before moving on to The Magicians, let me pad this review with some further quotes from The Price of Peace. Not a cool move for a reviewer, but still, to bring this to a conclusion and to add some spice, I'll share them: 

"The real struggle of today…is between that view of the world, termed liberalism or radicalism, for which the primary object of government and of foreign policy is peace, freedom of trade and intercourse, and economic wealth, and that other view, militarist, or, rather, diplomatic, which thinks in terms of power, prestige, national or personal glory, the imposition of a culture, and hereditary or racial prejudice. . . . The great threat facing liberalism was not socialism but the thirst for military domination. “Soldiers and diplomatists—they are the permanent, the immortal foe.” (John Maynard Keynes, “On the Way to Genoa: What Can the Conference Discuss and with What Hope?,” The Manchester Guardian, April 10, 1922; CW, vol. 17, 373.)

The Price of Peace (p. xvii-iii). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

Keynes was a philosopher of war and peace, the last of the Enlightenment intellectuals who pursued political theory, economics, and ethics as a unified design. He was a man whose chief project was not taxation or government spending but the survival of what he called “civilisation”—the international cultural milieu that connected a British Treasury man to a Russian ballerina

Id.(p. xviii). 

[S]o the manuscript Keynes had helped salvage from a POW camp in Cassino, Italy [Wittegenstein's Tractatus], pushed Keynes out of the philosophy business. A Treatise on Probability was debated avidly by the leading lights of Cambridge philosophy but quickly fell out of favor. Wittgenstein’s work, meanwhile, became the foundational text of analytic philosophy—a school of thought that still dominates English-speaking philosophy departments, in which language itself is understood to be the source of all truths that philosophers can uncover.

Id.(p. 116). 

Price instability undermined the public’s faith in its government and its institutions; failing to control it would, Keynes told the Treasury, “strike at the whole basis of contract, of security, and of the capitalist system generally.”

Id. (p. 129). 

Governments would find themselves forced to choose between maintaining a stable exchange rate and a stable price level. When the choice came, Keynes argued, there should be no hesitation: Keep prices stable, and adjust exchange rates. It might be true that “over the long run,” rashes of inflation and deflation would burn themselves out. “But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs,” Keynes observed. “In the long run, we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.” (A Tract on Monetary Reform (London: Macmillan, 1924, p. 80.)

Id. (p. 130). 

Money existed to be spent on finer things: the pursuit of Apostolic “good states of mind.” From his undergraduate days to his deathbed, Keynes believed that these were not exclusive goods. One man living a good life did not detract from another’s ability to live well any more than one person’s enjoyment of a painting would ruin another’s ability to appreciate it.

Id. (p. 146). 

[A] snapshot of Keynes’ view of economics in the hierarchy of intellectual pursuits. Ethics—by which Keynes meant the elements that made up a good life—were a more important consideration for public policy than economics, the field that had made Keynes famous. The remains of his early reverence for Edmund Burke is evident in the note’s distinct modesty of ambition. Even when imagining the “ideal future of society,” Keynes could only envision striking a balance between what was “tolerable” and what was “not intolerable.” Keynes had in truth already been working on his political theory project for some time.

Id. (p. 149). 

He was forging a new set of philosophical foundations for twentieth-century society. He announced the program across the top of the page: “Prolegomena to a New Socialism—The Origins and End of Laissez-Faire.” Keynes had an ambiguous relationship with the word socialism. Sometimes he deployed it as an epithet; in other moods, he used it to describe a progressive ideal.

Id. (p. 149). 

The Time of the Magicians, on the other hand, deals with four thinkers who made their mark on post-war culture in ways that are, on the whole, quite apart from politics. Wittgenstein spent his time in an Italian POW camp (he was an Austrian soldier) writing the Tractatus, which attempts to resolve some of the most vexing issues of philosophy by his analysis of propositions. Heidegger, on the other hand, after his service in the German military, sloughs off his prior train of thought and delves into what he labels Dasein, our "being-there" in this world. Despite its immediate impact and its concern with human placement, his thought--like Wittgenstein's--held no immediate political implications. (But more on this later.) Benjamin was an itinerant (meaning often broke and without a position) scholar who wasn't a systematic thinker but who made penetrating (according to some) observations about intellectual topics that he investigated. Again, no immediate political implications arise from his work. Finally, Ernst Cassirer is the oldest, most established, and most "bourgeois" of these four. He, too, was a philosopher obsessed with issues surrounding symbols, language, art, and such, but he pursued his project within the context of Neo-Kantianism, then the reigning school of philosophy in Germany. In this period (1919-1920) he didn't write directly about politics (although after the Second World War he published The Myth of the State). But while none of these four directed their thinking toward politics, all three deeply influenced the course of philosophy and high culture during this period and beyond. 

I would be remiss, however,  to suggest that the only impetus for a new philosophic perspective represented by The Magicians arose only from the War and the consequent social, economic, and political dislocation that it wrought. Even before the war, the world of Newtonian physics had been crumbling under the weight of Einstein's new theories of relativity, which were soon followed by theories of quantum mechanics. In philosophy itself, there was a strong movement, such as found in the Vienna Circle and via Moore and Russell at Cambridge, to anchor philosophy in science and logic and to jettison the rest of traditional philosophy, such as metaphysics and ethics. And the arts, which had experienced profound changes before the war, continued down new and often disorienting experimental roads. Change was happening in all walks of life, and The Magicians were responding to these changes. 

Both books are exceptionally fine and important works of intellectual history. Thinkers who worked and struggled with the realities of the inter-war years, such as those listed above, and others, like R.G. Collingwood, Hannah Arendt, and others, have a renewed value today as we experience democracy under attack and the world haunted by irrational spirits among the people. History doesn't offer answers, but it does provide lessons, hints about the future, that we ignore at our peril. 

H

Thoughts for the Day: Friday 12 February 2021

 

Essay on contemporary issues published in 1972 

Crises of the Republic

Hannah Arendt

Something else, however, which became fully manifest only in the decades after [George] Sorel’s and [Alfredo] Pareto’s death, was incomparably more disastrous to this view. The enormous growth of productivity in the modern world was by no means due to an increase in the workers’ productivity, but exclusively the development of technology, and this depended neither on the working class nor on the bourgeoisie, but on the scientists. The “intellectuals,” much despised by Sorel and Pareto, suddenly ceased to be a marginal social group and emerged as a new elite, whose work, having changed the conditions of human life almost beyond recognition in a few decades, has remained essential for the functioning of society.

Lost Knowledge of the Imagination

Gary Lachman

In the aleatory compositions of John Cage, the ‘active confusion’ of the intellectual demagogue, Marshall McLuhan, who abandoned meaningful content with his dictum that the ‘medium was the message’, and the sensory barrage of ‘multi-media’ overload – siphoning off aspects of ‘Scientism’ for artistic purposes – [Erich] Kahler saw at work a deliberate attempt to undermine the whole conception of coherence in a misguided movement to break free of what it considered the restrictions of outworn, outmoded sensibilities. One of the main driving forces behind this demolition work, Kahler believed, was the increasing technological character of modern life.

Time of the Magicians

Wolfram Eilenberger

The core accusation that [Walter] Benjamin levels at the tragedy of the whole of the modern age and its philosophy is “objectification”—of nature and, in particular, of humanity.

Plato's Revenge

William Ophuls

Self-organizing systems are therefore relatively autonomous, stable, and enduring, whereas artificial systems are intrinsically dependant, unstable, and transient.

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

So three processes produce greater complexity in our world: competition and interdependence among entities creates niches that new entities can fill; this competitive environment also encourages individual entities to breach performance limits by adding new subsystems; and large systems of entities can capture or task simpler systems, adapting and building on the grammar of these simpler systems to boost performance.

Putting Man Before Descartes - The American Scholar

John Lukacs

Of course a danger is a potentiality, not an actuality. Of course some of these developments may not happen. The road to hell may be paved with good intentions, but the road to heaven may be paved with bad intentions that have not matured into acts. That is our saving grace, our hope. But we must recognize that the source of the new and enormous danger is not outside but inside this world, inside the minds of men, including scientists and those who support and cheer them on.

Time Warrior

Steve Chandler

Sadness, depression, frustration, upset, and anxiety can only be produced by seeing a situation and then producing an interpretation of it and then believing that interpretation.

Thoughts for the Day: Thursday 11 February 2021

 

First published in 1961

Between Past and Future

Hannah Arendt

Thinking, as Arendt experiences it, is an inner silent dialogue, which may reach conditional conclusions but whose real result is a proliferation of distinctions made by conversing with a thinking partner. To be conscious of thought as a conversation is rare, due both to its silence and its lightning-like speed, but to Arendt the dialogic character of the activity of thinking is what human consciousness (con-scientia) is.

--Jerome Kohn, "Introduction"

An Essay on Metaphysics

R. G. Collingwood

All modern scientific work rests on the absolute presupposition that nature is one and that science is one: that the different realms of nature are in part governed by one and the same code of absolutely identical laws, the laws of mathematics, and in part by special codes which do not differ radically among themselves but are so linked together by analogies and similarities that they may be regarded as so many local variants of laws which in spite of these variations can still be called ‘laws of nature’; while the various sciences that investigate the various realms of nature are not independent sciences but only modifications of one and the same thing, a single thing which we call by the single name of natural science.

Age of Anger

Pankaj Mishra

Walter Benjamin wrote, the self-alienation of humankind ‘has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order’.

The Price of Peace

Zachary D. Carter

A nonplussed Hayek told an interviewer, “Milton [Friedman's] monetarism and Keynesianism have more in common with each other than I have with either.” For Hayek, who believed that depressions simply had to burn themselves out, even monetary therapy was dangerous.

The Caretakers of the Cosmos

Gary Lachman

I say to some extent, because although (theoretical physicist John Archibald] Wheeler and the scientists who follow his lead use the term ‘participation’ they do not share [Owen] Barfield’s, [Colin] Wilson’s and others’ belief that our own volition – our will – can increase our participation. Theirs is a ‘participatory universe’ but, like earlier scientific models, it is a passive one. That our consciousness participates in the universe is for them as much a ‘law’ as is gravity. For people like Barfield, the idea is to consciously increase our participation, and hence freedom. And by consciously increasing our participation, we do not then gain greater control over the things that make up our world, but of our picture of that world, just as while I cannot control what takes place in a television programme I am watching, I can control the quality of the picture on the screen; i.e., increase or decrease the focus, clarity, and so on.

Thoughts for the Day: Thursday 4 February 2021

 

How vulnerable is the whole texture of facts in which we spend our daily life; it is always in danger of being perforated by single lies or torn to shreds by the organized lying of groups, nations, or classes... 

— Hannah Arendt

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt

Essences cannot be localized. Human thought that gets hold of them leaves the world of the particular and goes out in search of something generally meaningful, though not necessarily universally valid. Thinking always “generalizes,” squeezes out of many particulars—which, thanks to the de-sensing process, it can pack together for swift manipulation—whatever meaning may inhere. Generalization is inherent in every thought, even though that thought is insisting on the universal primacy of the particular. In other words, the “essential” is what is applicable everywhere, and this “everywhere” that bestows on thought its specific weight is spatially speaking a “nowhere.”

Time of the Magicians

Wolfram Eilenberger

Particularly so in light of the seemingly reactionary alternative origin to the age of modern philosophy Benjamin proposes. Ultimately, for him, only God—an event as divine as the phenomenon of speech itself—can supply true salvation. Just as language—as the foundation of all meaningful access to the world—cannot in Benjamin’s view be of human origin, the healing shock of the perception of truth (in “pure language”) cannot be, either. Like Wittgenstein, Benjamin insists time and again that the miracle of language cannot be explained in language. At most, its essence can be shown through particular linguistic modes of representation.

Between Past and Future

Hannah Arendt

The underlying theme of every essay in Between Past and Future is that the great Western philosophic-political tradition has been ruptured, and so definitively ruptured that its authority can never be restored.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

Fareed Zakaria

It’s strange that in America we have not learned the lesson that hasty, unplanned development can provoke a backlash. After all, the country has experienced several, most notably the 1930s Dust Bowl, the greatest ecological disaster in North American history. The event is seared in the American imagination, depicted in novels and captured in movies. The bitter tale of desperate Dust Bowl migrants inspired John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath—describing the plight of people who could be called AFarmerica’s first climate refugees. And it is a story of human action causing a natural reaction.

We just read (aloud) Grapes of Wrath this fall: a great book.

Collingwood's the Idea of History

Peter Johnson

First, in human understanding, facts do not come alive until the ideas internal to them are grasped. Second, the appropriate question to ask of human activities is not whether they are true or false, but what they mean.

The Ministry for the Future

Kim Stanley Robinson

“The rentier class.” Keynes meant by this the people who made money simply by owning something that others needed, and charging for the use of it: this is rent in its economic meaning. Rent goes to people who are not creators of value, but predators on the creation and exchange of value. So “the euthanasia of the rentier class” was Keynes’s way of trying to describe a revolution without revolution, a reform of capitalism in his time, toward whatever subsequent post-capitalist system might follow.

The Machiavellians

James Burnham

If, in the selection of members of the élite, there existed a condition of perfectly free competition, so that each individual could, without any obstacle, rise just as high in the social scale as his talents and ambition permitted, the élite could be presumed to include, at every moment and in the right order, just those persons best fitted for membership in it. Under such circumstances—which [Alfredo] Pareto seems to imagine after the analogy of the theoretical free market of classical economics, or the biological arena of the struggle for survival—society would remain dynamic and strong, automatically correcting its own weaknesses. However, a condition of this sort is never found in reality. There are always obstacles, or “ties” as Pareto calls them, that interfere with the free circulation of individuals up and down the social scale.

Cf. Collingwood on "the ruling class" in his "The Three Laws of Politics."

The Confidence Game

Maria Konnikova

Psychopathy is part of the so-called dark triad of traits. And as it turns out, the other two, narcissism and Machiavellianism, also seem to describe many of the traits we associate with the grifter.

Thoughts for the Day: Friday 29 January 2021

 

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

To survive, let alone flourish, liberal democracy needs the right’s support. It needs, that is, conservatives who accept liberal and democratic ground rules. Yet conservatism began life as an enemy of liberalism and never fully abandoned its reservations about democracy.

The Price of Peace

Zachary D. Carter

The great threat facing liberalism was not socialism but the thirst for military domination. “Soldiers and diplomatists—they are the permanent, the immortal foe.”

I disagree with Keynes, at least in part and regarding the U.S. military. I believe that most of the top brass have spoken out in commitment to democracy & the rule of law ("liberalism") and have remained committed to the American tradition of civilian control of the military and to non-interference in politics.

The Shape of Ancient Thought

Thomas McEvilley

The concept of Love (philia), in fact, figures large in Epicurean axiology. The noble nature devotes itself to wisdom and love, of which the first is a mortal god, the second immortal.

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

The peculiar political unreality and traditionalism among anti-Stalinists seems to be closely connected with the general political situation in this country. All totalitarian movements, but Bolshevism even more today than Nazism a decade ago, are completely absent from the American domestic scene. All that Bolshevism actually means today is a possible menace from abroad, helped by domestic espionage, with the result that anti-Stalinists think more and more exclusively in terms of foreign policy. Since they have no contact with and little lively interest in politics as the realm of the statesman, they have degenerated into armchair strategists who marshal the forces of the world for and against Stalin. The new emphasis on foreign policy is what chiefly distinguishes present-day anti-Stalinism from earlier forms of anti-totalitarianism like Trotskyism or anti-fascism. Although fascist groups in this country were never very strong, they existed nevertheless. The fact, moreover, that totalitarian and partially totalitarian dictatorships of the fascist brand had sometimes been helped to power by the native bourgeoisie (the significance of which was greatly overrated by all Marxists) led American anti-fascists, rightly or wrongly, to believe “it can happen here,” which naturally gave them a personal stake in the struggle and revealed to them certain possibilities for action at home.

How does Arendt's assessment of anti-Communists ("anti-Stalinists") and her assessment of U.S. politics written around 1949 compare with the current U.S. situation? It seems to me that we currently have a strong proto-fascist, anti-democratic, anti-liberal political movement at work in our country. It's a minority, but because of a variety of factors, it has an out-sized influence on policy and events.

The Wedge

Scott Carney

Focus lets us intentionally form and file symbols. With it, we temporarily hire the librarian to pull specific symbols from the paralimbic library and then escort them into the higher brain areas. Focus is a kind of wedge at the root of everything we do. It’s as easy as breathing. It allows us to take control of how we want to experience the world. However, we can’t focus all the time. Instead, we use focus to help give the limbic librarian new instructions for how to continue when we’re not paying attention.

Time of the Magicians

Wolfram Eilenberger

Against this image of continuous human progress, which inspired the whole Enlightenment, not least the philosophy of Kant, [Walter] Benjamin places the logic of disruptive intervention, later called “Chok” (shock). The quintessential Chok events, which both bring down extant entire images of the world and create new ones, are “origins” (Ur-Sprünge, literally “primal leaps”)...

Any chok about today?