Thoughts for the Day: Wednesday 13 January 2021

Time of the Magicians

Wolfram Eilenberger

If we look more closely, Wittgenstein’s entire philosophical oeuvre, and especially his later work, is run through with metaphors and allegories of liberation, of exits and escapes.

Natural Born Heroes

Christopher McDougall

And what Plutarch taught them is this: Heroes care. True heroism, as the ancients understood, isn’t about strength, or boldness, or even courage. It’s about compassion.

Collingwood's the Idea of History

Peter Johnson

The historical imagination is central to history, but not in quite the same way as it is to knowledge in general. What is imagined need not be wholly fanciful. It may be something as hard-nosed as pondering the cause of my car engine failing.

The Wedge

Scott Carney

Claustrophobia conveys bad feelings about the environment and demands that the conscious mind come up with a solution. The conscious mind can override the sensation until the sensory system decides to make itself unbearable. It becomes a conversation between consciousness and sensory-ness. And this is an insight into comfort and homeostasis.

Plato's Revenge

William Ophuls

Liberty has become license, and the social basis of the modern, liberal state has eroded away.

Thoughts for the Day: Tuesday 12 January 2021

 

Lost Knowledge of the Imagination

Gary Lachman

[W]e need imagination to grasp reality – that part of it immediately before us, and its wider horizons that exceed the reach of our physical senses – that we can speak of a ‘knowledge’ of the imagination. Imagination has a noetic character; it is the source and medium of our other way of knowing. It shows us aspects and dimensions of reality that we would miss without it – and which much, if not most of official Western culture has missed since the new way of knowing became dominant.

Plato's Revenge

William Ophuls

Participation involves an I-Thou relationship with creation—that is, a personal relationship characterized by immediacy and intimacy, as opposed to an impersonal, disconnected I-It relationship that keeps reality at arm’s length. The savage participates in nature to such a degree that reality blazes with intrinsic meaning. Life is directly perceived to be vital and sacred, as in Blake’s poetic vision of tigers burning brightly in the forests of the night. The myths of primal societies are therefore auxiliary, mere reminders of what their inhabitants experience directly, immediately, and continuously—that they are connected to all of creation . . . .

Participation [as a way of knowing] is urged by David Abram, Owen Barfield, and Giambattista Vico (in the form of “poetic wisdom”) as well a number of others . . . .

Illuminations

Walter Benjamin

“One of the most remarkable characteristics of human nature,” writes Lotze, “is, alongside so much selfishness in specific instances, the freedom from envy which the present displays toward the future.”

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

Yet Nazi policy, realized best in the phony world of propaganda, was well served by the fabrication. Had the Nazis been content merely to draw up a bill of indictment against the Jews and propagandize the notion that there are subhuman and superhuman peoples, they would hardly have succeeded in convincing common sense that the Jews were subhuman. Lying was not enough. In order to be believed, the Nazis had to fabricate reality itself and make Jews look subhuman. So that even today, when faced by the atrocity films, common sense will say: “But don’t they look like criminals?” Or, if incapable of grasping an innocence beyond virtue and vice, people will say: “What terrible things these Jews must have done to have the Germans do this to them!”

The Price of Peace

Zachary D. Carter

The General Theory [by John Mayard Keynes] was a book about, among other things, inequality and social progress. The central problems of the twentieth century, Keynes argued, were best solved by alleviating inequality. Enterprise and economic growth were driven not by the unique genius and vast fortunes of the very rich but by the purchasing power of the masses, which created markets for new ideas. To put people to work, governments needed to create systems of support for the poor and the middle class, not new favors for the rich.

Breath

James Nestor

The nagging need to breathe is activated from a cluster of neurons called the central chemoreceptors, located at the base of the brain stem. When we’re breathing too slowly and carbon dioxide levels rise, the central chemoreceptors monitor these changes and send alarm signals to the brain, telling our lungs to breathe faster and more deeply. When we’re breathing too quickly, these chemoreceptors direct the body to breathe more slowly to increase carbon dioxide levels. This is how our bodies determine how fast and often we breathe, not by the amount of oxygen, but by the level of carbon dioxide. Chemoreception is one of the most fundamental functions of life.

Thoughts for the Day: Monday 11 January 2021

 

1984

George Orwell

And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. “Who controls the past,” ran the Party slogan, “controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. “Reality control,” they called it; in Newspeak, “doublethink.”

I and Thou, Trans. Kaufmann

Martin Buber and Walter Kaufmann

Feelings one “has”; love occurs. Feelings dwell in man, but man dwells in his love. This is no metaphor but actuality: love does not cling to an I, as if the You were merely its “content” or object; it is between I and You.

Dao De Jing

Roger Ames, David Hall

In governing effectively, coercion is perceived as impoverishing and dehumanizing. So the consummate political model in Daoism, corresponding to the consummate experience itself, is described as wuwei (“noncoercive activity”) and ziran (“self-so-ing,” or “what is spontaneously so”).

Apologies to the Grandchldren

William Ophuls

“On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog”

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.

The University Bookman on John Lukacs

John Lukacs, Russell Kirk, Gerald Russello, and Peter Edman

For words are not mere tools, neither are they mere symbols. They are representative realities; they remind us of the inevitable connection between imagination and reality. . . . The corruption of speech involves the corruption of truth, and the corruption of words means the debasement of speech which is the debasement of our most human and historic gifts. [John Lukacs]

The Force of Character

James Hillman

Jonathan Swift, “On the Difficulty of Knowing One’s Self,” says you must have a reflective mirror to achieve self-knowledge: “A Man can no more know his own Heart than he can know his own Face, any other Way than by Reflection.” For Swift this reflection comes from the regard of others.

Beyond the Robot

Gary Lachman

Meaning perception is our ability to step back and see something as a whole, to see the forest, and not only the trees. Immediacy perception, as its name suggests, is our ability to focus on individual details, what is immediately before us. It is like a searchlight. It has a powerful beam, yet it has one problem: “it can only focus on one thing at a time,” hence Hume’s failure to see the connection between cause and effect.

Thoughts for the Day: Saturday 9 January 2021 (Three Days After the U.S. Capital Was Sacked by the Barbarians)

 

I've been off my game for a couple days, distracted by the sacking of the U.S. Capital by the barbarians. I'm hoping no such further distractions come along. Hoping. 

Kinds of Power

James Hillman

The supremacy of a dogma and the single aim of party line, of aggrandizement of the family or the junta of colonels, count more than the exemplar of tyranny in a single person. Absolutism is not a ruthless ruler, but a ruthless rule—and this we don’t easily remember, for our minds fix upon the figures of czars and crime lords. These images serve to keep the danger of tyranny projected onto Stalin, Genghis Khan and Al Capone, protecting us from the absolutism that can rule the psyche in the guise of fundamentalism in religion, bottom-lineism in business and progress in the sciences.

The Price of Peace

Zachary D. Carter

[M]uch of Keynes’ enthusiastic disposition came from his enduring faith in the power of ideas. He had been thinking about the economic miseries of the postwar world for a decade and had come to the conclusion that global calamity was a result of simple intellectual error. The problems were great, but they had straightforward and essentially painless solutions.

Was the Great Depression a "simple intellectual error?" Hard to believe, but had all of the wealth and productive capacity in the world suddenly disappeared?

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt 

The manifestation of the wind of thought is not knowledge; it is the ability to tell right from wrong, beautiful from ugly. And this, at the rare moments when the stakes are on the table, may indeed prevent catastrophes, at least for the self.

Crises of the Republic

Hannah Arendt

No one in his right senses can believe—as certain German student groups recently theorized—that only when the government has been forced “to practice violence openly” will the rebels be able “to fight against this shit society (Scheissgesellschaft) with adequate means and destroy it.” (Quoted in Der Spiegel, February 10, 1969, p. 30.) This linguistically (though hardly intellectually) vulgarized new version of the old Communist nonsense of the thirties, that the victory of fascism was all to the good for those who were against it, is either sheer play-acting, the “revolutionary” variant of hypocrisy, or testifies to the political idiocy of “believers.” Except that forty years ago it was Stalin’s deliberate pro-Hitler policy and not just stupid theorizing that stood behind it.

Seems relevant, do you think?

The Wedge

Scott Carney

It just takes the slightest effort to consciously hijack control and determine for ourselves how deeply we breathe, how often, and even stop it altogether for long stretches until our bodies have no choice but to wrest back control when we pass out. This makes breathwork the perfect wedge between our autonomic and somatic systems. And yet the control switch between consciousness and unconsciousness is so perfectly smooth that we don’t always notice what a feat it is.

The Folly of Fools

Robert Trivers

But psychologists have shown that power corrupts our mental processes almost at once. When a feeling of power is induced in people, they are less likely to take others' viewpoint and more likely to center their thinking on themselves. The result is a reduced ability to comprehend how others see, think, and feel. Power, among other things, induces blindness toward others.

Personal Knowledge

Michael Polanyi

[H]ence also the coining of the new term I have used for my title: Personal Knowledge. The two words may seem to contradict each other: for true knowledge is deemed impersonal, universally established, objective. But the seeming contradiction is resolved by modifying the conception of knowing.

My Favorite Books of 2020

My Favorite Books of 2020

The following is a review of the favorite books that I completed last year. Some  started the year before, or even earlier, but they go in for this year if I completed them this year. And, of course, I started some books in 2020 that I've yet to finish. I include most of the books that I read last year. There are two reasons for this. One, I read even more news articles and essays than usual to keep up with current events (and my goodness it was a busy year on that account). And, two, I'm a very selective reader. I usually won't start a book unless I'm confident that I'll be getting something worthwhile out of taking the time and effort to read it. Most of the books I will cite I've reviewed, although a couple of late reads haven't been reviewed yet and I don't tend to review well-known fiction. 

So, on to the list. 

Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption

by 

Bryan Stevenson

This was an outstanding book, at once uplifting and horrifying. Uplifting as we read about Stevenson and his colleagues and clients struggling for justice. Horrifying as I read about the South (mostly) in the 1990s maintaining a legal system that seems little different than of Jim Crow days. One would have thought that the world of To Kill a Mockingbird would be long past, but not with many of Stevenson's cases. 

The Principles of History and Other Writings in Philosophy of History

by 

R.G. Collingwood,

 

William H. Dray (Editor),

 

W.J. Van der Dussen (Editor)

Okay, first, I read this book quickly before this, but this was a careful and complete reading. And I won't bore you with details, as this is clearly a work of limited interest to most people. But if you've any interest in thinking very deeply about history (and you've already read his The Idea of History), then this book is a must. 

Earning the Rockies: How Geography Shapes America's Role in the World

by 

Robert D. Kaplan

This book now holds a special resonance with me. When I read it in early 2020, I had no idea that C and I would be moving later that in the year from Brooklyn to Colorado, now living where we can see Pike's Peak out our front windows. This made Kaplan's road trip (which continued on to San Diego) all the more poignant. But even if you don't make this trip, like all of Kaplan's work, it's a deep reflection on the State of America and the world. He combines a journalist's eye with a scholar's learning. My review. 

Secret Body: Erotic and Esoteric Currents in the History of Religions

by 

Jeffrey J. Kripal

This book, like the other books by Kripal that I've read, provides the intellectual equivalentof a roller-coaster ride. The book revolves around Kripal's personal story,which begings with him as a devout Catholic kid from a small town in southeast Nebraska, then becoming a monk, then becoming a scholar of Hinduism, then a chronicler of Esalen, and then becoming an explorer of the fringes of reality in contemporary America, which includes UFOs and other weird (paranormal) phenomenon. And he approaches all of these topics as an extraordinary scholar-explorer. My review. 

The Return of Holy Russia: Apocalyptic History, Mystical Awakening, and the Struggle for the Soul of the World

by 

Gary Lachman

I'm an established fan of Lachman's work, so my appreciation of this work should come as no surprise. Lachman isn't a scholar, at least in the traditional sense of holding an academic post or by concentrating his inquiries on one limited topic. Perhaps he can best be described as an intellectual journalist whose main interest centers on aspects of the Western intellectual and cultural tradition that are no longer (or never where) on the center stage of Western intellectual life. In this book, he takes an intellectual journey east to Russia. For those, like me, who held only a partial and fragmented sense of Russian history, culture, and thought, this book is a great boon. Lachman, with his usual patience, thoroughness, and lucidity, provides a grand tour of Russian thought and culture from its Byzantine and Viking roots up to the present. My review. 

Men in Dark Times

by 

Hannah Arendt 

Even bum times have some rewards. One upside for me was that I took advantage of a "pandemic" offer that opened up the Hannah Arendt virtual reading group to all comers.

(It's sponsored by the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College.) This was the first work that we discussed when I joined. I'd read some of this book before, but not all of it. It's a book of biographical essays about a wide array of individuals: Karl Japters, Pope John XXIII, Isak Dinesen, Bertolt Brecht, and others. What more need I say: it's Hannah Arendt! 

New Leviathan: Or Man, Society, Civilization, and Barbarism (Revised)

by R.G. Collingwood & 

David Boucher (Editor)

This wasn't my first reading of The New Leviathan, but my first reading of this edition that Collingwood scholar David Boucher edited. It includes Boucher's introduction and some additional material. But one needs no excuse to read and re-read this great work. Its continued relevancy is apparent to anyone looking around our world today. My review.  

Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

by 

James Nestor

Breath? We all breathe, so what's the big deal? Read this book and you'll find out. Like my choice of Scott Carney's book (below), Nestor is a hands-on investigative journalist who not only researches his topic, but he also dives into experiments and travels to out-of-the-ordinary places (such as the catacombs of Paris) to make his story vivid and complete. 

The Golden Day: A Study in American Literature and Culture

by 

Lewis Mumford 

Lewis Mumford is one of the great humanists of the twentieth century and a great explorer and expositor of the American experience. This early work about some of the greats of American literature and letters is a wonderful appreciation of those who shaped the American experience with their reflections, writers such as Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Melville (whom Mumford helped rescue from obscurity). My review. 

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism

by 

Hannah Arendt,

 

Jerome Kohn (Editor)J

These are the early essays of Hannah Arendt that run from her days as a young scholar in Germany (with the prologue of a television interview in Germany from the early 1960s) on through 1954, shortly after she'd burst onto the American scene with her work The Origins of Totalitarianism. A must for any serious student of Arendt; i.e., anyone who wants to think deeply about politics. Alas, no review, too much that could be said! (Lame excuse.) 

Collingwood's The Idea of History: A Reader's Guide

by 

Peter Johnson

Perhaps you're not ready for a dive straight into Collingwood's The Idea of History, or you want a considered overview and assessment (as I did), then this is an excellent choice. My review. 

Mavericks, Mystics, and Misfits: Americans Against the Grain

by 

Arthur Hoyle 

One perk of throwing one's book reviews onto the internet, not only on my blog, but also onto Goodreads and Amazon, is that occasionally an author will contact me to ask if I would read his or her book and share a review. If the book looks like it would suit me, I agree to do so, and this book is one such instance. And a happy one indeed. Hoyle gathers a series of biographical essays about a wide array of American characters, beginning with the early American divine Roger Williams to persons living among us today. The diversity of these characters (some known to me beforehand, some not) is counter-balanced by the sense that they are all Americans and a part of our shared American experience. The book provided an enjoyable and valuable read. My review. 

The Wedge: Evolution, Consciousness, Stress and the Key to Human Resilience

by 

Scott Carney

Like James Nestor (Breath, above), Scott Carney is a hands-on investigative journalist who takes a thourough and intriguing look at the interactions of the human body and mind. A fun and informative read as Carney, like Nestor, travels far and wide to investigate his topic, and, like Nestor, he undertakes some exciting (and risky) ventures to provide first-hand insights into his topics. All in all, fun and instructive. My review.

Angle of Repose

by 

Wallace Stegner 

For a long time, C has described this novel as one of her favorites. So, as we contemplated our long trek in a rental truck from Brooklyn to Colorado Springs this past June, the audio version of this novel received a nomination for a listening project and was so selected. And what a great choice it was! We thought something that related to the American West would be most appropriate given that we were moving to the Mountain West. This novel provides a wonderful tale that flips back and forth between the late nineteenth century and the 1970s. Thanks to C for tolerating (nay, enjoying) another trip through this novel. No review from me, but plenty of takes are available of what is perhaps the best work of this outstanding novelist. 

Commanding Hope: The Power We Have to Renew a World in Peril

by 

Thomas Homer-Dixon  

In September I learned that Thomas Homer-Dixon was releasing a new book, and I bought it as soon as it was available. I'd read his book The Upside of Down and gotten through a chunk of his The Ingenuity Gap (see below). I've also read many shorter pieces and watched presentations by Homer-Dixon. He is, for my money, one of the most important voices addressing issues surrounding climate change and environmental degradation. In this book,  Homer-Dixon asks--in a very deep and considered way--whether we can realistically hope to change the disastrous course upon which our civilization remains intent upon. Homer-Dixon trained as a political scientist, but his scope of expertise reaches into the natural sciences and the humanities. It's a bracing but also hopeful book. 

Prairie Nocturne: A Novel

by

Ivan Doig  

C and I decided to read to each other after we finished The Angle of Repose. This book, by another writer centered in the American West, Ivan Doig, is set in the 1920s. It's a fine tale. It's at the end of a trilogy, but that wasn't any impediment to our enjoying it. 

One of Ours

by 

Willa Cather 

Another read-aloud. We'd read aloud Cather's My Antonia years ago, and enjoyed it. In fact, C has read most of Cather's works, but not this one. So into it  we went. This one begins in rural western Nebraska before the First World War and runs into the war (in more than one way). It was quite an engaging story centered on Claude, a young man coming of age and trying to find his place in life. The tale moves from the Nebraska prairie to New York harbor to a troopship crossing the Atlantic to the battlefields and villages of France. I was deeply impressed by Cather's mastery of so many characters and settings. An outstanding work.  

The Ingenuity Gap: How Can We Solve the Problems of the Future?

by 

Thomas Homer-Dixon

As I mentioned above about Homer-Dixon's Commanding Hope, I'd started his The Ingenuity Gap long ago but never finished it. This year I took the opportunity to read it all the way through. It is worth it, to say the least. Alas, it's insights recorded a generation ago are still all too relevant to the world today. My review. 

The Grapes of Wrath

by 

John Steinbeck

Another read aloud, and a great one. I'd read some Steinbeck before (The Pearl, in high school--it's a wonder that I can remember that far back), but nothing since then, so I really only know him by reputation. As it turns out, his reputation is well-earned. Not only is this a powerful, deeply moving tale, but the writing is quite extraordinary. In one brief chapter, Steinbeck describes a turtle crossing the road with the attention to detail of a great painter. And, of course, he moves his readers with the pathos and tribulations of his characters and the horrible injustices that they face. It's a portrait of America, complex and disturbing. A great book. 

The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World

by 

Barry Gewen 

One of the great traditions about the end of each year are lists of best books chosen by different folks. This book, and the following two, come from these lists. Thse three books allowed a strong finish to the non-fiction reading year. This book centers on Henry Kissinger, a figure who's been both honored and reviled, but who can't be ignored. Gewen delves into Kissinger's role and decision in Chile and Vietnam, but the most intriguing part of the book is Kissinger's relation to other Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany who thought deeply about politics.  All were exiled from their native country (Germany) and all of them eventually settled and worked in the U.S.  The three, Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, and Hans Morgenthau became seminal figures in American political thinking. (But only Morgenthau had a close relationship with Kissinger). An outstanding work of intellectual history. My review. 

The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes

by 

Zachary D. Carter

I described the preceding book as "an outstanding work of intellectual history." So is this work and the following one. A trifecta! In this work (review forthcoming), Carter traces the career of John Maynard Keynes and his most noteworthy intellectual progeny. One would not have thought it possible, but my appreciation for Keynes increased significantly having read this work. 

Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy

by 

Wolfram Eilenberger

The final entry for this year and another strong contender. These four individuals were the giants of German philosophy in the period from 1919 to 1929, and they taught or  influenced some of the most important thinkers who came after them. I came away with a better understanding of the project of each of them. I now enjoy a greater apprecation of Wittgenstein; I still think Heidegger a stinker and Benjamin an enigma (I still don't grasp what others find valuable in him); and I have a new found interest in Cassirer. Cassirer is the oldest, most "bourgeois," and traditional of the four, and the one of the four whom I definitely intend to read more of. I suppose that says a lot about me. I suppose that I'm a philosophical fuddy-duddy, but so be it. I y'am what I y'am. 

In reviewing my list, especially the last three books and my continued reading of Arendt and Collilngwood, highlights my interest in the period from the First World War to the conclusion of the Second World War. I'll be reading more of thinkers from this period and more about this period. This was a period of social, political, economic, cultural, and intellectual upheaval. Sound familiar? As I write this, the U.S. Capital is under siege from a mob. (History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme. A cliche? Perhaps, but some truth in it, nevertheless.) 

Now, for my top picks. In fiction, The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, with a strong showing by Stegner and Cather. 

For the non-fiction, I will exclude consideration any works by Arendt or Collingwood, as they are sui generis. And I will avoid anything else too nerdy and pick something that most folks might read. Thus, the award goes to James Nestor's Breath, with Scott Carney's The Wedge a strong second and Bryan Stevenson's Just Mercy also a strong contender. You can't go wrong with any of these. If you want to take a deeper dive, read Thomas Homer-Dixon. 

So, hope you all had a great reading year and on to 2021!