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