Poulet's Quotes
From Georges Poulet's Studies in Human Time. Poulet's analysis tends towards paraphrase, but he digs up amazing quotes.
The soul is afraid...in seeing that each moment snatches from her the enjoyment of her good, and that what is most dear to her glides away at every moment....It is a horrible thing to feel all one's possessions flowing away.
Pascal
Let not anyone tell me that all the feelings which I attribute to men...are not felt as I describe them; for it is only in the occasion itself that it seems as if one has them or not; and not even then does anyone discover that he has them; it is just that one's actions make us suppose necessarily that one has them.Molière, Lettre sur la comédie de l’Imposteur
Woe to the man who, in the first moments of a love affair does not believe that this liaison will be eternal! Woe to him who, in the arms of the mistress he has just won, preserves a deadly prescience, and foresees that he will be able to detach himself from her.Benjamin Constant, A Mme de Krudner
I have always had such a dread of the present and of the real in my life that I have never represented in art a painful or delightful emotion while I was experiencing it, but have attempted instead to flee to the sky of poetry from that land whose brambles have, at every step, lacerated feet too fragile and perhaps too ready to bleed....Thus I always carried within me the memory of times that I had not seen, and the discontented experience of old age entered into my child's mind and filled it with mistrust and a precocious misanthropy.
Alfred de Vigny, Journal
Jeffrey Collins on Mark Lilla
From the July 18, 2008 TLS:
Several German thinkers produced by interwar Germany cast a shadow over The Stillborn God. Lilla's account of the varied political implications of anthropological, cosmological and Gnostic conceptions of God recalls the work of Eric Voegelin; his interest in the fecundity of Hegel's eschatological vision that of Karl Lowith. But the most palpable unnamed influence in Lilla's text is Carl Schmitt, the German theorist of political "decisionism" whose posthumous academic popularity has been little hampered by his Nazism. Lilla borrows Schmitt's thesis that Hobbes first introduced a hairline split between political and religious authority that was subsequently widened by Spinoza. Schmitt also influentially deployed the term "political theology" to argue that most ideologies of the state were "secularized theological concepts". The Stillborn God seems to deploy this conceptual apparatus, but with the intention of celebrating the liberal tradition that Schmitt reviled.I think this is about right, but I take the error to be one of anachronism: casting contemporary atheism back onto the earlier thinkers most amenable to it, while ignoring the issue that the secularized state that it would produce was fairly unthinkable at the time. It doesn't make Hobbes or Rousseau any less secular, but it makes the fulcrum on which Lilla's distinction pivots somewhat incoherent. There's a similarity here to the deflationary readings of Hegel, which assign to Hegel a thoroughly modern atheism which does not seem capable of transcending the present epoch.As an account of Enlightenment ideas, The Stillborn God is schematically misshapen. Categorizing canonical philosophers as friends or enemies of a "Great Separation" - at least as that notion is defined by Lilla - elides too many complexities. John Locke, for instance, did advocate a stringent "separation" of religious and political life, but he did not share the anthropologically circumscribed (and inherently atheistic) understanding of religion that supposedly undergirded Lilla's "Great Separation". By contrast, Hobbes and Spinoza exhibited the irreligion that Lilla requires, but they were not "separationists". Both advocated religious establishments, theological censorship, political controls on the clergy, and minimalist religious creeds designed to valorize state power. In crafting an autonomous political logic, they sought to co-opt (rather than sequester) the social power of religion. Lilla has domesticated Hobbes in particular, who was capable of writing: "Is not a Christian king as much a bishop now, as the heathen kings were of old?". And Rousseau hardly betrayed Hobbes on this point. Lilla's narrative, astoundingly, ignores The Social Contract, where Rousseau's account of "civil religion" pays homage to Hobbes for boldly fusing religious and political power. Likewise, there is a distinct echo of Hobbes's "Mortall God" in Hegel's spiritualized state. In short, Lilla's effort to disentangle an Anglo-American "separationist" liberalism from a German "theological" variant encounters more than a few hopeless snarls. Indeed, his polarization of these two options sets up a non shooting war of small differences.
George Packer: The Assassins' Gate
I'm watching Generation Kill and wanted some more background, so I picked up this book on Juan Cole's recommendation. Packer says he supported the war "by about the same margin that the voting public had supported Al Gore," and there is an "I wuz duped" tone to the book that helps reinforced the voices of the dozens of individuals quoted and mentioned who actually tried to improve the situation rather than give people the results they wanted, and who were marginalized or fired for their troubles.
But it also occasionally brings out a defensive side of Packer, who spends a few pages pointlessly attacking antiwar protesters for being naive.
The movement's assumptions were based on moral innocence--on an inability to imagine the horror in which Iraqis lived, and a desire for all good things to go together, for total vindication. War is evil; therefore, the prevention of war must be good.Now really, holding the protesters to some pure ideological standard is absurd. The point of protesting wars is, namely, to protest, not to propose: an act of disagreement when no other power is available, by joining up with whatever strange bedfellows are available to oppose them. Plenty of them had read Kenneth Pollack's damn book (now out-of-print but readily available for $0.01), found it unconvincing, and decided that no, war in Iraq was still a bad idea, perhaps by the margin that Gore lost to Bush. Plenty of them had supported military action in Afghanistan and/or Bosnia. Plenty of them, including many of the organizers, fairly loathed ANSWER for being pointlessly annoying and divisive. So what? All protesters have are numbers, which are still a poor substitute for actual power.
Packer's feels like a justificatory posture. If he couldn't have seen through the smokescreen, then others did not either; they opposed the war for the wrong reason, ignoring Saddam Hussein's horrible crimes and pushing pure isolationism. Against them he mentions the general populace:
And so the American people never had a chance to consider the real difficulties and costs of regime change in Iraq.Despite the best efforts of the media and the government to disguise such, there was no shortage of information out there for those who choose to look for it that described exactly these difficulties and costs. (Even Walter Pincus and Dana Priest brought some warnings to those who read past the first page of the Post.) No one should be making excuses for "the American people," and certainly not from ignorance. We all have blood on our hands, George. Own up.
RIP Thomas M. Disch
I first heard Disch's name when I was a pre-teen computer geek and his text adventure game Amnesia came out. I didn't play it until years later, but I do remember reading about how the game had squeezed the whole of Manhattan onto a single 5 1/4" disk as the game's map, including subway and bus system. How? By making New York awfully empty. Most of the street intersections are completely barren, save for occasional Chock Full O' Nuts and other food stores. These were important: Wikipedia quotes a review complaining that "the main character would collapse after an unrealistically short amount of time if he didn't eat or sleep frequently."
And yes, much of the game was wandering around this empty simulation of Manhattan as a homeless man, sleeping in an abandoned tenement, being persecuted by everyone from police to rats, and begging and washing windshields for enough money to keep yourself fed. The game made the gap between ten cents and ten dollars seem insurmountable and condemned you to a random and frustrating struggle merely to stay alive.
Later on I would realize exactly how representative this was of Disch's worldview and would come to recognize Disch's signature move of cutting down his characters right at their greatest moment of triumph. But it made Disch an ideal representative of the left-behind in America, both in the close-minded midwest and in decaying and broken cities. On Wings of Song presented the divide between the urban and rural parts of the US taken to a plausible extreme, well before it became a fashionable trope. 334 presents, with more sympathy than was usual for Disch, the failure of New York to provide for its indigenous people. And I still rate The MD as a very modern fable about technology and medicine, as well as one of the better allegories of AIDS. And his best short stories--"Descending," "102 H-Bombs," "Dangerous Flags," "Slaves," "The Asian Shore," "Angouleme," etc.--are some of the best in the genre and easily some of the best of the new wave.
Many right-wing sci-fi authors use cruelty to show the unstoppable forces of history, how the strong survive and the weak perish, and so on and so forth. Disch's cruelty sometimes took similar forms, but he always treated its effects on the personal level and made sure that no one could walk away feeling good about those left aside on the road of "progress." In this I do not know his better.
(Also see John Sladek's piece on Disch. Disch and Sladek also collaborated on the odd, indescribable non-scifi novel Black Alice.)
Sellars on Kant
When Kant insists that we ought to act from a sense of duty he is not making the absurd mistakes which have often been attributed to him. He is simply repeating the point with which he opens the argument of the Fundamental Principles of Metaphysic of Morals, that the only unconditional good is a good will. By this he means that the only state of a person which is unconditionally good from a moral point of view is the disposition to act from a sense of duty. He has two points in mind: (a) Whereas action from any motive can have bad results, the sense of duty alone is such that only by virtue of ignorance does it have bad results. Action from other motives even where ignorance is absent can lead to bad results. Thus the sense of duty is the only motive which has a direct conceptual tie to the categorically valid end of moral conduct. In this sense a good will is a categorical ought-to-be. (b) Although the general welfare is also an end in itself, a categorical ought-to-be, the ought-to-be of the happiness of any given individual is, Kant believes, conditional on his having a good will.It's still hard for me to see how this is not question-begging or even circular. Sellars wants to bring in specificity to the data on which the good will acts, but this poses the problem of whether the good will obtains its disposition from this data (in which case the will is not unconditioned), or whether the disposition is innate and/or noumenal, in which case the will still has the capacity to act in a state of complete ignorance and still be acting from the sense of duty.Wilfrid Sellars, Form and Content in Ethical Theory
It was Sellars's goal to merge scientific reality with phenomenological experience by offering a constructivist account of how our conceptual knowledge of the latter emerges without appealing to any pie-in-the-sky Platonism. Since Sellars's problem was not with a priori knowledge in the Kantian sense per se (whether he would term this knowledge is a different question entirely), he would not have to necessarily be opposed to a naturalistic conception of morality, i.e., one that could fit within the scientific image. This is why he can say that for Kant, "The fallibility of moral philosophy is not the fallibility of empirical induction," because morality need not be obtained from empirical induction. Consequently, Kant ends up doing a bit of Sellars's work for him if Sellars can accept that the good will obtained in such a way fulfills the criteria required for a moral authority.
Montaigne: On Democritus and Heraclitus
Democritus et Heraclitus ont esté deux philosophes, desquels le premier trouvant vaine et ridicule l'humaine condition, ne sortoit en public, qu'avec un visage moqueur et riant : Heraclitus, ayant pitié et compassion de cette mesme condition nostre, en portoit le visage continuellement triste, et les yeux chargez de larmes.(Translation available here.)alterJ'ayme mieux la premiere humeur, non par ce qu'il est plus plaisant de rire que de pleurer : mais par ce qu'elle est plus desdaigneuse, et qu'elle nous condamne plus que l'autre : et il me semble, que nous ne pouvons jamais estre assez mesprisez selon nostre merite. La plainte et la commiseration sont meslées à quelque estimation de la chose qu'on plaint : les choses dequoy on se moque, on les estime sans prix. Je ne pense point qu'il y ait tant de malheur en nous, comme il y a de vanité, ny tant de malice comme de sotise : nous ne sommes pas si pleins de mal, comme d'inanité : nous ne sommes pas si miserables, comme nous sommes vils.
Ridebat quoties à limine moverat unum
Protuleratque pedem, flebat contrarius alter.Juvenal
Iannis Xenakis: Free Stochastic Music By Computer
Category Mistake!
It seems to me that none of these interpretations [of quantum theory] is at all satisfactory, and in the gap left by the failure to find a sensible way to understand quantum reality there has grown a pathological industry of pseudo-scientific gobbledegook. Claims that entanglement is consistent with telepathy, that parallel universes are scientific truths, that consciousness is a quantum phenomena abound in the New Age sections of bookshops but have no rational foundation. Physicists may complain about this, but they have only themselves to blame.I am far too ignorant to say how plausible Coles's thesis is, other than that acausality doesn't seem any less plausible than decoherence or Everett's multiple-worlds. And it has the side effect of delegitimizing one of the most overused scientific metaphors of our time. (The most egregious example offhand being Michael Frayn's Copenhagen.)But there is one remaining possibility for an interpretation that has been unfairly neglected by quantum theorists despite—or perhaps because of—the fact that it is the closest of all to commonsense. This view that quantum mechanics is just an incomplete theory, and the reason it produces only a probabilistic description is that it does not provide sufficient information to make definite predictions. This line of reasoning has a distinguished pedigree, but fell out of favour after the arrival of Bell’s theorem and related issues. Early ideas on this theme revolved around the idea that particles could carry ‘hidden variables’ whose behaviour we could not predict because our fun- damental description is inadequate. In other words two apparently identical electrons are not really identical; something we cannot directly measure marks them apart. If this works then we can simply use only probability theory to deal with inferences made on the basis of our inadequate information. After Bell’s work, however, it became clear that these hidden variables must possess a very peculiar property if they are to describe our quantum world. The property of entanglement requires the hidden variables to be non-local. In other words, two electrons must be able to communicate their values faster than the speed of light. Putting this conclusion together with relativity leads one to deduce that the chain of cause and effect must break down: hidden variables are therefore acausal. This is such an unpalatable idea that it seems to many physicists to be even worse than the alternatives, but to me it seems entirely plausible that the causal structure of space-time must break down at some level. On the other hand, not all ‘incomplete’ interpretations of quantum theory involve hidden variables.
One can think of this category of interpretation as involving an epistemological view of quantum mechanics. The probabilistic nature of the theory has, in some sense, a subjective origin. It represents deficiencies in our state of knowledge. The alternative Copenhagen and Many-Worlds views I discussed above differ greatly from each other, but each is characterized by the mistaken desire to put quantum probability in the realm of ontology.
Peter Coles, From Cosmos to Chaos
Speaking of Apt Covers...
Isn't this the best cover for a philosophy book...ever? (This volume concerns the Tractatus only.)
(Okay, maybe it would be better if everything in the painting was a word in the shape of the corresponding thing, like "TREE" in the shape of a tree, but this is still pretty good.)
John Williams: Stoner
Whatever my reservations about the New York Review of Books, if it subsidizes reissues of things like this, I pardon its sins. Extra points for choosing such an apt cover painting to implicitly portray its hapless professor hero:
And here is Stoner speaking:
Stoner looked across the room, out of the window, trying to remember. "The three of us were together, and he said--something about the University being an asylum, a refuge from the world, for the dispossessed, the crippled. But he didn't mean Walker. Dave would have thought of Walker as--as the world. And we can't let him in. For if we do, we become like the world, just as unreal, just as...The only hope we have is to keep him out."Walker is an ignorant, smooth-talking, careerist academic, and there's little separating his portrayal in this book (from 1965, but taking place mostly in the first half of the century) from these sorts of people today. Stoner is an impractical dreamer, a farmboy who goes to a local college and discovers he loves literature, and so does his graduate work at the same school and then gets a professorship there. He makes two mistakes: he marries the wrong woman, and he makes the wrong enemy in his department. These are big mistakes, and he pays big for them.
I cannot recall any other academic novel that treats its subject material with such unremitting gravity. The standard model of an academic novel is to either indulge in high melodrama (Mary McCarthy, Iris Murdoch) or to make light of the intellectual pretenses of its characters (Kinsley Amis's overrated Lucky Jim, Malcolm Bradbury's far funnier Stepping Westward). Williams's approach seems to have been to adopt the social realist approach of George Gissing and Sinclair Lewis's more sober moments and apply it to the incongruous and hermetic world of a university. Consequently, he treats the small events of Stoner's life with a sense of real consequence, as though they were matters of life and death. And so they become.
After his mistakes, Stoner is a defeated man, and it takes him years to recover. But what saves the novel from being just an exercise in misery is that Stoner does get his triumph. He fights against the inertial decline of his life, and he wins. It is, objectively speaking, a small triumph, but on the terms that Williams has set, it validates his existence without qualification. The novel is a passage from ideals that cannot be fulfilled to a non-tragic view of life, and it's summarized best in this passage:
In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age, he began to know that it was neither a stae of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as an act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.I don't mean to downplay the brutally accurate portrayals of academic politics and fleeting trends, which feel absolutely au courant, but the novel would not stand out as it does if it did not treat its subject matter with the same respect and humility with which Stoner himself treats literature and teaching.
