Dear Reader,
I haven't forgotten about my blog here, but I've been distracted by (1) six deaths in my family in six months, and (2) my work-related blog, the VISTA Expertise Weblog. That blog for now and the immediate future is consuming most of my writing energy. Although it's mainly VISTA-related, there's an unavoidable amount of philosophy to it given its author, so you may find it interesting.
I'll resume my more directly philosophic explorations in the not-too-distant future. Until then, be well and struggle for wisdom.
Yours truly,
Rick
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Friday, March 13, 2009
Sleepless
Dear Reader,
Ironically, for a man from a race of sleepwalkers, I can't sleep tonight.
My Grandma, Ann Saling, died a week ago, and we held her service two days ago. The service was a trainwreck, horror after horror with a few grace notes mixed in whose contrast sharpened the pain. It was so bad I was actually struck dumb when it was my turn to speak, and even now I cannot write about the details. I've been a fan of horror films all my life and watch the most astonishing fictional horrors, yet now I feel like a Lovecraftian protagonist who collapses in the face of true horror. Nihilism is so much worse a violation than death or mere grotesquerie.
Although I spent yesterday shying away from the trauma of the previous day, distracting myself, I find myself tonight unable to stop replaying the worst of it when I should be sleeping. After two sleepless hours I gave up trying and thought to fall back on my old comfort of writing to achieve emotional alchemy.
Rereading my last entry, from October, about pathei mathos, I found that it still rang true to me. Moreover, in the depths of pain now, stripped of abstract intellectual imagining by the direct grip of experience, I feel its truth more profoundly now than when I wrote it.
Why pathei mathos? Why do we only question ourselves under duress?
I think the problem lies in our mimesis, which I believe to be the essence of human nature, the very heart of our species. Intense mimcry seems to be the strange attractor that organizes all the anomalies and general weirdness of this species into a coherent pattern. It is an evil joke to call ourselves Homo sapiens, wise man, when wisdom is the surest thing we are not. Homo mimesis names the core of us better. For man all the world is indeed a stage, and the best actors are in the audience, playing the roles of their lives.
To fully immerse ourselves in our roles we must believe in our performances, which requires the complete shutdown of our critical faculties where perspective on ourselves is concerned. Great performances require commitment; one cannot be convincing and self-conscious simultaneously. Thus our mimesis and our profound resistance to self-scrutiny depend on each other, evolved to reinforce one another and create one of those powerful harmonic feedback loops evolution loves.
The more clearly we look at this nexus of drives within our nature, the more singers we find contributing decisively to this harmony.
Consider the psychological effect of acclimation, in which any stimulus, no matter how anomalous or unpleasant, can be adapted to by the human mind until we no longer notice it, like how sanitation workers get used to the odors associated with their job. Acclimation helps counteract the disruptive effect of sudden jumps in pain, ensuring that we sink back into our roles as we become used to the new conditions rather than breaking out of our mimesis completely, likewise ensuring that any wakefulness from our sleepwalking through life, our self-unconsciousness, is kept as brief as possible. That is, evolution's priorities for us placed mimetic immersion above disruptive wisdom as a survival trait.
We usually think of acclimation as the balm that soothes our pain, that allows us to adapt to it, but for that very reason it is also the chloroform we place over our own mouths whenever we become momentarily conscious, protecting us from insights and ensuring our operation can continue.
Or as another example of a powerful drive within us that makes the most sense when considered as a contributor to our essential mimesis, consider our species's notorious dearth of instincts compared to other mammals. Instincts place limits on a species's available range of behaviors by hardwiring them for specific behaviors. The more instincts you have, the less range you have as an actor, because the more of your behavior you cannot alter to fit your role. The greatest actors would have to have the fewest instincts (using the term here strictly biologically, not in the colloquial jargon of acting itself, in which instincts are—typical of English—something entirely different than instincts in biology (hardwired behavior); acting instincts are closer to intuition or the capacity to be true to the character you are playing, and these are the not the kind of thing our species lacks).
A third drive that contributes to this harmonic is the remarkable capacity for doing things unprecedented in the history of evolution, or doing things to an unprecedented extent. Sure other animals use tools, but none as wildly and intensely as we do. Sure others change their environment, but none as wildly and extensively as we do. Sure, other animals use language, but none so wildly and diversely as we do. The list goes on forever, because our capacity to do the unexpected does. This seemingly infinite, Protean malleability permits us to completely lose ourselves not only in precedented roles but unprecedented ones as well. That is, we can not only organize ourselves around any natural roles for which there are precedents, we can also organize ourselves around unnatural and artificial roles without precedent. The dynamic range in human cultures far exceeds the behavioral range of any other species, which is necessary for a species organized above all around imitating anything.
Each of these harmonic factors reinforces each of the others. Our wild dynamic range would not be possible without our capacity to acclimate to anything, however alien it might be at first. Thus, a stable civilization can be created around the idea of (among other things) tearing the hearts out of other people on top of enormous artificial mounds oriented to the stars. Likewise, our wild dynamic range would not be possible if our behavior were constrained by an evolved system of instinctive behavior. You don't find wolves deciding to organize themselves around the building of monuments to their own dead, because wolf instincts create an intricate and consistent worldwide wolf culture that constrains their behavior within functional and sustainable limits, whereas humanity's poverty of instincts permits us to organize around almost anything.
Finally (for this essay) a fourth example of an essential human characteristic that powerfully harmonizes with all these others organized around mimesis is neotony, an evolutionary principle first brought to my attention by Desmond Morris's The Naked Ape. Neotony is a process by which a new species evolves from an old one by interrupting its normal course of maturation to prevent adult characteristics from developing, that is, by retaining childlike characteristics into adulthood. Morris noted that many of our species's differences from the other apes are almost entirely explained in terms of neotony. Young apes have less hair than adult apes, and we have less hair than other primates. Young primates have larger heads relative to the size of their bodies, and so do we. Young animals have more generic, less specialized bodies and so do we. Young mammals are more social, and so are we. Young mammals are more curious and so are we. Young animals learn new behavior more easily, and so do we.
Overall, our species is an ideal case study in how neotony can turn one species into another, and I have long recognized that it is pivotal to understanding what we are, but now look at neotony in terms of the components of our essential behavioral harmony and its importance increases. Many of the instincts animals develop are not present at birth but instead activate later in the development process, so by interrupting that process neotony would cause these instincts never to develop in the new species; if humanity is one of the most intensely neotonous species, then we would expect to find a correspondingly extreme reduction in the number of instincts present in an adult human being, which we do. Our extreme capacity for unprecedented behavior is most closely associated in other animals with play, curiosity, and learning, all features more typical of young animals than of adults, except in human beings, who retain this childlike capacity for highly variable behavior into adulthood. Our capacity for mimicry is just the neotonous retention of learning-by-example that all young mammals do taken to an extreme because it is never switched off in adulthood as it is in other animals.
Neotony, extreme behavioral range, instinctual poverty, acclimation, self-unconsciousness, and mimesis together (along with other harmonizing human drives) create in human beings an extremely effective talent for mimicry, a paradoxical combination of extreme flexibility in the choice of behavioral models combined with an intense commitment to whatever roles we find ourselves in.
Our essential mimesis makes us very good at what we have evolved to do, but extraordinarily bad at wisdom. We are anti-evolved against genuine introspection, though we have the capacity to imitate the surface of it trivially. We have the capacity to be convinced by ourselves and our own roles, but almost no capacity to genuinely question ourselves or even to perceive ourselves in context, since that would interfere with perceiving ourselves according to the roles we have adopted.
In short, by means of our most essential survival traits we must and will subvert any chance of breaking out of our perpetual dream states. By our commitment to our roles, by being convinced of our own authenticity and our own understanding of who and what we are, we are guaranteed to be unable to question those roles, that authenticity, or that understanding, and without such questioning wisdom is quite impossible (though the imitation of the surface of it, the intense desire to be thought wise, the aping of wisdom, are not only possible but inevitable for a mimic).
That is why our only opportunities for advancing in wisdom can occur during those all-too-brief windows (1) after a sharp, unprecedented pain has shaken up our worlds so strongly that we groggily awake from ourselves, and (2) before our powerful capacity for acclimation adapts us to our new condition and puts us back to sleep.
That is, to that list of powerful harmonizing drives and effects that make us Homo mimesis, we can finally understand pathei mathos not as a curse of arbitrary gods to make wisdom unreachable except through pain—no jealous Olympian gods withhold from us the fires of enlightenment—nor as the idle speculation of ancient philosophers and storytellers—no fiction invented for our entertainment or catharsis—but rather as the necessary and inevitable consequences of our evolutionary recipe for survival. Wisdom is incompossible with mimesis, and mimesis is our specific, special priority and mission.
That is why it is impossible for us to know ourselves or to reflect upon ourselves as we actually are—the prime requisites for wisdom—except during the briefest of windows here and there in our lives when we suffer from fresh pain so intense that for a short time we cannot sleep.
Yours truly,
Rick
Postscript: If only it were the nightly sleep we needed to interrupt, perhaps we could all become wise, but alas, it is the sleep of a lifetime from which we must awake, and that we cannot do for long. The only permanent end to the sleep of mimetic personality comes with the sleep of the dead, the eternal sleep from which we none of us ever awake, and in which, alas, wisdom does not await us, only the dissolution of the self back into the selfless cosmic realms of soil and sea.
Ironically, for a man from a race of sleepwalkers, I can't sleep tonight.
My Grandma, Ann Saling, died a week ago, and we held her service two days ago. The service was a trainwreck, horror after horror with a few grace notes mixed in whose contrast sharpened the pain. It was so bad I was actually struck dumb when it was my turn to speak, and even now I cannot write about the details. I've been a fan of horror films all my life and watch the most astonishing fictional horrors, yet now I feel like a Lovecraftian protagonist who collapses in the face of true horror. Nihilism is so much worse a violation than death or mere grotesquerie.
Although I spent yesterday shying away from the trauma of the previous day, distracting myself, I find myself tonight unable to stop replaying the worst of it when I should be sleeping. After two sleepless hours I gave up trying and thought to fall back on my old comfort of writing to achieve emotional alchemy.
Rereading my last entry, from October, about pathei mathos, I found that it still rang true to me. Moreover, in the depths of pain now, stripped of abstract intellectual imagining by the direct grip of experience, I feel its truth more profoundly now than when I wrote it.
Why pathei mathos? Why do we only question ourselves under duress?
I think the problem lies in our mimesis, which I believe to be the essence of human nature, the very heart of our species. Intense mimcry seems to be the strange attractor that organizes all the anomalies and general weirdness of this species into a coherent pattern. It is an evil joke to call ourselves Homo sapiens, wise man, when wisdom is the surest thing we are not. Homo mimesis names the core of us better. For man all the world is indeed a stage, and the best actors are in the audience, playing the roles of their lives.
To fully immerse ourselves in our roles we must believe in our performances, which requires the complete shutdown of our critical faculties where perspective on ourselves is concerned. Great performances require commitment; one cannot be convincing and self-conscious simultaneously. Thus our mimesis and our profound resistance to self-scrutiny depend on each other, evolved to reinforce one another and create one of those powerful harmonic feedback loops evolution loves.
The more clearly we look at this nexus of drives within our nature, the more singers we find contributing decisively to this harmony.
Consider the psychological effect of acclimation, in which any stimulus, no matter how anomalous or unpleasant, can be adapted to by the human mind until we no longer notice it, like how sanitation workers get used to the odors associated with their job. Acclimation helps counteract the disruptive effect of sudden jumps in pain, ensuring that we sink back into our roles as we become used to the new conditions rather than breaking out of our mimesis completely, likewise ensuring that any wakefulness from our sleepwalking through life, our self-unconsciousness, is kept as brief as possible. That is, evolution's priorities for us placed mimetic immersion above disruptive wisdom as a survival trait.
We usually think of acclimation as the balm that soothes our pain, that allows us to adapt to it, but for that very reason it is also the chloroform we place over our own mouths whenever we become momentarily conscious, protecting us from insights and ensuring our operation can continue.
Or as another example of a powerful drive within us that makes the most sense when considered as a contributor to our essential mimesis, consider our species's notorious dearth of instincts compared to other mammals. Instincts place limits on a species's available range of behaviors by hardwiring them for specific behaviors. The more instincts you have, the less range you have as an actor, because the more of your behavior you cannot alter to fit your role. The greatest actors would have to have the fewest instincts (using the term here strictly biologically, not in the colloquial jargon of acting itself, in which instincts are—typical of English—something entirely different than instincts in biology (hardwired behavior); acting instincts are closer to intuition or the capacity to be true to the character you are playing, and these are the not the kind of thing our species lacks).
A third drive that contributes to this harmonic is the remarkable capacity for doing things unprecedented in the history of evolution, or doing things to an unprecedented extent. Sure other animals use tools, but none as wildly and intensely as we do. Sure others change their environment, but none as wildly and extensively as we do. Sure, other animals use language, but none so wildly and diversely as we do. The list goes on forever, because our capacity to do the unexpected does. This seemingly infinite, Protean malleability permits us to completely lose ourselves not only in precedented roles but unprecedented ones as well. That is, we can not only organize ourselves around any natural roles for which there are precedents, we can also organize ourselves around unnatural and artificial roles without precedent. The dynamic range in human cultures far exceeds the behavioral range of any other species, which is necessary for a species organized above all around imitating anything.
Each of these harmonic factors reinforces each of the others. Our wild dynamic range would not be possible without our capacity to acclimate to anything, however alien it might be at first. Thus, a stable civilization can be created around the idea of (among other things) tearing the hearts out of other people on top of enormous artificial mounds oriented to the stars. Likewise, our wild dynamic range would not be possible if our behavior were constrained by an evolved system of instinctive behavior. You don't find wolves deciding to organize themselves around the building of monuments to their own dead, because wolf instincts create an intricate and consistent worldwide wolf culture that constrains their behavior within functional and sustainable limits, whereas humanity's poverty of instincts permits us to organize around almost anything.
Finally (for this essay) a fourth example of an essential human characteristic that powerfully harmonizes with all these others organized around mimesis is neotony, an evolutionary principle first brought to my attention by Desmond Morris's The Naked Ape. Neotony is a process by which a new species evolves from an old one by interrupting its normal course of maturation to prevent adult characteristics from developing, that is, by retaining childlike characteristics into adulthood. Morris noted that many of our species's differences from the other apes are almost entirely explained in terms of neotony. Young apes have less hair than adult apes, and we have less hair than other primates. Young primates have larger heads relative to the size of their bodies, and so do we. Young animals have more generic, less specialized bodies and so do we. Young mammals are more social, and so are we. Young mammals are more curious and so are we. Young animals learn new behavior more easily, and so do we.
Overall, our species is an ideal case study in how neotony can turn one species into another, and I have long recognized that it is pivotal to understanding what we are, but now look at neotony in terms of the components of our essential behavioral harmony and its importance increases. Many of the instincts animals develop are not present at birth but instead activate later in the development process, so by interrupting that process neotony would cause these instincts never to develop in the new species; if humanity is one of the most intensely neotonous species, then we would expect to find a correspondingly extreme reduction in the number of instincts present in an adult human being, which we do. Our extreme capacity for unprecedented behavior is most closely associated in other animals with play, curiosity, and learning, all features more typical of young animals than of adults, except in human beings, who retain this childlike capacity for highly variable behavior into adulthood. Our capacity for mimicry is just the neotonous retention of learning-by-example that all young mammals do taken to an extreme because it is never switched off in adulthood as it is in other animals.
Neotony, extreme behavioral range, instinctual poverty, acclimation, self-unconsciousness, and mimesis together (along with other harmonizing human drives) create in human beings an extremely effective talent for mimicry, a paradoxical combination of extreme flexibility in the choice of behavioral models combined with an intense commitment to whatever roles we find ourselves in.
Our essential mimesis makes us very good at what we have evolved to do, but extraordinarily bad at wisdom. We are anti-evolved against genuine introspection, though we have the capacity to imitate the surface of it trivially. We have the capacity to be convinced by ourselves and our own roles, but almost no capacity to genuinely question ourselves or even to perceive ourselves in context, since that would interfere with perceiving ourselves according to the roles we have adopted.
In short, by means of our most essential survival traits we must and will subvert any chance of breaking out of our perpetual dream states. By our commitment to our roles, by being convinced of our own authenticity and our own understanding of who and what we are, we are guaranteed to be unable to question those roles, that authenticity, or that understanding, and without such questioning wisdom is quite impossible (though the imitation of the surface of it, the intense desire to be thought wise, the aping of wisdom, are not only possible but inevitable for a mimic).
That is why our only opportunities for advancing in wisdom can occur during those all-too-brief windows (1) after a sharp, unprecedented pain has shaken up our worlds so strongly that we groggily awake from ourselves, and (2) before our powerful capacity for acclimation adapts us to our new condition and puts us back to sleep.
That is, to that list of powerful harmonizing drives and effects that make us Homo mimesis, we can finally understand pathei mathos not as a curse of arbitrary gods to make wisdom unreachable except through pain—no jealous Olympian gods withhold from us the fires of enlightenment—nor as the idle speculation of ancient philosophers and storytellers—no fiction invented for our entertainment or catharsis—but rather as the necessary and inevitable consequences of our evolutionary recipe for survival. Wisdom is incompossible with mimesis, and mimesis is our specific, special priority and mission.
That is why it is impossible for us to know ourselves or to reflect upon ourselves as we actually are—the prime requisites for wisdom—except during the briefest of windows here and there in our lives when we suffer from fresh pain so intense that for a short time we cannot sleep.
Yours truly,
Rick
Postscript: If only it were the nightly sleep we needed to interrupt, perhaps we could all become wise, but alas, it is the sleep of a lifetime from which we must awake, and that we cannot do for long. The only permanent end to the sleep of mimetic personality comes with the sleep of the dead, the eternal sleep from which we none of us ever awake, and in which, alas, wisdom does not await us, only the dissolution of the self back into the selfless cosmic realms of soil and sea.
Spelling
Dear Reader,
I just corrected the spelling in my comment about myself, which previously read "curioser and curioser." My wife is an editor, and I'm no slouch at spelling, but I've had this wrong for years. Heraclitus is right—we really are sleepwalkers.
Yours truly,
Rick
I just corrected the spelling in my comment about myself, which previously read "curioser and curioser." My wife is an editor, and I'm no slouch at spelling, but I've had this wrong for years. Heraclitus is right—we really are sleepwalkers.
Yours truly,
Rick
Thursday, October 09, 2008
Pathei Mathos
Dear Reader,
I have started reading William Chase Greene's Moira: Fate, Good, & Evil in Greek Thought (1944, reprinted 1963) and I'm blown away by the first five pages, which include one of the most agile sweeps through core Greek concepts I have read anywhere. Those pages sketch relationships among dozens of crucial elements, though in-depth exploration of their meaning is left to the rest of his book. To aid my own milling of this nutritious grist, I'm going to explore the vocabulary here for a while to help explore the Greek cultural context of its philosophers, starting with this paragraph from page 5:
Greene's strength is not in his priorities or even his conclusions but in the wealth of the material he works through. That is, although he does not always interpret the material correctly—indeed, most moderns fail to understand the Greeks at the level of profundity they require—he is right about as often as he's wrong, and more importantly he picks the right material to reveal the Greek preoccupations. In this opening chapter he turns over one vital, pivotal Greek term after another. If you truly wish to come to grips with many of the core concepts that so completely separate the classical Greek worldview from your own—and if you ever want to truly think, to understand yourself and your world, then you must find some worldview alien to the modern from which to triangulate, to gain perspective, without which wisdom is impossible—then here they are in these opening pages of his book, laid out in sequence for you to begin researching.
Yet to take an example from this paragraph, neither Greene nor most commentators on the meaning of pathei mathos truly come to grips with it. Here, for example, he summarizes its meaning as "the discovery that wisdom may come from suffering, which is a school of character." This is barely the beginning of what pathei mathos means. It obscures as much as it reveals, and the quirky, optional tone of his interpretation is a typically modern way of trying to distance himself from the core Greek concept here, which was intended as an indictment of human nature, something not optional at all nor arbitrary but essential to the nature of what we are, the problem we create for ourselves, the very reason why "know thyself" was considered such an essential mission for the classical Greeks that it was inscribed on the entryway of the Oracle at Delphi.
Pathei mathos must have been a very widely quoted expression in classical Greece, but today we know it best from Aeschylus's tragedy Agamemnon, and in that context its meaning and implications should be unmistakable, had we not a powerful drive not to hear what Aeschylus strives to tell us.
For the Greeks, the centerpiece of their literature was Homer's Iliad, which chooses a crucial sequence from the cycle of stories about the Trojan War, the war that effectively ended their heroic age with the utter devastation of their best and brightest upon the plains of Troy, squandered over a domestic dispute.
The culture that made that act of horrific shame and loss their first national epic paired it with their second, Homer's Odyssey, a selection from the cycle of stories referred to as The Returns, in which the surviving "victors" in that great debacle almost all died on the journey home or upon their return. Homer's epic chooses the ten-years of horror and despair through which Odysseus struggles to go home, one of the very very few to survive both the terrible war and the harrowing return home.
This is the context for Agamemnon, which is about the great king of the Greeks who led that fabled fleet of a thousand ships to its ruinous victory over Troy, and whose own return home ended rather less well than Odysseus's. Even beyond the sheer wasteful futility of the war itself, Agamemnon returned home reeking of the blood guilt of sacrificing his own daughter Iphigenia to change the winds to permit the Greek fleet to leave for Troy in the beginning; returned home with his concubine Cassandra, the Trojan prophet who foresaw all of the horrors to come but was cursed to be universally disbelieved and ignored, even by those she loved most, doomed to live through helplessly what she foresaw to no avail; returned home to be murdered by his wife Clytemnestra for murdering their daughter Iphigenia; returned home to become the reason their son Orestes would murder Clytemnestra for murdering Agamemnon.
The great Gilbert Murray, in the preface to his masterly translation of Agamemnon (available free from Project Gutenberg), takes us to the heart of things:
Implicit but not quite clear in Murray's summation is the nature of that gift—to repair a defect in human nature that made it possible for us to be so abysmally stupid that we could commit crimes in the name of justice and fail forever to realize that this must inevitably perpetuate the cycle of crimes. This gift is not one way among others to learn, as Greene implies in the paragraph I quoted above from Moira. The specific usage of pathei mathos within Aeschylus leaves us no doubt, if translated clearly enough. Murray, who understands this work so well unfortunately obscures the point a bit by molding the language into verse, but Herbert Weir Smyth's translation is clear enough:
In response to the cognitive dissonance of the alien nature of classical Greek culture clashing against our modern prejudices we tend to glide past or willfully twist the most profound passages. The full import of this fixed law we do not care to face.
First, only suffering can lead us to wisdom. Because of the defects of our human nature, we will do anything to avoid overturning our cherished delusions, so that the metamorphoses of wisdom can only work upon us against our will and under the duress of pathos (helpless suffering).
Second, wisdom does not always or even usually come to men, even by suffering, or else the great chain of crimes and punishments that constituted archaic justice would have been broken long ago by the wisdom it imparted to those upon whom it inflicted suffering—they suffered but did not gain the wisdom they needed to break the cycle of violence that Agamemnon is about—but whatever wisdom any given individual is capable of will have to be beaten into him. A modern will chafe at this interpretation, will insist on reading this passage in isolation from the entire rest of the play, indeed cycle of plays, of which it is a part, but that is merely an illustration of the first point, that we will do anything to avoid overturning our cherished delusions.
This gift of Zeus to mankind is not a Christian gift, like a salvation offered to all men (despite Murray's wording in his preface), nor is it a Modern gift, like a self-evident truth that we all share equally as birthright; it is a gift as understood by the classical Greeks, to whom the bad were many, the good few. This point emphasizes not that wisdom comes to all men but rather always against men's will. Heraclitus certainly agreed with the Aeschylean conception of pathei mathos: "Every beast is driven to pasture by blows," and "It would not be better for men if they got what they want." We want the wrong things and left to our own devices we veer away from wisdom in favor of petty, vitiating pleasures.
Greene's quick reading of pathei mathos overturns its distinctively Greek meaning in favor of a Modernist reading—hey, man, do whatever you like, you might even try suffering so you can grow wiser, that's one way to build up your character—but he does bring this powerful concept to our attention right up front, a service for which I'm happy to forgive him his perfectly understandable lapse in interpretation.
As an antidote to Greene's sketchy interpretation, I offer this transcription of Texas philosopher Kenneth Smith from his course on ancient Greek philosophy:
Finally, although there have been many attempts to translate this difficult but vital quotation, I should draw this one at least to your attention. Evan Thomas's article "The Worst Week," from the 19 November 2007 issue of Newsweek, discusses the connections between the collapse of Lyndon Johnson's presidency and the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Junior and Robert Kennedy. He tells the story of how Kennedy wanted King's endorsement for the presidency and was on the verge of getting it when King was assassinated. On April 4th, 1968, at what was supposed to be a campaign speech in Indianapolis it instead fell to Kennedy to bear the terrible news to the people who had gathered to hear him speak. He abandoned his prepared speech and instead spoke from notes he had written on the plane flight, capturing his initial shock and grief. The turning point in his speech was his take on this passage from Agamemnon: "My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He wrote, 'In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.'"
Yours truly,
Rick
I have started reading William Chase Greene's Moira: Fate, Good, & Evil in Greek Thought (1944, reprinted 1963) and I'm blown away by the first five pages, which include one of the most agile sweeps through core Greek concepts I have read anywhere. Those pages sketch relationships among dozens of crucial elements, though in-depth exploration of their meaning is left to the rest of his book. To aid my own milling of this nutritious grist, I'm going to explore the vocabulary here for a while to help explore the Greek cultural context of its philosophers, starting with this paragraph from page 5:
The spectacle, and still more the experience, of life’s vicissitudes has always been the parent of perplexity. Disappointed hopes, the prosperity of the wicked, the suffering of the innocent, even the little ironies of circumstance, invite men to question whether the ultimate power in the universe is good or evil. One type of answer, common among the ancient Greeks, takes a dark view of human life. It ranges from brooding melancholy to stark pessimism and the cry that “it were best never to have been born” (μὴ φῦναι [me psunai]); from kindly consolation of others, and counsels of moderation (sophrosyne) and the avoidance of risks (“the half is better than the whole”; “excess in nothing,” μηδὲν ἄγαν [meden agan], “live in obscurity,” λάθε βιώσας [lathe biosas], “endure and renounce,” ἀνέχου καὶ ἀπέχου [anechou kai apechou]) to manly endurance of hardship (tlemosyne), or even to the discovery that wisdom may come through suffering (πάθει μάθος [pathei mathos]), which is a school of character. . . .
Greene's strength is not in his priorities or even his conclusions but in the wealth of the material he works through. That is, although he does not always interpret the material correctly—indeed, most moderns fail to understand the Greeks at the level of profundity they require—he is right about as often as he's wrong, and more importantly he picks the right material to reveal the Greek preoccupations. In this opening chapter he turns over one vital, pivotal Greek term after another. If you truly wish to come to grips with many of the core concepts that so completely separate the classical Greek worldview from your own—and if you ever want to truly think, to understand yourself and your world, then you must find some worldview alien to the modern from which to triangulate, to gain perspective, without which wisdom is impossible—then here they are in these opening pages of his book, laid out in sequence for you to begin researching.
Yet to take an example from this paragraph, neither Greene nor most commentators on the meaning of pathei mathos truly come to grips with it. Here, for example, he summarizes its meaning as "the discovery that wisdom may come from suffering, which is a school of character." This is barely the beginning of what pathei mathos means. It obscures as much as it reveals, and the quirky, optional tone of his interpretation is a typically modern way of trying to distance himself from the core Greek concept here, which was intended as an indictment of human nature, something not optional at all nor arbitrary but essential to the nature of what we are, the problem we create for ourselves, the very reason why "know thyself" was considered such an essential mission for the classical Greeks that it was inscribed on the entryway of the Oracle at Delphi.
Pathei mathos must have been a very widely quoted expression in classical Greece, but today we know it best from Aeschylus's tragedy Agamemnon, and in that context its meaning and implications should be unmistakable, had we not a powerful drive not to hear what Aeschylus strives to tell us.
For the Greeks, the centerpiece of their literature was Homer's Iliad, which chooses a crucial sequence from the cycle of stories about the Trojan War, the war that effectively ended their heroic age with the utter devastation of their best and brightest upon the plains of Troy, squandered over a domestic dispute.
The culture that made that act of horrific shame and loss their first national epic paired it with their second, Homer's Odyssey, a selection from the cycle of stories referred to as The Returns, in which the surviving "victors" in that great debacle almost all died on the journey home or upon their return. Homer's epic chooses the ten-years of horror and despair through which Odysseus struggles to go home, one of the very very few to survive both the terrible war and the harrowing return home.
This is the context for Agamemnon, which is about the great king of the Greeks who led that fabled fleet of a thousand ships to its ruinous victory over Troy, and whose own return home ended rather less well than Odysseus's. Even beyond the sheer wasteful futility of the war itself, Agamemnon returned home reeking of the blood guilt of sacrificing his own daughter Iphigenia to change the winds to permit the Greek fleet to leave for Troy in the beginning; returned home with his concubine Cassandra, the Trojan prophet who foresaw all of the horrors to come but was cursed to be universally disbelieved and ignored, even by those she loved most, doomed to live through helplessly what she foresaw to no avail; returned home to be murdered by his wife Clytemnestra for murdering their daughter Iphigenia; returned home to become the reason their son Orestes would murder Clytemnestra for murdering Agamemnon.
The great Gilbert Murray, in the preface to his masterly translation of Agamemnon (available free from Project Gutenberg), takes us to the heart of things:
The trilogy of the Oresteia, of which this play is the first part, centres on the old and everlastingly unsolved problem of the ancient blinded vengeance and the wrong that amendeth wrong. Every wrong is justly punished; yet, as the world goes, every punishment becomes a new wrong, calling for fresh vengeance. And more; every wrong turns out to be itself rooted in some wrong of old. It is never gratuitous, never untempted by the working of peitho (persuasion), never merely wicked. The Oresteia first shows the cycle of crime punished by crime which must be repunished, and then seeks for some gleam of escape, some breaking of the endless chain of "evil duty." In the old order of earth and heaven there was no such escape. Each blow called for the return blow and must do so ad infinitum. But, according to Aeschylus, there is a new Ruler now in heaven, one who has both sinned and suffered and thereby grown wise. He is Zeus the Third Power, Zeus the Saviour, and his gift to mankind is the ability through suffering to Learn.
Implicit but not quite clear in Murray's summation is the nature of that gift—to repair a defect in human nature that made it possible for us to be so abysmally stupid that we could commit crimes in the name of justice and fail forever to realize that this must inevitably perpetuate the cycle of crimes. This gift is not one way among others to learn, as Greene implies in the paragraph I quoted above from Moira. The specific usage of pathei mathos within Aeschylus leaves us no doubt, if translated clearly enough. Murray, who understands this work so well unfortunately obscures the point a bit by molding the language into verse, but Herbert Weir Smyth's translation is clear enough:
Zeus, who sets mortals on the path to understanding, Zeus, who has established as a fixed law that "wisdom comes by suffering." But even as trouble, bringing memory of pain, drips over the mind in sleep, so wisdom comes to men, whether they want it or not. Harsh, it seems to me, is the grace of gods enthroned upon their awful seats.
In response to the cognitive dissonance of the alien nature of classical Greek culture clashing against our modern prejudices we tend to glide past or willfully twist the most profound passages. The full import of this fixed law we do not care to face.
First, only suffering can lead us to wisdom. Because of the defects of our human nature, we will do anything to avoid overturning our cherished delusions, so that the metamorphoses of wisdom can only work upon us against our will and under the duress of pathos (helpless suffering).
Second, wisdom does not always or even usually come to men, even by suffering, or else the great chain of crimes and punishments that constituted archaic justice would have been broken long ago by the wisdom it imparted to those upon whom it inflicted suffering—they suffered but did not gain the wisdom they needed to break the cycle of violence that Agamemnon is about—but whatever wisdom any given individual is capable of will have to be beaten into him. A modern will chafe at this interpretation, will insist on reading this passage in isolation from the entire rest of the play, indeed cycle of plays, of which it is a part, but that is merely an illustration of the first point, that we will do anything to avoid overturning our cherished delusions.
This gift of Zeus to mankind is not a Christian gift, like a salvation offered to all men (despite Murray's wording in his preface), nor is it a Modern gift, like a self-evident truth that we all share equally as birthright; it is a gift as understood by the classical Greeks, to whom the bad were many, the good few. This point emphasizes not that wisdom comes to all men but rather always against men's will. Heraclitus certainly agreed with the Aeschylean conception of pathei mathos: "Every beast is driven to pasture by blows," and "It would not be better for men if they got what they want." We want the wrong things and left to our own devices we veer away from wisdom in favor of petty, vitiating pleasures.
Greene's quick reading of pathei mathos overturns its distinctively Greek meaning in favor of a Modernist reading—hey, man, do whatever you like, you might even try suffering so you can grow wiser, that's one way to build up your character—but he does bring this powerful concept to our attention right up front, a service for which I'm happy to forgive him his perfectly understandable lapse in interpretation.
As an antidote to Greene's sketchy interpretation, I offer this transcription of Texas philosopher Kenneth Smith from his course on ancient Greek philosophy:
Taught by suffering: drop by drop wisdom is distilled from pain. This is the link between aristeia and the tragic ethos. A Greek aristos would rather be educated by suffering than be happy his whole life long, because you don’t get educated by happiness. No one is wised up by getting things the way he wants—that just consolidates the idiotism in him, makes his ego think the world exists for its sake, as the ego has always suspected. Suffering shows the schism between what we want and how the world is organized, the contraindication the world gives us that we’ve been strategizing from totally wrong precepts. Suffering is the collision between human delusions and real truth. Not every human being has equal potential to learn from suffering. Some people just suffer, or just respond with alternative tactics.
Finally, although there have been many attempts to translate this difficult but vital quotation, I should draw this one at least to your attention. Evan Thomas's article "The Worst Week," from the 19 November 2007 issue of Newsweek, discusses the connections between the collapse of Lyndon Johnson's presidency and the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Junior and Robert Kennedy. He tells the story of how Kennedy wanted King's endorsement for the presidency and was on the verge of getting it when King was assassinated. On April 4th, 1968, at what was supposed to be a campaign speech in Indianapolis it instead fell to Kennedy to bear the terrible news to the people who had gathered to hear him speak. He abandoned his prepared speech and instead spoke from notes he had written on the plane flight, capturing his initial shock and grief. The turning point in his speech was his take on this passage from Agamemnon: "My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He wrote, 'In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.'"
Yours truly,
Rick
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Tripping over the Voids
Dear Reader,
I noticed when Michael Distaso died. Death is not the five stages of grieving, neither like a program nor even like the authors of that model meant it, as five fluctuating states, strange attractors for the force of loss.
Every death is different. Different feelings felt differently, different holes in our lives found at different times in different places. Shakti's death was a slap; I wept and sobbed and staggered, felt the full force at once, fell apart and fell over every day for a long time, only a little less day by day. Morgana's death is a creeping numbing, a slow, soft fading of strength from many little places throughout my day; I cried hard while I held her on Monday before she died that night, but since then I have been empty-quiet inside.
We are not individuals but communities. We are all Swiss, full of holes filled with one another. When one of us dies, the rest of us find ourselves full of confusing holes. Where we thought we were ourselves, we find we were someone else now gone. Where we thought our day was a whole, we find holes instead. We turn to look at our life but find an empty room instead.
But then Rashid gallops down the stairs like a maniac, lands facing me, stands stock still, wide green eyes like surprise, a pause, Meeps! once decisively, then turns and tears back up the stairs.
What the Hell was that? Which stage of grieving is this supposed to be?
Yours truly,
Rick
I noticed when Michael Distaso died. Death is not the five stages of grieving, neither like a program nor even like the authors of that model meant it, as five fluctuating states, strange attractors for the force of loss.
Every death is different. Different feelings felt differently, different holes in our lives found at different times in different places. Shakti's death was a slap; I wept and sobbed and staggered, felt the full force at once, fell apart and fell over every day for a long time, only a little less day by day. Morgana's death is a creeping numbing, a slow, soft fading of strength from many little places throughout my day; I cried hard while I held her on Monday before she died that night, but since then I have been empty-quiet inside.
We are not individuals but communities. We are all Swiss, full of holes filled with one another. When one of us dies, the rest of us find ourselves full of confusing holes. Where we thought we were ourselves, we find we were someone else now gone. Where we thought our day was a whole, we find holes instead. We turn to look at our life but find an empty room instead.
But then Rashid gallops down the stairs like a maniac, lands facing me, stands stock still, wide green eyes like surprise, a pause, Meeps! once decisively, then turns and tears back up the stairs.
What the Hell was that? Which stage of grieving is this supposed to be?
Yours truly,
Rick
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Monday, April 14, 2008
Morgana in Passing
Dear Reader,
I am sitting up with Morgana, our nineteen-year-old kitty. She is dying.
Her decline has been rapid. A week ago she was still jumping up onto counters. She has had trouble getting around increasingly this week, her jumps deteriorating into crashes, and as of today she cannot walk at all. If I hold her upright and support her weight she can stagger to where she wants to go, and thus we communicate enough for me to help her get what she needs.
Most of today she has spent in her kitty bed, breathing shallowly, eyes not quite closed, not sleeping, watching me, periodically meowing silently. When she needs my help, she either struggles to move or makes a low, short moan, and we work together to figure out what she needs. She has drunk only a little water today, eaten only a little food, and grown quieter and weaker throughout the day. I doubt she will last another day, perhaps not even the night.
Over the course of my life, I have had many cats in my family, but for almost half my life my immediate family was Beverly, Shakti, and Morgana. Of our two kitties, gray-tabby Shakti was the smarter, weirder, and antisocial of the two, and tortoise-shell Morgana has been the fearless one with the indomitable will and expressive, sometimes operatic voice. Morgana, no slouch in the smarts department herself, learned to open closed doors at our old house and likes being read to (especially children's books about cats), but it is the core of her personality that shines at the end.
When we first brought Shakti and Morgana home all those years ago, they had just been spayed and were still recovering from the anesthesia. They were both dizzy from the drug. Shakti just lay down on the carpet, her head swaying as she focused on looking around without falling over. Morgana, true to form, would not be subdued by the dizziness, and staggered around the room exploring, falling over, and getting back up repeatedly. She even tried to jump up onto furniture in the room, with predictable results, and once fell over onto Shakti. Although Shakti was six months older than Morgana and rapidly grew to be twice her weight, for the first half of their lives with us Morgana was clearly the top cat, dominating by her inexhaustible energy and sheer will to have things exactly the way she wants them (a classic tortie trait).
We lost Shakti to renal failure two years ago.
Now, at Morgana's end, she is still true to form. Although exhausted and unable to bear her own weight most of the time today, five times today when sufficiently motivated she still dragged herself to her feet and staggered to her destination, be it the pee pad we put down for her or back to her little bed. She teetered up onto all fours, tilting crazily, staggered forward a few steps, fell, and got back up again and continued on until she reached her destination, much like she did eighteen and a half years ago. Step by step, she reverts to the helpless kitten and I to her surrogate mama.
I have written at times about the inadequacies of language for genuine communication, as well as about my own linguistic inadequacies, and these both strike me strongly at times like this. I cannot convey what it means for a man without children to lose a cat who has been a beloved member of the family for almost half his life. My life so far, my prospects for the future, my priorities, are all slightly clarified by these passages of mortality, by these periods of caring and waiting and comforting and weeping.
Grief can be more than just a pathos, a suffering; it can also be a lense or a still. Aeschylus, in Agamemnon, wrote "drop by drop, wisdom is distilled from pain." A bitter bargain: an alchemy of loss with a reek of necromancy to transform dumb suffering into a faintly wiser suffering, to extract a hair's breadth more clarity in exchange for a beloved life.
Yours truly,
Rick
I am sitting up with Morgana, our nineteen-year-old kitty. She is dying.
Her decline has been rapid. A week ago she was still jumping up onto counters. She has had trouble getting around increasingly this week, her jumps deteriorating into crashes, and as of today she cannot walk at all. If I hold her upright and support her weight she can stagger to where she wants to go, and thus we communicate enough for me to help her get what she needs.
Most of today she has spent in her kitty bed, breathing shallowly, eyes not quite closed, not sleeping, watching me, periodically meowing silently. When she needs my help, she either struggles to move or makes a low, short moan, and we work together to figure out what she needs. She has drunk only a little water today, eaten only a little food, and grown quieter and weaker throughout the day. I doubt she will last another day, perhaps not even the night.
Over the course of my life, I have had many cats in my family, but for almost half my life my immediate family was Beverly, Shakti, and Morgana. Of our two kitties, gray-tabby Shakti was the smarter, weirder, and antisocial of the two, and tortoise-shell Morgana has been the fearless one with the indomitable will and expressive, sometimes operatic voice. Morgana, no slouch in the smarts department herself, learned to open closed doors at our old house and likes being read to (especially children's books about cats), but it is the core of her personality that shines at the end.
When we first brought Shakti and Morgana home all those years ago, they had just been spayed and were still recovering from the anesthesia. They were both dizzy from the drug. Shakti just lay down on the carpet, her head swaying as she focused on looking around without falling over. Morgana, true to form, would not be subdued by the dizziness, and staggered around the room exploring, falling over, and getting back up repeatedly. She even tried to jump up onto furniture in the room, with predictable results, and once fell over onto Shakti. Although Shakti was six months older than Morgana and rapidly grew to be twice her weight, for the first half of their lives with us Morgana was clearly the top cat, dominating by her inexhaustible energy and sheer will to have things exactly the way she wants them (a classic tortie trait).
We lost Shakti to renal failure two years ago.
Now, at Morgana's end, she is still true to form. Although exhausted and unable to bear her own weight most of the time today, five times today when sufficiently motivated she still dragged herself to her feet and staggered to her destination, be it the pee pad we put down for her or back to her little bed. She teetered up onto all fours, tilting crazily, staggered forward a few steps, fell, and got back up again and continued on until she reached her destination, much like she did eighteen and a half years ago. Step by step, she reverts to the helpless kitten and I to her surrogate mama.
I have written at times about the inadequacies of language for genuine communication, as well as about my own linguistic inadequacies, and these both strike me strongly at times like this. I cannot convey what it means for a man without children to lose a cat who has been a beloved member of the family for almost half his life. My life so far, my prospects for the future, my priorities, are all slightly clarified by these passages of mortality, by these periods of caring and waiting and comforting and weeping.
Grief can be more than just a pathos, a suffering; it can also be a lense or a still. Aeschylus, in Agamemnon, wrote "drop by drop, wisdom is distilled from pain." A bitter bargain: an alchemy of loss with a reek of necromancy to transform dumb suffering into a faintly wiser suffering, to extract a hair's breadth more clarity in exchange for a beloved life.
Yours truly,
Rick
Sunday, April 13, 2008
The Blessing of Paralysis
[Originally written Sunday, 24 December 2006 at 12:27 PM]
Dear Reader,
When I force myself to do the wrong thing, eventually I lose my ability to continue. Although my coworkers see this as a great curse and inconvenience to them, it is a great gift. I do not know how I came by this gift, but I appreciate it. I used to curse it as well, used to revile it as an inconvenience, but gradually my counselor and I managed to sort out the patterns in it and figured out that I am only paralyzed when I am doing the wrong thing or avoiding doing the right thing.
Often, the incorrect direction in my life results from my willingness to sacrifice my own needs or goals to further someone else's. More often, I am postponing what I understand to be the higher priorities in favor of what someone else pursuasively argues to be the top priorities. Most often, I am giving up top priorities not even for that but for expediency, for "practical" considerations, postponing the important for the urgent. In my gut, in my bones, in my soul, I believe in how vital it is to align yourself with the deep principles of the cosmos, not to let yourself be distracted by apparent self-interest or even apparent expediency, and history is an open textbook on the reasons for sticking with deeper priorities regardless of the tides of fashion or pragmatism.
Unfortunately, this is an easy way to disappoint people. Lack of follow-through, not finishing what you start, indecisiveness, changing directions—all these things are easy distractions for other people, easy targets, easy excuses for complex problems. When there is a goat among the sheep and something goes wrong, sheep will look to the goat every time, not to what the sheep might all have in common, might be generating themselves from the imperatives of their sheepish character. It is harder still for the sheep or the goat to look to what they might have created together as the source of their problems, to look to the complex culture they have created in their off-kilter interactions.
Though we wear the masks of adulthood, we are still children, especially those who most wrap themselves in the cloak of adulthood, those who care the most about believing and seeming to be distant from childish things. This inherent childishness in all of us is stamped on everything we do and say and think. To anyone with a nose for it we reek of childishness and everything associated with us gives it off as a miasma. It is painfully obvious, except to us, that our oh-so-adult rationality is merely a way of formalizing our childish impulses and prejudices. So it is that faced with problems, we seek easy explanations that excuse us from any blame.
My periodic paralyses makes me a goat; I stand out and am available for scaping to anyone associated with me who does not care to look within themselves for their own contribution to our mutual problems. Often, those very mutual problems will trigger my retreat, as we lead ourselves into doing the wrong things, but it is my retreat that is visible and hence as the only apparent choice my retreat becomes the explanation of our ills.
In my latest bout of paralysis I have finally taken into my heart that earnestness, good intentions, hard work, followthrough, and communication are no guarantee of doing the right thing. I have come to understand that you have to know what the right thing is and do that, or all else is irrelevant; you can't just think you know what the right thing is—it has to actually be the right thing. It turns out that one of the roads to Hell really is paved with good intentions, and travelled by intelligent, well-meaning, conscientious people who fell prey to the delusion that they contained an innate ability to sense the truth. Such an ability would be a characteristic of the divine, not of the human. Thus, hybris. Again.
Yours truly,
Rick
Dear Reader,
When I force myself to do the wrong thing, eventually I lose my ability to continue. Although my coworkers see this as a great curse and inconvenience to them, it is a great gift. I do not know how I came by this gift, but I appreciate it. I used to curse it as well, used to revile it as an inconvenience, but gradually my counselor and I managed to sort out the patterns in it and figured out that I am only paralyzed when I am doing the wrong thing or avoiding doing the right thing.
Often, the incorrect direction in my life results from my willingness to sacrifice my own needs or goals to further someone else's. More often, I am postponing what I understand to be the higher priorities in favor of what someone else pursuasively argues to be the top priorities. Most often, I am giving up top priorities not even for that but for expediency, for "practical" considerations, postponing the important for the urgent. In my gut, in my bones, in my soul, I believe in how vital it is to align yourself with the deep principles of the cosmos, not to let yourself be distracted by apparent self-interest or even apparent expediency, and history is an open textbook on the reasons for sticking with deeper priorities regardless of the tides of fashion or pragmatism.
Unfortunately, this is an easy way to disappoint people. Lack of follow-through, not finishing what you start, indecisiveness, changing directions—all these things are easy distractions for other people, easy targets, easy excuses for complex problems. When there is a goat among the sheep and something goes wrong, sheep will look to the goat every time, not to what the sheep might all have in common, might be generating themselves from the imperatives of their sheepish character. It is harder still for the sheep or the goat to look to what they might have created together as the source of their problems, to look to the complex culture they have created in their off-kilter interactions.
Though we wear the masks of adulthood, we are still children, especially those who most wrap themselves in the cloak of adulthood, those who care the most about believing and seeming to be distant from childish things. This inherent childishness in all of us is stamped on everything we do and say and think. To anyone with a nose for it we reek of childishness and everything associated with us gives it off as a miasma. It is painfully obvious, except to us, that our oh-so-adult rationality is merely a way of formalizing our childish impulses and prejudices. So it is that faced with problems, we seek easy explanations that excuse us from any blame.
My periodic paralyses makes me a goat; I stand out and am available for scaping to anyone associated with me who does not care to look within themselves for their own contribution to our mutual problems. Often, those very mutual problems will trigger my retreat, as we lead ourselves into doing the wrong things, but it is my retreat that is visible and hence as the only apparent choice my retreat becomes the explanation of our ills.
In my latest bout of paralysis I have finally taken into my heart that earnestness, good intentions, hard work, followthrough, and communication are no guarantee of doing the right thing. I have come to understand that you have to know what the right thing is and do that, or all else is irrelevant; you can't just think you know what the right thing is—it has to actually be the right thing. It turns out that one of the roads to Hell really is paved with good intentions, and travelled by intelligent, well-meaning, conscientious people who fell prey to the delusion that they contained an innate ability to sense the truth. Such an ability would be a characteristic of the divine, not of the human. Thus, hybris. Again.
Yours truly,
Rick
Thursday, December 27, 2007
EFL (English as a First Language)
Dear Reader,
As far as I know, I coined this sarcastic term about a decade and a half ago, but with modern cultural churn who can tell anymore if they invented anything or just heard it, forgot it, remembered it, and mistook remembering for inventing. My hope here is that since I have never encountered it anywhere else since "inventing" it maybe I really did.
But first, a few words about its well-established counterpart, ESL.
Standing for English as a Second Language, the term ESL is a useful aid to remembering that when non-native speakers of English struggle grammatically, it does not necessarily indicate the kind of mental confusion it does when native speakers so struggle. On the contrary, a below-average communication in English by an ESL student usually indicates an above-average mind at work, since the student is breaking free of the linguistic, mental, and cultural confines of a single language to embrace others, unlike the majority of Americans. Clearly, how far above the average varies widely, but too often we focus on the linguistic struggle; when we peer past the tangled structure of the communication to the better organized thoughts behind it, we work to do justice to the person's greater-than-apparent mental depth, but rarely do we really do justice to the person by peering past both to consider the kind of person who makes the effort to transcend linguistic boundaries.
Many people throughout the world are polyglot, more than here at home, but this is more than a value-neutral, statistical difference to be measured and recorded as a fact. There is an ethical dimension to the recognition that other languages have value as do the people who speak those languages, as there is to assuming anyone worth speaking with will learn English. Likewise, there is a philosophical dimension (that is, a moral imperative) to the lifelong struggle to break out of one's psychological and cultural blinders, and learning additional languages is a valuable tool in that struggle to become a better person. Every language carries its cultural and cognitive context with it intrinsically, and each language has advantages over others, lessons and concepts best expressed in that language. Someone who speaks but a single language frames his mind narrowly, denying himself access to the realms of thought to which other languages are better suited.
The relationship between thought and language is by no means mechanistic or deterministic. Even within a single language there are layers of understanding and development possible to those who more fully master their language than to those who do not, ideas that can be expressed and therefore considered but that require more effort to do so than the simpler, foundational concepts that come more naturally to speakers of that language. Likewise, spending time with ESL speakers gives one the opportunity to discover how English can be bent to encompass concepts that come more naturally to speakers of a different language when they work to express their own natural ideas in English. Spending time reading and working to truly grasp translations of works originally written in other languages offers one the same kind of portal; the more difficult the work (that is, the more alien the ideas the translation attempts to put into English) the better leverage it offers against one's own conceptual limitations. These and other opportunities for pushing the limits of English help create a wide scope of differentiation among even monoglot English speakers as to their cognitive dilation or constriction.
English in particular, being such a borrower from other languages, offers great variation in the cultural aperture of its speakers. (I do not single it out as unique in this regard, unlike so many English chauvinists who leech their self-esteem from association with what they perceive as the linguistic winner. For one thing, I do not speak anywhere near enough languages to judge fairly (can anyone?), but more importantly I know there are other strategies for linguistic expansion than English's borrowing approach; for example, German grows by borrowing concepts but fully translating them into (sometimes extremely polysyllabic) native German terms. I'm sure there are other strategies available to other languages. For purposes of this discussion, English's advantage is that its approach to borrowing is so crude, so obvious, that it wears its borrowing on its sleeve, calling attention to the issue.) I do not mean all English speakers are cosmopolitan, but rather that the difference between the most and least cosmopolitan English speakers is great.
Interestingly, we find English chauvinists at both ends of that spectrum. When a master of English with a daunting command of the language asserts the superiority of English, we may disagree but we are at least impressed by the speaker's own fluent superiority over ourselves. The most annoying group (yet amusing in their unintentionally ironic way) are English speakers who tout its virtues and propose the extermination of as many other languages as possible yet who speak English itself as badly as a beginning ESL speaker.
These illiterate chauvinists are part of a larger group of English speakers who think as badly as they speak; their waking life is like a dream state in which ideas never clarify and thoughts flow only partly formed from one to another with no greater context than the speaker's shifting emotional state. Although an ESL student's appearance of cognitive poverty is usually a linguistic illusion, this kind of native English speaker's appearance of cognitive poverty is genuine. English is their only language; they have no superior linguistic resources to fall back on to help them organize their thinking. They can only be said to have language skills in some kind of stripped-down, reduced definition of the term; in truth they hover somewhere between pre-linguistic and genuinely linguistic, with just enough language skills to pass for normal and pursue their appetites and drives. The contempt usually wrongly laced into the term ESL is far better deserved by this group of speakers, for whom I coined the term English as a First Language, or EFL.
Yes, in this era of dividing emotions into good ones and bad ones, contempt has been labeled bad and we are all to strive to purge it from our personalities, but in truth contempt is a vital emotion for helping give us direction, for helping to stimulate a profound aversion to those ways of being we must avoid if we are to become better people. Judging contempt as bad and eschewing it goes hand in hand with sliding into contemptible behavior oneself, making it easy to be lazy, ignorant, and selfish (since after all we must not judge). Any mature human being without a preprogrammed, reflexive aversion to contempt can easily combine contempt and compassion to put it to good use. Consider the poor EFL student whose mind is a fog, whose life is but a semicoherent waking dreamstate, struggling to pass for normal and defensively avoiding criticism and other opportunities to grow for fear they might expose his true ignorant nature. We have all been there. That is what those of us who are lucky and disciplined grow out of. We can sympathize with the plight of the EFL student, pity him and try to help him improve, but we should not let that dull our contempt for him, because we never want to be like that again and we do not believe it is okay for anyone to remain that way.
Even aside from simple defensiveness and our unwillingness to show contempt when it is deserved, a foundational delusion helps prevent many EFL students from improving, the delusion of adulthood. In our culture, we have a polarized, quantum model of maturation that by law divides life into completely helpless (younger than eighteen years old) and completely competent (twenty-one years or older), with an odd semi-adult stage between. This model has nothing to do with the individual, who is stamped with these Procrustean labels regardless of personal characteristics. The complete vacuity and irreality of this measurable, objective, mathematical system of "adulthood" warps us all psychologically to an extent unthinkable to most of us. Since at "adulthood" we acquire a host of legal and financial responsibilities (though with increasingly less authority as our civilization senesces into explicitly infantilizing us all) regardless of our personal resources, we simply have to fake it to convince ourselves we're ready and able and mature enough to handle those responsibilities. At adulthood, society offers us that or the asylum or prison so deceit and self-deceit in order to pass is the obvious choice.
Very few "adults" are willing to be open about their ignorance, which is a precondition for addressing it. Culturally, we do not model good behavior for becoming a genuinely mature human being, which requires a lifetime of study and practice to improve; instead we offer the polarized ignorant/educated model in every facet of life: there is the helpless & ignorant period of imposed study followed by graduation and acceptance and empowerment.
Embracing ignorance and studying to improve is separated from being empowered and respected, all of which is captured by the concept of "done." When we are "done" studying we graduate, but not until we are "done." But then, if we are "done," why would we need to continue studying? If we are still studying, we are clearly not yet "done."
The very framework of legal and economic reward in our culture reinforces this dichotomy, which is partly why so many of us fall for it. After graduation, most of us stop studying, and that includes studying to improve our linguistic skills. The cultural model for those who continue is that they do so for entertainment or as a hobby, but not as a vital, necessary part of becoming an adequate human being. Readers in our culture are a minority, serious readers a minority of a minority, and people who continue to study and discuss English itself are considered as fringe and eccentric as philatelists or birders (or philosophers). In our licentious culture, such quirks as continuing to study English after graduation may be permitted but they are by no means considered necessary, let alone something that all English speakers should emulate lifelong.
We have a static notion of maturation—it is a goal to arrive at, and then you are "done"—and we have an artificial and arbitrary notion of maturation—it has nothing to do with your intrinsic characteristics, only your age and perhaps certification by academic authorities. This model of maturation perfectly misfits the reality of language and thought. English, for example, is to spoken communication what Chinese is to written—a subject so complex and open-ended that precisely no one will ever truly master either one. Practical "mastery" of either one consists of having got a lot further in one's studies than most of one's peers, far enough to realize that (a) one will never finish and (b) it is worthwhile and necessary to continue studying it lifelong. That combination of education, dedication, and humility is about as much as one can hope for in open-ended fields like this, and such people are the ones who usually discover and share the insights that advance the field.
By contrast, those who stop studying English when they are "done" remain linguistic and cognitive cripples lifelong, with enough skills to pass, to fit in, to be accepted into the herd, but not enough to genuinely think or communicate. This truth about our situation is so important yet underrecognized that it needs terminology. Given the moral imperative of the situation and my distrust of affectations of objectivity, I prefer a judgmental term like EFL.
And just to clarify, usually when snooty, discriminatory types like I doubtless appear to be throw about standards and judgments on subjects, our ulterior motive is almost always to split the world into good and bad with ourselves (oh so coincidentally) on the good side. I hope I have made clear that I am doing no such thing here. EFL syndrome is a side-effect of intrinsic factors in our shared culture, the one I belong to. We all have it to greater or lesser degrees. We are all struggling to some extent with our linguistic and cognitive inadequacies.
I am studying language and philosophy remedially, not just to get better but also to make up for lost decades of inadequate study. My command of language is crude and I have no coherent style, and my thinking is riddled with cultural viruses. I am usually at a loss as to how to communicate with other human beings. If ever I slip into hubris, I always have Shakespeare and Austen and Vidal and so many others to remind me what real fluency looks like and Heraclitus and Hegel and Arendt and so many others to remind me what real thinking looks like. And between me and them are layers of expertise—I am not one step away from their fluency but rather many stages of development away, some of which I understand sufficiently to identify them as absent from my language and thought, and doubtless others of which I can do little more than suspect their existence.
In short, if you feel I am judging others harshly, fear not: I am judging myself by the same standards and found wanting. Why not be "compassionate" or "reasonable" and lower my standards? Because they are not mine; they are the requirements imposed by reality on what constitutes a genuine capacity to comprehend the actual cosmos and communicate meaningfully about it. Rather than ignore our responsibilities or whine about them or lie to ourselves about them, we need to impose some standards and discipline on ourselves and resume the lifework of uplifting ourselves enough to be worthy of the civilizational—nay, special—task we face. We have met the enemy and he is us. If we want a better world, we must become better people.
Why would anything less constitute maturity?
Yours truly,
Rick
[Final two-and-a-half paragraphs completed Sunday, 13 April 2008 at 11:45 PM]
As far as I know, I coined this sarcastic term about a decade and a half ago, but with modern cultural churn who can tell anymore if they invented anything or just heard it, forgot it, remembered it, and mistook remembering for inventing. My hope here is that since I have never encountered it anywhere else since "inventing" it maybe I really did.
But first, a few words about its well-established counterpart, ESL.
Standing for English as a Second Language, the term ESL is a useful aid to remembering that when non-native speakers of English struggle grammatically, it does not necessarily indicate the kind of mental confusion it does when native speakers so struggle. On the contrary, a below-average communication in English by an ESL student usually indicates an above-average mind at work, since the student is breaking free of the linguistic, mental, and cultural confines of a single language to embrace others, unlike the majority of Americans. Clearly, how far above the average varies widely, but too often we focus on the linguistic struggle; when we peer past the tangled structure of the communication to the better organized thoughts behind it, we work to do justice to the person's greater-than-apparent mental depth, but rarely do we really do justice to the person by peering past both to consider the kind of person who makes the effort to transcend linguistic boundaries.
Many people throughout the world are polyglot, more than here at home, but this is more than a value-neutral, statistical difference to be measured and recorded as a fact. There is an ethical dimension to the recognition that other languages have value as do the people who speak those languages, as there is to assuming anyone worth speaking with will learn English. Likewise, there is a philosophical dimension (that is, a moral imperative) to the lifelong struggle to break out of one's psychological and cultural blinders, and learning additional languages is a valuable tool in that struggle to become a better person. Every language carries its cultural and cognitive context with it intrinsically, and each language has advantages over others, lessons and concepts best expressed in that language. Someone who speaks but a single language frames his mind narrowly, denying himself access to the realms of thought to which other languages are better suited.
The relationship between thought and language is by no means mechanistic or deterministic. Even within a single language there are layers of understanding and development possible to those who more fully master their language than to those who do not, ideas that can be expressed and therefore considered but that require more effort to do so than the simpler, foundational concepts that come more naturally to speakers of that language. Likewise, spending time with ESL speakers gives one the opportunity to discover how English can be bent to encompass concepts that come more naturally to speakers of a different language when they work to express their own natural ideas in English. Spending time reading and working to truly grasp translations of works originally written in other languages offers one the same kind of portal; the more difficult the work (that is, the more alien the ideas the translation attempts to put into English) the better leverage it offers against one's own conceptual limitations. These and other opportunities for pushing the limits of English help create a wide scope of differentiation among even monoglot English speakers as to their cognitive dilation or constriction.
English in particular, being such a borrower from other languages, offers great variation in the cultural aperture of its speakers. (I do not single it out as unique in this regard, unlike so many English chauvinists who leech their self-esteem from association with what they perceive as the linguistic winner. For one thing, I do not speak anywhere near enough languages to judge fairly (can anyone?), but more importantly I know there are other strategies for linguistic expansion than English's borrowing approach; for example, German grows by borrowing concepts but fully translating them into (sometimes extremely polysyllabic) native German terms. I'm sure there are other strategies available to other languages. For purposes of this discussion, English's advantage is that its approach to borrowing is so crude, so obvious, that it wears its borrowing on its sleeve, calling attention to the issue.) I do not mean all English speakers are cosmopolitan, but rather that the difference between the most and least cosmopolitan English speakers is great.
Interestingly, we find English chauvinists at both ends of that spectrum. When a master of English with a daunting command of the language asserts the superiority of English, we may disagree but we are at least impressed by the speaker's own fluent superiority over ourselves. The most annoying group (yet amusing in their unintentionally ironic way) are English speakers who tout its virtues and propose the extermination of as many other languages as possible yet who speak English itself as badly as a beginning ESL speaker.
These illiterate chauvinists are part of a larger group of English speakers who think as badly as they speak; their waking life is like a dream state in which ideas never clarify and thoughts flow only partly formed from one to another with no greater context than the speaker's shifting emotional state. Although an ESL student's appearance of cognitive poverty is usually a linguistic illusion, this kind of native English speaker's appearance of cognitive poverty is genuine. English is their only language; they have no superior linguistic resources to fall back on to help them organize their thinking. They can only be said to have language skills in some kind of stripped-down, reduced definition of the term; in truth they hover somewhere between pre-linguistic and genuinely linguistic, with just enough language skills to pass for normal and pursue their appetites and drives. The contempt usually wrongly laced into the term ESL is far better deserved by this group of speakers, for whom I coined the term English as a First Language, or EFL.
Yes, in this era of dividing emotions into good ones and bad ones, contempt has been labeled bad and we are all to strive to purge it from our personalities, but in truth contempt is a vital emotion for helping give us direction, for helping to stimulate a profound aversion to those ways of being we must avoid if we are to become better people. Judging contempt as bad and eschewing it goes hand in hand with sliding into contemptible behavior oneself, making it easy to be lazy, ignorant, and selfish (since after all we must not judge). Any mature human being without a preprogrammed, reflexive aversion to contempt can easily combine contempt and compassion to put it to good use. Consider the poor EFL student whose mind is a fog, whose life is but a semicoherent waking dreamstate, struggling to pass for normal and defensively avoiding criticism and other opportunities to grow for fear they might expose his true ignorant nature. We have all been there. That is what those of us who are lucky and disciplined grow out of. We can sympathize with the plight of the EFL student, pity him and try to help him improve, but we should not let that dull our contempt for him, because we never want to be like that again and we do not believe it is okay for anyone to remain that way.
Even aside from simple defensiveness and our unwillingness to show contempt when it is deserved, a foundational delusion helps prevent many EFL students from improving, the delusion of adulthood. In our culture, we have a polarized, quantum model of maturation that by law divides life into completely helpless (younger than eighteen years old) and completely competent (twenty-one years or older), with an odd semi-adult stage between. This model has nothing to do with the individual, who is stamped with these Procrustean labels regardless of personal characteristics. The complete vacuity and irreality of this measurable, objective, mathematical system of "adulthood" warps us all psychologically to an extent unthinkable to most of us. Since at "adulthood" we acquire a host of legal and financial responsibilities (though with increasingly less authority as our civilization senesces into explicitly infantilizing us all) regardless of our personal resources, we simply have to fake it to convince ourselves we're ready and able and mature enough to handle those responsibilities. At adulthood, society offers us that or the asylum or prison so deceit and self-deceit in order to pass is the obvious choice.
Very few "adults" are willing to be open about their ignorance, which is a precondition for addressing it. Culturally, we do not model good behavior for becoming a genuinely mature human being, which requires a lifetime of study and practice to improve; instead we offer the polarized ignorant/educated model in every facet of life: there is the helpless & ignorant period of imposed study followed by graduation and acceptance and empowerment.
Embracing ignorance and studying to improve is separated from being empowered and respected, all of which is captured by the concept of "done." When we are "done" studying we graduate, but not until we are "done." But then, if we are "done," why would we need to continue studying? If we are still studying, we are clearly not yet "done."
The very framework of legal and economic reward in our culture reinforces this dichotomy, which is partly why so many of us fall for it. After graduation, most of us stop studying, and that includes studying to improve our linguistic skills. The cultural model for those who continue is that they do so for entertainment or as a hobby, but not as a vital, necessary part of becoming an adequate human being. Readers in our culture are a minority, serious readers a minority of a minority, and people who continue to study and discuss English itself are considered as fringe and eccentric as philatelists or birders (or philosophers). In our licentious culture, such quirks as continuing to study English after graduation may be permitted but they are by no means considered necessary, let alone something that all English speakers should emulate lifelong.
We have a static notion of maturation—it is a goal to arrive at, and then you are "done"—and we have an artificial and arbitrary notion of maturation—it has nothing to do with your intrinsic characteristics, only your age and perhaps certification by academic authorities. This model of maturation perfectly misfits the reality of language and thought. English, for example, is to spoken communication what Chinese is to written—a subject so complex and open-ended that precisely no one will ever truly master either one. Practical "mastery" of either one consists of having got a lot further in one's studies than most of one's peers, far enough to realize that (a) one will never finish and (b) it is worthwhile and necessary to continue studying it lifelong. That combination of education, dedication, and humility is about as much as one can hope for in open-ended fields like this, and such people are the ones who usually discover and share the insights that advance the field.
By contrast, those who stop studying English when they are "done" remain linguistic and cognitive cripples lifelong, with enough skills to pass, to fit in, to be accepted into the herd, but not enough to genuinely think or communicate. This truth about our situation is so important yet underrecognized that it needs terminology. Given the moral imperative of the situation and my distrust of affectations of objectivity, I prefer a judgmental term like EFL.
And just to clarify, usually when snooty, discriminatory types like I doubtless appear to be throw about standards and judgments on subjects, our ulterior motive is almost always to split the world into good and bad with ourselves (oh so coincidentally) on the good side. I hope I have made clear that I am doing no such thing here. EFL syndrome is a side-effect of intrinsic factors in our shared culture, the one I belong to. We all have it to greater or lesser degrees. We are all struggling to some extent with our linguistic and cognitive inadequacies.
I am studying language and philosophy remedially, not just to get better but also to make up for lost decades of inadequate study. My command of language is crude and I have no coherent style, and my thinking is riddled with cultural viruses. I am usually at a loss as to how to communicate with other human beings. If ever I slip into hubris, I always have Shakespeare and Austen and Vidal and so many others to remind me what real fluency looks like and Heraclitus and Hegel and Arendt and so many others to remind me what real thinking looks like. And between me and them are layers of expertise—I am not one step away from their fluency but rather many stages of development away, some of which I understand sufficiently to identify them as absent from my language and thought, and doubtless others of which I can do little more than suspect their existence.
In short, if you feel I am judging others harshly, fear not: I am judging myself by the same standards and found wanting. Why not be "compassionate" or "reasonable" and lower my standards? Because they are not mine; they are the requirements imposed by reality on what constitutes a genuine capacity to comprehend the actual cosmos and communicate meaningfully about it. Rather than ignore our responsibilities or whine about them or lie to ourselves about them, we need to impose some standards and discipline on ourselves and resume the lifework of uplifting ourselves enough to be worthy of the civilizational—nay, special—task we face. We have met the enemy and he is us. If we want a better world, we must become better people.
Why would anything less constitute maturity?
Yours truly,
Rick
[Final two-and-a-half paragraphs completed Sunday, 13 April 2008 at 11:45 PM]
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Three New Volumes of Serge Mouraviev's Heraclitea, Part 1
I last discussed Serge Mouraviev's magnum opus, Heraclitea, in my blog entry of 27 May 2006. Much to my surprise and in the highlight so far of my blogging endeavor, on 10 February of this year (2007), Mr. Mouraviev himself contacted me by email to thank me for my discussion of his work. He also wanted to add to that discussion:
another very important reason of the difficulty in understanding Heraclitus: the present fashion, very widespread among scholars, to cast doubt on the genuineness and/or credibility of any non corroborated or "suspicious" piece of information. I call this the presumption of guilt and consider it to be the methodological original sin of many a student of Ancient Greek philosophy as such.I quite agree with Mr. Mouraviev. Any serious effort to understand Heraclitus from the second and third-hand fragments that remain must involve at least two quite distinct phases—analysis and synthesis—and the analysis phase must begin with the gathering of all fragments attributed to him regardless of the analyst's judgment about their authenticity. Mr. Mouraviev is the only Heraclitean analyst to date I have encountered who has done this.
Also very much to my surprise and delight, he arranged to send me review copies of the three Heraclitea volumes published in 2006, all part of section III.3.B of the series (the pertinent texts of the fragments of Heraclitus's book):
Heraclitea Volume III.3.b/i: Texts, Translations, and Materials (ISBN 3-89665-368-7)
Heraclitea Volume III.3.b/ii: Language and Poetics (ISBN 3-89665-369-5)
Heraclitea Volume III.3.b/iii: Critical Notes (ISBN 3-89665-370-9)
Even for someone like me whose French is tres rusty the value of these volumes to the serious student of Heraclitus makes the slow work of translation easily worthwhile. These volumes are concise, systematically organized, and thorough in their exploration of the fragments. This is the most complete collection of Heraclitean fragments I have seen to date, since Mr. Mouraviev includes not only relatively unknown authentic fragments but even every spurious fragment attributed to Heraclitus. He uses a simple three-part ranking system for each fragment to rate (1) the reliability of its attribution to Heraclitus, (2) its fidelity to Heraclitus's text, and (3) its fidelity—if correctly interpreted—to Heraclitus's message.
This is all in French and Greek, except that the first of these three volumes, which translates the fragments themselves, also translates them into English and Russsian. The Greek is presented not only in the form familiar to students of classical Greek (which is actually taught using the bicameral, polytonic Greek alphabet invented by Byzantine scholars in the Middle Ages, and thus only tenuously related to Classical Greek) but also in the actual Classical Greek (unicameral, unspaced form of the words in both Old Ionian and Old Attic) matching as closely as possible the way Heraclitus would have written them; he includes the ancient Greek only for those fragments whose text we can trace back to the Greek. For fragments whose oldest remaining source is Latin, he offers the Latin with translation into polytonic Greek. Where the oldest sources are Medieval Greek, he offers the polytonic Greek but again not the genuine Classical. These choices are exactly what we would expect from a man who in every other way throughout this series shows the most serious concern with doing justice to the material, reconstructing as much as we can fairly reliably do but no more.
The English translations are eccentric and entertaining, set in Medieval blackletter with a King James Bible approach to the language (conspicuous use of "evadeth" and "'twas" and "whate'er" and such). The grammar is spun about because he is opting for a fairly literal translation, tying word order more closely to the original Greek than English grammar can successfully bear; this word order is a legitimate approach as a step between the two languages, but it does not make this the most accessible English translation of the fragments. Clearly the translation to French is his first priority here, but in addition he has indicated that in a separate volume he will make his attempt to synthesize all of this material into as close an approximation as he can of Heraclitus's original work. Given that, it is easy to see that in these volumes his priority in translation is not to bring the reader close to Heraclitus's thought but instead close to the raw fragments as we have them. That is, these volumes are primarily concerned with studying the vestiges.
To be continued in part 2 of this review.
Yours truly,
Rick
Sunday, October 14, 2007
How Quick in Temper and in Judgment Weak
Dear Reader,
Rudeness, aggression, rage, paranoia, and addiction to crises make a wretched brew, make it difficult to help or even be close to someone you care about. If these vices grow they too easily creep past unpleasant and become unacceptable. When intolerable behavior will not be mended you must separate yourself from it or risk your self-respect and sanity.
But how easy it is to confuse the mad with the bad! If a loved one drifts into irreality and you mistake it for sheer cussedness you risk abandoning the sick instead of healing them. Oh, but how easy too to confuse the other way around! If you coddle a jerk, you hurt yourself and only invite more.
No stones mark these bounds, only nuances that weave snag by fray by twist into benightedness. Our fevered culture and medicine respond clumsily, blind to the flowering of illness. Not until madness blooms into destruction does the penny drop. Until then we can only watch and grieve as a fair child unravels in fits and starts smeared across the slow passing of seasons.
Yours truly,
Rick
Rudeness, aggression, rage, paranoia, and addiction to crises make a wretched brew, make it difficult to help or even be close to someone you care about. If these vices grow they too easily creep past unpleasant and become unacceptable. When intolerable behavior will not be mended you must separate yourself from it or risk your self-respect and sanity.
But how easy it is to confuse the mad with the bad! If a loved one drifts into irreality and you mistake it for sheer cussedness you risk abandoning the sick instead of healing them. Oh, but how easy too to confuse the other way around! If you coddle a jerk, you hurt yourself and only invite more.
No stones mark these bounds, only nuances that weave snag by fray by twist into benightedness. Our fevered culture and medicine respond clumsily, blind to the flowering of illness. Not until madness blooms into destruction does the penny drop. Until then we can only watch and grieve as a fair child unravels in fits and starts smeared across the slow passing of seasons.
Yours truly,
Rick
Tuesday, October 09, 2007
Nonpersistence of Memory
Dear Reader,
I based my description of the picture in the previous entry on the photo's timestamp recorded by the camera, but Beverly pointed out that (1) the timestamp was wrong and (2) the kitties are wearing their collars. Surya hates to be restrained and escaped her collar within the first few days we had her home, and only a day or so later she got Rashid out of his. Hence, this photograph was probably taken the day we brought them home.
Once my brain is in the proper time framework, other elements of the photo corroborate the true timeframe. First, when we brought Rashid home his fur was wiry, but after a month on the good food we fed them it turned soft and glossy. In this picture, you can see how coarse it is. Second, knowing the size of the chair, the size of the kittens is revealed to be much smaller than I interpreted it when I first posted this picture, too small to be a month after we brought them home. A month of gorging themselves on yums helped them grow rapidly.
I had forgotten about Surya's immediate escape act, so the purple of Rashid's collar failed remind me of the timeframe, and the subtler clues escaped me, too.
This all illustrates a central tenet of Heraclitus's philosophy, that we look the cosmos in the face and fail to recognize it for what it is, that the truth is right in front of us and sometimes fully visible but we still fail to attend to it properly. When he wrote that the hidden harmony is best and that nature loves to hide, he was writing as much about the subjective as the objective; that is, it is not just that the deep principles that organize and power reality are often literally invisible, but also that when the meanings of things are overt and visible usually we still fail to recognize them.
Contrary to the fairy tale of objectivity, we perceive the world through the lenses of ourselves, with our minds packed with preconceptions and preoccupations before we even begin to perceive a situation, with every perception premolded to conform to the shape of our mind and its current concerns even before we begin to pay attention. The attending itself that we imagine involves a direct transfer of the complete reality before us into a reliable and continuously accessible memory instead consists of moving a laser-pinpoint spotlight of consciousness across the field of "perception" before us, haphazardly selecting isolated details and impressions according to whatever combination of mood, questions, and attractions has us in its thrall at the moment. Once the direct stimulus of perception has passed, when we turn away, every other element of the reality we faced vanishes from our "awareness" as though it had never been present, and of the isolated details we abstracted into our memories few survive more than a handful of minutes. When later we ponder what we "saw," in truth we use the few blurry points of detail we remember as an empty framework we fill to "remember" it; we connect the dots with our own idiosyncratic inner logic and flesh out the details with our imagination and expectations about how things work in the real world, and we call the result a reliable memory. With that chimera as a starting point, substituting for truth, we then begin to make associations and deductions, deriving meaningful conclusions that were we wise and awake enough we would realize carry more meaning about ourselves based on how we composed the memory than about the reality left so far behind.
All this activity involved in recollection is unconscious to us. For us memory is like magic: it just happens or it doesn't. Though we claim it as a deliberate act, its actual workings are never visible to us while we engage in it. This is why almost everyone believes more or less in the integrity and validity of his own memory, why so few of us attend to studies that demonstrate the radical unreliable of witness testimony, why the few who do attend so often fall into the religion of numbers, believing that if they can discipline and organize this horrifically unreliable process to generate numbers, that the resulting precision will somehow substitute for its lack of reality.
Also Heraclitean is the realization that man does not stand apart from nature but rather that we are of it, that it flows through us, creates us, develops us, erodes us, and disperses us. So we should not be too surprised that we can look directly into the face of human nature too and not see it for what it is either, "seeing" instead evidence of whatever faith we cling to, scientific or otherwise, proven by the details of human nature our own unconscious natures have selected to fit their own preconceptions and preoccupations.
In 1 Corinthians 13 Paul writes "for now we see through a glass darkly . . ." but he does not linger over this Heraclitean insight to explore why we do so, eager as he is to move on to his revolutionary vision of emancipation from human nature. But Heraclitus, skeptical of such self-escape, would linger over this, one of his favorite motifs, would stress that we see darkly through the glass of ourselves, that if we would see more clearly we must improve that glass, cultivate excellence in ourselves, struggle always toward wisdom. Where other men imagine wisdom to be an extravagance they can safely postpone until their end of days, when they can spare the time, as their last duty, Heraclitus realized that the cultivation of wisdom is man's first duty, the prerequisite for doing anything else, because without it we are fools who will do the wrong things, remember the wrong things, see the wrong things. Even with a photograph to help us remember.
This is why Heraclitus wrote "wisdom stands apart from all else."
Yours truly,
Rick
I based my description of the picture in the previous entry on the photo's timestamp recorded by the camera, but Beverly pointed out that (1) the timestamp was wrong and (2) the kitties are wearing their collars. Surya hates to be restrained and escaped her collar within the first few days we had her home, and only a day or so later she got Rashid out of his. Hence, this photograph was probably taken the day we brought them home.
Once my brain is in the proper time framework, other elements of the photo corroborate the true timeframe. First, when we brought Rashid home his fur was wiry, but after a month on the good food we fed them it turned soft and glossy. In this picture, you can see how coarse it is. Second, knowing the size of the chair, the size of the kittens is revealed to be much smaller than I interpreted it when I first posted this picture, too small to be a month after we brought them home. A month of gorging themselves on yums helped them grow rapidly.
I had forgotten about Surya's immediate escape act, so the purple of Rashid's collar failed remind me of the timeframe, and the subtler clues escaped me, too.
This all illustrates a central tenet of Heraclitus's philosophy, that we look the cosmos in the face and fail to recognize it for what it is, that the truth is right in front of us and sometimes fully visible but we still fail to attend to it properly. When he wrote that the hidden harmony is best and that nature loves to hide, he was writing as much about the subjective as the objective; that is, it is not just that the deep principles that organize and power reality are often literally invisible, but also that when the meanings of things are overt and visible usually we still fail to recognize them.
Contrary to the fairy tale of objectivity, we perceive the world through the lenses of ourselves, with our minds packed with preconceptions and preoccupations before we even begin to perceive a situation, with every perception premolded to conform to the shape of our mind and its current concerns even before we begin to pay attention. The attending itself that we imagine involves a direct transfer of the complete reality before us into a reliable and continuously accessible memory instead consists of moving a laser-pinpoint spotlight of consciousness across the field of "perception" before us, haphazardly selecting isolated details and impressions according to whatever combination of mood, questions, and attractions has us in its thrall at the moment. Once the direct stimulus of perception has passed, when we turn away, every other element of the reality we faced vanishes from our "awareness" as though it had never been present, and of the isolated details we abstracted into our memories few survive more than a handful of minutes. When later we ponder what we "saw," in truth we use the few blurry points of detail we remember as an empty framework we fill to "remember" it; we connect the dots with our own idiosyncratic inner logic and flesh out the details with our imagination and expectations about how things work in the real world, and we call the result a reliable memory. With that chimera as a starting point, substituting for truth, we then begin to make associations and deductions, deriving meaningful conclusions that were we wise and awake enough we would realize carry more meaning about ourselves based on how we composed the memory than about the reality left so far behind.
All this activity involved in recollection is unconscious to us. For us memory is like magic: it just happens or it doesn't. Though we claim it as a deliberate act, its actual workings are never visible to us while we engage in it. This is why almost everyone believes more or less in the integrity and validity of his own memory, why so few of us attend to studies that demonstrate the radical unreliable of witness testimony, why the few who do attend so often fall into the religion of numbers, believing that if they can discipline and organize this horrifically unreliable process to generate numbers, that the resulting precision will somehow substitute for its lack of reality.
Also Heraclitean is the realization that man does not stand apart from nature but rather that we are of it, that it flows through us, creates us, develops us, erodes us, and disperses us. So we should not be too surprised that we can look directly into the face of human nature too and not see it for what it is either, "seeing" instead evidence of whatever faith we cling to, scientific or otherwise, proven by the details of human nature our own unconscious natures have selected to fit their own preconceptions and preoccupations.
In 1 Corinthians 13 Paul writes "for now we see through a glass darkly . . ." but he does not linger over this Heraclitean insight to explore why we do so, eager as he is to move on to his revolutionary vision of emancipation from human nature. But Heraclitus, skeptical of such self-escape, would linger over this, one of his favorite motifs, would stress that we see darkly through the glass of ourselves, that if we would see more clearly we must improve that glass, cultivate excellence in ourselves, struggle always toward wisdom. Where other men imagine wisdom to be an extravagance they can safely postpone until their end of days, when they can spare the time, as their last duty, Heraclitus realized that the cultivation of wisdom is man's first duty, the prerequisite for doing anything else, because without it we are fools who will do the wrong things, remember the wrong things, see the wrong things. Even with a photograph to help us remember.
This is why Heraclitus wrote "wisdom stands apart from all else."
Yours truly,
Rick
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
Rashid and Surya a Year Ago
Dear Reader,July of last year we brought home Rashid and Surya from PAWS. He was snuffly with a cold, which it took him a week and a half to shake; by the time he shook it, she had the cold. By August, they had both shaken their colds, and grown to boot, but they were still bitty things and devoted to each other. I was sorting through recent photos to post when I ran across this and was reminded of the relief we felt at finally having them both well and happy.
Yours truly,
Rick
Saturday, April 28, 2007
True words aren't beautiful
Dear reader,
One last verse, 81, from Red Pine's Lao Tzu's Taoteching:
True words aren't beautiful
beautiful words aren't true
the good aren't eloquent
the eloquent aren't good
the wise aren't learned
the learned aren't wise
the sage accumulates nothing
but the more he does for others
the greater his existence
the more he gives to others
the greater his abundance
the Way of Heaven
is to help without harming
the Way of the sage
is to act without struggling
Yours truly,
Rick
One last verse, 81, from Red Pine's Lao Tzu's Taoteching:
True words aren't beautiful
beautiful words aren't true
the good aren't eloquent
the eloquent aren't good
the wise aren't learned
the learned aren't wise
the sage accumulates nothing
but the more he does for others
the greater his existence
the more he gives to others
the greater his abundance
the Way of Heaven
is to help without harming
the Way of the sage
is to act without struggling
Yours truly,
Rick
The Way begets them
Dear reader,
Here is verse 51 from Red Pine's Lao Tzu's Taoteching:
The Way begets them
Virtue keeps them
matter shapes them
usage completes them
thus do all things honor the Way
and glorify Virtue
the honor of the Way
the glory of Virtue
are not conferred
but always so
the Way begets and keeps them
cultivates and trains them
steadies and adjusts them
nurtures and protects them
but begets without possessing
acts without presuming
and cultivates without controlling
this is called Dark Virtue
Yours truly,
Rick
Here is verse 51 from Red Pine's Lao Tzu's Taoteching:
The Way begets them
Virtue keeps them
matter shapes them
usage completes them
thus do all things honor the Way
and glorify Virtue
the honor of the Way
the glory of Virtue
are not conferred
but always so
the Way begets and keeps them
cultivates and trains them
steadies and adjusts them
nurtures and protects them
but begets without possessing
acts without presuming
and cultivates without controlling
this is called Dark Virtue
Yours truly,
Rick
The Tao Moves the Other Way
Dear Reader,
Here is verse 40 from Red Pine's Lao Tzu's Taoteching:
The Tao moves the other way
the Tao works through weakness
the things of this world come from something
something comes from nothing
Yours truly,
Rick
Here is verse 40 from Red Pine's Lao Tzu's Taoteching:
The Tao moves the other way
the Tao works through weakness
the things of this world come from something
something comes from nothing
Yours truly,
Rick
Lao Tzu's Taoteching
Dear Reader,
Heraclitus and Lao Tzu were probably contemporaries, though Lao Tzu was probably the elder. Any reader of their books is struck by the similarities in their philosophies (though closer reading shows important differences as well). How few great thinkers are so fluent with the paradoxical, gnomic, compressed wisdom that best approaches nature's own dialectical weave!
Understanding either writer requires a deep immersion in his culture, as I have written about before. Likewise, neither writer can be understood unless you begin to see the cosmos as they see it, for even from their own highly original cultures they each stood out as unique thinkers. Each is a hazard to translators and readers alike.
Which is part of why I love Red Pine's translation of Lao Tzu, Lao Tzu's Taoteching. Here is a nuanced translation that includes an obvious and essential yet all-too-rare feature: each verse is accompanied by selected commentaries from a stunning pantheon of great Chinese thinkers, including some of the greatest students of Lao Tzu's masterpiece—Confucius, Mencius, Sun Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Chang Tao-Ling, Ssu-ma Ch'ien, Han Fei, and many, many more—and even an opening quote from the Buddha to go with Lao Tzu's first verse. The commentary is extremely well chosen, and severely concise, with only a two-page spread given for each verse. Red Pine restricts the majority of his own commentary to the Introduction and Glossary; in the verses themselves, he tightly restricts his own comments to brief and vital notes on the choices he made in his translation and occasional points of clarification. The overt interpretation itself he leaves largely in the hands of the masters, whose commentary is (not surprisingly given the star power at work) enlightening.
I have Arthur Waley's classic translation The Way and Its Power, and I am eagerly looking forward to reading Ursula LeGuin's translation recommended to me by Jerry Goodnough, but reading Red Pine's version is one of those delightfully surprising experiences that reminds me there are still writers of taste at work here and there in the modern world. Within my admittedly limited experience, this is the way to read Lao Tzu in English.
Yours truly,
Rick
Heraclitus and Lao Tzu were probably contemporaries, though Lao Tzu was probably the elder. Any reader of their books is struck by the similarities in their philosophies (though closer reading shows important differences as well). How few great thinkers are so fluent with the paradoxical, gnomic, compressed wisdom that best approaches nature's own dialectical weave!
Understanding either writer requires a deep immersion in his culture, as I have written about before. Likewise, neither writer can be understood unless you begin to see the cosmos as they see it, for even from their own highly original cultures they each stood out as unique thinkers. Each is a hazard to translators and readers alike.
Which is part of why I love Red Pine's translation of Lao Tzu, Lao Tzu's Taoteching. Here is a nuanced translation that includes an obvious and essential yet all-too-rare feature: each verse is accompanied by selected commentaries from a stunning pantheon of great Chinese thinkers, including some of the greatest students of Lao Tzu's masterpiece—Confucius, Mencius, Sun Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Chang Tao-Ling, Ssu-ma Ch'ien, Han Fei, and many, many more—and even an opening quote from the Buddha to go with Lao Tzu's first verse. The commentary is extremely well chosen, and severely concise, with only a two-page spread given for each verse. Red Pine restricts the majority of his own commentary to the Introduction and Glossary; in the verses themselves, he tightly restricts his own comments to brief and vital notes on the choices he made in his translation and occasional points of clarification. The overt interpretation itself he leaves largely in the hands of the masters, whose commentary is (not surprisingly given the star power at work) enlightening.
I have Arthur Waley's classic translation The Way and Its Power, and I am eagerly looking forward to reading Ursula LeGuin's translation recommended to me by Jerry Goodnough, but reading Red Pine's version is one of those delightfully surprising experiences that reminds me there are still writers of taste at work here and there in the modern world. Within my admittedly limited experience, this is the way to read Lao Tzu in English.
Yours truly,
Rick
Thursday, March 01, 2007
The Finger
Dear Reader,
Yesterday, I resumed the Ancient Greek Philosophy course I am taking from Kenneth Smith. We are still working our way through Heraclitus, carefully and deeply, attending not just to problems with the translations but also with the greater cultural context for each fragment to illuminate it as fully as possible. Tonight over dinner, Beverly and I discussed a group of fragments that deal with people's paradoxical gullibility toward finite details but cynicism toward the infinite principles and powers of the cosmos. We discussed the use of myths and metaphors and imprecise language to try to stretch beyond the limits of language - with its emphasis on the finite - to indicate the existence and nature of the infinite beyond.
Beverly noted that in Metaphorical Theology: Models of God in Religious Language, Sallie McFague defined metaphor as a finger pointing at the moon. Beverly then noted that most cats cannot comprehend the human act of pointing. When we point behind a cat at birds out the window, the cat instead of turning around to follow the path of our finger simply stares at and perhaps sniffs our finger. The metaphorical act of pointing, in which the finite becomes a symbol for the not-yet-seen, is beyond most cats. Likewise, when Heraclitus, Jesus, Lao Tzu, Mohammed, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Buddha, or other great thinkers point with finite words to the infinite cosmic forces that steer all things through all things, we stare and sniff at the words. Maybe human beings are more like cats than we thought.
The Buddha responded to this human limitation with his Flower Sermon, in which instead of preaching to the huge gathering at Spirit Mountain he simply held up a golden lotus and waited. Most people saw only a flower where they were expecting words of wisdom, and so were confused, believing that his "sermon" was gibberish. Yet it was among the most profound, indicating clearly and directly our attachment to words and doctrines, our inability to see through these metaphors to the reality they try to indicate.
Lao Tzu and Heraclitus responded to this human limitation with their extraordinarily concise tomes Tao te ching and Peri physeos, in which they bent and stretched language into paradoxes that point to the infinite. Doing so requires coming into conflict with our petty attachment to linear thinking, our arbitrary distaste for contradictions, and our abhorrence of rethinking the fundamental assumptions of our lives. We respond by lashing out, accusing them of being nonsensical, or perversely obscure, that is, of making no sense on purpose, just to bother us.
We attack them, and well we should. They are committing the ultimate crime. They are giving us the finger.
Yours truly,
Rick
Yesterday, I resumed the Ancient Greek Philosophy course I am taking from Kenneth Smith. We are still working our way through Heraclitus, carefully and deeply, attending not just to problems with the translations but also with the greater cultural context for each fragment to illuminate it as fully as possible. Tonight over dinner, Beverly and I discussed a group of fragments that deal with people's paradoxical gullibility toward finite details but cynicism toward the infinite principles and powers of the cosmos. We discussed the use of myths and metaphors and imprecise language to try to stretch beyond the limits of language - with its emphasis on the finite - to indicate the existence and nature of the infinite beyond.
Beverly noted that in Metaphorical Theology: Models of God in Religious Language, Sallie McFague defined metaphor as a finger pointing at the moon. Beverly then noted that most cats cannot comprehend the human act of pointing. When we point behind a cat at birds out the window, the cat instead of turning around to follow the path of our finger simply stares at and perhaps sniffs our finger. The metaphorical act of pointing, in which the finite becomes a symbol for the not-yet-seen, is beyond most cats. Likewise, when Heraclitus, Jesus, Lao Tzu, Mohammed, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Buddha, or other great thinkers point with finite words to the infinite cosmic forces that steer all things through all things, we stare and sniff at the words. Maybe human beings are more like cats than we thought.
The Buddha responded to this human limitation with his Flower Sermon, in which instead of preaching to the huge gathering at Spirit Mountain he simply held up a golden lotus and waited. Most people saw only a flower where they were expecting words of wisdom, and so were confused, believing that his "sermon" was gibberish. Yet it was among the most profound, indicating clearly and directly our attachment to words and doctrines, our inability to see through these metaphors to the reality they try to indicate.
Lao Tzu and Heraclitus responded to this human limitation with their extraordinarily concise tomes Tao te ching and Peri physeos, in which they bent and stretched language into paradoxes that point to the infinite. Doing so requires coming into conflict with our petty attachment to linear thinking, our arbitrary distaste for contradictions, and our abhorrence of rethinking the fundamental assumptions of our lives. We respond by lashing out, accusing them of being nonsensical, or perversely obscure, that is, of making no sense on purpose, just to bother us.
We attack them, and well we should. They are committing the ultimate crime. They are giving us the finger.
Yours truly,
Rick
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Communication
Dear Reader,
I go through phases in which I cannot bear to "communicate" with my fellow human beings. Communication would be nice, but "communication" is sheer torture.
If I use words that I know will be misinterpreted, then I am writing something I know will cause my readers to come to a false conclusion. That is a reasonable definition of lying. "Self-expression" is this lying, this urge to spew words without regard for how they will be read. To communicate we have to know our audience and be able to use the words that will convey what we mean to that audience. Since none of us speaks exactly the same language, no set of words will communicate the same message to more than a few people.
Since language is a drug to us, as is our own ego, we will want to deny this truth about the limits of communication, will want to argue that if we feel we understand then we do, will want to argue that any discrepancy cannot matter, will want to argue that our efforts at communication are close enough. Close enough to what? For what? For us to go through the motions of communication and feel we are successfully mimicking it? Although the Homo sapiens we dream ourselves to be would communicate easily and fluently with all others of our kind, the Homo mimesis we actually are can manage it only rarely and imperfectly. Some of us find that difference exquisitely painful.
Yours truly,
Rick
I go through phases in which I cannot bear to "communicate" with my fellow human beings. Communication would be nice, but "communication" is sheer torture.
If I use words that I know will be misinterpreted, then I am writing something I know will cause my readers to come to a false conclusion. That is a reasonable definition of lying. "Self-expression" is this lying, this urge to spew words without regard for how they will be read. To communicate we have to know our audience and be able to use the words that will convey what we mean to that audience. Since none of us speaks exactly the same language, no set of words will communicate the same message to more than a few people.
Since language is a drug to us, as is our own ego, we will want to deny this truth about the limits of communication, will want to argue that if we feel we understand then we do, will want to argue that any discrepancy cannot matter, will want to argue that our efforts at communication are close enough. Close enough to what? For what? For us to go through the motions of communication and feel we are successfully mimicking it? Although the Homo sapiens we dream ourselves to be would communicate easily and fluently with all others of our kind, the Homo mimesis we actually are can manage it only rarely and imperfectly. Some of us find that difference exquisitely painful.
Yours truly,
Rick
Saturday, January 27, 2007
Fame
Dear Reader,
I hope I never become famous. I certainly do my best in this blog to ensure I never will.
Yours truly,
Rick
I hope I never become famous. I certainly do my best in this blog to ensure I never will.
Yours truly,
Rick
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