Month: August 2012

Literarily Pleasing, but Incoherent

I found the folllowing quotation here:

But now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth. 

— Umberto Eco
The world is a play of phenomena, an enigmatic play of appearances beneath which there is no reality.  Harmless in itself, the world is made terrible by us when we make the mad attempt to lay bare an underlying truth it fails to possess.  Part of Eco's thought, I take it, is that those who seek the world's underlying truth fool themselves into thinking that they have found it, and having convinced themselves that they are now in possession of it, feel entitled and perhaps even obligated to impose it on others for their own good.  But these others, naturally, resist the imposition and react violently.  Hence the pursuit of the truth leads to contention and bloodshed. Better to live and let live and admit that there is a variety of perspectives, a diversity of interpretations, but no God's Eye perspective and no final interpretation, let alone an uninterpreted reality in itself, a true world hidden by the world of appearances.   The world is interpretation all the way down.  Being has no bottom.
 
The line of thought is seductive but incoherent.  If the world is an enigma, then it is true that it is an enigma.  If it is harmless, then it is true that it harmless.  If it is made terrible by our attempt to interpret it, then it is true that it is made terrible by our attempt to interpret it.  If our attempt is mad, then it is true that our attempt is mad.  And if it has no underlying truth, then it is true that it has no underlying truth.
 
If that is the truth, then there is after all an underlying truth and the world cannot be a play of relativities, of  shifting perspectives, of mere interpretations.  If the world is such-and-such, then it is, and doesn't merely seem.

Some Recent Writing on Kerouac

October is Kerouac month hereabouts and she is still a good six weeks off.  But Danny Lanzetta's In Defense of Kerouac and Other Flawed Literature should be noted before it scrolls into cyber-oblivion.  Excerpt:

Kerouac's work is undoubtedly sophomoric at times. He is hopelessly naïve about people, which sometimes leads to this and other times just comes off as laziness, a selfish desire to write the way he wanted to write and live the way he wanted to live, collateral damage be damned.

The first link is to this OTR passage:

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing but burn, burn, burn like fabulous roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!"

Lanzetta seems to be suggesting that this is a particularly bad specimen of  Kerouac's scrivening.  But although too often quoted, it is passages like this that grabbed my attention and gave me shivers back in the '60s  and that still do now in my 60s.  My 'beatitude' is considerably more measured these days, and it's a good thing too: too much 'madness' leads to an early grave.  Jack's prodigious quaffing of the joy juice caught up with him in '69 at the tender age of 47, and his hero Neal Cassady (the Dean Moriarty of On the Road) was found dead on the railroad tracks near San Miguel Allende, Mexico the year before a few days shy of his 42nd birthday.

But it is for the hyper-romanticism and the heartfelt gush & rush that some of us read Kerouac still despite his many literary flaws, not to mention the mess he made of his life and the lives of others.  He was no cool beatnik.  He was mad to live, to talk, to feel, to know, to be saved.  He was a restless dreamer, a lonesome traveler, a dharma seeker, a desolation angel passing through this vale of tears & mist, a pilgrim on the via dolorosa of this dolorous life, a drifter on the river of samsara hoping one day to cross to the Far Shore.

More in the Kerouac category.

The Last Words of Leon Trotsky

On this date in 1940 in Mexico City Ramon Mercader drove an ice axe (not an ice pick as some accounts have it) into the skull of Leon Trotsky.  He died the next day.  Here we read:

Mercader later testified at his trial:

I laid my raincoat on the table  in such a way as to be able to remove the ice axe which was in the pocket. I  decided not to miss the wonderful opportunity that presented itself. The moment  Trotsky began reading the article, he gave me my chance; I took out the ice axe  from the raincoat, gripped it in my hand and, with my eyes closed, dealt him a  terrible blow on the head.

According to Joseph Cannon, the secretary of the Socialist Workers Party  (USA), Trotsky's last words were "I will not survive this attack. Stalin  has finally accomplished the task he attempted unsuccessfully before."

Trotsky, who didn't shrink from murder and brutality in pursuit of his utopian fata morgana, met his end brutally. Live by the sword, die by the sword.

Gratitude

Every day find something to be grateful for. 

It might be the regularity of nature.  Without it, how would you make coffee?  And then there is coffee itself and its wonderful taste.  What a marvellous, yet harmless, drug!  And then there are the  thoughts that percolate up under its agency.  There are so many of them swarming and demanding attention.   Some are even worth writing down. Your notebooks lay ready: they weren't destroyed during the night.  And the pens too.  Your fingers are supple and free of arthritis.  And there is your library of  books, thousands of them, to supply you with thought- and blog-fodder . . . .

But if you want to be miserable you should be able to find something to kvetch about.

Doubt, the Engine of Inquiry

Paul Brunton, Notebooks, vol. 13, part II, p. 10, #48:

It is the first operation of  philosophical training to instill doubt, to free the mind of all those numerous suggestions and distortions imposed on it by others since childhood and maintained by its own slavish acceptance, total unawareness, or natural incapacity.

Or as I have put it more than once in these pages: Doubt is the engine of inquiry, the motor of mental development. Of course, doubting  and questioning are not ends in themselves, but means to the attainment of such insight as it is possible for us to attain.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Midnight and Moonlight

Eric Clapton, After Midnight

Thelonious Monk, 'Round Midnight

Jack Kerouac, Old Angel Midnight

Allman Bros., Midnight Rider

Rolling Stones, Midnight Rambler

B. B. King, et al., Midnight Hour

Maria Muldaur, Midnight at the Oasis  (This one goes out to Mary Korzen)

Patsy Cline, Walkin' After Midnight

Joey Powers, Midnight Mary.  A one-hit wonder.

Kenny Ball, Midnight in Moscow  One of many memorable instrumentals from the early '60s.

Rolling Stones, Moonlight Mile

Doors, Moonlight Drive

Anne Murray, Shadows in the Moonlight (This one goes out to K. P.)

Ludwig van Beethoven, Moonlight Sonata.  A part of it anyway with scenes from the great Coen Bros. film, "The Man Who Wasn't There."

Van Inwagen on Quine on Existence

From Peter van Inwagen, "McGinn on Existence" in Modes of Existence: Papers in Ontology and Philosophical Logic, eds. Bottani et al., Ontos Verlag, 2006, p. 106:

There is the theory of Quine, according to which the two oppositions [that between being and non-being and that between existence and non-existence] are not two but one.  Existence and being are the same.  Existence or being is what is expressed by phrases like 'there is,' 'there are,' and 'something is.'  And, similarly, non-existence is what is expressed by phrases like 'there is no, 'there are,' and 'nothing is.'  Thus, 'Universals exist' means neither more nor less than 'There are universals,'  and the same goes for the pairs 'Carnivorous cows do not exist'/'Nothing is both carnivorous and a cow' and 'The planet Venus exists'/'Something is the planet Venus.'  This outline constitutes the essence of Quine's philosophy of being and existence.

And an accurate and succinct outline it is.  But it just reinforces me in my conviction of the wrongheadedness of Quine's version of the thin theory of existence.

I grant that existence and being are the same.  My objections begin with the assimilation of 'exists' to 'something.'  The following are logically equivalent:

Cats exist
There are cats
Something is a cat.

and the same goes for:

Mermaids do not exist
There are no mermaids
Nothing is a mermaid.

But the thin theorist goes beyond the relatively uncontroversial claim of logical equivalence to the eminently dubious claim that the meaning (van Inwagen uses this word above) of 'exist(s)' is exhausted by the meaning of 'something' and the meaning of 'not exist' is exhausted by the meaning of 'nothing.'

To sort this out, we first note that 'something' splits into 'some' and 'thing.'  To appreciate this, observe that the following are nonsensical

Some is a cat
Thing is a cat.

Equally nonsensical are their canonical counterparts:

(∃ )(x is a cat)
( x) (x is cat).

So both  'some' and 'thing' are needed for  'Something is a cat' — '(∃x)(x is a cat)' — to make sense. 

Now it is obvious that existence is not expressed by 'some' or '∃' since these are merely signs for particular (as opposed to universal) logical quantity.  Existence is not someness.  Existence is not expressed by '∃.'  And it is obvious that existence is not expressed by the variable 'x,' which is merely the canonical stand-in for the third-person singular pronoun, 'it.'  It is obvious, I hope, that one  cannot express the thought that cats exist by saying 'It is a cat.'  Existence is not 'itness.'  Existence is not expressed by 'x' any more than it is expressed by '∃.'

So existence cannot be expressed by the quantifier part of 'something' or the variable part.  Is existence expressed by both together?  No.  Putting together two pieces of mere logical syntax just gves you more logical syntax.  If existence is to come into the picture, we have to get off the plane of mere logical syntax: there has to be some reference to the real world. Suppose we write 'Something is a cat' as

Some thing is a cat.

But now the cat is out of the bag.  For surely these things one is quantifying over are existing things: 'thing' is a variable having existing values.  So to be perfectly clear, one must write:

Some existing thing is a cat.

And now the explanatory circularity of the Quinean account is obvious.  We were promised an account of existence in terms of the so-called existential quantifier.  But the account on offer presupposes the very 'thing' we want an account of, namely, existence.  Clearly, one must presuppose that the objects in the domain of quantification are existing objects if the logical equivalences above mentioned are to hold. 

The Quietist on the Delights of Escapism

There are the undeniable and readily accessible delights of escapism into scholarship, and science, and research and inquiry of all sorts.  When 'reality' becomes too much to bear, what is wrong with retreating into an ivory tower?  Who can rightfully begrude us our right to peace and quiet and happiness?

You say that there are more pressing concerns than the nature and extent of the influence of Avicenna on Aquinas' De Ente et Essentia?  No doubt.  But do you really believe that your becoming hot and bothered over these 'pressing concerns' will lead to any improvement?  Are you sure about that?  And isn't your political activism your mode of escape from something or other?  I like peace and quiet; you like 'drama' and contention.  To each his own.

Thus spoke the quietist.