Author: Bill Vallicella

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Kerouac’s Favorite Song

Ellis Amburn, Subterranean Kerouac (St. Martin's 1998), p. 324:

One night he [Kerouac, during a 1962 visit to Lowell, Mass.] left a bar called Chuck's with Huck Finneral, a reedy, behatted eccentric who carried a business card that read: "Professional killer . . . virgins fixed . . . orgies organized, dinosaurs neutered, contracts & leases broken."  Huck's philosophy of life was: "Better a wise madness than a foolish sanity."  They drove to a friend's house in Merrimack, New Hampshire, and on the way, Jack sang "Moon River," calling it his favorite song.  Composed by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer, "Moon River" was the theme song of the popular Audrey Hepburn movie Breakfast at Tiffany's.  Sobbed by a harmonic, later swelling with strings and chorus, the plaintive tune's gentle but epic-like lyrics describe a dreamer and roamer not unlike Kerouac.

Indeed they do.  A restless dreamer, a lonesome traveler, a dharma seeker, a desolation angel passing through this vale of mist, a drifter on the river of samsara hoping one day to cross to the Far Shore.  Here is another version of the tune with some beautiful images.

 

 

Kerouac October Quotation #16: No More Booze, Publishing, or Seminal Emission

Some of the Dharma, p. 240:

Sunday Jan 30 [1955] . . This is it . . . the day I decide to go forward instead of backward . . . will stop drinking, cold turkey (if I can do it) . . . Drink is the curse of the Holy Life — alcohol is the curse of Tao — I'll be like Reverend Henry Armstrong now — I put on the cloth this morning in the yard — (damn the cloth) — I felt its dignified hugeness on me — This, coupled with No Publishing and No Loosing of Sexual Vitality, would return me to the original pristine state of the child . . . 6 year old Ti Jean seeing the red sun in the snow windows of Lowell wondering "Qui c'est ca, moi?" (O what difference does it make?) — Now I'll go to Nin's and help with the new house and prepare for Summer & Fall in Mexico in a grass hut — now I'll imitate the action of the child and like water rule the low valleys of the world — Adoration to the Child.

[. . .]

Armed with continence, and with sublime childlike solitariness, and with unwasted vitality, 33 years old, I go reveal the holy life to men who perish for lack of knowledge.

Nirvana as Asphyxiation

E. M. Cioran, Drawn and Quartered, tr. R. Howard (New York: Seaver Books, 1983), p. 118:

In the Benares sermon, Buddha cites, among the causes of pain, the thirst to become and the thirst not to become. The first thirst we understand, but why the second? To long for nonbecoming — is that not to be released? What is meant here is not the goal but the way as such, the pursuit and the attachment to the pursuit. — Unfortunately, on the way to deliverance only the way is interesting. Deliverance? One does not attain it, one is engulfed in it, smothered in it. Nirvana itself — an asphyxia! Though the gentlest of all.

I am reminded of Ramanuja's rejoinder to Shankara: "I want to taste sugar, not become sugar." If salvation is destructive of all individuality, what could it be worth? If, on the other hand, salvation is merely entry into a Hinterwelt that reproduces in improved form features of the hic et nunc — as on the puerile Islamic conception of paradise as endless disporting with black-eyed virgins — then (i) what rational person could believe in it, and (ii) how could it solve the fundamental problems that plague us here below? They would simply be reproduced in the hinterworld.

Gray Flannel and the Matter of Money

Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit  appeared in 1955 two years before Jack Kerouac's  On the Road. I never finished Gray Flannel, getting only 80 or so pages into it.  It's a book as staid as the '50s, a tad boring, conventional, and forgettable in comparison to the hyperromantic and heart-felt rush of the unforgettable On the Road. Since how 'beat' one is in part has to do with one's attitude towards money, which is not the same as one's possession or nonpossession of it, I'll for now just pull some quotations from Horace and Sloan Wilson.  The Horace quotations seem not to comport well with each other, but we can worry that bone on another occasion.

Quaerenda pecunia primum est; virtus post nummos. (Horace, Epistles I, 1, 53) Money is to be sought first of all; virtue after wealth. Or, loosely translated, cash before conscience.

Vilius argentum est auro virtutibus aurum. (Horace, Epistles I, 1, 52). Silver is less valuable than gold, gold less valuable than virtue.

The next morning, Tom put on his best suit, a freshly cleaned and pressed gray flannel. On his way to work he stopped in Grand Central Station to buy a clean white handkerchief and to have his shoes shined. During his luncheon hour he set out to visit the United Broadcasting Corporation. As he walked across Rockefeller Plaza, he thought wryly of the days when he and Betsy had assured each other that money didn't matter. They had told each other that when they were married, before the war, and during the war they had repeated it in long letters. "The important thing is to find a kind of work you really like, and something that is useful," Betsy had written him. "The money doesn't matter."

The hell with that, he thought. The real trouble is that up to now we've been kidding ourselves. We might as well admit that what we want is a big house and a new car and trips to Florida in the winter, and plenty of life insurance. When you come right down to it, a man with three children has no damn right to say that money doesn't matter. (The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Simon and Shuster, 1955, pp. 9-10)

Why Liberals Don’t Get the Tea Party

Good analysis by Peter Berkowitz. Excerpt:

Born in response to President Obama's self-declared desire to fundamentally change America, the tea party movement has made its central goals abundantly clear. Activists and the sizeable swath of voters who sympathize with them want to reduce the massively ballooning national debt, cut runaway federal spending, keep taxes in check, reinvigorate the economy, and block the expansion of the state into citizens' lives.

In other words, the tea party movement is inspired above all by a commitment to limited government. And that does distinguish it from the competition.

 

 

Kerouac October Quotation #14 and Quiz

Describing the famous Gallery Six poetry reading in The Dharma Bums, Kerouac writes,

The other poets were either hornrimmed intellectual hepcats with wild black hair like Alvah Goldbrook, or delicate pale handsome poets like Ike O'Shay (in a suit), or out-of-this-world genteel looking Renaissance Italians like Francis DaPavia (who looks like a young priest), or bow-tied wild-haired old anarchist fuds like Reinhold Cacoethes, or big fat bespectacled quiet booboos like Warren Coughlin.

Who are or were these five poets in real life?

Islam and the West

It is certainly time that the West considered systematically whether it has irreconcilable differences with Islam. The belligerence of many Islamic spokesmen and the unassimilable quality of many Muslim immigrants in the West, as well as the spectacular terrorist provocations of extreme Islamic groups, make this a very legitimate question.

Read the rest.

The Bundle Theory and the Identity of Indiscernibles

I have been defending the bundle-of-universals theory of concrete particulars (BT) against various weak objections over a series of posts, here,  here, here, and here. Now I consider a very powerful objection, one that many will consider decisive.  The objection can be cast in the mold of modus tollendo tollens:  If BT is true, then the Identity of Indiscernibles is a necessary truth.  But the Identity of Indiscernibles is not a necessary truth. Ergo, BT is not true.

1. The Identity of Indiscernibles (IdIn) is the converse of the Indiscernibility of Identicals (InId) and not to be confused with it.  InId is well-nigh self-evident, while IdInis not.  Roughly, the latter is the principle that if x and y share all properties, then x = y.  It is a strictly ontological principle despite the epistemological flavor of 'indiscernible.' As just stated, it is more of a principle-schema than a principle.  We will get different principles depending on what we count as a property.  To arrive at a plausible nontrivial principle we must first rule out haecceity properties.  If, for any x,there is a property of identity-with-x, then no two things could share all properties, and the principle would be trivially true due to the falsehood of the antecedent.  Haecceity properties are creatures of darkness in any case as I argue elsewhere.

A plausible, nontrivial, principle results if we allow as properties all and only relational and  nonrelational pure properties.  A pure property is one that makes no reference to any specific individual.   Being married would then be an example of a pure relational property: to be married is to be married to someone, but not to any specified individual.  Being married to Xanthippe, however, is an impure relational property.  Being obese would be an example of a nonrelational property.  Here then is a plausible version of the Identity of Indiscernibles:

Necessarily, for any x, for any y, and for any relational or nonrelational pure property P, if (x has P iff y has P) then x = y.

2.  It is obvious, I think, that BT entails IdIn in the above form.  Consider a concrete particular, an iron sphere say, at a time.  On BT it is nothing but a bundle of universals. This implies that it is not possible that there be a second iron sphere that shares with the first  all relational and nonrelational pure properties.  This is not possible on BT because on BT a concrete particular is nothing more than a bundle of universals.  Thus there is no ontological ingredient in a concrete particular that could serve to differentiate it from another particular having all the same relational and nonrelational pure properties.  And if it is not possible that there be two things that differ numerically without differing property-wise, then the Identity of Indiscernibles as above formulated is necessarily true.

I am assuming that BT, if true, is necessarily true.  This is a special case of the assumption that the propositions of metaphysics, if true, are necessarily true.  If this assumption is granted, then BT entails IdIn.

3.  But is IdIn true?  Since it is necessarily true if true, all it takes to refute it is a possible counterexample.  Imagine a world consisting of two iron spheres and nothing else.  (The thought experiment was proposed in a 1952 Mind article by Max Black.) They are the same size, shape, volume, chemical composition and so on.  They agree in every nonrelational respect.  But they also agree in every relational respect.  Thus, each has the property of being ten meters from an iron sphere.   What Black's example seems to show is that there can be numerical difference without property-difference.  But then IdIn is false, whence it follows that BT is false.

4.  This is a powerful objection, but is it fatal?  Here are three ways to resist the argument, fit topics for further posts.  He who has the will to blog will never be bereft of topics.

a. Maintain that BT is a contingent truth.  If so, then BT does not entail IdIn as formulated above.

b. Grant that BT entails IdIn, but deny that scenarios such as Black's are really possible.  Admit that they are conceivable, but deny that conceivability entails possibility.

c.  An immanent universal can be wholly present at different places at once.  So why can't a bundle of universals be wholly present in different places at once?  Argue that Black's world can be interpreted, not as two particulars sharing all universals, but as one particular existing in two places at the same time.  From that infer that Black's Gedankenexperiment does show that IdIn is false.

Any other paths of resistance?

Kerouac October Quotation #13: Buddhist Life Denial

From Some of the Dharma, Viking 1997, p. 175, emphasis added:

No hangup on nature is going to solve anything — nature is bestial — desire for Eternal Life of the individual is bestial, is the final creature-longing — I say, Let us cease bestiality & go into the bright room of the mind realizing emptiness, and sit with the truth. And let no man be guilty, after this, Dec. 9 1954, of causing birth. — Let there be an end to birth, an end to life, and therefore an end to death.  Let there be no more fairy tales and ghost stories around and about this.  I don't advocate that everybody die, I only say everybody finish your lives in purity and solitude and gentleness and realization of the truth and be not the cause of any further birth and turning of the black wheel of death.  Let then the animals take the hint, and then the insects, and all sentient beings in all one hundred directions of the One Hundred Thousand Chilicosms of Universes. Period.

Nature is the cause of all our suffering; joy is the reverse side of suffering.  Instead of seducing women, control yourself and treat them like sisters; instead of seducing men, control yourself and treat them like brothers.  For life is pitiful.

Stop.

The Philosopher as Rhinoceros

George Santayana, Character and Opinion in the United States (New York: Norton, 1967), p. 35:

So long as philosophy is the free pursuit of wisdom, it arises wherever men of character and penetration, each with his special experience or hobby, looks about them in this world. That philosophers should be professors is an accident, and almost an anomaly. Free reflection about everything is a habit to be imitated, but not a subject to expound; and an original system, if the philosopher has one, is something dark, perilous, untested, and not ripe to be taught, nor is there much danger that anyone will learn it. The genuine philosopher — as Royce liked to say, quoting the Upanishads — wanders alone like the rhinoceros.

Is it any wonder that Santayana quit his teaching job at Harvard and spent the rest of his life in retirement in Rome?

The difference between a philosopher and a professor of philosophy is the former lives for what the latter lives from.