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Monday, June 13th, 2005
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12:24 am - Chau y hola
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I do not think that this blog will ever be updated again, and it might be destroyed.
However, there is another one here. If I could syndicate that one here I would, but I don't know how. If you do, let me know.
-Robbie
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| Friday, October 15th, 2004
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10:34 pm - ¿Che amigos antiguos?
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I am in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in the fatherland of my father and much of my family before him and still. I've been here for quite a while and will be here for quite a while more. I am trying to think of a way to stay here for an indefinitely long time, which would somehow involve making dollars in the States and spending them as pesos here. Any ideas?
I wonder what the odds are that anybody will ever see this. I just re-discovered it myself.
In other news, I voted, for Kerry, and sent my ballot from the embassy today. I spent hours, absolutely hours, reading every candidate's statement and proposition and every argument for and against every candidate and proposition for the federal, state, and local elections. I took it all rather more seriously than I anticipated, such a good philosopher and liberal artist and citizen I am, and was much less confident in my decisions than I anticipated (a lack of conviction being something I have somewhat recently come to respect, since it seems to me so honest and fair, if also difficult and unpragmatic). The whole business made me feel rather embarrasingly sentimental about democracy, I admit.
And I find that I remain an overwhelmingly liberal voter, though as always after thorough reading and consideration I did manage to surprise myself with a few votes, which I presume to be intellectually healthy.
The only graffiti that are more common in Bs.As. than anti-Bush graffiti are anti-F.M.I. (que es "I.M.F.") graffiti. I think I'll try to read the motorcycle diaries (of El Che) soon, since it'll be good language practice and he is something of a national icon.
-r
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| Wednesday, June 23rd, 2004
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2:05 am - I was curious what it would look like, and I impressed myself.
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| Wednesday, June 2nd, 2004
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3:35 am - Reading the newspapers and reconsidering War and Peace
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Toward the end of the year 1811, an intensified arming and concentration of the forces of western Europe began, and in 1812 these forces -- millions of men, reckoning those that transported and victualed the army -- moved from the west eastward to the Russian frontier, where in exactly the same way the Russian forces had been massing during that year. On the twelfth of June the forces of western Europe crossed the Russian border and war began, that is, an event took place counter to human reason and human nature. Millions of men perpetrated against one another such an infinite number of crimes, frauds, treacheries, robberies, forgeries, issues of counterfeit money, depredations, incendiarisms, and murders, as are not recorded in the annals of all the courts of justice in the world, but which those who committed them did not at the time regard as crimes.
What brought about this extraordinary event? What were its causes? The historians, with naive certainty, tell us that its causes were the wrongs inflicted on the Duke of Oldenburg, the nonobservance of the Continental system, the ambition of Napoleon, the firmness of Aleksandr, the mistakes of diplomats, and so on.
Consequently it would only have been necessary for Napoleon, Rumyantsev, or Talleyrand, between a levee and a reception, to have taken the pains to write a more adroit note, or for Napoleon to have written to Aleksandr: "Monsieur, mon frère, I consent to restore the Duchy to the Duke of Oldenburg," and there would have been no war.
We can understand these views being held at the time. We can understand how to Napoleon it seemed that the war was caused by England's intrigues (as in fact he said on the island of St. Helena). We can understand that to the members of the English Parliament the cause of the war seemed to be Napoleon's love of power; that to the Duke of Oldenburg its cause seemed to be the violence done to him; that to the merchants the cause seemed to be the Continental system, which was ruining Europe; that to the generals and old soldiers it seemed that the chief cause was the necessity of giving them employment; that to the legitimists of the day it was the need for reestablishing les bons principes; and to the diplomats of that time it all seemed to result from the fact that the alliance between Russia and Austria in 1809 had not been sufficiently well concealed from Napoleon, and from the awkward wording of Memorandum No. 178. It is natural that these and a countless, an infinite number of other reasons -- the number depending on the multiplicity of points of view -- presented themselves to the men of that day, but to us, to posterity contemplating the accomplished fact in all its magnitude, and seeking to penetrate its plain and terrible meaning, these causes seem insufficient. To us it is inconceivable that millions of Christian men killed and tortured one another either because Napoleon was ambitious, or Aleksandr firm, or because England's policy was astute, or the Duke of Oldenburg wronged. We cannot grasp the connection between these circumstances and the actual fact of slaughter and violence: why, because the Duke was wronged, thousands of men from the other side of Europe pillaged and slaughtered the inhabitants of Smolensk and Moscow and were slaughtered by them.
To us, their descendants, who are not historians and are not carried away by the process of research and can therefore regard the event with unclouded common sense, the causes that suggest themselves are legion. The deeper we delve in search of these causes the more of them we discover, and each single cause or series of causes appears to us equally valid in itself, and equally false by its insignificance compared to the magnitude of the event and by its impotence (unless in conjunction with all the other concurring causes) to occasion the event. To us the willingness or unwillingness of this or that French corporal to serve a second term appears as much a cause as Napoleon's refusal to withdraw his troops beyond the Vistula and to restore the Duchy of Oldenburg, for had the corporal refused to serve, and had a second, a third, a thousand corporals and privates, also refused, Napoleon's army would have been so greatly reduced that the war could not have taken place.
If Napoleon had not taken offense at the demand that he withdraw beyond the Vistula, and had he not ordered his troops to advance, there would have been no war. But if all his sergeants had refused to serve a second term there also could have been no war. Nor could there have been a war had there been no English intrigues and no Duke of Oldenburg, and had Aleksandr not felt insulted, and had there not been an autocratic government in Russia, or a French Revolution and the ensuing dictatorship and Empire, or all the other things that produced the French Revolution, and so on. Without any one of these causes nothing could have happened. Accordingly all of them -- myriads of causes -- coincided to bring about what occurred. And so there was no single cause for the war, but it happened simply because it had to happen. Millions of men, renouncing human feelings and reason, had to move from west to east to slay their fellows, just as some centuries earlier hordes of men had moved from east to west slaying their fellows.
The actions of Napoleon and Aleksandr, on whose words the event seemed to hang, were as little voluntary as the actions of any soldier who was drawn into the campaign by lot or conscription. This could not be otherwise, for in order that the will of Napoleon and Aleksandr (on whom the event seemed to depend) should be carried out, the concurrence of innumerable circumstances was required, without any one of which the event could not have taken place. It was necessary that millions of men in whose hands the real power lay -- the soldiers who fired the guns, transported provisions and cannons -- should consent to carry out the will of those weak individuals, and should have been induced to do so by an infinite number of diverse and complex causes.
We inevitably resort to fatalism to explain the irrational phenomena of history (that is to say, phenomena the reasonableness of which we do not understand). The more we try to account for such phenomena rationally, the more irrational and incomprehensible do they become to us.
Every man lives for himself, using his freedom to attain his own ends, and feels in his whole being that he can at any moment perform or abstain from performing this or that action, but as soon as he has performed it, that action executed at a given moment in time becomes irrevocable and belongs to history, in which it has not a free but a predetermined significance.
There are two sides to the life of every man: the personal life, which is free to the degree that its interests are abstract, and the elemental life of the swarm, in which he ineluctably follows the laws decreed for him.
Consciously man lives for himself, but unconsciously he serves as an instrument for the accomplishment of the historical, social ends of mankind. An act committed is irrevocable, and that action coinciding in time with the actions of millions of other men acquires historical significance. The higher a man stands in the social scale, the more connections he has with people and the more power he has over them, the more manifest is the predetermination and inevitability of his every act.
"The hearts of kings are in the hand of God."
A king is the slave of history.
History, that is, the unconscious, common, swarm life of mankind uses every moment of the life of kings as an instrument for its own ends.
Though Napoleon at that time, in 1812, was more convinced than ever that it depended on him to shed or not to shed the blood of his people -- as Aleksandr expressed it in the last letter he wrote him -- he had never been so subject to inevitable laws, which compelled him (while thinking that he was acting of his own volition) to do for the world in general, for history, what had to be done.
The people of the west moved east to slay their fellow man. And by the law of coincidence, thousands of minute causes fitted together and combined to produce the movement and the war: reproaches for the nonobservance of the Continental system, the Duke of Oldenburg's wrongs, the movement of troops into Prussia -- undertaken (as it seemed to Napoleon) for the sole purpose of obtaining an armed peace -- the French Emperor's love of war and habit of waging it coinciding with the inclinations of his people, the passion for grandiose preparations, the expenditures on those preparations and the necessity of obtaining advantages to compensate for them, the intoxicating effect of the honors he received in Dresden, the diplomatic negotiations which in the opinion of contemporaries were carried on with a sincere desire to attain peace but which only wounded the self-esteem of both sides, and millions upon millions of other causes that adapted themselves to the fated event and coincided with it.
When an apple has ripened and falls -- why does it fall? Is it because of the force of gravity, because its stem withers, because it is dried by the sun, because it grows heavier, because the wind shakes it, or because the boy standing under the tree wants to eat it?
None of these is the cause. All this is only the conjunction of conditions in which every vital, organic, elemental event occurs. And the botanist who finds that the apple falls because the cellular tissue decomposes, and so forth, is just as right and as wrong as the child who stands under the tree and says the apple fell because he wanted to eat it and prayed for it to fall. In the same way the historian who says that Napoleon went to Moscow and was destroyed because Aleksandr desired his destruction is just as right and as wrong as the man who says that an undermined hill weighing thousands of tons fell because of the last blow of a workman's mattock. In historic events the so-called great men are but labels giving names to events, and like labels they have only the slightest connection with the event itself.
Every act of theirs that seems to them an act of their own free will is, in the historical sense, not free at all, but is connected with the whole course of history and determined from eternity.
-War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Ann Dunnigan, Book III, Part One, Chapter One
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| Thursday, February 19th, 2004
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7:34 pm - Reading Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil
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Alas, he who knows the heart divines how poor, stupid, helpless, arrogant, blundering, more prone to destroy than save is even the best and deepest love! --It is possible that within the holy disguise and fable of Jesus' life there lies concealed one of the most painful cases of the martyrdom of knowledge about love: the martyrdom of the most innocent and longing heart which never had sufficient of human love, which demanded love, to be loved and nothing else, demanded it with hardness, with madness, with fearful outbursts, against those who denied it love; the story of a poor soul unsated and insatiable in love who had to invent hell so as to send there those who did not want to love him -- and who, having become knowledgeable about human love, finally had to invent a god who is wholly love, wholly ability to love -- who had mercy on human love because it is so very paltry and ignorant! He whose feelings are like this, he who knows about love to this extent -- seeks death. --But why reflect on such painful things? As long as one does not have to.--
-269 (translated by R.J. Hollingdale)
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| Monday, October 27th, 2003
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1:10 am - On Reading Marx
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Spending a couple of weeks in The Communist Manifesto, Capital, The German Ideology, and The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, it occurs to me that probably not even any of the self-described communists or socialists I have met really appreciate the depth of beauty and humanity in Marx. I am not sure how far I can go with him in philosophy, but I see the enormity of his ambition or the enormity of his vision and I think of it as noble and beautiful and good.
Though maybe I'm sentimental about the working class.
(And I read that he is descended on his father's side of an eminent line of rabbis, which I did not know.)
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| Thursday, April 10th, 2003
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11:15 pm
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"S'il y avait un peuple de dieux, il se gouvernerait démocratiquement. Un gouvernement si parfait ne convient pas à des hommes."
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du Contrat Social
"If there were a people of gods, they would govern themselves democratically. A government so perfect does not suit men."
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Of the Social Contract
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| Sunday, March 30th, 2003
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2:13 am - Further in Paradise Lost - September 23, 2002
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It was striking at the beginning that Satan and Jesus similarly sacrifice themselves, and Milton sets the scenes in Heaven and Hell so strikingly parallel that he seems to be encouraging us to see the similarity. It strikes me now that Adam is in the same situation. Adam sacrifices himself for his love of Eve, and it is clear that his sacrifice is a deliberate and difficult decision. He is not persuaded by Eve's speech as she was of the serpent's. He is aghast, and he recognizes immediately their doom. But he says that, even if he were to get a new Eve, he would still be attached to and devastated over the one he lost. He decides, agonizingly, to eat the fruit to avoid being without her, and tries to persuade himself after he's already decided to make it go down easier. Next to his sacrifice of himself for romantic love, the other two self-sacrifices warrant further thought. Why does Satan sacrifice himself to war against God, and to continue to fight after having lost? Could it be some kind of love? He certainly loves his freedom and independence, hates submitting to authority. And his inclination away from God produces Sin, whom he loves physically to produce Death. Is Satan's self-sacrifice contrasted to Adam's for being over self-love? And what of Jesus' self-sacrifice? This one seems more clearly or explicitly concerning love. But love of what? Is it love for man or love for God? How is it different or similar to self-love or romantic love? Is it presented as a better or good or true love, in contrast to other, base forms?
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2:04 am - Another ten minutes, this time upon beginning Milton's Paradise Lost - September 19, 2002
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I am struck by Satan's nobility, or by my sympathy for him. The words that Milton puts in Satan's mouth, and the mouths of the other demons to describe God, are words like "tyrant" and "monarch(y)" and "the throne." Knowledge of Milton's trouble with the English monarchy gives credence to the impression that he's as sympathetic to his Satan as I am. Satan wants freedom, and his desire to be opposed to God spawns Sin from his head. But he is unashamed of Sin, he even loves it, and his love of Sin, of his opposition to God's will, of his determination to be free, results in Death. I wonder if Sin would have been good and death something entirely different if Satan would have won the war. I wonder if Sin and Death are what they are in Milton because Satan lost and God's will prevailed. Satan seems very much like God, and perhaps this is the problem. God is a jealous God and man is to put no other God before him. Perhaps Satan rebels against God's authority because the apple has fallen too close to the tree. The same problem exists in man, who is in God's own image. All Satan must do for man to rebel is whisper in his ear the suggestion that he can disobey and become more like God. And this is so favorable that the temptation is unbearable. Satan is a bizarre image of evil. It seems that all he does is whisper alternate ideas into ears. He wants not to serve, and he makes suggestions of doubt in authority.
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1:54 am - Ten minutes of not-letting-the-pen-stop-moving, starting on a prompt (italicized below).
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For some weird reason the seminar reading on my mind right now is the Pascal. Something about Pascal has stuck with me, I think because I came closer to being convinced of Christianity's case through reading Pascal than ever before. I am not exactly sure why this should be. Pascal's discussion of Christianity is unusual, it seems to me, at least in that it is very different from Augustine, Aquinas, and the others we've read. Pascal seemed, in the first reading, to be absolutely wretched because he was somehow utterly convinced of the rightness of Christianity but nevertheless didn't really believe in it. This seems like an absurdity. Perhaps it was that he didn't feel it, but wanted to because he was in some other way convinced. I'm not sure if he was trying to persuade himself or if he was trying to compel Christianity to "click" in his head.
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Looking back over the little piece I just wrote, I suddenly see that what I'm really interseted in is religion and knowability. How can we know a thing without any evidence that is hard and real? And what constitutes hard and real evidence anyway? Do I know a mathematical proof somehow more concretely than a profoundly religious man knows God? Why can't I be a profoundly religious man? But on what basis can I become one religion rather than another, or rather than none at all? I love the story of Jesus, I am inspired by it and connected to it. But how can I believe that he, as a historical man, was divine? Why shouldn't I be a Jew or Muslim or Hindu? And beside Jesus, how can I believe that anything is divine unless everything is? What's the fundamental difference between divine things and earthly things? I don't seem to see any such thing. How should I know what to worship? Am I missing something, missing out on something?
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What frightens me is insensibility in the world. For me to know anything at all requires that what surrounds me be sensible and consistent. I need to be able to pull information about it to my mind while it is in a form that is either true or one that approximates truth closely enough that the true is sensible behind the false. What is frightening about insensibility is randomness. If the universe is not consistent, or if it doesn't reach my mind in a consistent form, then it is or appears to me to be entirely random and unpredictable. For it to be random and unpredictable means that it is essentially unknowable, or that its knowability is sharply limited. Unknowability isolates a thing, or at least the perceiver of it. "Perceive" seems a misnomer, in fact, for if a thing is totally inconsistent, thus unpredictable and random, and thus unknowable, it's hardly a "thing" at all.
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In this place, what would really help is an infallibility of reason or an objective information source. If reason can be trusted without question then insensibility is not so frightening because I have access to a tool that enlarges sensible things, making connections and following paths of necessary consequences, increasing the pool of known things. An objective information source is harder to imagine or conceive of, but such a believable thing would obviously impart sensibility. The alternative to these is to admit to living in an insesnsible and unknowable world, thereby isolating the self or perhaps even denying its existence. I could live by ease or practicality, accepting for pragmatism that I can know things, but this seems to me to be a denial of the question rather than an answer to it.
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The thing that unsetles me about Pascal is his determination that certain things are truths while still being unsure, it seems, of how to know truth. I suppose that I can't very well criticize that, for I cling to certain truths myself while being very confused about truth's knowability, or perhaps more accurately, my methods of determining truth. But the truths I cling to seeem to be of a very different order than his. My truths are of number and mathematical relationships, of the most essential ethics and morality I can thing of, of sensibility in the universe, while his are of an innate wretchedness in man and the principles of Christianity. Perhaps my clinging to sensibility is similar to Pascal's clingings, but sensibility seems to coïncide with my experience. I cannot, or do not (at least) understand how experience can coïncide with his clingings.
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| Sunday, February 2nd, 2003
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10:35 pm - Is there a way to put a title on this journal?
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I've been having trouble knowing what to put up here. I'm not a diarist. I have for a while been consistently writing on the books I've been reading with the goal of not letting the pen stop moving for ten minutes, which makes a raw and dirty stream of thoughts in words. I suppose I can slowly start typing the old ones up, and putting new ones here -- though I can't even imagine typing them first, so I will probably continue to write them on paper. Maybe I will do this.
I will call this journal Question Period. There will be no answers here. Questions, period.
-robbie
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| Friday, January 31st, 2003
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1:05 am - I've been writing on paper.
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| Wednesday, September 18th, 2002
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8:35 pm - Reading Pascal's Pensées
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How are reason and intuition related? How should we know what is under the proper jurisdiction of each, when one is appropriate and the other not?
Is the undistracted man really wretched, without exception? Why should God be a hidden God?
Does Pascal ever successfully transcend both skepticism and dogma? Is doing so even possible?
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| Thursday, September 5th, 2002
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10:58 pm - Reading Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy
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Cogito ergo sum: I think, therefore I am.
Is this preferable to: Thinking is, therefore thoughts are? Does the being of a thinker follow necessarily from the being of thoughts? Descartes sits in a dark room and meditates; he comes to doubt existences, even of his own body; he comes closer to the Eastern or Buddhist nonbeing than any Westerner before him; but at the very heart of it he turns the other way. He becomes the Western thinker.
Am I?
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Close your eyes and breathe. Imagine infinity -- non-finiteness -- itself. Imagine boundlessness, limitlessness. Imagine unending depth and breadth in all ways and directions. Imagine all thought and all reason, all questions and all answers, all numbers and all emotion, all humanity. Imagine beyond limits of space and time. Imagine all power and all perfection, unified.
This is God.
Where the Hell did this idea come from? Might it have been made from nothing by finiteness and imperfection?
Ideas are effects at least as much as they are causes.
-robbie
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| Saturday, August 31st, 2002
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6:38 pm
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Excerpt from paper and leather journal:
June 4, 2002 - 11:21pm
I bought this book six months ago because it's the kind of book I wanted to see and handle. It's spent most of the time since in a drawer because it's blank and I don't know the remedy for that. The idea to fill it with journal-keeping is the most obvious one but I've tried before and failed to keep a journal, partly for being lazy and partly for being disgusted. Personal journal-keeping is self-congratulatory and egocentric. Well, be it damned: am I egocentric or am I not? This books needs filling. If it becomes too gratuitous to live with, I will destroy it.
June 12, 2002 - 1:30am
I will probably not be keeping a journal.
--
Don Quixote de la Mancha decided to be a knight-errant. To be a knight-errant, of course, requires a lady love: so Don Quixote was in love. This is because he decided. Is this his madness?
And while his horse was a hack, it was first and foremost of all hacks.
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| Wednesday, August 14th, 2002
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11:41 pm
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Thaumastikos, e, on, [thaumazô] inclined to wonder or admire, Arist.
Thaumazô
I. to wonder, marvel, be astonied, Il., etc.
2. c. acc. to look on with wonder and amazement, to wonder at, marvel at, Hom., Hdt., attic
b. to honour, admire, worship, Lat. admirari, observare, Od., Hdt., attic:--th. tina tinos for a thing, Thuc.; epi tini Xen.
3. c. gen. to wonder at, marvel at, Thuc., etc.; th. sou legontos Plat.
4. c. dat. rei, to wonder at, Thuc.
5. c. acc. et inf., th. se penthein Eur.
II. Pass. to be looked at with wonder, Hdt.; thaumazetai mê parôn, i. e. I keep wondering that he is not present, Soph.
2. to be admired, Hdt.; ta eikota th. to receive proper marks of respect, Thuc.
- Liddell and Scott's Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon
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thaumastikos's journal