Preoccupations

Baudrillard

Of all I've read today about Baudrillard, and Fimoculous has a good round up of links to the obituaries, the Guardian piece by Steven Poole struck me because of this:

Baudrillard took to calling his works "theory fictions": because the present is always more fantastical than the most lurid science fiction, "theory" must compete with it on an imaginative level. So Baudrillard offered himself as an extrapolator, a canary in the cultural coalmine. "My work is paradoxical," he explained. "It's surrealist like fiction." He found a sympathetic soul in the novelist JG Ballard, who called him "the most important French thinker of the last 20 years". (In 1974, Baudrillard had hailed Ballard's Crash as "the first great novel of the universe of simulation".)

Baudrillard once wore a gold lamé suit with mirrored lapels while reading his poetry in a Las Vegas bar. If he didn't take himself particularly seriously, his critics complained that he didn't take anything else seriously either. A recurring charge was that it was politically and morally irresponsible, at the very least, to speak of the "unreality" of modern war, because to do so was to ignore the realities of killing and suffering. Baudrillard's response, in his 2004 book The Lucidity Pact, or The Intelligence of Evil, was laconic: "The reality-fundamentalists equip themselves with a form of magical thinking that confuses message and messenger: if you speak of the simulacrum, then you are a simulator; if you speak of the virtuality of war, then you are in league with it and have no regard for the hundreds of thousands of dead ... it is not we, the messengers of the simulacrum, who have plunged things into this discredit, it is the system itself that has fomented this uncertainty that affects everything today."

One sceptical British interviewer called Baudrillard a "philosopher clown", a description to which he probably would not have objected, instead taking it as an invitation to think about the social function of clowns.

Technorati tags: Baudrillard, Jean Baudrillard, Ballard, J G Ballard

A remembered future

Sometimes, posts just seem … right. This is Morgan Meis (3 Quarks Daily):

The twentieth century was insane. We forget to remember that. … Through it all, the challenge to the coherence and sustainability of human experience was relentless. If tradition was disrupted and broken down here and there in the 19th century, it was upended completely, remade from the insight (inside ?) out, and sometimes obliterated during the 20th. …

Czeslaw Milosz was as sensitive to these issues as anyone. This is a man who picked his way through the rubble of Warsaw when its ruins were still steaming, when the place was just an open wound. That experience, and the knowledge gained from it, is shot through everything that Milosz ever wrote. For Milosz, man is guaranteed nothing. That’s it. Nothing. And man can be reduced, or reduce himself, to nothing, at any moment. …

Gombrowicz too experienced such things. … But Gombrowicz chose flight, literally and metaphorically. … That is his particular freedom. It is the freedom of Socrates as Kierkegaard describes him in The Concept of Irony, the freedom that escapes from every possible determination.

Truth be told, this version of freedom annoys Milosz. Because for Milosz, the possibility of meaning in human affairs is dependent on commitment. If nothing else, it is founded on the capacity for human beings to hold experience together even as forces from within and without work to tear it apart. How one does this is not entirely clear but Milosz’s entire oeuvre is the sustained attempt to do so even as he lacks a blueprint. That is a pretty brave literary task to set in front of oneself. From Milosz’s standpoint, Gombrowicz has retreated into his own consciousness instead of forcing himself constantly to confront the problems of the world as it is encountered. …

But then the two come together again, in Milosz’s mind, because Gombrowicz never falls into the trap of those intellectuals who have lost track of the root problems of experience, actual experience, that have been thrown up by the 20th century. Milosz writes that, “A comparison of Gombrowicz with western writers, with Sartre, for example, would reveal, in the case of the latter, a deficiency of a certain type of experience connected with history and specific cultural traditions, a deficiency that is compensated for by theory.”

I think we’re still working this stuff through. And I’ll make one more rash claim. The future right now is in the past. Sometimes it is in the past, the immediate past, where things get clear again. For those of us whose lives stretch from the era of the 20th century into the next one, the most important thing for taking the future seriously is doing work on the things that have recently past. Only now is it becoming even vaguely possible to understand how important are the tentative thoughts put forward by people like Milosz and Gombrowicz. And there are others, back there, waiting for us. We simply have to take seriously the idea that turning our backs on the future is a way of renewing it.

We are, beyond question, 'still working this stuff through'. Spot on.

'A remembered future'? In July of last year, I wrote:

In 1984, Harold Fisch published A Remembered Future and wrote of how art can give us 'the unappeased memory of a future still to be fulfilled'. More recently, Heaney has written of how 'We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves. The best it can do is to give us an experience that is like foreknowledge of certain things which we already seem to be remembering. What is at work … is the mind's capacity to conceive a new plane of regard for itself, a new scope for its own activity' ('Joy or Night', 1990, in The Redress of Poetry, 1995).

For me, reading Milosz is to remember the future.

Technorati tags: Czeslaw Milosz, Milosz, Gombrowicz

Cooling down

Travelling back from the foothills of the Pyrenees, where it was very, very hot, and catching up on my feeds and email. Just read this from David Weinberger:

… there is no corrective for fallibility. We live in the breach between the world and how we take it. We are that breach. It closes only when they shovel the dirt over us. Until then, there are only degrees and modes of fallibility.

That doesn't mean the authorities have no authority. It does mean that there is nothing with total authority. We're stuck with always having the argument about what to believe because knowledge is a way to manage fallibility, not to escape it.

Technorati tags: David Weinberger, knowledge, modernity

Labyrinths and Internet

Fascinating, and frustrating, posting at things magazine: I'm not sure why the advent of 'global communications technology' is seen as leading to the demise of reliquaries, and I certainly don't date the going of the 'divine on the defensive' to about a 100 years ago — that's being going on since at least the sixteenth century. As Cornelius Ernst (see here, paras 6 & 7; Tim's address), my favourite twentieth century theologian, puts it: 'I cannot think of a single clerical philosopher of real distinction since the Middle Ages (and whether it is appropriate to speak of any medieval thinker as a 'philosopher' is of course problematic)'.

But I was interested by this (thanks to Matt Webb for drawing my attention to it):

The internet feels like a giant reliquary at times. … The web is also like being stuck in a giant uncatalogued library, with every dusty shelf offering up hidden treasures; you just have to hunt for them. Our mental picture is a combination of the Gormenghastian, before the great fire, and the octagonal library in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose. The latter was apparently inspired by the Robarts Library at the University of Toronto, a brutalist construction by Mathers and Haldenby, in collaboration with Warner Burns Toan & Lunde. The library does have a medieval aspect , a fortress of knowledge (according to the Wikipedia, one of its nicknames is 'Fort Book'. It's also the subject of the widespread 'sinking library' urban legend).

Eco's fictional medieval library was strongly influenced by Jorge Luis Borges, in particular the Argentinian's Library of Babel, an unfolding, labyrinthine, almost infinite space, that apparently contained all knowledge:

'When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness. All men felt themselves to be the masters of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal or world problem whose eloquent solution did not exist in some hexagon. The universe was justified, the universe suddenly usurped the unlimited dimensions of hope.'

… Perhaps the internet is also best understood as a dual system (and not just the DOS vs Mac hierarchy that Eco playfully compared to religion back in 1994). We suggest that rather than just a cabinet of curiosities (the traditional wunderkammer remains a popular web metaphor), the internet is in fact a combination of reliquary and labyrinth, both a maze of one's own making and a receptacle for wonder, a place where getting lost is a self-conscious act, portals act as balls of twine, to be unwound or ignored at your peril.

The internet as 'a receptacle for wonder': I linked last year to something Matt Jones posted about awe and wonder and the net. The image of the net as labyrinthine library containing all knowledge makes me think of Dante's great image in the Paradiso (Canto XXXIII; Borges' fantastical library of course recalls this, in deliberately distorted form), when he looks into the heart of the eternal light and 'Within its depths I saw ingathered, bound by love in one volume, the scattered leaves of all the universe' ('Nel suo profondo vidi che s' interna, / legato con amore in un volume, / ciò che per l'universo si squaderna', Temple Classics translation).

'Reliquary' I am less sure about. I think it more useful at this point to do more work on the net-as-memory (individual +) and on what light might be (unexpectedly) shed upon this by studies such as Penelope Reed Doob's The Idea of the Labyrinth — which dedicates some pages to the relationship between labyrinth imagery and medieval understanding of memory and memory practices (on which, I recall, there's Mary Carruthers' book, The Book of Memory, amongst much else). Gabriel Josipovici years ago drew attention to the labyrinth as 'the favourite image of modern literature', 'the mazes of Kafka, Proust, Beckett, Borges and Robbe-Grillet' (The World and the Book). It takes me further than I meant to go in this post, but I can't resist quoting this from Gabriel's book:

In place of Dante's ordered journey we find ourselves involved with heroes who wander without map or compass along paths which are endless for the simple reason that we would not recognise the end even if we came to it. … there is no emergence for the heroes of modern fiction from the labyrinths of reflecting mirrors and demonic analogy. At the end they are no nearer the exit than they were at the beginning. All they have done is move through all the arteries of the labyrinth. Yet this, if they but knew it, is both the exit and the answer. … the writing was the travelling.

Unlike Dante, we have no vantage point from which to 'look back, standing on solid ground, over the winding uphill way, with its little figures of men and women dotted about at various stages of their own ascent' (The World and the Book). The internet, without end, is our own faithfully reflecting mirror, or demonic analogy.

The Paradigm Shift Rate

via antimega, Ray Kurzweil's PP presentation of his Emerging Technologies (2005) talk.

The Singularity is near — allegedly. Wikipedia article here.

Sappho, Rexroth et al

Some Sappho links:

• classicpersuasion.org — The Divine Sappho
• two Metafilter pages: here and here

'Sappho everywhere chooses the emotions that attend delirious passion from its accompaniments in actual life. Wherein does she demonstrate her supreme excellence? In the skill with which she selects and binds together the most striking and vehement circumstances of passion. … Are you not amazed how at one instant she summons, as though they were all alien from herself and dispersed, soul, body, ears, tongue, eyes, colour? Uniting contradictions, she is, at one and the same time, hot and cold, in her senses and out of her mind, for she is either terrified or at the point of death. The effect desired is that not one passion only should be seen in her, but a concourse of the passions.' Longinus, On the Sublime

Kenneth Rexroth (1905–1982) on Sappho, Herodotus and The Bhagavad-Gita.

Bureau of Public Secrets and its Kenneth Rexroth Archive.

The nature of Science

The Pinocchio Theory (Steven Shaviro) on Isabelle Stengers' The Invention of Modern Science — 'pretty much the best thing anyone has written about the science wars (the disputes between scientists and those in the humanities and 'soft' social sciences doing "science studies" … )':

In other words: science produces truths, but it doesn't produce The Truth. It isn't the sole authority on everything, or the one and only source of legitimate knowledge. To say that science produces truths is also to say that it's meaningless to ask to what degree these truths are "discovered," and to what degree they are "invented." This just isn't a relevant distinction any longer. What matters is that they are truths, and our very existence is intricated with them. We can't deny that the Earth goes around the Sun, rather than the reverse, just as we can't deny the legacy of wars and revolutions that have led to our current world situation. And this is all the more the case when we expand our point of view to consider historical sciences, like biology, alongside experimental ones like physics. Despite the current mathematization of biology, the story of how human beings evolved is an historical one, not one that can be 'proven' through experiment. If physics is a matter of events, then biology is even more so. Stengers notes that American creationists explicitly make use of the fact that biology isn't experimental in the sense that physics is, in order to back up their claims that evolution is just a "theory" rather than something factual. One problem with scientific imperialism -- the claim that science is the ONLY source of truth -- is that its overreaching precisely encourages these sorts of counter-claims. I'd agree with the creationists when they say that the theory of evolution is not established in the same way as, say, Newton's laws of motion are established. (Though remember that in quantum situations, and relativistic near-speed-of-light situations, those laws of motion themselves no longer work). Rather, our answer to the creationists should be that denying that human beings evolved through natural selection (combined, perhaps, with other factors having to do with the properties of emergent systems) is exactly the same sort of thing as denying that the Holocaust ever happened.

As for science, the problem comes when it claims to explain everything, when it arrogates to itself the power to declare all other forms of explanation illegitimate, when it abstracts itself away from the situations, the events, in which it distinguishes truth from fiction, and claims to be the repository of all truths, with the authority to relegate all other truth-claims to the status of discredited fictions. …

One way to sum all this up is to say that science, for Stengers, is a process rather than a product; it is creative, rather than foundational. Its inventions/discoveries introduce novelty into the world; they make a difference. Scientific truth should therefore be aligned with becoming (with inciting changes and transformations) rather than with power (with legislating what is and must be). Scientists are wrong when they think they are entitled to explain and determine everything, through some principle of reduction or consilience. But they are right when they see an aesthetic dimension to what they do (scientists subject themselves to different constraints than artists do, but both scientists and artists are sometimes able to achieve beauty and cogency as a result of following their respective constraints).

The real future

It's a bumper night. This from Don Parks:

I often feel as if I am living in a river of time.  When I was young, I didn't really care what might be downstream.  As I got older and experienced many harrowing turns of the river, I found myself looking farther and farther ahead.

What I just realized was that my sense of now changed over the years to include the future, near and far.  An event that will happen feels almost as real to me as an event happening now, just as the shape of the river downstream affects the flow of the river upstream.

Don is the author of one of my favourite meditations on death and the net.

Thinking in the body

And as if that weren't enough excitement for one night, there's this from Anne Galloway:

If Derrida were a verb, then that's what happened to Webb the other night. Brilliant. And now he's got a question:

"The way Derrida operates inside language instead of over it, I want a philosophy (or rather, a way of doing philosophy) which is of embodiment (embodiment of all kinds, including the nonhuman) instead of happening over it. Where can I find that? What can I do? Where can I start?"

My quick answer? There's always The Phenomenology of Perception. But The Body in Pain really made me think about when language fails, and Dangerous Emotions is a hell of a read. And, really, to do philosophy is to live life.

Derrida: a modern Socrates?

Writing in the LRB, Judith Butler argues that Derrida, like Socrates, found 'the question (to be) the most honest and arduous form of thought'.

'How do you finally respond to your life and to your name?' … That he asks the question is exemplary, perhaps even foundational, since it keeps the final meaning of that life and that name open. It prescribes a ceaseless task of honouring what cannot be possessed through knowledge, what in a life exceeds our grasp.

"Coming to terms" with Derrida will not be easy: he has coloured and affected so much of what we perceive, focusing so many of our perceptions and intuitions, challenging these and always rendering us restless just when we might have been tempted to stop.

… his work fundamentally changed the way in which we think about language, philosophy, aesthetics, painting, literature, communication, ethics and politics. His early work criticised the structuralist presumption that language could be described as a static set of rules, and he showed how those rules admitted of contingency and were dependent on a temporality that could undermine their efficacy. He wrote against philosophical positions that uncritically subscribed to 'totality' or 'systematicity' as values, without first considering the alternatives that were ruled out by that pre-emptive valorisation. He insisted that the act of reading extends from literary texts to films, to works of art, to popular culture, to political scenarios, and to philosophy itself. This notion of 'reading' insists that our ability to understand relies on our capacity to interpret signs. It also presupposes that signs come to signify in ways that no particular author or speaker can constrain in advance through intention. This does not mean that language always confounds our intentions, but only that our intentions do not fully govern everything we end up meaning by what we say and write.

Above all, I respond to what Judith Butler calls his insistence 'on the Other as one to whom an incalculable responsibility is owed, one who could never fully be 'captured' through social categories or designative names, one to whom a certain response is owed'.

This conception became the basis of his strenuous critique of apartheid in South Africa, his vigilant opposition to totalitarian regimes and forms of intellectual censorship, his theorisation of the nation-state beyond the hold of territoriality, his opposition to European racism, and his criticism of the discourse of 'terror' as it worked to increase governmental powers that undermine basic human rights. This political ethic can be seen at work in his defence of animal rights, in his opposition to the death penalty, and even in his queries about 'being' Jewish and what it means to offer hospitality to those of differing origins and language.

Derrida made clear in his short book on Walter Benjamin, The Force of Law (1994), that justice was a concept that was yet to come. This does not mean that we cannot expect instances of justice in this life, and it does not mean that justice will arrive for us only in another life. He was clear that there was no other life. It means only that, as an ideal, it is that towards which we strive, without end. Not to strive for justice because it cannot be fully realised would be as mistaken as believing that one has already arrived at justice and that the only task is to arm oneself adequately to fortify its regime. The first is a form of nihilism (which he opposed) and the second is dogmatism (which he opposed). Derrida kept us alive to the practice of criticism, understanding that social and political transformation was an incessant project, one that could not be relinquished, one that was coextensive with the becoming of life and the encounter with the Other, one that required a reading of the rules by means of which a polity constitutes itself through exclusion or effacement. How is justice done? What justice do we owe others? And what does it mean to act in the name of justice? These were questions that had to be asked regardless of the consequences, and this meant that they were often questions asked when established authorities wished that they were not.

I am also, though, moved by her opening paragraph on Derrida and mourning.

Edward Said, 1935–2003

In The Guardian, Daniel Barenboim remembers his close friend, Edward Said — an excellent pianist who, Barenboim believes, drew deeply on his love and knowledge of music in formulating his judgements about literature and post-colonialism:

In recent years, due to his terrible illness, he was unable to maintain the level of physical energy necessary to play the piano. I remember many unforgettable times that we spent playing Schubert pieces for four hands. Two or three years ago, I had a concert at Carnegie Hall in New York and he was going through a very difficult period of his illness. The concert was on a Sunday afternoon. Although he knew that I had arrived that very morning from Chicago, he showed up very early at rehearsal with a volume of Schubert's pieces for four hands. He told me: "Today I want us to play at least eight bars, not for the pleasure of playing, but because I need it to survive."

As you can imagine, at that moment, just in from the airport and with one hour of rehearsal before the afternoon's concert, the last thing I wanted to do was to play Schubert for four hands. But, as is always the case, when you teach you learn, and when you give you receive. And you learn when you teach because the student asks questions that you no longer even ask yourself, because they are part of the almost automatic thought which each one of us develops. And suddenly, the question addresses something that forces us to rethink it from its origin, from its very essence. ...

His concept of inclusion also derived from music, as well as the integration principle. The same could be applied to his book Orientalism. It speaks of the idea of Oriental seduction versus western production. In music, there is no production without seduction. Productive as a musical idea may be, if it is lacking the seduction of the necessary sound, it is insufficient. This is why I say that Edward Said was, for many, a great thinker, a fighter for the rights of his people, and an incomparable intellectual. But for me, he was always, really, a musician, in the deepest sense of the term.

Said's Guardian obituary can be found here, and Tom Paulin's celebration of Said's life and work (another Guardian piece) is here. Other articles and tributes about Said, published since his death, are listed here at 3quarksdaily.

Jacques Derrida, 1930–2004

Jacques Derrida, father of Deconstructionism, has died (BBC News).

"Deconstruction" is the name given to a radical and wide-ranging development in the human sciences, especially philosophy and literary criticism, initiated by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida in a series of highly influential books published in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including (in translation): Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, Speech and Phenomena, Margins of Philosophy, and Dissemination. "Deconstruction," Derrida's coinage, has subsequently become synonymous with a particular method of textual analysis and philosophical argument involving the close reading of works of literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, linguistics, and anthropology to reveal logical or rhetorical incompatibilities between the explicit and implicit planes of discourse in a text and to demonstrate by means of a range of critical techniques how these incompatibilities are disguised and assimilated by the text. In one of its typical analytical procedures, a deconstructive reading focuses on binary oppositions within a text, first, to show how those oppositions are structured hierarchically; second, to overturn that hierarchy temporarily, as if to make the text say the opposite of what it appeared to say initially; and third, to displace and reassert both terms of the opposition within a nonhierarchical relationship of "difference." ...

The concept of difference is crucial to Derrida, who uses it to "deconstruct" Western philosophy, which he argues is founded on a theory of "presence," in which metaphysical notions such as truth, being, and reality are determined in their relation to an ontological center, essence, origin (archè), or end (telos) that represses absence and difference for the sake of metaphysical stability. The best-kept secret of Western metaphysics is thus the historical repression of difference through a philosophical vocabulary that favors presence in the form of voice, consciousness, and subjectivity. Derrida calls this philosophy "logocentrism" or "phonocentrism" in that it is based on a belief in a logos or phonè, a self-present word constituted not by difference but by presence (Writing and Difference 278-82). Logocentrism, for Derrida, represents Western culture's sentimental desire for a natural or Adamic language whose authority is guaranteed by a divine, transcendental signified. On the surface, language seems unwilling to face up to its human arbitrariness, yet on closer inspection it also appears to call attention to its differential structure: language at once posits and retracts its own desire for presence.

Derrida's deconstructive method proceeds by means of slow and ingeniously detailed close readings of texts, focusing on those points where a binary opposition (e.g., signifier/signified, presence/absence, nature/culture, literal/figural, outside/inside), a line of argument, or even a single word breaks down to reveal radical incongruities in the logic or rhetoric. Unlike ambiguity, irony, or paradox, these incompatibilities cannot be harmonized in the service of textual "unity" or "integrity," terms that for Derrida would be synonymous with "self-presence." Instead, the contradictions expose the text to the force of its own difference, its displacement from a univocal center of meaning. They show that what a text says and how it says it do not converge but simultaneously strive toward and defer convergence. Deconstruction always reveals difference within unity.

The John Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism

Czeslaw Milosz, 1911–2004

Hope, from The World (A Naïve Poem)

Hope means that someone believes the earth
Is not a dream, that it is living flesh;
That sight, touch, hearing tell the truth;
And that all the things we have known here
Are like a garden, looked at from the gate.

You can't go in, but you can see it's there.
And if we could see clearly and more wisely
We know we'd find in the world's garden
Some new flower or undiscovered star.

Some people think our eyes deceive us; they say
That there is nothing but a pretty seeming:
And just these are the ones who don't have hope.
They think that when a person turns away
The whole world vanishes behind his back
As if a clever thief had snatched it up.

I posted about the death of Czeslaw Milosz two days ago, here. Also two days ago, The New Republic online republished Leon Wieseltier's August 1, 1983 review of Milosz's Charles Eliot Norton Lectures (Harvard University), The Witness of Poetry:

The Witness of Poetry ... is the credo of a great poet. It reveals that Milosz is really a religious thinker. His religiousness is not "tacit", as a critic recently claimed; it is explicit, as it has been in his poems for many years. What is tacit, in this book, is his politics. The politics, to be sure, are anti-Communist; and the authority of Milosz's anticommunism is pretty much absolute. He is angry at universalism and utopianism. 'The young cannibals who, in the name of inflexible principles, butchered the population of Cambodia, had graduated from the Sorbonne,' he observes, 'and were simply trying to implement the philosophic ideas they had learned.' ... Milosz reveres, instead, human custom. And he reveres the Roman patrimony of his country — 'Latin as the language of the church and of literature, the theological quarrels of the Middle Ages, Latin poetry as a model for Renaissance poets, white churches in the baroque style'.

All of this might make him suspect, as he puts it, 'of entering into an alliance with reactionaries, for in our century it is they who are the rear guard defending a discrimination among values'. The rhetoric may sound a little stiff, so let us agree at once that there are allies of reactionaries and there are allies of reactionaries. Milosz is not the kind who praises Edmund Burke from the Waldorf Towers. His reverence for human custom is based upon the personal participation in it. The same is true of his religiousness. He does not shill for the spiritual life, or for its civil utility; he lives spiritually. For this reason his credo is not precisely criticism, but something more primary. For this reason, too, Milosz does not carry his faith like a flag. His quarrels with Western literature and Western politics are many, but he is nobody's scourge. He seeks to illuminate, but not quite to influence. This is the humility of the genuinely conservative, and the privacy of the genuinely religious. It is also the restraint of a man who bears many of ideology's scars, who is familiar with the consequences of forcing the soul's certainties upon society.

Perhaps the most paradoxical feature of this century is that it is the century for which the spiritual should be most obvious. How could the slaughters of Hitler and Stalin, and the Communist captivity of half of Europe and most of Asia, not shake the soul? The striking thing about Milosz's insistence upon a dimension of the holy is its appositeness to the age. Milosz's raised point of regard, his feud with the aesthetic and scientific circumscriptions of reality, is a perfectly plausible response to the events he has experienced. It is not a leap of faith. History leapt; he did not. Like the Siennese and Florentine painters of the late fourteenth century, who responded to the mortalitá of the Black Death with a rudely transcendental art — nothing so fearfully foreshadows the corpse-consciousness of the mid-twentieth century as Boccaccio's opening pages — Milosz demands a more decisive knowledge. 'Veni Creator', he called a poem written in 1961.

Come, Holy Spirit
bending or not bending the grasses,
appearing or not above our heads in a tongue of flame,
at hay harvest or when they plough in the orchards or when snow
covers crippled firs in the Sierra Nevada.
I am only a man: I need visible signs.
I tire easily, building the stairway of abstraction.
Many a time I asked, you know it well, that the statue in church
lift its hand, only once, just once, for me.

Nor is he the only one whose power of religious perception has been quickened by the horrors of his history. Leszek Kolakowski, the other intellectual who was Poland's loss and our gain, long ago exchanged the scholastics of the Party for the scholastics of the Church. (In 1976 I sat in Kolakowski's seminar at All Souls and heard him explain all that Lucien Goldmann did not understand about Pascal; it remains in my memory as an exemplary exercise of the uncaptive mind.) There are sufferings that put the purely secular to shame, that create a need for meanings that neither reason nor society can satisfy. The secularization of modern life was anyway an exaggeration; a lot of religion remained. But there is no way that some of the traditional themes of religion can be dodged after the scale and the style of contemporary carnage.

Much has been written about the collapse of the eighteenth century in the calamities of the twentieth century — too much, because the rejection of the Enlightenment was as much responsible for what occurred as the acceptance of the Enlightenment. Still, for the walking wounded, the untragic point of view is insufficient. It cannot have answers to questions it cannot ask. And there is no point of view that is less tragic than Marxism. It continues to reproduce the instrumental illusion of the last centuries, the confidence in man's demiurgic power over society, as if nothing ever happened. This has the consequence of cynicism, which seems to be the most popular feeling east of the Elbe. It also has the consequence of an intellectual crackup, of a necessary exchange of new lies for old truths. Milosz has exchanged the lethal shallowness of this tradition for its ancient antithesis. His solution is the resacralization of the world.

This is a notable, important review and needs to be read in full. (Link via 3quarksdaily.)

Czeslaw Milosz, 1911–2004

Photo by Mikhail Lemkhin (all rights reserved)

Czeslaw Milosz died in Kraków on 14 August, aged 93. He was a great writer, his work encompassing both poetry and novels, essays and philosophical, theological reflections of considerable power and eclectic range. His witness to the terrors and inhumanity of the twentieth century did not prevent him from witnessing simultaneously to the enduring human love for the sensual and spiritual. The obituaries in The Daily Telegraph and The Times are worth reading.

Two poems, by way of introduction and memorial:

A Confession (1985)

My Lord, I loved strawberry jam
And the dark sweetness of a woman’s body.
Also well-chilled vodka, herring in olive oil,
Scents, of cinnamon, of cloves.
So what kind of prophet am I? Why should the spirit
Have visited such a man? Many others
Were justly called, and trustworthy.
Who would have trusted me? For they saw
How I empty glasses, throw myself on food,
And glance greedily at the waitress’s neck.
Flawed and aware of it. Desiring greatness,
Able to recognise greatness wherever it is,
And yet not quite, only in part, clairvoyant,
I knew what was left for smaller men like me:
A feast of brief hopes, a rally of the proud,
A tournament of hunchbacks, literature.

Preparation (1986)

Still one more year of preparation.
Tomorrow at the latest I'll start working on a great book
In which my century will appear as it really was.
The sun will rise over the righteous and the wicked.
Springs and autumns will unerringly return,
In a wet thicket a thrush will build his nest lined with clay
And foxes will learn their foxy natures.

And that will be the subject, with addenda. Thus: armies
Running across frozen plains, shouting a curse
In a many-voiced chorus; the cannon of a tank
Growing immense at the corner of a street; the ride at dusk
Into a camp with watchtowers and barbed wire.

No, it won't happen tomorrow. In five or ten years.
I still think too much about the mothers
And ask what is man born of woman.
He curls himself up and protects his head
While he is kicked by heavy boots; on fire and running,
He burns with bright flame; a bulldozer sweeps him into a clay pit.
Her child. Embracing a teddy bear. Conceived in ecstasy.

I haven't learned yet to speak as I should, calmly.

How Richard Rorty found religion

Fascinating article by Jason Boffetti :

Rorty believes that we in the West are all polytheists now because we think that there are various goods and no overarching good. He chooses this term “polytheism” carefully—and not altogether ironically—because he believes that the idea can bring together John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Nietzsche, and William James in the belief that “there is no actual or possible object of knowledge that would permit you to commensurate and rank all human needs.” If gods and goods are plural and serve different people in different ways, why should we feel the need to rank them? In fact, it may be the pursuit of such divergent human ends that benefits us all in the long run. Hence “romantic utilitarians” and pragmatists like Rorty “will probably drop the idea of diverse immortal persons, such as Olympian deities, but . . . will retain the idea that there are diverse, conflicting, but equally valuable forms of life.” The term “romantic,” then, serves for Rorty as a more evocative term than “secular,” since it suggests that atheists might speak just as inspirationally about their faith in human potentiality as theists speak about the movement of God in history.

Rorty denies that a culture of romantic polytheism has no room for conscientious monotheists. It’s just that a “pragmatic theist”—whom Rorty defines as a theist who wants to make his private religious beliefs publicly relevant—must be willing to “get along without personal immortality, providential interventions, the efficacy of sacraments, the Virgin Birth, the Risen Christ, the Covenant of Abraham, the authority of the Koran, and a lot of other things which many theists are loath to do without.” The price for public relevance comes, for Rorty anyway, at the cost of monotheism’s most miraculous, particularistic, and, in Rorty’s view, implausible beliefs.

Of course, Rorty admits that someone like an Alasdair McIntyre would deplore the idea of a “demythologized Christianity” because it would “drain all of the point out of religion.” But Rorty believes that the advantages of a vague theism outweigh the losses. Furthermore, viable examples of this vague and pragmatist sort of theism already exist. Rorty writes that “a pragmatist philosophy of religion must follow [Paul] Tillich. . . . Liberal Protestants, to whom Tillich sounds plausible, are quite willing to talk about their faith in God, but demur at spelling out just what beliefs that faith includes.” They must learn to “get along without creeds” but instead hold the kinds of beliefs that “make the sort of difference to a human life which is made by the presence or absence of love.” If the doctrines of Rorty’s own “romantic polytheism” seem equally fuzzy, his sources for spiritual inspiration are far more concrete.

In addition to this non-creedal creed, Rorty suggests for his new religion a nonscriptural canon, arguing that poetry and literature might adequately serve as sacred texts for pragmatists, atheists, polytheists, and secularists. In Philosophy as Social Hope, Rorty quotes approvingly from Dorothy Allison, who writes in “Believing in Literature” that literature “has shaped my own system of belief—a kind of atheist’s religion. . . . [T]he backbone of my conviction has been a belief in the progress of human society demonstrated in its fiction.” Like Allison, Rorty claims that literature sustains his “atheist’s faith.”

But poetry and literature do more than provide consolation for the atheist’s soul; they transform it, reshaping beliefs and motivations. In “The Inspirational Value of Great Works of Literature,” the last chapter of Achieving Our Country, Rorty writes that literature “must be allowed to recontextualize much of what you previously thought you knew.” But he finds that in this post-Nietzschean, post-philosophical culture, many of the older literary texts are simply obsolete (Plato’s dialogues and sacred Scripture, for example) because they no longer serve to transform us; we are a different sort of people in the twenty-first century than the ones those texts appealed to. Claiming as allies thinkers such as Dorothy Allison, Harold Bloom, and Matthew Arnold, Rorty writes that we should “hope for a religion of literature, in which works of the secular imagination replace Scripture as the principal source of inspiration and hope for each new generation. We should cheerfully admit that canons are temporary, and touchstones replaceable.”

The novels of Marcel Proust and Henry James are strong candidates for inclusion in Rorty’s canon. James’ novels, for instance, teach us to appreciate “the other” and thus to build social solidarity that can substitute for a traditional religious text. Rorty writes that the term “‘spiritual development’ is usually used only in reference to the attempt to get in touch with the divine. But it is occasionally used in the broader sense, one in which it covers any attempt to transform oneself into a better sort of person by changing one’s sense of what matters most. In the broader sense of the term, I would urge that the novels of Proust and James help us achieve spiritual growth.”

It is clear that this secular, poetic, and novelistic canon is part of what makes Rorty’s own polytheism romantic instead of literal. He writes in “Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism” that “the substitution of poetry for religion as a source of useful ideals . . . seems to me usefully described as a return to polytheism.” And in modern secular democracies “poetry should take over the role that religion has played in the formation of individual human lives.”

But Rorty goes even further in replacing sacred texts with literature and poetry. Poets will serve to fill the vacancy left by priests. Although at one point Rorty writes that romantic polytheism has no need of priests or “priest-substitutes . . . who purport to tell you how things really are,” he writes at another point that poets will be “to a secularized polytheism what the priests of a universal church are to monotheism.”

Link via Marginal Revolution.

The Music of the Spheres

David Weinberger (again):

If our hearts were as pure, as chaste, as snowy as Pythagoras' was, our ears would resound and be filled with that supremely lovely music of the wheeling stars. Then indeed all things would seem to return to the age of gold. Then we should be immune to pain, and we should enjoy the blessing of a peace that the gods themselves might envy.

On the Music of the Spheres, John Milton

About 550 years before your Lord was born, Pythagoras came up with the most beautiful idea in Western history. Here's roughly what he thought:

It's obvious from the shape of the night sky and the movement of the stars that the universe consists of five nested spheres. The distances between those bowls must reflect the order and beauty of the universe, for that order and beauty is uniform throughout the cosmos.

We can hear the order in music. Use a bridge to divide a string into the ratios 2:1, 3:2, 4:3, or 5:4 and you hear something beautiful. (Notice that you can make these ratios with only the numbers 1-5, a simplicity required for order and beauty.)

Since the cosmos is perfectly ordered, the distance between the moving objects in the sky must be in the same mathematical relationship that sounds so beautiful when applied to a lyre. The spheres themselves must make a sound as they whir around. That sound must therefore be harmonious and beautiful.

But, why don't we hear the sound? Because we have been hearing it all of our lives. If it were to stop, we would notice its absence.

How wonderful! This idea assumes the Greek notion that perfect orderliness and reason is indistinguishable from beauty. It adds that beauty is so always-present that it is absent; we could only hear its presence if it were to become absent.

Philosophy may start with awe, as Aristotle said, but it usually proceeds pretty quickly to tell us that what we think is real isn't real, but something else we can't see is. If the watery-ness of everything were obvious, Thales wouldn't have had to say that everything is water. If you could take the world at face value, we wouldn't need philosophy. (Yes, maybe you can and maybe we don't.) Having said the the universe is other than it seems, the philosopher then has to explain why it seems other than it is: If everything is made of water, why isn't everything wet? Or, in MadLibs form: "Despite the way it seems, the universe is really ________. It doesn't look like that because _________."

Pythagoras' view of that inevitable mystery of philosophy is remarkable. That which is always present can't itself be known or experienced, the Harmony of the Spheres implies. Knowledge requires lack, imperfection, absence, separation, apartness, nothingness. Our knowledge is a disruption of the perfection of order. That's why the world can be other than it seems. Its truth is in the unheard and the unspoken.

No wonder Pythagoras founded a religion.

The Great Chain of Being

David Weinberger:

Over sixty years ago, Arthur Oncken Lovejoy, a professor at Johns Hopkins, gave a series of lectures that resulted in his classic work, The Great Chain of Being. Its central aim was to show that there was a:

...plan and structure of the world which, through the Middle Ages and down to the late eighteenth century...most educated men were to accept without question - the conception of the universe as a "Great Chain of Being", composed of an immense, or...infinite, number of links ranging in hierarchical order from the meagerest kind of existents...through "every possible" grade up to the ens perfectissumum.

At the top was God, of course. Then came angels and demons, then humans, then animals, then plants, minerals, and at the bottom, non-being. Within these broad categories, each and every thing had its place, depending on how much "spirit" it contained as opposed to mere "matter." Not only were rabbits ahead of fish, and gold ahead of lead, but squires were above merchants.

While the hierarchy of beings was laid out as rungs on a ladder, the theory of "correspondences" added a layer of complexity and even beauty to the notion: Different sets of rungs reflected the order of larger sets in what we would today call a fractal way: The governmental order reflected the order of the cosmos, human psychology reflected the four elements, etc.

Despite this nicely complicating wrinkle, the fundamental fact and purpose of the Great Chain of Being was to be simple and complete: Every entity had its spot in the hierarchy, every spot was filled, and there could be no movement and no vacancies ... ruling out evolution and extinction, not to mention making social mobility a crime against nature.

Why believe such a foolish thing? After all, it can't be derived from evidence. It does, however, do something that all great theories do: It unifies disparate experience. In fact, the Great Chain is precisely about showing the inner order of the diversity of entities. It unifies them not only in terms of their rank order but also in terms of their value. And it explains why there are precisely these types of creatures and not others.

Even though the Chain has gone through some serious revisions over the millennia, in one important way it has remained the same. In the 18th Century, Linnaeus re-did Aristotle's classifications, adding a couple more grand categories. But, like Aristotle, Linnaeus assumed that he was uncovering God's own way of classifying the world. Likewise, modern "cladistics" redraws Linnaeus' tree (and Stephen Jay Gould would remind us that it's more like shrubbery than a tree) according to each animal's ancestry, not according to the similarities of their anatomy, which is all Linnaeus had to go on. In all these cases, the chain or tree is assumed to represent real classifications, although the nature of the reality — God in Aristotle's or Linnaeus' eyes, Nature's in Darwin's — is different.

But now we are at a breaking point, for the digitization of knowledge makes it inescapably clear that most of the classificatory schemes that we care about are invented, not discovered. Why is this so clear? Because it's so easy to pivot the table, to switch schemes, to file ideas under multiple categories. Classifications are tools.

Further, classifications often no longer are the best guides to value. Google beats Yahoo because, while Yahoo puts everything into neatly arranged folders, Google looks at the one-to-one links that spread across the tree of knowledge like the work of a million spiders on LSD.

The overtaking of trees by webs means that instead of something getting its meaning from the bucket it's in, its meaning is determined by the billion different reasons people thought it'd be interesting to link to it. If you want to see what something is, don't look to where the Great Bucketer in the Sky put it. Instead, look to what the population of people who care about it think that it's about. That's why Google can turn up a page that doesn't even have the words on it that you're looking for: The page thought it was a maintenance manual for O-rings and didn't know that it's in fact about why the Challenger blew up. But the web of interested people knew it.

Once we recognize that classification schemes are tools and not representations of reality, they get much handier as tools. Of course, the price is giving up our place in the eternal order of the universe.

A case for torture?

Alasdair Palmer, writing in today's Sunday Telegraph:

The pictures, and now videos, recording the activity of some US soldiers inside Abu Ghraib prison seem to provide a definitive answer to the question of whether torture can ever be justified. The answer is an emphatic no. ...

On an official level, torture is a topic so mired in hypocrisy and humbug that it is hard to have an honest discussion about it. The US is one of the 127 countries that have signed and ratified the Convention on Torture - a convention that, the judges at the Hague Tribunal have ruled, "signals to all members of the international community that the prohibition on torture is an absolute value from which nobody must deviate". Yet many, perhaps a majority, of the signatories do torture people (signatories include countries such as Algeria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Somalia). And it is not just the satraps of barbaric dictatorships who believe that torture can be justified. As Alan Dershowitz, the distinguished American civil liberties lawyer, pointed out, practically everyone accepts that there are circumstances in which torture should be used. There is, for example, the situation where the police know that a man in custody can tell them where a bomb primed to kill thousands is located. Few people, says Mr Dershowitz, believe that torture could never be justified in such a case. ...

At some point, it becomes morally impossible to maintain that an individual's right not to be tortured is so important that it outweighs the certain murder of thousands of others. Torture then stops being the "absolute evil" which the convention says it is. It becomes an evil which sometimes is capable of being the lesser of two abominations - and one which it can be right to choose. That is what most politicians believe. So why have they signed a declaration insisting that torture is "an absolute evil from which nobody must ever deviate"? Often the answer is their capacity for hypocrisy and humbug, but it is not always so and the pictures from Abu Ghraib explain why not.

There is a horribly slippery slope from "humiliation and degredation" to the bestial barbarity of Abu Ghraib - and if Seymour Hersh is right, that is what happened after the US decision to legitimise torture. The only way to stop the slide to the ghastly bottom of that slope is not to get on it. That is the logic behind the absolute ban on torture - and it is a logic that makes sense. ... The effect, however, of an absolute prohibtion on torture will be that terrorist outrages that could have been prevented will happen. Any subsequent deaths may be a price worth paying for preserving our moral integrity. But the hideous grins on the faces of the Abu Ghraib torturers should not allow us to forget that it is the price that will one day be paid.

Rowan Williams: the Iraq War, political responsibility, the response of the people ... and education

On 10 April, A N Wilson, writing in The Daily Telegraph (may require free registration), gave this appraisal of Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury:

If one reason alone had to be found for wishing to hold on to Anglicanism, it is our new Archbishop of Canterbury. Rowan Williams is infinitely the most interesting person to emerge into public life in our country for a generation. After decades in which all public figures indulged in soundbite utterance on every subject, we hear at last the lilting, clever voice of a man who thinks before, and while, he so mellifluously speaks.

Some of his words are, like those of the mysterious angel in Tennyson, hard to understand. Some of them are poetry. Sometimes, they cut to the heart of our contemporary concerns. He speaks of very old things, such as the human hunger for God, in new, but not in trendy or toe-curling ways. He is probably a saint, but he does not seem like a man who has cut himself off from the darker experiences. He is neither one of those lovey-bishops who constantly woo the headline-writers by saying "controversial" things, nor is he, like some Christian leaders of recent years, pathetically apologetic for his Church or his creeds. He is smilingly confident without being cocky.

When I hear him talking, I think - I'd like to hear more of this. Living a life based on this set of propositions would be a good thing to do. Moreover, imaginative unselfishness of the particular kind embodied in Dr Williams's Christianity would be a good antidote to many of its alternatives: to rampant consumerism, to overconfident social Darwinism, to the hate-filled paranoias of Judaism and Islam and the smug pessimism of the atheists.

Yesterday, Rowan Williams gave the University Sermon at Cambridge. The Times reports:

Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, today launched a powerful and unprecedented attack on the Government over its policy in Iraq. He accused Tony Blair and his ministers of rushing into the war, of not being sufficiently truthful and of creating "a weakening of trust in the political system of our nation". Arguing that trust could be restored by the admission of error or miscalculation, Dr Williams even made a case for civil disobedience, arguing that political obedience in our age has become "problematic". Anglican theologians have never sanctioned compliance with "unjust law", he said. ...

He condemned the "idle and selfish hearts" of those who advocate Christian obedience while themselves being slow to bring their own thoughts "under obedience to Christ". Dr Williams said: "Part of the continuing damage to our political health in this country has to do with a sense of the events of the last year on the international scene being driven by something other than attention. There were things government believed it knew and claimed to know on a privileged basis which, it emerged, were anything but certain. There were things which regional experts and others knew which seemed not to have received attention."
Dr Williams, a former lecturer in divinity at Cambridge, addressing a congregation of academics, clerics and students, continued: "Forgetting the melodramatic language of public deception, which is often just another means of not attending to what is difficult and takes time to fathom, the evidence suggests to many that obedience to a complex truth suffered from a sense of urgency that made attention harder." He indicated that the Government had, by its behaviour over Iraq, lost its right to obedience from its citizens.

"We do not usually look in our rulers for signs of advanced contemplative practice. Nor do we say, even as Christians, that no obedience is due to unbelieving governments. But we do say that credible claims on our political loyalty have something to do with a demonstrable attention to truth, even unwelcome truth." ...

Dr Williams said Christian obedience must be an "intelligent obedience" that involved a careful questioning. "Whatever may have been the theology of obedience in past ages, we cannot now ignore the democratisation of knowledge and the deepened awareness of how ideological distortions may be sustained in public life."

The full sermon can be found here. In the course of his sermon, the Archbishop spoke also about education:

Christian obedience in its biblical sense can never be just a passive conformity to commands in the hope that this will somehow ensure a reward for us. It is properly an obedience given where we see authority engaged with a truth beyond its own interest and horizon - ultimately with the truth of Christ. The obedience of the pupil, at any educational level, is rightly and credibly demanded when the very shape of the intellectual exercise is visibly to do with a mind being pressed and moulded into truthfulness by a reality that has nothing to do with the petty power games that intellectual life can sometimes produce. The best teacher, the one who has most claim on obedience, may be the one who is at times least fluent and confident, most puzzled and engaged and troubled by the truth. The best master is the one who is most visibly mastered by demands and standards that have nothing to do with the serving of his own personal interests. If obedience is a form of attention, the attentive person is the one who should command obedience.

(All this made me recall the words of Martin Seligman, President of the American Psychological Association: 'There's an enormous range of things that are larger than us that we can belong to and be part of, some of which are prepackaged. Being an Orthodox Jew, for example, or being a Republican are prepackaged ones. Being a teacher, someone whose life is wrapped up in the growth of younger people, is a non-prepackaged one. ... Aristotle said the two noblest professions are teaching and politics, and I believe that as well. ...')

Miracles

In a review (NY Review of Books) of Debunked! ESP, Telekinesis, Other Pseudoscience, by Georges Charpak and Henri Broch, Freeman Dyson writes:

The book also has a good chapter on "Amazing Coincidences." These are strange events which appear to give evidence of supernatural influences operating in everyday life. They are not the result of deliberate fraud or trickery, but only of the laws of probability. The paradoxical feature of the laws of probability is that they make unlikely events happen unexpectedly often. A simple way to state the paradox is Littlewood's Law of Miracles. Littlewood was a famous mathematician who was teaching at Cambridge University when I was a student. Being a professional mathematician, he defined miracles precisely before stating his law about them. He defined a miracle as an event that has special significance when it occurs, but occurs with a probability of one in a million. This definition agrees with our common-sense understanding of the word "miracle."

Littlewood's Law of Miracles states that in the course of any normal person's life, miracles happen at a rate of roughly one per month. The proof of the law is simple. During the time that we are awake and actively engaged in living our lives, roughly for eight hours each day, we see and hear things happening at a rate of about one per second. So the total number of events that happen to us is about thirty thousand per day, or about a million per month. With few exceptions, these events are not miracles because they are insignificant. The chance of a miracle is about one per million events. Therefore we should expect about one miracle to happen, on the average, every month. Broch tells stories of some amazing coincidences that happened to him and his friends, all of them easily explained as consequences of Littlewood's Law.

The link for this review came via Marginal Revolution. There, too, I came across Persi Diaconis. Another article, from Vanderbilt University, summarises Diaconis's view of coincidence thus:

What are the odds? The mathematician will answer that even in the most unbelievable situations, the odds are actually very good. The law of large numbers says that with a large enough denominator — in other