Music on My Mind

 

Meret, "Breath of the Dying Sun".

Fortnightly Book, May 17

 Hermann Karl Hesse (1877-1962) began writing while working at a bookshop in the 1890s, but it was only in 1904 that he published his first successful work, Peter Camenzind, which became a bestseller in Germany. It did well enough that Hesse realized that devoting himself fulltime to writing could be a viable career. It was not as straightforward as he perhaps had hoped -- he had to work around a very complicated personal life and the Great War -- but he did well enough, and in 1931 he began writing a book that was originally intended to be the story of a man reincarnated across several lives. Of course, at this time things were rather complicated in Germany; Hesse had lived in Switzerland for a while at this point, but the rise of the Nazi regime would seriously impede his work. Because the Nazis looked at him with suspicion, German journals and publishing houses stopped working with him, so he couldn't get things published. Finally, having worked on the book for eleven years, resulting it in its having a very different character than he had originally intended, he published Der Glasperlenspiel, The Glass Bead Game in 1943 in Switzerland. It is largely this work that resulted in his reception of the Nobel Prize for Literature a few years later, in 1946. It would be his last major work, although for the next decades he did write many shorter works while keeping up an extensive correspondence.

The Glass Bead Game is the next fortnightly book. It is set in the future -- exactly when is unspecified, but Hesse elsewhere suggests that the narrator is looking back from around the beginning of the 25th century. The world's intellectual life has become dominated by the Glass Bead Game, a logical and mathematical system allowing players to improvise elaborate compositions of cultural values and ideas like music. The narrator is trying to figure out the life of Joseph Knecht, a young man with an interest in music, who rose to prominence as Magister Ludi, a key figure in the Order that primarily organizes the public games for the Glass Bead Game, who eventually becomes disillusioned by the intellectual life of his time.

Charles Péguy, The Mystery of the Holy Innocents and Other Poems

 Introduction

Opening Passage: From The Mystery of the Holy Innocents:

I am, God says, Master of the Three Virtues.

Faith is a loyal wife.
Charity is a fervent mother.
But hope is a very little girl.

I am, God says, the Master of the Virtues.

It is Faith who holds fast through century upon century.

It is Charity who gives herself through centuries of centuries,
But it is my little hope
who gets up every morning.

I am, God says, the Lord of the Virtues.

It is Faith who resists through century upon century.
It is Charity who yields through century upon century.
But it is my little hope
Who every morning
Says good-day to us.

I am, God says, the Lord of the Virtues. (p. 69)

Summary: Since this is a collection of poems, there is no plot or direct throughline, but there is a recurring theme of France as an expression of Catholic hope despite its mounting difficulties. We get this in "Presentation of the Beauce to Our Lady of Chartres" (of which you can hear Paul Mankin's interpretation of the French original here), in which the Beauce, the rich farmland region between the Seine and the Loire, is pictured as being engaged in a sort of quasi-liturgical procession, its harvests and beauty being offered as a gift to the Virgin:

We were born for you on the margin of this plain,
Where the golden River Loire serenely curves,
And this sandy glorious stream forever serves
To kiss the sacred hem of your immortal train. (p. 23)

Just as here you look down on an ocean of wheat,
Over there it's an ocean of heads you control,
And the harvests of joy and the harvests of dole
Are collected each night in the courts round your feet. (p. 25)

Different expressions of French hope even in difficulty are also found in "Prayer to Our Lady of Chartres For a Credit to be Carried Forward", "For Those who Die in Battle", and The Mystery of the Holy Innocents.

The Mystery of the Holy Innocents is the primary, and longest, poem in this collection, and it is on the Christian virtue of hope itself, rooted, of course, in the Passion of Christ and the martyrdom of the saints. One of the most striking passages in the poem pictures the prayers of Christians as ships in great fleets of ships sent to conquer God:

Those three or four words which conquer me, me the conquerable,
And which they send in front of their misery like two invincible hands joined together.
Those three or four words which advance like a strong prow in front a weak ship,
And which cleave the wave of my anger.
And when the prow has passed, the ship passes and all the fleet behind it. (p. 87)

There are four great fleets. The first is the fleet of the Paternosters, the Our Fathers,

And it is a fleet of the line
A battle fleet,
Like a beautiful classical fleet, like a fleet of triremes,
Advancing to attack the King (p. 90)

After it follows the second fleet, "the fleet with white sails, the innumerable fleet of the Ave Marias, / And it is a fleet of biremes" (p. 95). The third fleet is all the prayers of the Christian clock -- the Divine Office or Liturgy of Hours, the prayers of the Mass and Vespers, the graces before meals. These are the three fleets of prayers, containing all of the prayers of the Church. But there is, the poem goes on to say, a fourth fleet, "the invisible fleet" (p. p. 95), consisting of the prayers never said, the half-felt, half-understood impulses of the heart, completely imperceptible, but each one treated by God as if it were fully a prayer like any other.

The Mystery of the Holy Innocents also explores the ways in which France is the France of St. Louis, a saint of hope, in which the liberty of the Frenchman is an image of the liberty, the gratuitousness and grace, of God. In the same way, an extensive section of it reflects on the Old Testament as an anticipation of the New Testament, an anticipation that itself anticipates the martyrdom of the Holy Innocents, who themselves symbolize the virtue of hope. All of history up to them is but the childhood of a salvation history that ends in the hopeful innocence of a new childhood:

Nothing is less elaborate than my Paradise.
Aram sub ipsam, on the steps of the altar itself
These simple children play with their palms and their martyrs' crowns.
I believe they play at hoops, God says, and perhaps at quoits
(at least I believe so, for do not think
that they ever ask my permission)
And the palm forever green they use apparently as a hoop-stick. (p. 165)

Favorite Passage: From "For Those who Die in Battle" (from Eve):

Happy are they who die for a temporal land,
When a just war calls, and they obey and go forth,
Happy are they who die for a handful of earth,
Happy are they who die in so noble a band.

Happy are they who die in their country's defence,
Lying outstretched before God with upturned faces.
Happy are they who die in those last high places,
Such funeral rites have  a great magnificence.

Happy are they who die for their cities of earth,
They are the outward forms of the City above.
Happy are they who die for their fire and their hearth,
Their father's house and its humble honour and love. (p. 58)

Recommendation: Highly Recommended.

*****

Charles Péguy, The Mystery of the Holy Innocents and Other Poems, Pansy Pakenham, tr., Wipf and Stock Publishers (Eugene, OR: 2017).

Dashed Off XVII

 The notion of a practice presupposes those of intentionality and teleology, which distinguish this practice from that, and apparent practice from real, and attempted practice from nonpractice.

Look *through* the argument and see its mechanism.

The book of Esther teaches us that corrupt law and politics have their own loopholes.

Hans Jonas: Act so that the effects of your action are compatible with the permanence of genuine human life.

Consent is always a multilayered thing; this is why anything based on it gets so complicated.

Every con works by consent.

Family is in itself a natural human interest, a way in which we contextualize ourselves biologically and socially,a nd a scaffolding by which we are able to learn how to see ourselves as human persons within the human community.

Music contributes to our moral development by providing a communication through which we can be opened up to personality-in-general, unspecified person-connection, as carried by its expressiveness and our responsiveness to it, and by its beauty, which requires rising above our own selfish interests to appreciate.

There is a skill in being poor well and a skill in being rich well.

The friction of the writing is the material of the writing; it is what the planning and problem-solving uses, as engineers use friction and resistance.

(1) Suppose it is possible that there is nothing.
(2) What is possible in this way would have to be actually possible.
(3) What is actually anything requires that something actually is, with respect to which it is actually what it is.
(4) Therefore if it is possible that there is nothing, something actually is.
(5) Something actually being implies that it is not true that there is nothing.
(6) Therefore, if it is possible that there is nothing, it is not true that there is nothing.

"When someone chooses X but is aware of no reason to choose ~X, it is not necessary that the action be free." James Chastek

Law by its nature is tolerant of falsehoods that do not directly oppose its means in matters of justice.

polite fictions // legal fictions

Law exists only in an ocean of reason.

We can only fully give ourselves to those who give us to ourselves.

'One' is predicable of every multitude.

Every intellectual system implies alternative intellectual systems that are related to it in various ways.

Half of every proession is consistency.

Intellectuals unchallenged become intellectually flabby.

participation, appreciation, participative appreciation, appreciative participation

When viewing a painting, one may also imagine observing the scene, but that is not what one is doing in viewing the painting, which is seeing the painting as what it is, such-and-such scene in paint.

We do not discover scenes in the real world until we recognize the possibility of conveying them in works of art.

Stable and effective political representation requries a semi-independence only property with property rights can give. The desperate and the buyable cannot be easily represented.

academic logistics as planned economy logistics

Hegelian dialectic as a progressive system of transcendental arguments

Eros seeks life undying.

"It is not money but the volume of goods and services which determines whether a country is poverty-stricken or prosperous." Thomas Sowell

Contracts and covenants are disciplines of memory, specifying things to be kept in remembrance, and whose enorcement depends on what is kept in remembrance for the purposes of the agreement.

No amount of infallible interpretation by Pope or Council could ever exhaust the riches of Scripture as divine revelation.

The exemplar cause is that which an effect imitates from being directed by an agent to an end.

The more educated a people, the more they are governed by custom and habit.

Parental authority changes its nature when one attains adulthood, or when the parent dies, but it does not vanish.

"The vestments of the ministers denote the qualifications required of them for handling divine things." Aquinas

We can capture something of the eternal in art because it echoes ourselves and tends personward.

make-believe as mimesis (internal/imaginative mimesis)

'it is fictional that he is seeing a red-roofed mill' vs 'it is really the case that he is seeing a fictional red-roofed mill'

Sometimes make-believe is a 'game', and sometimes it is not.

In poetry, you co-construct the fictional object out of signs, projecting from them 'where' the object would be in the space of possibilities. In painting, this co-construction is much more subtle because the painter provides much more in the way of detail. In poetry, it is fictional that one sees the fictional object; in painting, one sees the fictional object.

It is the purpose of poetry to be excellent use of language. Any other purported purpose is just one of the things poetry can do.

Every painting is indexical (of painter's intention/method), iconic (of what it depicts, even if only colors and shapes), and symbolic (of what is conveyed in and by it).

Conventions have different relations to the natural, and may even admit of grades of closeness to the natural. Two descriptions may be equally conventional but one more natural than the other.

When we see a picture of a dog, we are doing one of the things that we call 'seeing a dog'.

To identify an origin is to identify something such that the effect falls within the scope of its end.

Both the natural and the artificial imitate the divine.

Since, as Walton says, we are not free to make-believe with a prop in any way we like, props have affordances for make-believe, a semiotic potential relative to our capacity for make-believe.

We treat clothing as a quasi-part of ourselves; and likewise we may treat the case of something as a quasi-part of it.

'encased' as falling under the category of habitus
-- it is when a solid physical substance wholly vests another physical substance

place that can encase as an external formal cause (e.g., with minerals)

It takes a universe to make a man.

Personification is often a sign of a lively mind; persons who are thoughtful about the world personalize and personify it.

'Fictional' is just a version of 'made to be true'.

We want not merely pleasure but deserved pleasure, and we take pleasure in deserved pleasure.

"Every being is either the same or other." Aristotle (Met I (10.3, 1054b)
"To-something is the least of all categories as regards physis and ousia, and is posterior to what-kind and how-great." Met N 14.1, 1088
"Not-being has as many senses as the categories." Met N 14.2, 1089

echein is the root of both hexis and schema (the latter through its aorist infinitive, schein)

"Enchantment is the art of awakening spiritual presences in material things." John Michael Greer

The wrongness of flattery shows that we need standing in order to praise.

We extensively use the categories of situs and habitus as sources of metaphors for abstract and intellectual and psychological things.

In general, people use wealth as a means for getting out of general responsibilities to others; not usually in an absolute sense but by using moenty to substitute responsibilities, real or made-up, that they find more convenient.

transfictional identity

"The existence of place is held to be obvious from the fact of mutual replacement." Aristotle Phys IV
"...place would not have been thought of, had there not been a specific kind of motion, namely, that with respect to place."

Llull in Liber Chaos quite clearly does not take habitus to be vestment but habitus as a quality.

Llullian astrology
A -- Air Gemini Libra Aquarius Jupiter, wet & hot
B -- Fire Aries Leo Sagittarius Mars Sol, hot and dry
C -- Earth Taurus Virgo Capricorn Saturn, dry & cold
D -- Water Cancer Scorpio Pisces Venus Luna, cold & wet
--Suppose Sun & Venus in Cancer: DBD; B est devictus, D regnat
-- Suppose Saturn & Jupiter in Aries. Then BCA ; then properties = B = hot and dry, where hot is proper and dry is appropriated.

"Since conjecture is based on changeable signs, it results in a weaker habit of certainty than scientia and opinio." Albert

the longstanding and widespread cultural associations between envy (phthonos) and magical curses

The state is the consequence of the people, not their principle.

the Eucharist and the longing for paradise

taste as confused and obscure knowledge

2 Cor 5:21 -- justice is not merely imputed to us, we become God's justice in Christ.

In television, one should always treat location as a character; it shares its mood, and arbitrarily aids and impedes; it implies a backstory and may tend to a tragic or comic end. It is the ultimate supporting cast.

To respect and appreciate beauty as it ought to be respected and appreciated, we must treat it as having in smoe way a real and cosmic importance.

What we want piecemeal is not necessarily what we want overall; and what we opine piecemeal is not necessarily our overall opinion.

royal prerogative as default priority of Crown -- as tribal chieftaincy, as legal personality, in principal corporation sole

A singer of true talent achieves excellence by incorporating and building on and around what a singer of much less talent would deem an imperfection.

While music often is representational, its great strength is not as such, but as presentational.

Music wraps us in a mood that shapes the possibilities of thought.

Abstract art aspires (at least often) to the condition of music.

Free verse aspires to the condition of untamed thought. (This is why it often seems childish when poorly done.)

When we read philosophically, we read the text not merely in what is on the page, but in the space of possibilities of reasoning through which the text on the page sketches a route.

Music works by induction of internal movement and eduction of symbolic association; it impresses upon us and it evokes what is beyond itself.

Generally, one can substitute 'artificial' for Walton's fictional. (Sometimes 'imaginatively artificial'.)

Asking whether there are fictional characters is like asking whether there are pirouettes and changements; they obviously and identifiably exist as parts of performances and practices for performances and imaginations of performances.

A novel scores and choreographs a performance.

Beauty is needed for speed of learning.

Even innocence bubbles up against constant imposition of rules.

The actor clothes himself in the character.

It is no more 'voodoo metaphysics' to say that fictional characters exist than it is 'voodoo physics' to say that a body has a center of gravity.

In creating us, God creates the standing actual possibility of all of our works.

Storytelling is often explicitly deontic.

Something can only be identified as evil in the context of a greater good against which it shows up as evil.

usefulness to others as a function of strength, intelligence, and sociableness

Even if you assume that PSR itself is false, all our experimental reasoning requires that something in its vicinity is true.

In faith, our belief is an expression of God's trust in us.

Serious philosophical argument is generally quite digressive.

As against water, so against trouble: every dam is temporary.

In partisan politics, everyone has an incentive not to be persuaded by you.

We can think of possibilities as having a tendency or striving to actualize because possibilities depend on actualities, which can have a tendency to act.

In a world in which Holy Scirtpure eixsts, all reading contains spiritual possibilities.

It takes a lot of leisure to learn things well.

medicamentum quotidianae poenitentiae

imputation, adoption, and inheritance

Tradition is a weaving of old and new.

deduction modeled as space (paths/routes)
modeled as time (steps)
modeled as causation

c as the coordination factor for spatial and temporal measurements
locomotion as rotation in time and space according to this factor

Human singing works not by being at a pitch or frequency but by moving through it. It is swift sketching rather than close copying.

quasi-vowel-harmony in singing

in timelit lands we walk our way

the ascetic discipline of understatement

One thing may borrow the being of another, and some things (accident) have being wholly in the borrowing; they are born on loan and in debt, so to speak.

We usually need not empathy but many different empathies.

There seems to be something like a general conservation of prudery; people adapt to relaxation of sexual norms in one area by tightening them in another area.

Bound by Suspense, in More than Iron Chains

Sonnet XXXV
by Alexander Thomson 

 Suspiciens altam lunam, sic voce precatur. -- Virgil 

Fair, silver Queen! whose all pervading eye
Beholds at once whate'er the world contains!
Wilt thou in pity listen from on high,
To him whose lonely heart to thee complains?
Thou seest his soul in anxious torture lie,
Bound by suspense, in more than iron chains;
Thou know'st the cause that prompts his frequent sigh,
And fills with terror's frost his shiv'ring veins.
Oh, tell him then, and end this cruel fear,
Why the dear Youth to whom his heart is join'd,
With Friendship's voice delays to soothe his ear;
Oh tell him this and ease his frantic mind:
From trembling thoughts relieve his cheerless day,
And save his restless night from dreams of wild dismay. 

 Edinburgh Feb 1789

Two Poem Drafts

The second is a poetic exercise, based on Catullus 8, in which you try to use English words to suggest the sound, rather than the meaning, of the original Latin. I cheated a bit by reading v as English v rather than as the classical Latin w-sound, which would give a weally, weally weird sound, and using a few other anglicizations. Of course, it's hard to make anything that does that well and makes any sense in English, but I confess myself rather pleased with "you fill, sir, your ferry with candies, to be solaced" (the original is fulsere vere candidi tibi soles, 'truly, brilliant suns blazed for you'). 

 Two Epics

Two great prose epics did England make:
one was the Tale with Hobbits,
of humble things that rise to wake,
all the schemes of pride to break,
of friends who never will forsake;---

two great prose epics did England make:
one was the Tale with Rabbits,
the quiet hearts who hold up the light
amidst the crashing of darkness and night,
the peaceful folk who rise to the fight;---

and in these epics, clear and bright,
true sustenance the soul may take,
and form heroic habits.

Not Quite Catullus 8

Mister Cattle, in designing ineptly your rage
at what the days, perishing prettily, declare,
you fill, sir, your condo with candies, to be solaced;
conventuals treat of this, corporeally, with caveat.
Who matters? Known but by quantity, name beaten out newly,
a ballet like to molten tomb, choked with seafaring boats,
or, like to volleyballs, now pulled nigh apart,
you fill, sir, your ferry with candies, to be solaced.
Now I am ill and unveiled, too quiet, important -- no lie --
not quite frugal, unstaring; now, mister, vividly
obstinate man, perfect your dark art,
that no rogue have any invitation -- 
yet too you dole out like a rogue bearing nullities.
Scholastically weighed, too! To be man and vital,
quick as night-bats flit in day's light failing,
but unknown by the mob in its sea-saw declaiming,
unbiased and replaced and, labelled, in morgue placed --
that's you, Cattle, destined to suffer.

Subjunctive Modus Ponens

 We have subjunctive conditionals of the form, If p were true, q would be true. We can abbreviate these as (p > q). Indicative conditionals admit of modus ponens, (If p is true, q is true; p is true; therefore q is true). So it seems natural that there would be something analogous for subjunctive conditionals. However, there are complications.

The antecedent of If p were true, q would be true is ambiguous. It could mean something like:

If p were true [rather than what is actually true], q would be true.

Call this the properly counterfactual interpretation. But it could also mean:

If p were true [as it may be], q would be true.

Call this the fortassic interpretation (from Latin fortasse). These are not at all the same thing, but subjunctive conditionals can be used in both ways. This matters a lot. The Supplement on Debates over Counteractual Principles at the SEP has the following example:

If George were caught, he would face years of prison.
Actually, George did get caught.
In that case, he will face years of prison.

This is clearly invalid on the properly counterfactual interpretation. It is at least defensible on the fortassic interpretation. Another example, from the same source:

If the soldier had shot the prisoner, then (even) if the captain hadn’t given the order to shoot, the prisoner (still) would have died.
Actually, the soldier did shoot the prisoner.
So, if the captain hadn’t given the order to shoot, the prisoner would have died.

Again, this is clearly invalid on the properly counterfactual interpretation. But if the main conditional is fortassic, then it is again defensible.

The essential thing is that when we construct a subjunctive conditional, we can do so in such a way as to rule out the possibility of the actual state of affairs from falling under the antecedent (properly counterfactual) or in such a way as to allow that it could (fortassic).

In both of the above examples, we need fortassic interpretations in order to allow the indicative second premise to be combinable with the antecedent. On the counterfactual interpretation, it becomes irrelevant and we have committed an equivocation, namely, treating the indicative p is true as if it were the same as were p to be true. 

Thus, if we have a genuine counterfactual conditional, we can only get modus ponens if our ponens premise is shifted toward the same set of counterfactual situations as the antecedent of the counterfactual conditional:

If p were true [given some change to the actual], q would be true.
p were true [given the same change to the actual].
Therefore, q would be true [given the same change to the actual].

Colloquial English doesn't let us do anything directly like p were true on its own; the usual way we would say something like this is, 'p would be true'. Thus:

If George were caught, he would face years of prison.
George would be caught.
So he would face years of prison.

The shift in how it's stated is awkward, but I suppose it could be argued that it serves a function. In 'George were caught', we are, from the way things actually are, positing a counterfactual situation in which things would be different; with 'George would be caught', we are shifting to the perspective of that counterfactual situation. We then draw a conclusion from within that perspective.

The fortassic interpretation allows us to do the same thing; it just also allows us to treat the perspective of no-difference-from-the-actual as one of the options.

The abbreviation (p > q) unfortunately obscures this. If we say,

p > q
p
Therefore q,

there is nothing to indicate that the ponens premise (p) is to be taken subjunctively and not indicatively. Thus we should probably require something like an index in the antecedent of a subjunctive conditional, to let us indicate when we are in the same region of possibilities:

p₁ > q
p₁
Therefore q.

But this is not always adequate, either. When we have the fortassic conditional and an indicative ponens, the indicative does not cover the same region of possibilities; it's only a part of it. We could do something like p_∈1, but this does not distinguish the indicative situation from the other situations that fall within that region of possibilities. Perhaps p_@∈1? But we need something along such lines if we are to handle counterfactuals properly in a formal notation.