Music on My Mind

 

Jenni Varitainen, "Joku johun nojota". Joku johun nojata means something like 'someone you can lean on'.

Iustinus Martyr

 Today is the feast of one of the patron saints of this blog, St. Justin Martyr. From his Second Apology (ch. 13):

For I myself, when I discovered the wicked disguise which the evil spirits had thrown around the divine doctrines of the Christians, to turn aside others from joining them, laughed both at those who framed these falsehoods, and at the disguise itself and at popular opinion and I confess that I both boast and with all my strength strive to be found a Christian; not because the teachings of Plato are different from those of Christ, but because they are not in all respects similar, as neither are those of the others, Stoics, and poets, and historians. For each man spoke well in proportion to the share he had of the spermatic word, seeing what was related to it. But they who contradict themselves on the more important points appear not to have possessed the heavenly wisdom, and the knowledge which cannot be spoken against. Whatever things were rightly said among all men, are the property of us Christians. For next to God, we worship and love the Word who is from the unbegotten and ineffable God, since also He became man for our sakes, that becoming a partaker of our sufferings, He might also bring us healing. For all the writers were able to see realities darkly through the sowing of the implanted word that was in them. For the seed and imitation impacted according to capacity is one thing, and quite another is the thing itself, of which there is the participation and imitation according to the grace which is from Him.

The word for 'Word' and 'word' here is, of course, logos, which can also be translated as 'reason'. The mention of 'seed' is a reference to the Stoic idea of logos spermatikos, seed-reason, which in this particular case is our own partial rational participation in Reason itself; as he says earlier (ch. 10), "For whatever either lawgivers or philosophers uttered well, they elaborated by finding and contemplating some part of the Logos."

Fortnightly Book, May 31

 I recently noted that I had had Gustave Flaubert's Sentimental Education on my shelves for years, intending to read it for a fortnightly book, but just kept forgetting about it. This therefore seems a good time not to forget about it.

Sentimental Education: History of a Young Man is Flaubert's third published novel, and came out in 1869, when Flaubert was forty-eight. It was heavily influential on both French Romanticism and French Naturalism, and is sometimes said to mark the beginning of a new era in novelistic style -- emphasizing scene depiction over commentary, artificially maintaining a neutrality of description in ethical matters, deliberately hiding the author's role in telling the story. At the time of its publication, however, it was a failure, and while it's often hailed today as Flaubert's masterpiece, it seems to be considered less approachable than Flaubert's first novel, Madame Bovary (which I did for the Fortnightly Book fourteen years ago!). 

We will see, in any case. I am reading it in the Dover Thrift Edition. I don't know who the translator is. The note on the bibliographical page says:

This Dover edition, first published in 2006, is an unabridged republication of the uncredited translation, edited by Dora Knowlton Ranous, that was published by Brentano's, New York, in 1922. The Introduction by Louise Bogan is reprinted from the edition of Sentimental Education published by New Direction Books, New York, in 1957.

Remembering, Understanding, Loving

 This trinity, then, of the mind is not therefore the image of God, because the mind remembers itself, and understands and loves itself; but because it can also remember, understand, and love Him by whom it was made. And in so doing it is made wise itself. But if it does not do so, even when it remembers, understands, and loves itself, then it is foolish. Let it then remember its God, after whose image it is made, and let it understand and love Him. Or to say the same thing more briefly, let it worship God, who is not made, by whom because itself was made, it is capable and can be partaker of Him; wherefore it is written, Behold, the worship of God, that is wisdom. And then it will be wise, not by its own light, but by participation of that supreme Light; and wherein it is eternal, therein shall reign in blessedness. For this wisdom of man is so called, in that it is also of God. For then it is true wisdom; for if it is human, it is vain. 

[St. Augustine, De Trinitate, Book XIV, Chapter 12]

Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game

 Introduction

Opening Passage: The book has a frame including a 'General Introduction', and some poems and short stories attributed to Joseph Knecht, but really the beginning of the work is tucked within this frame and begins with the beginning of Joseph Knecht's vocation:

No knowledge has come down to us of Joseph Knecht's origins. Like many other pupils of the elite schools, he either lost his parents early in childhood, or the Board of Education removed him from unfavorable home conditions and took charge of him. In any case, he was spared the conflict between elite school and home which complicates the youth of many other boys of his type, makes entry into the Order more difficult, and in some cases transforms highly gifted young people into problem personalities. (p. 47)

Summary: The feuilleton was a newspaper supplement invented by French newspapers in the nineteenth century in response to censorship laws. There would be line drawn on the page, separating part of it from the main news, usually in smaller print, and this supplementary material would be devoted to art reviews, cultural commentary, gossip, serialized fiction, epigrams, jokes, reports of scientific discoveries, and the like. What newspaper editors discovered is that censors were less interested in this material; you could get away with a lot more 'under the line', including even political commentary if you dressed it up as a review of a play or opera. It is a good example of the ingenuity of human thought. But notice also that one of the things it does is relegate all serious intellectual thought to the same status as gossip columns and horoscopes. The 'serious story' is what avoids all serious comment, which could get you into trouble; the real intellectual life occurs under the line. But putting something under the line also limits how deep it can be; everything in the feuilleton is superficial, which is why the censors don't care so much, and under the line you cannot really discuss anything in the way it deserves.

The events of The Glass Bead Game occur well into the future; the exact is indeterminate in the story, but Hesse says elsewhere that he thought of the story is occuring at the beginning of the 25th century. The people of that time look back on us and call our age the Age of the Feuilleton. From their perspective, real intellectual life in our age is something we barely know how to do; it is an age in which everything of cultural and intellectual value was forced under the line and treated as not the real thing, but a sort of lark in which you are allowed some exception to the way your real life works. This is not to say that there was no intellectual life at all, of course; but it is hard to have any real approach to intellect and culture if your intellectual life consists  entirely of essays on things like Friedrich Nietzsche's relationship to women's fashion, or superficial surveys of historical topics, or crossword puzzles. (The sort of things, in other words, that are found in most newspapers and, for that matter, the internet, today.) Everything is just bits and pieces, nothing handled at depth, and amusement rather than vocation. All of this would likely be fine, if it were part of a larger intellectual and cultural ecosystem that was fundamentally based on system and depth and vocation. But when it began to be treated as the foundation of intellectual and cultural life, the result was world wars and many other terrible things. 

Enter the Glass Bead Game. Originally, it was precisely that: a game played with glass beads. It was developed in the field of music as a method for improving memory and improvisation. One player would call out some muscial bit -- a bar or a motif or the like -- and the other player would respond with continuation and variation. This call-and-response then began to be tracked on a framework with glass beads (like a very complicated abacus). Eventually this game caught the attention of mathematicians, who worked out the underlying mathematical theory for the game as it worked on the glass-bead frame. This mathematical theory turned out to be remarkably generalizable, and was taken up in philology, visual arts, and so forth, and while the Glass Bead Game continued to be played, the actual glass beads eventually dropped out; instead, people used the symbolic notations developed by applying the mathematics to different fields. And because the same general set of symbolic notations could apply to music, painting, sculpture, literature, and so forth, the game, while still showing in its general structure and some of its content its musicological origins, had long since stopped being played solely in terms of music. It became a game of point and counterpoint, of theme and variation, for all the arts taken together. The Age of the Feuilleton was over. The Glass Bead Game did for art and culture what the experiment had done for science and industry, and the explosion of interest in it was an intellectual revolution on the same scale the Scientific Revolutions and the Industrial Revolutions had been.

But all things come to an end. (One of the themes of the book.) In the case of the Scientific Revolution, experimental science raised field after field with intellectual advances, but at the same time, these things grew more and more remote from the ordinary lives of people. A game that could originally be played by anyone, to great general interest and excitement, became increasingly professionalized and nonprofessionals were pushed out, sometimes just by being outcompeted but sometimes by rather more forceful gatekeeping. Experimental science still retained its centrality in education, but the gatekeeping created a line between the science and the world outside, and the world outside began more and more to see science not as a common possession of humanity but as a thing to use for its own end, as a matter of investment and return, the notion of science for the sake of science being increasingly seen as an egghead quirk of scientists that you had to indulge to the extent -- and only to the extent -- that it went along with getting something useful. Scientists on their end became much less careful about the ways in which the expenses and difficulties and problems associated with their work burdened the outside world, which fed into a vicious cycle in which the world increasingly wondered why it was paying for all of this. At the same time, the success of the experimental sciences repeatedly led people to flatten intellectual life in order to force into the (perceived) mold of this or that scientifice success; all of human intellectual life began to be treated, not scientifically, because the discoveries had never been made for such thing, but scientistically, as if the experimental models were the reality and everything else (including actual human intellectual life) was just details. The result is a sort of decline even as experimental science continued to achieve great successes. 

This is all, of course, a feuilletonistic history. But the point of it is that as Joseph Knecht, the hero of the novel, enters the picture, the same pattern of decline is occurring for the Glass Bead Game, as well. There still are Glass Bead Game enthusiasts who play it as amateurs, but they are diminishing, and they are increasingly poorly regarded by the professionals, and the professionals are mostly found in relative isolation in the elite schools in the Pedagogical Province of Castalia, paid for almost entirely by the world outside, whose attitude has begun to move from enthusiasm to tolerance, and which is increasingly inclined to see the Glass Bead Game as an ivory-tower amusement for eggheads rather than a human activity valuable for all. It is also clear that the Glass Bead Game itself is causing an intellectual stagnation; once an immense field for creativity, it is flattening everyone's view, as they see all of intellectual life, every artistic field, as just what it is in the Glass Bead Game.

Joseph Knecht is a bright boy who does extraordinarily well in school and soon catches the interest of members of the Board of Education as having a promising future in the Glass Bead Game. Because of this he is sent to the top school in Castalia, majoring in music. He first receives fame by a series of debates with a fellow student, Plinio Designori, who is from a wealthy family who send students to the Castalian schools because learning about the Glass Bead Game stuff is what cultured people do; Joseph defends the Castalian way of life in the face of Plinio's more pragmatic and merely utilitarian view. His performance in these debates is a partial contributor to his first assignment when he graduates, to go to a Benedictine monastery and teach the Glass Bead Game to their small group of Glass Bead Game enthusiasts.

It's an odd assignment. The Catholic Church is very ambiguous about the Glass Bead Game; it has itself contributed some notable players, but also has been very critical of certain aspects of it. The Benedictine monks Joseph is sent to teach are very, very amateur. Nonetheless, a Benedictine monastery always has an intellectual life, and Joseph slowly develops a friendship with Father Jacobus at the monastery; Jacobus is one of the world's foremost historians. He also has a significant influence at the Holy See, and this turns out to be the key to why Joseph has been sent to the middle of nowhere to teach a bunch of amateurs things that are, to him, very basic. The Board that governs Castalia has begun to worry about its position with respect to the outside world, and naturally wants to make allies. The Catholic Church is currently in an upswing in its diplomatic influence and is also in many ways the major institution that has the most in common with Castalia itself. Joseph's handling of the debate with Plinio had shown that he had some skill as a sort of ambassador, and thus Joseph was sent to the monastery in the hope that it would be a first step toward overcoming, or at least getting around, the Holy See's standoffish skepticism about Castalia. This ends up being a wildly successful move on the part of the Castalians, since this is precisely what happens.

The success will lead eventually to Joseph Knecht being chosen Magister Ludi, the chief teacher, so to speak, of the Glass Bead Game. This is a role he will fulfill in exemplary fashion. But he finds himself occasionally uneasy. His colleagues don't really seem to grasp the precarity of Castalia's position with respect to the outside world. He will meet up with Plinio again, and come to the conclusion that Castalia did a disservice to Plinio in many ways. His familiarity with history, learned from the Benedictine historian, leads him to worry that Castalia and the Glass Bead Game are themselves becoming increasingly feuilletonesque. He himself has a creative side, writing poetry and short stories and music, that does not sit easily with the routines of professional intellectual life in Castalia.  As time goes on he finds that what really interests him is teaching the Glass Bead Game to mere beginners. All of this leads him to become the scandal of the age when, first of all the members of the Board of Education in Castalia history, he resigns.

In many ways, the Glass Bead Game itself is a more interesting character than Joseph Knecht himself. (Hesse's descriptions of it are certainly extraordinarily memorable, perfectly balanced to make it not quite clear how it works and yet perpetually intriguing at every point.) Joseph Knecht is just the point at which things come to a head. He is caught up in events over which he has relatively little control, and he becomes of interest mostly because he is both an exemplary Magister Ludi and the first person eccentric enough to understand that something is going wrong with the Game. Things could hardly have ever ended up entirely well for him; he has a personality that tends toward immersion, and failing that, immolation. But in a sense Joseph's life is itself a Glass Bead Game on a grand scale, a correlation of many cultural values across many disciplinary lines, into a unity. And in this Game he comes up with something creative. As his name, Knecht, implies, what the Glass Bead Game has begun to lose, and which needs to be reclaimed, is genuine service, the life and death of service to the world with which the Castalians are increasingly estranged.

Favorite Passage:

"Of course one should bring order into history," Jacobus thundered. "Every science is, among other things, a method of ordering, simplifying, making the indigestible digestible for the mind. We think we have recognized a few laws in history and try to apply them to our investigations of historical truth. Suppose an anatomist is dissecting a body. He does not confront wholly surprising discoveries. Rather, he finds beneath the epidermis a congeries of organs, muscles, tendons, and bones which generally conform to a pattern he has brought to his work. But if the anatomist sees nothing but his pattern, and ignores the unique, individual reality fo his object, then he is a Castalian, a Glass Bead Game player; he is using mathematics on the least appropriate object. I have no quarrel with the student of history who brings to his work a touchingly childish, innocent faith in the power of our m inds and our methods to order reality; but first and foremost he must respect the incomprehensible truth, reality, and uniqueness of events. Studying history, my friend, is no joke and no irresponsible game. To study history one must know in advance that one is attempting something fundamentally impossible, yet necessary and highly important. To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning. It is a very serious task, young man, and possibly a tragic one." (pp. 168-169)

Recommendation: Highly Recommended.

*****

Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game, Richard & Clara Winston, trs., Henry Holt & Co. (New York: 1990).

Dashed Off XIV

This ends the notebook that was finished in March 2025.

 

The best known truths are always amenable to metaphor.

Wisdom possesses in stillness what all other cognitive actions and state approximate in motion.

nest, burrows, and hunting territories as proto-institutions
-- they are materially the sorts of things, playing a relevant role in behavior appropriate for institutions, and could thus be institutions if formally recognized as such

Moral advice is obviously real, and its being moral, and thus is moral fact even if we assume falsely that moral counsels are the only moral facts.

The inability to find silver linings is a grave political debility.

It is common for people who have always had something to fail to grasp the significance of it.

People often confuse artifice-based (constructed) realism with anti-realism.

games as soluble-problem creation

All real persons are also possible fictional persons.

Pretty much everyone is sometimes better and often worse than they think.

"It is crazy to want what is impossible, and impossible for the wicked not to do so." Marcus Aurelius

"I am a rational creature, so I must sing hymns to the God." Epictetus

To be fully understood, arguments often have to be tried out in various ways.

We are not made sick by the presence of a virus but by what the virus does that impedes our bodily functions, directly or indirectly.

You need to develop and maintain minor skills in order to develop and maintain in major skills.

quasi-concordia, quasi-benevolentia, quasi-beneficentia as elements of relationship with a favorite book

All genuine benevolence requires a prior concord.

(concord -> benevolence) -> beneficence

The simpler the field, the easier it is to be an anti-realist about it.

French National Domain in the Holy Land: Church of the Paternoster (Eleona), St. Mary of the Resurrection Abbey, Tombs of the Kings, Church of Saint Anne

practical advisability as an indirectly moral concept

Sovereignty is a form of moral & juridical personality involving a right to legislate that is supreme in its jurisdiction-associated order.

All sovereignty is over people qua some X (as citizen, as tribal member, as creature, as resident, as territorial user, as subject, etc.), where X fixes order and jurisdiction.

A common problem empires have is that they end up training their own military opponents.

Law is a practical matter and heavily dependent on classifications, so it tends to fall out of a structure based on possible classifications of aspects of action:
(1) classification of sources of action: (a) individual statuses, (b) group statuses
(2) classification of circumstantial components of action
(3) classification of norms relevant to action
(4) classification of effects of action.

Document presupposes archive.

Practical inquiries impose standards of admissibility on evidence in light of the practical ends of inquiry.

To do justice to the true, the good, and the beautiful, one must sometimes reflect on the one, the something, and the other.

ens commenticium : ens rationis :: ens artificiale : ens reale

ens rationis: ens logicum, ens commenticium, ends ideale, ens palliolatum

"If I premise that my experience is not merely the production of the mental activity of my own nature; in other words, not merely a dream, in which you are my vision as I am yours, but in which the external as well as the internal has its share in my experience, then everything that is alike in our experience must bear a corresponding similitude in external circumstances." Oersted

No account of scientific discovery is adequate that ignores the joy of it.

"Light is the great proclaiming power of the world." Oersted

Evolutionary explanations often fail to grasp that many things are always happening at once.

weld, woad, and madder

The more intellectual a cause is, the harder it is to fit into a concrete/abstarct dichotomy, because its causal activity suggests both.

the integrity, substantiveness, and distinctiveness of discourse (e.g., of a fictional work)

Lv 19:33-34 and the Christian treatment of non-Christians who live in peace with Christians
-- much of Lv 19 can be seen as identifying specific forms, sometimes symbolic, of general conditions for being the People of God.
-- note that Ex 24:48-49 (cp. Nm 9:14) foresees the possibility of the stranger as participating directly through circumcision and PAssover, but only in becoming in some sense no longer a foreigner (cf. vv. 43-45). [Nm 15:14-16, 29, extends this to sacrifice.] Thus the 'resident non-Christian' may pray with us (sacrifice of sweet aroma), and shall not be barred from Eucharist (Passover) if he is also willing first to be baptized (circumcision), but must follow the laws on all of the these things. Nm 15:25-29 indicates that prayers for the whole congregation extend, at least sometimes, even to the non-Christian residing in the midst of the Christian assembly.
-- this certainly inclues the catechumenate; are there other categories (e.g., non-Christian spouses?)

to consider: bishops exercising divine authority per suffragium

the papal power of suppletio defectuum (power to provide remedies where the need arises from mere lack
-- related to the authority to confirm the brethren

Most of the good anyone does is in exchange for other good.

All explanation ultimately traces back to infinity.

Pleasure and pain are quite loosely correlated with survival and reproduction; they are relevant to them but also don't track them very tightly.

Every society has a mythological (imaginative), an aspirational, and an actual structure.

Reading is itself a kind of fine art.

We anticipate the wills even of people we don't know -- often badly, but inevitably.

Natural history fundamentally depends on the notion of goodness for a population of living things.

Mysticism is the hardest road to truth; it is the challenge of the climb and the triumph of overcoming it that is the attraction.

We trust most those whom we trust both from a recognition of their trustworthiness and from a recognition of the need to trust.

Every person projects a sake/behalf/cause qua person and bearer of value.

"Just as we would never see our face were it not for a mirror, so, too, we would never see our own inner life opposite us -- were it not for the mirror of art." Landmann-Kalischer

beauty as the value that reflects all other values

"The world is a collection of mutable things that are next to each other, follow upon one anotther, but which are overall connected with one another." Wolff
"The knowledge of the reason of things that are or occur is called philosophy."
"Philosophy is the science of the possibles insofar as they can be."
"If the reason of that which belongs to a species is contained in the notion of the genus, then things which we know philosophically are applied to more problems of human life than things which we know only historically."

To know many things, the human mind must first be wrong about many things.

Every liberty has a teleology.

"By *example* we mean a representation of something more determined which is supplied to clarify the representation of soemthing less determined." Baumgarten

Allegiance is not something human beings can deserve.

To the mission of the Church, we are all expendable; for the substance of the Church, we are each of infinite and everlasting value.

The very living of a human life posits some goodness to cosmos.

Comfort is an insatiably devouring god.

We should strive for what would be pleasing in a virtuous version of our society.

It is because we do not merely cognize but conceive that we can shape our judgments and reasonings.

Names are given by special fixation; it does not follow that they then only refer, nor even that there is anything special about their reference in itself.

'A new gunslinger comes to town; he's smooth-shaven, so we call him The Kid. The Kid is staying at The Royal Flush, having arrived by a riverboat, the *Far Horizon*. The Royal Flush is at the intersection of Pine and Red Oak Farm, which is where Red Oak Farm used to be. The Kid's actual name is Elwin, which means 'elf-friend'. He shouldn't be confused with the other Elwin in town.'
-- Any theory of names that cannot make sense of every sentence and proper name here is already wrong.

Theories of names often involve confusion of properties and predicates.

(1) Some beings are not real beings but rational beings.
(2) A being has properties in the way it has being.
(3) Quantifiers can be ampliated beyon the domain of real beings.
(4) We can reer to any being that can be an object of thought.

The aesthetics of sexuality can only connect to real sex by way of secrecies and privacies; this is one reason why pornographic cultures and subcultures so often seem weirdly sexless.

Never trust the feeling of empowerment.

'One person, one vote' obviously cannot apply to every person (people are not advocating that babies or juridical persons be given votes), nor can it apply to every vote. For it to apply, we must first coordiante the kind of person with the kind of vote. When we are talking about different kinds of vote (e.g., votes in Norway, votes in California), we change the persons to be consdiered; when we are talking about different kinds of person (e.g., citizen of Canada, citizen of Mexico), we change the votes to be considered.

People generally amp up public displays of sexuality to compensate for feelings of disorer, confusion, or even lack in actual sex.

The recognition of some sense of being 'self-made' is essential to the existence of a free society; and one notices whenever people attack the notion, that they are always trying to justify forcing people to do something.

Every instrumentalism is a realism about something else.

In ethics as in other things, unusual outliers can throw off our reasoning.

You will never find a democracy without fools.

patience as the maintenance of reserve forces

the integral, the real, the richly diverse

Genius by its nature makes use of lesser skills, and is limited or expanded by the lesser skills it has available.

Most politicsdoes not occur by persuasion, and most persuasion does not occur by rational justification.

"It is reciprocal action governed by proportion that keeps the city together." Aristotle

the prudent as that which tends to reasonable friendship in a way appropriate to friendship

All the evils of utilitarianism are tied to its obliteration of all consideration of the kind, mode, and order of means.

Jer 33:20-21 and the parallelbetween creation (physical nature) and covenant (social nature)

You get out of an educational institution what you put into it.

"Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods." Aristotle

Friendship is the foundation for shared good.

Exalted Above the Heavens

In some calendars, today, as the Thursday after Pentecost, is the Feast of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Eternal High Priest. 

 Now there have been many of those priests,
since death prevented them from continuing in office;
but because Jesus lives forever,
he has a permanent priesthood.
Therefore he is able to save completely
those who come to God through him,
because he always lives to intercede for them.
Such a high priest truly meets our need—
one who is holy, blameless, pure,
set apart from sinners, exalted above the heavens.
Unlike the other high priests,
he does not need to offer sacrifices day after day,
first for his own sins, and then for the sins of the people.
He sacrificed for their sins once for all when he offered himself.
For the law appoints as high priests men in all their weakness;
but the oath, which came after the law,
appointed the Son, who has been made perfect forever.

[Hebrews 7:23-28, NIV]

Whose Death Is the World's Desire

The Hunting of the Dragon
by G. K. Chesterton 

When we went hunting the Dragon
In the days when we were young,
We tossed the bright world over our shoulder
As bugle and baldrick slung;
Never was world so wild and fair
As what went by on the wind,
Never such fields of paradise
As the fields we left behind:

For this is the best of a rest for men
That men should rise and ride
Making a flying fairyland
Of market and country-side,
Wings on the cottage, wings on the wood,
Wings upon pot and pan,
For the hunting of the Dragon
That is the life of a man. 

For men grow weary of fairyland
When the Dragon is a dream,
And tire of the talking bird in the tree,
The singing fish in the stream;
And the wandering stars grow stale, grow stale,
And the wonder is stiff with scorn;
For this is the honour of fairyland
And the following of the horn; 

Beauty on beauty called us back
When we could rise and ride,
And a woman looked out of every window
As wonderful as a bride:
And the tavern-sign as a tabard blazed,
And the children cheered and ran,
For the love of the hate of the Dragon
That is the pride of a man. 

The sages called him a shadow
And the light went out of the sun:
And the wise men told us that all was well
And all was weary and one:
And then, and then, in the quiet garden,
With never a weed to kill,

We knew that his shining tail had shone
In the white road over the hill:
We knew that the clouds were flakes of flame,
We knew that the sunset fire
Was red with the blood of the Dragon
Whose death is the world’s desire. 

For the horn was blown in the heart of the night
That men should rise and ride,
Keeping the tryst of a terrible jest
Never for long untried;
Drinking a dreadful blood for wine,
Never in cup or can,
The death of a deathless Dragon,
That is the life of a man.

Links of Note

 * Eliyahu Rotenberg, Some Thoughts on the Philosophy of Law in Judaism, at "Ignatius of Zion"

* Katie Curtis, The Creative Retrieval of Aquinas in W. Norris Clarke, at "Chasing Logos"

* Chester H. Sunde, Psy.D., Plato Never Said 'Forms'

* Chris Fraser, The Limitations of Ritual Propriety: Ritual and Language in Xunzi and Zhuangzi (PDF)

* T. Benjamin White, I Read the Steinbeck Werewolf Book So You Don't Have To, at "The Composted Book Review"

* Hillel Wayne, Points are a weird and inconsistent unit of measure, on typographical points, at "Computer Things"

* Denis Kambouchner & Louis Rouquayrol, Descartes' Ethics, at the SEP

* Ahmed Alwishah & David Sanson, The Liar Paradox in Arabic and Islamic Philosophy, at the SEP

* B. A. Clarke, Pre-decimal Currency Was Mostly Fine, at "Clarke's Corner"

* Rob Alspaugh, The Point of ST I-II Q8 a2, at "Teaching Boys Badly"

* Casual Physics Enjoyer, The Particle Comes Alive, looks at the physics of particles in fluids

Magnifica Humanitas

 Pope Leo XIV recently released the encyclical letter, Magnifica humanitas. It explicitly positions itself as a sequel to Pope Leo XIII's Rerum novarum, but is also, I think, a deliberate sequel to Pope Francis's Dignitas infinita. Unfortunately, it has a lot of the problems that seem endemic to Church documents these days -- the things that suggest that perhaps it should have been thought through a bit more carefully. The claim that Nehemiah "did not impose solutions from above" is baffling; Nehemiah spends a significant part of the book giving orders, rebuking nobles and officials, and appointing people to be in charge. It is true that he works to reforge the community identity of the Israelites, and it is true that the Israelites respond well to his plans, which seems to be what is primarily in view, and I very much like the appeal to Nehemiah (who provides a good example of a laity-driven approach to reform), but the characterization of Nehemiah's work seems oddly selective.This is a recurring problem, as, again, has been common in Church documents recently.* Some people have noted that the writing, ironically, has a lot of stylistic similarities with results of AI programs, probably not because AI was used but because AI also tends to slide into this vaguely inspirational now-this-now-that committee-speak, of which Church officials have been the masters for years now.

Nonetheless, the encyclical is a nice summary of the social teaching of the Church. And contrary to the way it is sometimes being presented, it is largely positive about AI research, and just lays down exactly the sort of moral principles for such research that one would expect it to give. As some have noted, it doesn't even call for a ban of autonomous weapons systems -- it just insists that they "must be subject to the most rigorous ethical constraints, to guarantee respect for human dignity and the sanctity of life and to avoid a race to develop such arms" (section 197). This is remarkably weak.

What seems to be the intended point -- it could be clearer, but a number of things converge on this interpretation -- is that matters like the ethics of AI research require a significant amount of initiative on the part of the laity in general, distinct from any direct interference by the clergy; it thus reiterates the general principles that the laity need to keep in mind when dealing with any matter, like AI research, that can affect our understanding of human dignity. Read in that light, it does this very well. I just wish we were out of the era of throw-everything-in-somehow document-writing.

----

* One of the more interesting ones here is when it says that "the 'just war' theory, which has all too often been used to justify any kind of war, is now outdated" (section 192), but all the things it explicitly rejects are common modern modifications of the traditional just-war view, while it repeatedly says things that have commonly been said in traditional versions of just war theory. (For instance, one might think that it was proposing a pacifist approach, but then it goes on to give, sections 197-200, a discussion of how military decisions in war should be made, which explicitly appeals to principles of just war theory!)

Two Poem Drafts

 Nightfall

The evening, creeping now
on shower-watered fields,
builds in depth; the sun bows;
wonderfully to night it yields.

I sit alone in shadowed room,
still as stone, and wait
as fate is woven on the loom
with gloom; and there I ruminate.

The outer black, a sheet
like doubt, now covers all
and falls the night, complete,
against all light a wall.

The clouds are hiding stars,
the wide world is hid away,
yet night neither hides nor mars
the glory of light of day.

A dawn will come, will burn,
upturn the rule of shade,
and I will coolly yearn
and sigh for hope remade.

Connection

On page unmarked I mark a line;
I draw it straight and true
from mine to yours and yours to mine,
made even, as is due.

In silent air I draw a word
to reach through time and space
and on your ear alight, thus heard
with harmony and grace.

By light I speak, from eye to eye,
with glistening tear and hue;
to make a circuit, photons fly
between my heart and you.

I fold the world and make it small
to hold us both in bound;
within this O, I compass all:
here infinity is found.

The Power of Ideas

 It is the business of education to wait upon Pentecost. Unhappily, there is something about educational syllabuses, and especially about examination papers, which seems to be rather out of harmony with Pentecostal manifestations. The Energy of Ideas does not seem to descend into the receptive mind with quite that rush of cloven fire which we ought to expect. Possibly there is something lacking in our Idea of education; possibly something inhibiting has happened to the Energy. But Pentecost will happen, whether within or without official education. From some quarter or other, the Power will descend, to flame or to smolder until it is ready to issue in a new revelation. We need not suppose that, because the mind of the reader is inert to Plato, it will therefore be inert to Nietzsche or Karl Marx. Failing those, it may respond to Wilhelmina Stitch or to Hollywood. No incarnate Idea is altogether devoid of Power; if the Idea is feeble, the Energy is dispersed, and the Power dim, the indwelling spirit will be dim, dispersed and feeble -- but such as it is, so its response will be and such will be its manifestation in the world. 

[Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker, HarperCollins (New York: 1987) pp. 112-113.]

Be Skillful Money-Changers

 The Mosaic philosophy is accordingly divided into four parts — into the historic, and that which is specially called the legislative, which two properly belong to an ethical treatise; and the third, that which relates to sacrifice, which belongs to physical science; and the fourth, above all, the department of theology, vision, which Plato predicates of the truly great mysteries. And this species Aristotle calls metaphysics. Dialectics, according to Plato, is, as he says in The Statesman, a science devoted to the discovery of the explanation of things. And it is to be acquired by the wise man, not for the sake of saying or doing anything of what we find among men (as the dialecticians, who occupy themselves in sophistry, do), but to be able to say and do, as far as possible, what is pleasing to God. But the true dialectic, being philosophy mixed with truth, by examining things, and testing forces and powers, gradually ascends in relation to the most excellent essence of all, and essays to go beyond to the God of the universe, professing not the knowledge of mortal affairs, but the science of things divine and heavenly; in accordance with which follows a suitable course of practice with respect to words and deeds, even in human affairs. Rightly, therefore, the Scripture, in its desire to make us such dialecticians, exhorts us: Be skilful money-changers rejecting some things, but retaining what is good.

[St. Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis 1.28]

'Be skil(l)ful money-changers' is a saying commonly attributed to Jesus by the Church Fathers, although it's an agraphon, i.e., something not attributed to Him in the Gospels; it was particularly popular among the Alexandrian Church Fathers, who use it in different kinds of contexts as an exhortation to distinguish the true from the counterfeit.

Memory, Composition, Improvisation

Ben Laude has a nice breakdown of a famous scene from the movie Amadeus:

 

Memory, composition, and improvisation is a good way to look at talent, because they are the elements of excellence in every intellectual and cultural field.

Dashed Off XVIII

 the Church as model of both consecrated virginity and matrimony

Spirit by its nature is attracted to sign as meaning-bearing.

We make trade-offs not merely with quantitative assessments but also with judgments of quality, and the latter kind of trade-off assessment has features not found in the former.

It is a fact that some way sof playing poker are cheating in the context of the game being played; therefore there are moral facts.

Communication always begins with having-in-common.

Loves tend toward uniqueness, and the deeper they are, the more in them is unique.

Most words can be used of the potential as well as the actual.

Lk 24:51 (Christ taken up into heaven) // Lk 24:52-53 (Disciples going to Jerusalem and staying in the Temple)
-- the disciples do on earth what symbolically corresponds to what Christ does in the Ascension

The Ascension and Session are the culminations and completions of Incarnation.

Every advance in one's education consists in recognizing how what one had learned is a shadow of what one is learning.

'postulates of respect for the individual'

The modality of coming to know is not separate from the object of knowing.

We know there are molecules composing tables because there are tables that are necessarily composite, and study of the components brings us the molecules (and atoms &c.).

the sensible matter of matrimony as consenting presentation

That one can *model* discovered solutions as optimizations does not imply that optimizing is the best *strategy* for finding such solutions.

It follows from Malebranche's account of the passions that they should only be followed to the extent that doing so preserves society and our body.

Communication begins before we actually communicate.

What we usually call evidence is something we project to exist in a 'steady and general point of view', the open field of the publicly accessible.

One reason a school needs to support high-achieving students as much as possible is that such students are part of the support system for lower-achieving students.

You learn how to comprehend what you read by reading lots of things like it.

Coolness is a form of novelty.

Our ability to refer to fictional entities in pretense and make-believe is itself a metaphysical mystery.

Many of our assertions are parts of testimonial claims; higher-order reflection may classify those chains in different ways, but that does not affect those assertions as assertions, just as linked in systems with other assertions.

pretending to assert vs asserting what one pretends

We make believe in order to think through.

To say that we refer or assert in a game does not fundamentally affect any questions about reference or assertion.

Walton's discussion of fictional entities captures the whole problem with his project: saying "it is fictional that" or "in a game of make believe" reclassifies parts of the problem but doesn't actually answer any of the questions he seems to assume it does. (He seems, in fact, to be smuggling in loose, colloquial tones into a technical account that doesn't obviously require them -- e.g., on his account, something that is make-believe may also actually be the case outside the game, but he regularly borrows on our tendency to take 'make belive' as a marker for the *not real*. On his account, saying we fictionally refer can't give the conclusion that we don't actually refer, but he treats it as if it does whenever it is convenient for him to do so.

When people ask, "What is the value of X?", there is often no such thing as 'the value' but many very different values.

LLM behavior is pretty much exactly what you would expect from a blending of a huge number of people who talk too much.

"The affirmative proposition is prior to and better known than the negative (since affirmation explains denial just as being is prior to non-being)." Aristotle Met 996b

Strategy is a fundamentally analytic field.

symbolic habitus in the imagination

books as quasi-friends of pleasure
pets as quasi-friends of pleasure

the illocutionary force of what is said on the stage vs the illocutionary force of the stage-play

Cinema is in many ways a four-dimensional art; it requires use of space and time in visual storytelling.

"What then stops us from calling happy (eudaimona) the one who is active in accoradance with complete virtue, sufficiently equipped with external goods, not for some arbitrary duration but over a complete life?" Aristotle NE 1101a

The human state, like the human life, exists both by nature and by artifice.

Without the good of family and of civil society, no individual good can reliably exist.

All names admit of both nonfictional and fictional uses.
-- this is a specification of transperspectival and perspectival uses

"A safe fairy-land is untrue to all worlds." JRR Tolkien

The Chinese translation of The Lord of the Rings (which includes Silmarillion and Hobbit)
Mojie ("Magic/Demon Ring")
(1) Jingling baozuan ("The Elves' Jewels")
(2) Huobite ren ("The Hobbit Person")
(3) Mojie zaizian ("The Magic Ring Reappears")
(4) Shuangl-a qibing ("The Surprise Attack of the Two Towers")
(5) Wangzhe wudi ("The King is Invincible")
jingling = spiritual/refined/skilled mind/soul/spirit/sprite (hence 'Elf')

To live morally is to be living before the tribunals of conscience and God.

the technical infinity of humanity

We all begin to pray before we know what to pray.

allegory as tending toward a virtue ethics

The species-function of an institution is not the same as its society-function or its intrinsic function.

A game in game theory consists in
(1) a set of logical objects (agents/players)
(2) mapped to multiple elements in sets of choices
(3) so that the set of such elements is modeled by a maximizing function.

In most of what we care about we don't know what to maximize or optimize.

Any result that can be reached by natural selection can in principle be reached by intellectual intention.

There are usually very many coordination devices for solving any given coordination problem, and they are selected in general on the basis of things having little to do with the coordination problem itself.

A man trapped alone on a desert island would still form institutions (home, names, designated gathering areas, latrine-areas, gardens, pets, or what have you, depending on the situation). If joined by someone who refused to recognize these, the result would be an obviously recognizable form of institutional conflict.

Beore you can have an institution of driving on a given side of the road, one must already have the institutions of driving and of roads. Roads presuppose institutionalized forms of travel and transport. These in turn presuppose other institutions (militaries, king's messnegers, postal services, merchant trade, or whatever else).

Every Bayesian seems in practice to have a different Bayesianism.

Before every coordination problem is the selection of which coordination problem to have.

Either some moral principles are necessary or we live in a universe that favors some moral principles over others.

principles of administrative design
(1) facilitated compliance
(2) easy return to compliance
(3) penalty for continued noncompliance commensurate with severity of problem created by noncompliance

Large-scale problems are often solved by degrading the solutions to other problems.

The deontic power to buy, pay, and close debts may usually involve money, but it doesn't actually require money (favors or force may close a debt even more effectively than funds).

Either 'purchasing power' already presupposes money or the power to invade and occupy is a form of purchasing power.

Philosophical naturalists are in general only aspirationally so.

Promises are not necessarily forward-looking; we also promise that we have done or are doing something.

strongly actual: necessary things
properly actual: substances & accidents existing in the world
weakly actual: ficta and rational beings

The inevitability of inquiry grounds the postulate of intelligible order as inevitable, the necessity of inquiry to moral life grounds the postulate of intelligible order as obligatory.

If A is angry at B and as a result says, "No, have nothing more to do with me; you do not exist," the "you do not exist" concerns status as object rather than status as thing.

'Bad company' arguments are arguments a pari.

The existence conditions for fictional objects qua objects are the same as for any other objects; the differences between fictional and nonfictional objects are causal, not objective.

Most of the philosophical difficulties asosciated with fictional objects are not conclusive to fictional objects.

If I say of an erratic friend, "Which A will we meet tonight? Every day, a different A," I am distinguishing A objectively and not really.

fictional characters and practice opponents in arguing and fighting
-- this is one of the stronger analogies for a make-believe account

the use of make-believe in philosophical argument (e.g., imagining an opponent or a conversation)

prefix realism -- the prefix would in fact just be the domain indicator

artistic idea --> objective artifact --> external artifact

ampliated vs nonampliated existence games

purely figurative uses of 'fictional'

If I'm puzzled about "There is a center of gravity here," it is  pointless to try to answer questions about what it is for a center of gravity to be here by saying, "Ah, what this really means is, *metaphorically* there is a center of gravity here." Adding 'metaphorically' has not addressed any questions I am asking. All it has done is given limited information about how the *statement* relates to other statements. Likewise, if I say, "In a game of make-believe, there is a center of gravity here," this answers no questions about it unless I am asking how the statement relates to other statements, and even then very incomplete information (e.g., which of the many possible games of make-believe)?

fictional characters // words

"If we admit a certain kind of entity, we cannot but admit all the other kinds of entities that figure in the identity conditions of an entity of that kind. Yet we admit fictional works. So, we cannot but admit fictional objects as well, insofar as the latter entities figure in the identity conditions of the former entities." Alberto Voltolini
"Insofar as i) fictional objects are necessary identity conditions for fictional works and ii) the latter allegedly exist, then of course fictional works are logically sufficient for the existence of fictional objects; hence again, fictional objects exist as well."

To say that fictional objects don't exist is to say that they are neither primary beings nor secondary beings.

general powers of trusteeship (incident to the office of trustee) vs special powers (arising from special authorization and direction of the settlor)
-- special powers cna be mere naked powers (discretion of trustee) or powers in the nature of a trust (obligatory)

Swinburne's kinds of religious experience
(1) public object
--- (1a) through ordinary sensory object
--- (1b) through unuusal sensory object
(2) private object
--- (2a) through typical spiritual sensations
--- (2b) through atypical spiritual sensations
--- (2c) without any sensations

A means is potential to what acts for an end.

Every argument against God's existence is a defective part of an argument for God's existence, namely, the argument whereby it is shown to be wrong.

To be a person is to be a potential classifier; to live as a person is to be an actual classifier.

We often begin an inquiry into something by fictionalizing it.

(1) Necessarily, some propositions are not both true and false.
(2) Therefore there are reasons why some propositions are true or false but not both.
(3) The collection of all such reasons is called reality.
(4) Therefore, necessarily, there is some reality.

counterintuitive vs praeterintuitive

Aristotle's Metaphysics Lambda is an argument that thinking must be a principle of the universal heavens and of nature; that is, that change (kinesis) presupposes thought (noesis).

laws of nature --> intelligible order --> divine intellect

The universe is as if it were designed to produce stars.

The Bible makes very clear, in both the Old and the New Testaments, that there was prophetic revelation that did not contribute to Scripture, that not all prophets were concerned with public revelation.

Intellectual understanding infuses the social medium, descending thereby into the material world and transfiguring it.

Philosophy is a work of both discovery and invention; truth is sought in both ways, and most perfectly through their union.

Habitude XXXV

 It seems that original sin is not habitude. For original sin is lack of original justice, as Anselm says in the book on the virginal conception, and so original sin is a sort of privation. But privation is opposed to habitude. Therefore original sin is not habitude.

Further, actual sin has more of the notion of fault than original, inasmuch as it has more of the notion of the voluntary. But actual habitude of sin does not have the notion of fault; otherwise it would follow that a man sleeping, culpably sins. Thefore no original habitude has the notion of fault.

Further, in badness, act always precedes habitude, for bad habitude is never infused, but acquired. But original sin is not preceded by any act. Therefore original sin is not habitude.

But contrariwise is what Augustine says in the book on the baptism of infants, that due to original sin little children are capable of craving [concupiscibili], though they are not actually craving [concupiscentes]. But capability [habilitas] is called according to some habitude. Therefore original sin is habitude.

I reply that it must be said that, as was said above, habitude is twofold. One is that by which power is inclined to act, as kinds of knowledge [scientiae] and virtues are called habitudes. And in this way, original sin is not habitude. In another way, habitude is said to be a disposition of a nature composed of many things, according to which it has itself [se habet] either well or badly toward something, and especially according as the disposition has been turned as it were into nature, as is obvious from illness and health. And in this way original sin is habitude. For it is a sort of disordered [inordinata] disposition coming from the dissolution of that harmony in which the notion of original justice consisted, just as bodily illness is a sort of disordered [inordinata] disposition of body, according to which the equality in which the notion of health consists is dissolved. Whence original sin is called languor of nature.

To the first it must be said that, as illness of body has something of privation, inasmuch as equality of health is removed, and has something positive, to wit the humors themselves being disposed disorderedly [inordinata dispositos], so too original sin has privation of original justice, and with it disordered disposition [inordinatam dispositionem] of the parts of the soul. Whence it is not pure privation but a sort of corrupt habitude.

To the second it must be said that actual sin is a sort of disordering [inordinatio] of act, whereas original sin, since it is sin of nature, is a sort of disordered disposition [inordinata dispositio] of nature itself, which has the notion of fault inasmuch as it is derived from the first parent, as was said. Now this kind of disordered disposition of nature [inordinata dispositio naturae] has the notion of habitude, but disordered disposition of act [inordinata dipositio actus] does not have the notion of habitude. And because of this original sin is able to be habitude, but not actual sin.

To the third it must be said that that objection proceeds from the habitude by which power is inclined to act, but original sin is not such a habitude. Although even from original sin some inclination to disordered act [actum inordinatum] follows, not directly, but indirectly, to wit, through removal of the impediment [remotionem prohibentis], that is, original justice, which impeded disordered change [inordinatos motus], just as also from bodily illness there follows inclination to disordered bodily changes [motus corporales inordinatos]. Nor ought it to be said that original sin is infused habitude, nor acquired, save by the act of the first parent rather than the act of this person, but it is innate through defective origin.

[St. Thomas Aquinas, ST 2-1.82.1, my translation. The Latin is here, the Dominican Fathers translation is here.]

It's important to grasp that original sin is not sin in a strictly proper sense, i.e., in the sense that the person who has it has thereby sinned; rather, it is the sin of the whole human race, in the first parent as the head of the human race. In that parental sin, original justice, which protected from actual disorder, was lost, with the result that all descended human beings are disordered in their desires.

Besides the importance of original sin itself, one of the important points emphasized here is that the infused vs. acquired distinction is not exhaustive for habitudes; original sin is neither infused nor acquired by the person who has it, but is a result of a defective origination of the person, namely, being generated when original justice has been lost. This makes original sin a natural habitude like congenital illness rather than a rational habitude like science or virtue, although since it is a disordered state of our rational ability to organize our inclinations, disordered acts follow from it, which makes vice possible and, indeed, in the long run inevitable where there is nothing to counteract it.

And Stand a Barrier to Eternity

To a Daisy
by Alice Meynell 

Slight as thou art, thou art enough to hide
Like all created things, secrets from me,
And stand a barrier to eternity.
And I, how can I praise thee well and wide 

From where I dwell---upon the hither side?
Thou little veil for so great mystery,
When shall I penetrate all things and thee,
And then look back? For this I must abide, 

Till thou shalt grow and fold and be unfurled
Literally between me and the world.
Then I shall drink from in beneath a spring,

And from a poet’s side shall read his book.
O daisy mine, what will it be to look
From God’s side even of such a simple thing?

The Guardian 100 Best Novels

The Guardian recently published their list of 100 Best Novels As people have been commenting all over, the list is very weird. They took 172 authors, critics, academics, had each give a top ten list, and then compiled them into a single list, taking into account the weightings of the individual lists. I suppose it's inevitable that a list made this way will have some strangeness to it. It's absurd, for instance, for The Handmaid's Tale to be on a list of 100 best novels ever published in English, and even if it were, it is certainly not a better book than The Left Hand of Darkness. Charles Dickens doesn't even make the top 10, which is already a sign that the list can't be taken seriously. There are also some novelistic powerhouses that seem very underrepresented: if I haven't missed anything, Japan and Norway don't show up, France is represented entirely by Flaubert and Proust, and Germany seems to be represented entirely by Thomas Mann.  The author that I'm most disappointed not to see on a list like this is Alessandro Manzoni.

Still, it's been a while since I've done booklist around here. Bolded I have definitely read. I have linked to the ones that I've done as Fortnightly Books.

Looking at the ones I haven't read, I don't have a particular interest in reading most of them (which is not say that I wouldn't do so if the opportunity happened to arise).

I find to my complete and utter astonishment that while I've discussed them occasionally, I've never done Emma, Middlemarch, or Jane Eyre for the Fortnightly Book, which I could have sworn that I had. That will have to be rectified at some point. Vanity Fair, too, perhaps. The Great Gatsby is already on my list to do as Fortnightly Book sometime this year, and I have had Sentimental Education for years, intending to do it but always forgetting, so maybe I should actually get on that sometime.

100 My Ántonia
99 The Go-Between
98 The Road
97 Catch-22
96 Pedro Páramo
95 The Return of the Native
94 The Known World
93 Invisible Cities
92 Sentimental Education
91 Life and Fate
90 Jacob's Room
89 The Left Hand of Darkness
88 Ragtime
87 The Line of Beauty
86 The Turn of the Screw
85 The Vegetarian
84 The Talented Mr Ripley
83 A Farewell to Arms
82 The End of the Affair
81 Buddenbrooks
80 Rebecca
79 Go Tell It on the Mountain
78 A House for Mr Biswas
77 The Rainbow
76 Dracula
75 The Bluest Eye
74 Nervous Conditions
73 Austerlitz
72 Our Mutual Friend
71 Kindred
70 Jude the Obscure
69 Crime and Punishment
68 Blood Meridian
67 The Man Without Qualities
66 The Master and Margarita
65 The Color Purple
64 The Good Soldier
63 White Teeth
62 Half of a Yellow Sun
61 The Rings of Saturn
60 Howards End
59 Never Let Me Go
58 Disgrace
57 The Sound and the Fury
56 Mansfield Park
55 The Waves
54 Orlando
53 The Transit of Venus
52 The Golden Bowl
51 My Brilliant Friend
50 Wide Sargasso Sea
49 A Fine Balance
48 The Metamorphosis
47 Vanity Fair
46 The Leopard
45 The Golden Notebook
44 Giovanni's Room
43 Housekeeping
42 The Magic Mountain
41 Heart of Darkness
40 Song of Solomon
39 Their Eyes Were Watching God
38 The Age of Innocence
37 Invisible Man
36 The Handmaid's Tale
35 Great Expectations
34 Wolf Hall
33 David Copperfield
32 The God of Small Things
31 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
30 Frankenstein
29 Pale Fire
28 The Brothers Karamazov
27 The Trial
26 Don Quixote
25 Lolita
24 The Remains of the Day
23 Midnight's Children
22 Things Fall Apart
21 The Portrait of a Lady
20 Wuthering Heights
19 The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
18 Persuasion
17 One Hundred Years of Solitude
16 Nineteen Eighty-Four
15 Moby-Dick
14 Mrs Dalloway
13 Emma
12 Bleak House
11 The Great Gatsby
10 Madame Bovary
9 Pride and Prejudice
8 Jane Eyre
7 War and Peace
6 Anna Karenina
5 In Search of Lost Time
4 To the Lighthouse
3 Ulysses
2 Beloved
1 Middlemarch

Links of Note

 * Jacob Allee, Dorothy L. Sayers on Facts, Feelings, and Natural Law, at "Study the Great Books"

* Exploring the Richness and Roots of Fantasy, at "The Library of Lewis and Tolkien"

* Boaz Faraday Schuman, To Contradict Is to Cooperate: Prior, Abelard, Buridan, Grice (PDF)

* Harry D'Agostino, A MacIntyrean Auto-Biography (Part I -- After Virtue)

* Chris Bobonich & Katherine Meadows, Plato's Laws, at the SEP

* Ravi Thakral & Guillaine Arthur, Normativity and the Indefinite Singular in Morality (PDF)

* Brad Skow, The Plague Crucifix, on Danto's The Abuse of Beauty, at "Mostly Aesthetics"

* Benjamin Robert Koons, The Justice of Punitive Wars, at "The Journal of Controversial Ideas"

* Joseph E. Blado, Dölpopa, Shentong Buddhism, and the Three Jewels: An Analytic Friendly Analysis (PDF)

* Ambrose Gardeil, Evolution and the Principles of St. Thomas, translated by Matthew Minerd, with an interesting discussion of habitus, at "To Be a Thomist"

* Rob Spence, The Leopard, on Lampedusa's classic, at "First Folios"

* Toby Ord, Interpolation, Extrapolation, Hyperpolation: Generalising into new dimensions (PDF)

* Ben Burgis, It's Hard to Make Sense of Marxism Without a Conception of Objective Human Flourishing, at "Philosophy for the People"

* Chris Fraser, Tang Junyi on Mencian and Mohist Conceptions of Mind (PDF)

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 profession 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.