Life as Chess

This is a bit long, but it's a great passage:

Suppose it were perfectly certain that the life and fortune of every one of us would, one day or other, depend upon his winning or losing a game at chess. Don't you think that we should all consider it to be a primary duty to learn at least th names and the moves of the pieces; to have a notion of a gambit, and a keen eye for all the means of giving and getting out of check? Do you not think that we should look with a disapprobation amounting to scorn, upon the father who allowed his son, or the state which allowed its members, to grow up without knowing a knight from a pawn?

Yet it is a very plain and elementary truth, that the life, the fortune, and the happiness of every one of us, and, more or less, of those who are connected with us, do depend upon our knowing something of the rules of a game infinitely more difficult and complicated than chess. It is a game which has been played for untold ages, every man and woman of us being one of the two players in a game of his or her own. The chess-board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just, and patient. But also we know, to our cost, that he enver overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance. To the man who plays well, the highest stakes are paide, with that sort of overflowing generosity with which the strong shows delight in strength. And one who plays ill is checkmated--without haste, but without remorse.

My metaphor will remind some of you of the famous picture in which Retzsch has depicted Satain playing at chess with man for his soul. Substitute for the mocking fiend in the picture, a calm, strong angel who is playing for love, as we say, and would rather lose than win--and I should accept it as an image of human life.

Well, what I mean by Education is learning the rules of this mighty game....

--T. H. Huxley, "A Liberal Education; and Where to Find It," in Lay Sermons, Essays, and Reviews, Macmillan (London: 1880) 31-32.

A Bit of Connectivity

* Chris Bray has a good post on David Hackworth (cross-posted here) and others like him, and the failure of civilian hawks to take them seriously. Hackworth, who had received many distinguished awards for military service, because of his strongly pro-military views and advocacy of military reform, was occasionally sharply critical both of civilian hawks and Pentagon 'princes'. He died recently. His organization, Soldiers for the Truth, is a fairly good resource for acquainting oneself with straight talk by veterans and soldiers in the field about the U.S. military, U.S. foreign policy, and the like. I know much less about Bacevich, but the story sounds too familiar. There are, in fact, good pro-soldier reasons for being very wary of much of American military policy; and it is unfortunate that people are sometimes unwilling to recognize that. It's one of the sordid sides of partisan politics that I keep mentioning. Of course, Hackworth isn't above criticism; this seems about right, for instance, just judging on what little I know of the matter. But a serious interest in the health and reasonable use of the U.S. military -- an interest that should be shared in some degree by all American citizens, whatever their political assumptions -- requires at least taking the trouble to take people like Hackworth, and their call for reforms, seriously.

* Christian Humanism: The Knowledge of God and of Ourselves at "Internet Monk"

* Thick Epistemology at "Certain Doubts"

* Four Kinds of Ontological Argument at "The Maverick Philosopher"

* After Caleb's post questioning the explanatory power Lakoff's Strict Father / Nuturant Parent catories have and my post puzzling over Lakoff's claims about American religion, Chris mentioned Lakoff's claims about intonation at "Mixing Memory" in a personal reflection about when and why he came to have difficulty taking Lakoff's conceptual metaphor accounts seriously. And Coturnix (Bora Zivkovic) responds to all three at "Science and Politics".

I'll be giving a paper at the CPA Sunday, and I recently decided I didn't like how it was put together, so I am in the middle of completely reworking it. As you can imagine that means I'm very busy at the moment....

Sound Advice in Riddle Form

A "charade" riddle by Jane Austen:

You may lie on my first on the side of a stream,
And my second compose to the nymph you adore,
But if, when you've none of my whole, her esteem
And affection diminish -- think of her no more!

"My first" = first syllable; "my second" = second syllable; "my whole" = the whole word. The answer to the riddle is here.

The Scholasticum

By accident I came across Br. Alexis Bugnolo's weblog, The Scholasticum, which looks like a great resource in the making. From his profile:

I decided to publish this Blog, "The Scholasticum", to be an electronic forum for the discussion of Scholastic Theology and Philosophy for those who visit The Franciscan Archive, and for all others on the Internet. This site is part of the long term plans I have to study Scholasticism: a work which focuses on translating some of the great works of Scholastic Theology of the Franciscan School into English. If you visit my web page, you can read online part of Peter Lombard's Book of Sentences and Bonaventure's corresponding Commentaries, in English and Latin, as well as part 1 and 2 of Scotus' prologue to his Ordinatio, as well as find a host of links to their other works, some of which I have also published (e.g. Itinerarium, Collations on the 7 Gifts of the Holy Ghost). As I am a franciscan brother I am begging the means to do this, bit by bit over the years. I wish to thank my benefactors for all their assistance, and invite others of you who may be interested in helping if you can. If you would like to contact me, go to my web page, and send me an email directly.

It looks like the blog is only about two weeks old, but he already has several interesting selections from major scholastic texts, a post on the place of scholastic theology in the mind of the Catholic Church, a post that provides an introductory overview to the (early) history of scholasticism (I say 'early' because it only goes to the 14th century), the relation of Ratzinger's theology to scholasticism, and close textual commentaries on Aquinas's ST 1.1.1 and Scotus's Ordinatio Prol.1.1.

History Carnival Reminder

Don't forget to send in your submissions to the History Carnival. The relevant information from Sharon:

Email your nominations - your own blogwriting or that of other bloggers to me: sharon AT earlymodernweb DOT org DOT uk (replace AT with @, DOT with . and close up the spaces), by the end of Tuesday.

Remember, the History Carnival isn’t just intended for academics; entries don’t have to be particularly weighty or scholarly. But I do expect a focus on things historical and reasonable standards of accuracy and fairness in the use of historical sources. If you’re uncertain, check out the carnival’s homepage at the link above. And NB that the host’s decision is final.

You should include in your email: the title and permalink URL of the blog post you wish to nominate and the author’s name (or pseudonym) and the title of the blog.

You can submit multiple suggestions, but please try not to submit more than one post by any individual author for each Carnival (with the exception of multi-part posts on the same topic). (Unless you really can’t bear to choose.) You can submit your own work as well as that of other bloggers.

The posts should have been published recently, certainly within the previous month, and preferably since the date of the last Carnival (15 May).

Which reminds me that I'll have to think about what to send in myself.

A Sparkling Bond

Once when I was shedding bitter tears,
when, dissolved in pain, my hope was melting away,
and I stood alone by the barren mound
which in its narrow dark bosom hid the vanished form of my Life,
lonely as never yet was lonely man, driven by anxiety unspeakable,
powerless, and no longer anything but a conscious misery;--
as there I looked about me for help, unable to go on or to turn back,
and clung to the fleeting, extinguished life with an endless longing:
then, out of the blue distances --
from the hills of my ancient bliss, came a shiver of twilight --
and at once snapt the bond of birth, the chains of the Light.
Away fled the glory of the world, and with it my mourning;
the sadness flowed together into a new, unfathomable world.
Thou, soul of the Night, heavenly Slumber, didst come upon me;
the region gently upheaved itself;
over it hovered my unbound, newborn spirit.
The mound became a cloud of dust,
and through the cloud I saw the glorified face of my beloved.
In her eyes eternity reposed. I laid hold of her hands,
and the tears became a sparkling bond that could not be broken.
Into the distance swept by, like a tempest, thousands of years.
On her neck I welcomed the new life with ecstatic tears.
Never was was such another dream;
then first and ever since I hold fast an eternal, unchangeable faith
in the heaven of the Night, and its Light, the Beloved.

--Novalis, Hymns to the Night, Hymn III, George MacDonald, tr.

Only Darkness by Himself

III CONSIDERATION.
Man is only darkness by himself. It is not that he produces in himself the ideas by which he perceives all things, for he is not his own light. And Philosophy teaches me that the objects cannot form in the mind the ideas that they represent, that it must be recognized that there is nothing but God that can enlighten us. He is the great Son who penetrates all, and who fills all with his light. He is the great teacher who instructs all those who come into this world; it is in Him that we see all that we see, and that we are able to see all that which we are capable of seeing: because God contains the ideas or the resemblances of all beings, and being in him as we are, "in ipso enim vivimus, movemur, et sumus," we see in Him, or we are able to see in Him all beings successively. Finally, He is the intelligible world in which minds exist, and in which they perceive the material world that is neither visible, nor intelligible by itself.

This is from Malebranche, Méditations pour se disposer a l'humilité et a la pénitence (1676) in the Oeuvres Complètes 17(1):393-394. My (rough) translation. This is the least depressing of the Considerations, which are reflections on various issues that are supposed to incline us to humility and penitence. I have translated it here because I've never seen it translated before and it has relevance to the philosophical issues that are most discussed in Malebranche scholarship. The Latin phrase, of course, is from Acts 17:8, which is perhaps the most quoted Bible verse in early modern philosophical literature.