Four Poem Drafts

Heart's Leap

You are a summer morning,
golden day,
the roses brightly blooming on the way,
a vision for rejoicing,
sunrise-smile,
life and breath renewed upon the final mile,
mercy's fire burning,
warmth of flame,
the heart's upward leaping when it hears the Name.

The River-Wraiths

The river-splendored wraiths,
mist-entrained, walk at midnight moon,
silver on their fingers ring-encrusted
with gem of dream and drowning swoon,
and I, who miswandered, caught by cords,
must follow, and you, who dreamed too deep,
are bound behind with chains of whisper
forged of echoes born of sleep.
Hallowed hill and hollow, moor and field,
mountain high and valley, pass like wind,
and river-wraiths in splendor draw us
down to darkness and to world's end.

Thunderstorm

Lightning cracks the air,
rifting night with fire,
as if God took a pen
and flicked it across the page,
no mark behind but madness
drawn with ink of light;
and above us clouds still rumble
and glower with His grace.

Bell's Silence

A poor man on the roadside
rings a bell to catch the ear,
to draw in pennies.
A rose springs up before him;
he is silent,
lest one bell-disturbed petal
touch the ground.

Notes and Links

* Two versions of Daft Punk's "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" (both far better than that Kanye West nonsense): Daft Punk's original and the Carleton Singing Knights' a capella version.

Work it harder, make it better,
Do it faster, makes us stronger ,
More than ever hour after
[H]Our Work Is Never Over

The ambiguity of the sound "(h)our" is exquisite; it's like postmodernism on a good day. And indeed, if we wanted to make analogies that are probably stretched a bit too far, postmodernists are often trying to do in philosophy (very often badly, due to the academic taint) what Daft Punk sometimes does very well in music.

* Speaking of Daft Punk, Technologic has its strengths, too.

* John Heard discusses Maximilian Kolbe, who had his feast day recently.

* Ann Bartow has a post on pornography and politics worth reading at "Feminist Law Professors".

* Paul Robinson has an interesting quotation up by Dooyeweerd on Encyclopedia understood as "a philosophic science which indicates the place of the special sciences in the totality of human knowledge". It's noteworthy that Encyclopedia in fact used to be taught as an extremely important part of philosophy, at least in some places; Kant taught nine or ten semesters of Philosophical Encyclopedia, for instance. In essence they were unifying survey courses, although apparently much more systematic and architectonic in format than we usually are comfortable with in survey courses. What we call encyclopedias, of course, are a degenerate form of what encyclopedists originally tried to do, which was to provide a framework to facilitate an understanding of how every bit of knowledge was related to the rest.

* Chris has an interesting post on some research about folk meta-ethics.

* Susan Hurley recently died. You can get a sample of some of her work in this book symposium on Consciousness in Action. Some notices in the philosophical blogosphere on her death are here, here, and here.

Wisdom from Mother Syncletica

Amma Syncletica said, "There are many who live in the mountains and behave as if they were in the town, and they are wasting their time. It is possible to be a solitary in one's mind while living in a crowd, and it is possible for one who is a solitary to live in the crowd of his own thoughts."

Quoted here.

Problem of the Criterion

Ian has a good post at FQI on the Problem of the Criterion. In epistemology we essentially ask two sorts of questions. As Ian puts them:

(1) What do we know? What is the extent of our knowledge?
(2) How do we decide whether we know? What are the criteria for knowledge?

A major issue in epistemology is which question has priority. Roughly: Do you find the answer to (2) by answering (1) first (this position can be called Particularism); or do you find the answer to (1) by answering (2) first (this position can be called Methodism)? Ian gives a vigorous defense of Methodism. I made a few comments defending the Particularist, expecting for some reason to be in the lonely minority (I usually am!), but there are several good comments defending Particularism in the thread, which I highly recommend reading. One of the arguments that I thought was very good, and which I hadn't quite considered before, was raised by Dmitry Chernikov: anyone who believes there are properly basic beliefs has good reason to be a Particularist rather than a Methodist. (Put roughly, properly basic beliefs are beliefs that are adequate for knowledge but not because of any dependence on any other belief's adequacy for knowledge.) In retrospect this isn't surprising; it has been long known that there are a great many analogies between an epistemology that speaks of properly basic beliefs and Scottish common sense philosophy (Reid, Beattie, etc.), and the Scottish common sense philosophers are, in the early modern period, at least, the Particularists par excellence, and are firm critics of Methodism (whose primary instance in the early modern period is Cartesianism).

Flirting and Sex II

There has been some interesting discussion in the comments thread on my post on Ken Taylor's post on flirting. Taylor himself responds; I don't think it moves the discussion forward at all, but you're encouraged to read it and make up your own mind. (On the most important point, I don't see how Taylor can reject my point about the excessively sex-focused nature of his discussion in the post as a simple misreading, given that the lead-up to his Gricean suggestion consists of two longish paragraphs devoted wholly to the question of sexual arousal, and is followed by a paragraph which is easily read as saying that flirting is a sexually charged thing to be distinguished from other sexually charged things. Romance does indeed seem merely to be thrown in: sex is mentioned in one form or another more than twice as often as romance; the romance side of the matter is never elaborated, although the sex side certainly is in the discussion of arousal, and Taylor goes so far as to say explicitly in the fourth paragraph that, to his ear, if you don't intend to cause sexual arousal you aren't flirting; and we are never given any reasoning for romance being placed in the analysis at all unless it is taken to be a form of, or a close concomitant of, sexual arousal.) There's also a more important post-broadcast addendum to Taylor's original post, one added since my post was written, that emphasizes that mere possibility is intimated. I don't think that this actually strengthens the position in the post, since I rather assumed that. Taylor's suggestion:

I think you flirt only when: (a) you behave in ways intended to intimate the possibility of sex or romance and (b) you intend to make that intention manifest to the other.

would be quite a good start for understanding sexual innuendo, if we place the emphasis on the intimation of possibility that Taylor does; but it misses flirting as such entirely -- and I'm sticking by the 'obviously', since I think that when we consider the broad range of cases in which people flirt that this pretty clearly doesn't give us any insight into flirting. On the issue of playfulness, I've also gone on record denying that flirting is intrinsically playful -- although, possibly, Taylor's phrase "an air of intrinsic playfulness" might be felicitous, since something can have an air of intrinsic playfulness without being intrinsically playful, 'an air of' usually indicating an appearance. Even then, however, I think to put much emphasis on it as a clue to the nature of flirting would be to confuse a mark of success at flirting (flirting well) with what you are actually doing qua flirting (flirting as such); one can say interesting things about flirting from this angle, but the real character of flirting and flirtatiousness has to be discovered elsewhere, just as an account of how to live well can be a little fuzzy about what it is to live.

In any case, Kenny Pearce made an interesting comment:

I think the confusion may be caused by the fact that there is a subgroup of flirtatious behavior that might be described as "seduction in play" or some such. That is, seduction involves a serious (and manipulative) intention toward sex. As the degree of seriousness is lessened and replaced by playfulness so that we reach a range between merely teasing with no intention toward sex at all and playful, rather than serious, intentions toward sex it becomes an uncontroversial instance of flirtation. I think, however, that the confusion enters in the belief that this is a complete account of flirtation, when in fact that word has a much broader semantic range. The innocent end of the spectrum I've just described is a playful imitation of seduction which is (hopefully understand by the other to be) lacking the crucial element of seduction, namely a serious intention toward sex. There are, however, instances of flirtation that are far more innocent, far more subtle, and far further removed from sex, than this.

I think it's quite right to think that flirting has a broad semantic range. I don't think flirting is opposed to seduction; there will be cases where flirting is instrumental to a larger seductive project, and where the intentions involved in flirtation are quite serious, and recognized to be so. There will also be cases such as Kenny suggests here -- 'seduction in play' is a good name for them. There will be yet other cases, more Lady-Susan-like, where narcissism has various roles to play (from being the cause of the flirter's 'flirting with' the idea of sexual or romantic attachment to flirtation's being a purely instrumental behavior to put the narcissist in the spotlight again). There will be yet other cases where desperate for positive attention will be significant. Flirtatiousness may be occurrent or habitual, serious or playful in intent, pleasurable or painful, spontaneous or cultivated, done well or done badly, for sex or for romance or for the mere fun of it. (Jenkins wants to distinguish flirtatious behavior from flirting; I don't see the value of the distinction, but those who favor it could reformulate the point in terms that take the distinction into account.) Flirting is a behavior that can be interpreted differently in different contexts even when exactly the same things are done. For instance, the most common contexts for it certainly are cases where the possibility of sex or romance is in some way intimated; but there are other contexts as well. This is one contrast with something relatively one-dimensional, like sexual innuendo or romantic compliments. Jenkins is quite right in her original paper to distinguish flirting from things like these; one can do them without flirting, and one can flirt without doing them. It also distinguishes it from a multi-dimensional aspect of human life, like seductive behavior, which despite its multi-dimensional character is narrow in purpose.

(My own inclination is to treat flirting in terms of a theory of taste, in the eighteenth-century sense of the phrase; but that is hardly surprising, since I'm inclined to treat lots of things in terms of a theory of taste.)

So Now You Know

They further questioned: Why does the dog know his master, and the cat does not? and his [i.e., that of R. Elazar b. Zadok] answer was: It is certain that he who eats from what is left by a mouse is apt to have a poor memory, so much the more so the cat that himself consumes the mouse. They questioned again: Why do all these animals (i.e. dogs, cats, and the like) reign over the mice? and he answered: Because the mice are instinctively mischievous, since, says Rabha, they tear even garments; and R. Papa says: They gnaw through even the handle of a pick-ax.

--Babylonian Talmud (Tract Horioth, Chapter III)

So now you know why your cat seems so haughty; it's that she doesn't remember you at all, but would never admit it.

Grayling's Descartes

About a week and a half ago, Paul Robinson asked me what I thought of Grayling's suggestion that Descartes was a Jesuit spy, or, perhaps more accurately, intelligence gatherer for the Jesuits. I replied:

It's an entertaining idea; but it's pure speculation, with precious little evidence to support it. Most of what Grayling points to just suggests what would have been common at the time -- patronage by courts and the wealthy, and communication among intellectuals on interesting subjects. One of Grayling's odd arguments is that his meeting with Cardinal Berulle somehow suggests that he was an agent for the Jesuits. But this is extraordinarily unlikely; there was clear interest in the early French Oratory in Cartesian ideas as congenial to the order's Augustinianism -- Descartes was good friends with Berulle's successor, Condren, for instance. Further, our evidence is that there was not merely one 'secret' meeting, as one would expect if Grayling were right, but apparently several visits by Descartes to the Oratorian house, plus (even better attested) Descartes's attendance at a salon at which Berulle also attended, at which Berulle asked Descartes to explain to the guests how he intended to fight skepticism. Moreover, Grayling has to overstate rather drastically how intimate Descartes seems to have been with the Jesuits. There are indeed mysteries about Descartes's life; but Grayling's hypothesis, on our current evidence, is conspiracy-theory stuff.

Which is true, but I've been a bit uneasy with my response, because it sounds harsher than it really is, and it doesn't convey just how much of an improvement Grayling's biographical work is over some of his competition. Even on this point, where he makes the same mistake as Richard Watson (no relation), he does so with much more sobriety and reason than Watson does. The Bérulle incident is an excellent case in point. We know for a fact that Descartes had met Cardinal Bérulle: he attended at least one salon that Bérulle also attended; if he interacted with Bérulle outside of this (I should have put this condition in my reply), he likely visited the Oratorian House several times; and, unless I misremember, Descartes name-drops him at least once. Part of the problem in judging just how familiar Bérulle and Descartes were with each other is that most of our sources for Descartes's life are second-hand (Adrien Baillet is the most important of these) and the rest is fragmentary. So there's always a danger of historical pareidolia. We see this, I think, very clearly in the case of Watson's biography. One of the mysteries of Descartes's life is why one of France's foremost minds on a sudden picked up and moved to the Netherlands, there to spend most of the rest of his life. Baillet gives us an interesting suggestion in this regard. Attending the salon I previously mentioned, Descartes interacted with Bérulle, and they were both struck by each other, meeting several more times. Bérulle told Descartes that he should withdraw into solitude in order to write philosophy, and Descartes was so bowled over by Bérulle that he did. Now, this is, I said, an interesting suggestion, but it is not at all surprising that biographers have difficulty regarding this as any more than Baillet's attempt at a 'likely story'. So Watson suggests that really what happened was that Bérulle, deeply involved in the politics of France, tried to recruit Descartes to his cause, and Descartes, repelled by the Cardinal's fanaticism, immediately relocated to get away from him. It's actually rather funny reading it in Watson's Cogito Ergo Sum, since it's transparently obvious that the only reason Watson thinks Descartes must have done this is that that's the sort of Descartes Watson wants to believe existed. It is obviously not any more plausible than Baillet's version, and it lacks two of the merits of Baillet's version -- Baillet, for all that he garbles things, was basing his work on prior sources (the most important of which were Clerselier's lost papers), and Baillet's version fits with the fact that many of the first-generation Oratorians had an intense interest in Cartesian thought. But rather more seriously, we have no serious reason to believe that the interaction with Bérulle had anything to do with Descartes's moving except for the fact that Baillet makes the connection, in the very story Watson rejects as absurd. Without a principled reason for doing this, we are clearly turning history into a wax nose.

Grayling's version has Bérulle, opponent of the Jesuits, calmly letting Descartes know that he knows what Descartes's been up to for them, and (in effect) giving him a choice of leaving or getting in trouble. Grayling's construction of this version is far more sober and less subjective than Watson's (and, it must be said, much more interesting). He takes the trouble to bring in circumstantial narrative; and the result is a narrative much less implausible than Watson's, although one that still raises some questions. The attempt to formulate it is a genuine advance, even if one, like myself, regards it as a dead end, because givent he puzzle it was a possible narrative worth investigating. The admirable thing about Grayling's biography is that he faces squarely a great many of the mysteries of Descartes's life and handle them in a way based firmly on the evidence. I don't think he's usually successful at getting a grip on them, but this has at least as much to do with the state of the evidence as with anything else, and it is a decent attempt.

On the 'spy' hypothesis, it is worth pointing out two things, as well: namely, that to the extent that Grayling endorses the 'spy' label he takes it in a fairly weak sense -- that is, he takes it that Descartes was gathering information, and perhaps trying to infiltrate the Rosicrucians; and that it actually wouldn't be at all implausible for an intellectual of the time to gather information for other intellectuals. It's the systematic and somewhat cloak-and-dagger character of what Descartes would have done that makes it prima facie unlikely of an intellectual in the period; and it sits uneasily with other things we know of Descartes (as I note above, it's very unlikely on the evidence we have that Descartes was so completely involved with the Jesuits as Grayling has to postulate). My suggestion to readers of Grayling's Descartes is primarily that they just enjoy the book; and perhaps take the 'spy' aspect of it as chiefly a literary device that Grayling uses, sometimes to great effect, to lay out the historical background of Descartes's life, Grayling's attempt at a better version of Baillet's 'likely story', and thus to be regarded in exactly the same light we regard Baillet's story.