Hildegardis Bingensis

Arsen Darnay reminds us that today is the traditional feast day of St. Hildegard von Bingen. She is indeed Saint Hildegard; while she is not on the Universal or General Calendar, she is listed as a saint in the Martyrologium Romanum. This is, usually, a sign of someone who is saint by longstanding -- we are talking literally ages -- and widespread popular recognition of the right sort rather than by any formal canonization process. The main difference between saints on the Universal Calendar and saints not on the Universal Calendar is precisely that -- the latter have regular liturgical recognitions on their feastday only on some local calendars.

You can find a good list and discussion of English translations of a number of Hildegard's works here. The following is a selection from a letter (translated by Abigail Ann Young) in which she explains her own view of her visions:

O faithful servant, I, poor as I am in womanly form, am speaking these words to you again in true vision. If it pleased God to console my body as He does my soul in this vision, the fear would still not recede from my mind and heart, because I know that I am still a mere mortal, although from my infancy I have been in enclosure. Moreover many wise men have been so infused with wondrous deeds that they opened many hidden things but, as a result of vainglory, they attributed those deeds to themselves and so they fell. But those who draw off wisdom from God in the lifting up of their soul and account themselves as nothing become the columns of heaven, just as happened in Paul's case. He preceded the rest of the disciples in preaching and nevertheless regarded himself as of no value. John the Evangelist also was full of gentle humility and therefore he drew forth many things from divinity.

A New Poem Draft

On Time as the Consistent Union of Contraries

Through time
The droughten sky with rain can swell

Through time
Who does things badly does them well

Through time
The sinner is righteous saint

Through time
The stalwarts fail and faint

Through time
The risky is stable and safe

Through time
The soothing catches and chafes

Through time
The living are dead in earth

Through time
The worthless is priceless worth

Through time
The silent all have their say

Through time
Tomorrow is yesterday

Through time
The world, grown old and frail,
Is newly born, and strong and hale.

Music on My Mind

Noel Coward, "There are Bad Times Just Around the Corner." The man was a genius; few songs are so good at making bad times seem cheerful. I love the line, "Hurray! Hurray! Hurray! Suffering and Dismay!"

Myth of Barter

David Graeber has a really excellent post on money and the Myth of Barter -- the view that primitive trade is a barter system and that money develops as a way to facilitate such bartering. Exchanges and debts are pretty general features of the human condition, of course, but as anthropologists and historians have looked at the evidence, it has become increasingly clear that this story is false. Part of the problem is a lack of imagination -- the notion that if an exchange system is not money-based, it is necessarily a barter system, when in fact the ways and means of exchange are extraordinarily diverse (barter is widespread, but you can have gift economies, for instance, that work on completely different principles, and you can have economies largely based on highly structured ritualized transfers rather than any bartering). And part of the problem is that barter systems, where they exist, seem usually to presuppose money as a means of equalizing barter; that is, it would be more plausible -- although still perhaps not quite right -- to say that barter is a result of money than that money is a result of barter. What would really be more accurate to say is that, while occasional barter occurs spontaneously, bartering is not the crude and primitive economic interaction it is often treated as being, but requires, in order to be systematic, rather sophisticated conventions already to be in place. As Graeber notes, systematic barter typically requires either the development of traditional equivalences based purely on consistencies in trade (which are unlikely ever to require the development of a standardized money) or the pre-existence of at least a crude money-based accounting. Systematic barter is neither crude nor simple; but people keep thinking of it as if it were, ignoring the whole pack of assumptions involved in that. It's likely there are other factors involved in the endurance of the Myth of Barter.

Graeber's reply is a response to criticisms of his interview, which is also worth reading. You do have to be a little careful reading him, because he has a sense of humor that sometimes is a bit subtle.

Levinas on Heidegger and Nazism

Can we be assured, however, that there was never any echo of Evil in it? The diabolical is not limited to the wickedness popular wisdom ascribes to it and whose malice, based on guile, is familiar and predictable in an adult culture. The diabolical is endowed with intelligence and enters where it will. To reject it, it is first necessary to refute it. Intellectual effort is needed to recognize it. Who can boast of having done so? Say what you will, the diabolical gives food for thought.

Emmanuel Levinas, in his essay, "As If Consenting to Horror," which can be found in Critical Inquiry, Vol 15, No 2 (as translated by Paula Wissing). Prior to the Second World War, Levinas was one of the most important interpreters of Heidegger in France. Interested in phenomenology, he had gone to meet Husserl, and in so doing took a course by Heidegger, and was bowled over by him -- very impressed. Being and Time, which he considered an extraordinary philosophical work to the end of his life (but which he is speaking of in the quotation above), completely changed his view of the world. News of Heidegger's joining of the Nazi Party in 1933 left him thoroughly stunned, and it may well be this that led the Jewish philosopher to develop his own original work; some have argued that it did so be leading Levinas to regard Heidegger's work as in a fundamental way anti-anti-pagan -- and thus anti-Jewish in this indirect sense, Judaism being anti-paganism in its purest historical form. Levinas seems to have felt guilt at times, or at least embarrassment, for not recognizing, in his enthusiasm for Heidegger, even the possibility of Heidegger's commitment to a cause like the Nazi cause.

Links for Thinking

* Peter at "Conscious Entities" on qualia and intentionality. My view is a variation of his position (3); I think qualia are merely philosopher's fictions that imperfectly capture intentionality.

* John Wilkins had an interesting quotation from William Sharpe on historical study of sources.

* Roger Scruton, From Christ to Coke, discusses iconography.

* Adele J. Haft, Maps, Mazes, and Monsters: The Iconography of the Library in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose

* The London School of Philosophy has recently opened, and looks like an interesting venture.

* Peter Millican, who is a top-notch Hume scholar, has an excellent post on Hume, although it's also about the value of studying the history of philosophy in general.

* D. G. Myers discusses the (pseudo-)genre of literary fiction.

* The Maverick Philosopher discusses Lev Shestov's interpretation of the Fall. And previously he had a post on allegorical interpretation of the Fall.

ADDED LATER

* G. B. Sadler discusses Descartes and Dark City.

Chaerephon the Bat

Chaerephon is one of history's memorable secondary characters, in the sense that we hardly see him at all and yet can hardly forget him. He was a real person, a close childhood friend of Socrates. Xenophon calls him one of Socrates's "true companions" in the Memorabilia; in Plato's Apology, Socrates mentions him as a good friend of both Socrates and many in Socrates's jury; Aristophanes makes him a character and companion of Socrates in The Clouds, and we find him talked about in The Wasps and The Birds, as well. It was Chaerephon who went to the Oracle at Delphi and asked it whether there was any man in Greece wiser than Socrates, and thus it is Chaerephon whom Plato, at least, suggests was the one who started Socrates on his mission to find people who really knew what they were talking about. We know bits and pieces about his biography from Plato's Apology. In The Clouds Aristophanes refers to him as a living corpse, which perhaps is a clue to his appearance, and this may be thought confirmed by the fact that Aristophanes also nicknames Chaerephon "the bat" in The Birds. In both cases, of course, Aristophanes would have expected his audience to get the joke, so we can well imagine that the labels would have been obvious to the (apparently many) Athenian citizens who knew Chaerephon. I've always liked the bat label in particular: Chaerephon the Bat has a nice ring to it. It's hard to avoid thinking of him as looking a little like Dracula.

So you can imagine my delight on discovering that there is an entire genus of bats with the name Chaerephon.