The Wood between the Worlds
Tuesday, September 30, 2003
The mind, exercised by its own fertility and flooded by its inner lights, has infinite trouble to keep a true reckoning of its outward perceptions. It turns from the frigid problems of observation to its own visions; it forgets to watch the courses of what should be its ‘pilot stars.’
Santayana, "Intellectual Ambition"
The sad fact is that I’ve been saying nothing original at all, and the even sadder fact is that if by chance I do, it will surely be a novel blunder. This dilemma has often depressed me, since, on the one hand, there is in me some impulse that seems to be a love of truth and that, at any rate, compels me to think, yet on the other hand novelty and strangeness have no appeal. Moreover it is easy for me to make up stories that have more charm than does the truth, but having been made up they seem empty of all but novelty and strangeness. So my mind is not so much flooded as fitfully lit by inner lights flicked on to pass the time, then flicked off. Sitting then in the dark my eyes are drawn again to the window and from my cabin I look idly at the sea and stars, while the true pilot far off in the bridge guides us over the one by reckoning from the others.
Why, then, does it matter to me what I think I see, or to any of us who are not pilots? But it does, and if it’s madness to build grand theories on the idle sights determined by someone else’s course, still it’s worse madness to think that I see and understand nothing. Madness too to look away and trade away my own vision for the illusory comfort of the theories declaimed by the loudest fellow-passenger. How much better then, to try to know what can be known and see what can be seen, and to watch the dark ocean thoughtfully, until we reach the other shore.
Flory
Five senses then, to gather a small part of the infinite influences that vibrate in nature, a moderate power of understanding to interpret those senses, and an irregular, passionate fancy to overlay that interpretation--such is the endowment of the human mind. And what is its ambition? Nothing less than to construct a picture of all reality, to comprehend its own origin and that of the universe, to discover the laws of both and prophesy their destiny. Is not the disproportion enormous? Are not confusions and profound contradictions to be looked for in an attempt to build so much out of so little?
Santayana, "Intellectual Ambition"
Humility like darkness reveals the heavenly lights. The shadows of poverty and meanness gather around us, "and lo! creation widens to our view." Thoreau
What a windbag Thoreau was. Um, now on to a long post.
I've been meaning to return to the question of intellectual corruption, and last night someone accused me of having as ghastly high an opinion of reason as Plato shows in the Republic. My accuser had no idea, really, how far that is from being the case, but it has left me thinking about humility and intellectual purity. There are some, and I think my accuser is one, to whom words like purity and corruption sound like consecration and desecration. To speak of intellectual purity and corruption then sounds like the idolatry of reason.
That conclusion clearly relies on an assumed identity of intellectual activity with reason. To an extent that's fair; I tend to use "reason" that way, but knowing consciously that in doing so I am putting a much broader meaning into the word than is meant by philosophers like Plato or in general use. Plato meant by reason that human faculty that can by reflection ascend to the world of ideas. Idealism, though, is barking mad (see Stove’s article below). As Stove says, the astonishing thing about Plato is that he managed to treat as a major philosophical problem that one thing can be, for example, red and another thing can also be red. Spooky.
Apart from his idealism, though, Plato clearly also had a sense of certainty about reason, and that is what is commonly meant by reason, some mode of thought that provides certainty. Hume and Descartes, however, amply prove that certainty is not a characteristic of human knowledge. Some people take that to mean that knowledge itself is impossible, but that is a non sequitur unless one implicitly defines knowledge to be something certain. Instead of being certain, then, knowledge is approximate and probabilistic, but it does meaningfully exist. Epistemology is entertaining and good to study, but in the end, the inability to describe exactly what is the nature of the continuity of the mental and outer worlds cannot sanely be permitted to undermine confidence in thought itself.
Reason, that is, rational thought, then from its ethereal realm condescends to be a littler closer to what we mean by "reasonable." One of my philosophy professors liked to sum up the meaning of "rational" in the phrase "inference to the best explanation" (I don’t recall whether this idea was original to him). Logical fallacies like affirming the consequent (if A then B; B; therefore A) are readily seen to have rational use if their probable explanatory power is considered and not their strict validity. Scientific induction itself is formalized fallacy (A1 has B-ness, A2 has B-ness, A3 has B-ness; all As have B-ness) but has undeniable explanatory power. Mathematics and especially statistics have helped improve induction’s accuracy, even though what math is itself is not at all clear. The humanities bear a low reputation for their putative failure to have a corresponding check. Not only does that exaggerate the usefulness of statistics (leading to the spread of the "social sciences"), but it also overlooks the plain but all-important restraint on the humanities called "attention to detail." In fact, that is exactly why "theory," as the word is used in the humanities, is so wrong: it seeks to formalize inattention to detail. Reason is accurate thought that troubles to comprehend and explain details, since details are all that this world is.
With this idea of reason as the sum of accurate mental processes, i.e. good thinking, it should be clear how humble a term like "purity" is when applied to reason. It would be ludicrous to think of accurate thinking in spiritual terms like "consecration" and "desecration." Thought is purer when it has fewer errors and deceptions involved; thought is corrupted when deceptions are deliberately introduced. It follows that thought can be impure (full of inadvertent errors and deceptions taken on at secondhand) but relatively uncorrupted, because of the honest, i.e. uncorrupted, intentions and efforts of the thinker.
The latter is the condition of most good people in dogmatic authoritarian systems. Lacking the time, ability, or desire to analyze everything given to them, they accept the deliberate deceptions of authority in order to reconcile themselves to intolerable dogma. They don't, however, contribute deceptions of their own or surrender the intention of thinking well. I suspect, though, that thought cannot be both pure and corrupt, because even the introduction of one knowing deception, if it has any significance, will necessarily pollute all other thought as bit by bit reality has to be obscured and thinking warped to continue to hold the central falsehood.
It might, then, be better to say "more accurate" instead of "pure" and "falsely predicated" instead of "corrupt," except that I like shorter terms wherever possible. Then too, terms suggestive of morality are appropriate because morality depends on the intellect to tell it what it is. Murder is wrong; direct revelation or instinct may provide this moral fact; but what is murder? Any killing, even in war? Any killing except of fetuses? Any killing except in pursuit of the Revolution? It’s the intellect that provides knowledge of the meanings of the words and the means of the actions on which morality depends. No moral man can abandon his reason.
Flory
When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.
Santayana
Friday, September 26, 2003
Today in Greek class one of the students said "Language is largely structured on binaries" and added that perhaps it was entirely so, but binaries could be "combined to create nuances." There was sagacious nodding throughout the class at that--after all, it was a masterful display for someone so early in his career. It was senseless jargon artfully arranged to gratify the ego of the speaker and his listeners, at any rate those of the Elect; its only fault was succinctness, a fault tenure will someday correct.
I shouldn't be too hard on them. Not everyone nodded along, although that could also be explained by the general torpor at half past six on Friday, at the tail end of a three hour class. Besides, it was genuinely funny, even if I couldn't safely laugh, and it did more for me than the bucket of Starbucks I'd taken on board before class.
Never wonder, though, why academics are so eager to believe that language is only a social convention. It is, for them.
Flory
It's conventional now, that when gas prices rise the federal government launches an "investigation" of the cause. That is to say, the federal bureaucracy makes noisy statements to the press about gouging and imprecates upon those wreckers and splittists who masquerade as gas station owners. Since there is little to no economic sense in the word "gouging," anticipatory price rises being a necessary part of resource allocation, the result is simply to harass a few unfortunate station owners with legal costs until the external cause of the rise abates and the public's roused anger and the average price diminish.
I bring it up because it turns out that in the late Roman empire the same happened in response to rises in the cost of foodstuffs (wheat standing to them as energy sources do to us). In Power and Persuasion, the classicist Peter Brown writes that during the price crunch of 382-383 a provincial "governor decided to placate the populace by ordering the public flogging of a group of bakers." He quotes the orator Libanius: "He [the governor] sat there in his carriage and inquired at every stroke how much had gone into bribes and to whom, for them to charge prices like this for bread" (Oratio 58.4).
Better, I suppose, to be threatened with financial ruin and imprisonment than to be flogged, but in both cases the toadying of officialdom to the vile impulse of the mob is the same. It's just a pity that the former free citizenry of both republics became in time nothing but mobs to be appeased. How many American plebeians, sleek and self-righteous in their shiny SUVs but base in thought and character, can even follow the line of argument that leads from liberty to a condemnation of price controls and gouging witchhunts?
Flory
Thursday, September 25, 2003
Cause I’d like to believeCrowded House are awfully hedonistic (All I ask is to live each moment / free from the last), so they’re a good example of what I don’t want to imply by that last post. Religion and religious ideas are not all lies, beautiful or otherwise. That’s not to say that any of it is true, either, but there’s quite a difference between honest error and the sort of corruption that worries me. If there were a strong argument that all religious belief leads to intellectual corruption, then it would be another matter. There isn’t, though, because in religious thought as in other thought there is a good deal of sense as well as quite a lot of nonsense. For all its difficult to swallow stories, the Old Testament has many lucid passages that very well describe what it is to be human. You have to admire the succinctness with which Proverbs explains the special madness characteristic of infertility research, long before such was possible:
There is a God
Why sinful angels suffer for love.
I’d like to believe
In the terrible truth, in the beautiful lie.
There are three things that are never satisfied, four that never say, "Enough"—the grave, the barren womb, land that is not satisfied with water, and fire that never says, "Enough!" (Prov. 30:15-16)Dogmatic atheism has far worse consequences in any case, since atheists of that kind generally think that their faith starts with a denial of humanity and only gets more exciting from there. Would Freudianism, for instance, have found any adherents besides the old fool's mad nose surgeon friend, had he not offered such a deliciously nasty way to deny humanity any worth, and in pleasantly orthodox materialist terms? All in all, you’re better off believing in the cosmic cow, than to believe that sex, or money, or power, or any other such reductionist nonsense explains what it means to be human.
Good thought is hard enough to explain, but at least it is clear that good writing and good character are both as important, or more, than raw acquisition of information and fine displays of logic. I should note that I believe one of the entries in the "nosological" exhibition Stove puts on, so perhaps it is simply too late for me. At least I will try to think as clearly as I can, and honestly I suspect that particular proposition is the smallest of my problems, if indeed a problem at all.
Flory
Any student of the history of thought is soon able to say, with Macbeth, 'I have supp'd full with horrors.' To read a book of magic, say, or astrology, is horrible, because the spectacle of steady and systematic irrationality induces depression and nausea.
David Stove, "What is Wrong with Our Thoughts?"
Tuesday, September 23, 2003
A dull day; Vergil, obscure and apiarian, kicking at my skull with an egalitarian foot, and errands. A nice bonus, too, that the blogger software ate a long and thoughtful post. I can't bear to rewrite it, so I'll just start in medias res.
From the pious lie and the Grand Idea I've gone on to thinking about the beautiful lie. I mean by it falsehood born of the aesthetic impulse. By serendipity, at the library this afternoon I picked up William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience, in which he describes that very aesthetic need:
Although some persons aim most at intellectual purity and simplification, for others richness is the supreme imaginative requirement. When one's mind is strongly of this type, an individual [i.e., individualistic] religion will hardly serve the purpose. The inner need is rather of something institutional and complex. . . . [such that] one feels then as if in the presence of some vast incrusted work of jewelry or architecture; one hears the multitudinous liturgical appeal; one gets the honorific vibration coming from every quarter. (Lecture XIX)James, writing in 1902, cites Newman as someone whose beliefs were driven by a particularly strong aesthetic impulse. It was especially interesting to me because what began this line of thought last week was the realization that Newman worshipped the Grand Idea of the historical dialectic, as did so many others in the 19th century.
For us, a more vivid example of aesthetic compulsion is G.K. Chesterton. He was driven by aesthetic considerations into the most delusional political and economic ideas. Though they were less inhuman that those of more earthbound socialists, his ideas were if anything crazier. His wish to return England to small freeholding yeomanry differs little from the redistributive, re-educational ideals of Mao and Pol Pot. Of course, because he was a good man, he could never have thought his idea through to the violence its implementation would require, but in its way it is far more delusional than Pol Pot's simple-minded plan to slaughter the troublesome middle class. Unfortunately, Chesterton's religious beliefs were also driven by his aesthetic sense, with ugly results. His The Catholic Church and Conversion makes painful reading for anyone who respects him.
I'm sure I'll return to it in the future, because right now the intellectual corruption is about all I can think about, in one way or another.
Flory
[T]here is no place of Scripture that telleth us what an enchantment is. If therefore enchantment be not, as many think it, a working of strange effects by spells and words, but imposture and delusion wrought by ordinary means; and so far from supernatural, as the impostors need not the study so much of natural causes, but the ordinary ignorance, stupidity, and superstition of mankind, to do them; those texts that seem to countenance the power of magic, witchcraft, and enchantment must needs have another sense than at first sight they seem to bear.
Hobbes, Leviathan, chapter XXXVII
Monday, September 22, 2003
So it seems as if I ought to have something really grand to say or a noble quotation, to give a specious luster to this exercise in self-indulgence. Really, though, nothing seems more apposite than this (often quoted, I know) exchange from Alice in Wonderland:
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean--neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master--that's all."
So, introductions. I've just started graduate school, studying the classics. Studying dead languages complements too well the intrinsic Humpty-Dumptiness of contemporary academia. Everything is a text to be problematized, and it's all the better if the people who wrote (or made or built) the text are dead. There are no pesky Greeks or Romans hanging around to point out that, actually, this or that demented theory is all wrong.
And of course all classicists are pretty nuts to start with--it's the bit about devoting their lives to Latin and Greek that gives it away.
Anyway, this blog is meant to chronicle my weaving way through the peculiar Wood between the Worlds of academic life, the land of a thousand metas. I figure there'll be some good stories about leftist insanity, and at least a few about the non-partisan nuttiness of tenured professors. For obvious reasons, I'm going to keep names to myself, but I'll try to make up reasonably memorable ones to compensate. Everything else will be true. Otherwise what's the point, really?
Flory
Alice was too much puzzled to say anything; so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. "They've a temper, some of them-particularly verbs: they're the proudest--adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs--however, I can manage the whole lot of them! Impenetrability! That's what I say!"
