It feels, once again, like time to ping-back to the internet (I’m here, big guy!).  I caught a lot of hype a week ago about abandoned blogs (the New York Times claims 95% are dead!), so I thought I would at least make some feeble attempt at proving to myself that I can keep writing every now and then.  To forgive myself for never spouting my thoughts, I formerly had the allowed myself the excuse of a busy end-of-semester, and now I will grant myself the excuse of having no stable internet access–but this excuse will only carry me so far.

Since I was last writing somewhat regularly, have learned and read a fair amount–a healthy legion of unfinished posts in my publishing queue attest to this.  I rather hope to polish up a post or two on what I have learned about Levinas and religion, Levinas and political systems, Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational, Gottlob Frege, Ludwig Wittgenstein, the history of the classical world, relativism, Jurgen Habermas, naturalism, Re:, Hangedup, and a few other broad topics like languages, reason, atheism and theism, poverty, and the like.

In the meantime, the Summer Support Group for Philosophers has kicked off, with one meeting under its belt.  We focused that session, as well as the upcoming one, on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus-Logico Philosophicus.  My immediate reaction to the work was mixed.  If you have not had the pleasure of skimming the work, I suggest trying it.  You can find copies of the Ogden translation (the version I am reading) all over the web, but I suggest finding a good tabular or tree layout version to help encourage you to read it the way it was intended (read: the way I didn’t read it the first time).

So far, Wittgenstein has proven to be a pretty decent discussion generator.  I am not quite sure of his laconic/aphoristic approach was meant to ensure ambiguity or clarity, but it certainly seems to me that the former is the end result.  At times, the lack of explanation for his terminology is befuddling, and it is easy to lose track of the point of his work entirely from time to time.  Still, many of Wittgenstein’s propositions have proven to be good points for discussion–including such greats as 1, 2.0123, 3.02,  3.328, 3.333, 4.002, 4.003, 6.45, 6.54 (don’ t look ahead!).  So far I can see much of Rorty’s thought in this reading already, but I am trying hard to resist the temptation to defer to the Rortian interpretation–while I may be getting a good idea of how Rorty read Wittgenstein, my suspicion is that his reading might not be completely faithful to the author’s own thoughts.  In fact, I rather wish I would have better used my Rorty-reading time to finish trudging through Principia Mathematica, because this probably would have made Wittgenstein’s responses to Russell more intelligible.  Luckily I had the foresight to pick up a little Frege reading beforehand.

I might try to keep more info about thoughts and future readings for the summer group at another location, where members of our smallish group might enjoy doing public exegesis.  For now, I have put up a message board on the yet unused ThoughtAndPraxis.com.

recommended listening: Low’s “A Little Argument with Myself”, from the album Trust (hear it on Youtube or buy it at Insound)

I recently took it upon myself to read Charles Taliaferro and Stewart Goetz’s work Naturalism (for sale here).  I highly recommend the book for anyone looking for a good summary of some considerations of modern philosophy on the topic of naturalism.  The work is pithy, cogent, and I think easy to follow even for those not well-versed in the technical jargon and historic arguments surrounding this traditional metaphysical debate.  I would caution, though, that I think that the book seems to me overly critical of some features of naturalism, and also to me seems to overgeneralize many characteristics which I think abound in naturalists and non-naturalists alike.

I had the great pleasure of being introduced to Taliaferro last fall, and will likely be meet him again in a few days, so I took the time to throw together a little gut-reaction response to the work Natualism (which, I rather think might be better titled “Against Naturalism”, which indicates better that the purpose of this book seems to be the construction of an argument against naturalism, rather than some merely informational and “objective” presentation of historic facts and debates).

Here is my response to their work (in either ogg vorbis or mp3 format).

If you don’t feel like taking the 15 minutes to listen, here’s the gist of my thoughts, without most of the explanatory substance:

1. Yes, I agree with Goetz and Taliaferro that naturalism as they characterize it (through examples) stands on shaky ground, but…
2. Naturalist perspectives, being based on the ever-expanding realm of scientific advancement, are not simply reductionist.  Rather, their role can expand as our empirical observations and theories about these observations expand.  My feelings on this follow from my (mildly Kuhnian, i think) view that science is a primarily pragmatic rather than epistemological endeavor.
3. Because science offers us the opportunity to challenge traditional “supernatural” explanations, it bears the possibility to act as a corrective check for, or at least calls us to critically reflect upon, our folk psychology/physics/philosophy/metaphysics/dogmas.
4. Finally, I think that a strict, parsimonious, positive naturalism is not just likely epistemically problematic–it is psychologically untenable even for its most outspoken adherence (but so is anti-naturalism in some ways).  In the long run, though, if the apparent choice is between accepting on or the other tradtional dogma (either naturalist or unnaturalist), I would just assume have both perspectives around as long as possible duking it out, as neither seems wholy cogent to me.  With the argument preserved, we can pragmatically utilize one assumption in one context generally (say, anti-naturalism for religion; naturalism for science), but allow these perspectives to challenge each other in their own contexts as well.  In this way, I hope we can either realize that these distinctions are irrelevant, or that they are somehow complimentary, or that some better alternatives exist instead–and enjoy the fruits of continued argument.

What struck me as interesting, was that when I was looking for some alternative perspectives on naturalism while writing my response, one of the first results provided by my friend Google was lil’ ol me.  Yes, on the first page of my google results was an entry that I posted in October last year, entitled “Hobbes and Modern Science v. Descartes“.  Back in October, though, I was sort of on the other side of the argument.  Back then, I was chastizing modern science for its naturalist assumptions, rather than lauding it for bringing options to the table–at least until the end of the article.  In the end, though, it seems that both today and last october, I was arguing from one side (first against naturalists, then against anti-naturalists) in order to get to the middle.  In both places, I criticized dogmatism, dualism, and hubristic assumptions that we already know what types of substances make up the entirety of the cosmos.

The major discrepancy between my old article and my new one, it seems to me, is that I was content to characterize science in my October post as presuming the sort of materialistic naturalism that Goetz and Taliaferro seem to see in it, but this week I argued that that view of science is short-sighted.  Which description is more accurate?  In a way, I think both.  I think the end paragraph of my recorded response hints at the answer.  It seems that real human beings simply don’t portray stable, context independent dispositions of this sort.  In one context, we might all predictably be naturalists (say, when you consider whether or not you should worry about a 1,000 anvil falling on you from above), and in others we may all be anti-naturalists (say, when considering our plans for the future or interpreting our emotions).  It may simply not be possible to separate these two categories in a way that is both meaningful and able to be held by a real person over time.

Also, if you’re in the Sioux Falls area, I heartily implore you to come to Charles Taliaferro’s talk at the Augustana Naturalism Symposium this week; it will make your life better.

Also, I tried to stream my recorded response to Naturalism, but it does not seem to work for me.  Try it, if it shows up for you:

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Open a terminal.

sudo apt-get install build-essential cvs subversion libglib-2.0-dev automake libtool libltdl3-dev automake1.9 autotools-dev libpopt-dev libcurl3-dev libx11-dev x11proto-xext-dev libbz2-dev libid3tag0-dev libpng12-dev libtiff4-dev libungif4-dev libjpeg62-dev libssl-dev libfreetype6-dev bison flex gettext libimlib2-dev libpam0g-dev libxml2-dev libxcursor-dev libgtk1.2-dev autoconf pkg-config libpng3-dev libxine-dev libxkbfile-dev libsqlite3-dev giblib-dev libxmu-dev libxdamage-dev libxcomposite-dev libtag1-dev libtagc0-dev giblib-dev libasound2-dev libdbus-1-dev libfontconfig-dev

Say “y” to install… then try this…

wget http://omicron.homeip.net/projects/easy_e17/easy_e17.sh

next, this:

chmod +x easy_e17.sh
./easy_e17.sh -i -e

After the install is finished, do this:

sudo nano -w /usr/share/xsessions/e17.desktop

You’ll be taken to a brand new document.  Paste this text in it:

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=E-17
Comment=
Exec=/opt/e17/bin/enlightenment_start
Icon=
Type=Application

(click your mouse from the end of this text and drag it back to the beginning to copy it, middle-click to paste in a terminal)  Then hit Ctrl + x, say “y” to save changes.

Additionally, it’s a good idea to add e17 to your PATH:

sudo nano -w /etc/environment

go to the end of the line on this file, just inside the quotation marks, and add the text “:/opt/e17/bin” (no quotation marks), then Ctrl + x, and “y” to save changes.  Log out of your desktop environment and e17 should now be an option to select from GDM/XDM/KDM/etc.

In the event that you happen to be reading this review in order to decide whether or not to purchase Charles Spearin’s record The Happiness Project, I will attempt to make that decision easier for you.  If you enjoy music which inspires some basic level of reflective thought, and you are not afraid to step outside your comfort zone a bit, beyond the industry standards for music easily defined by terms like “pop” or “rock”, then I would strongly cadge you to just purchase the record from Arts & Crafts (you can preview the record online there), or somewhere else.  If you are unreflective or uncomfortable trying new things, I would suggest exploring your world a bit, reading some good books, and then buying the album and listening to it in a few years.

For myself, as both a self-diagnosed music junkie and a self-knighted meaning-ferreter, I am always particularly enticed by musicians who seem to work as hard as putting meaning into their pieces as I try to work getting it out.  That said, in my rather snobbish opinion, it is a rare album indeed which can exhibit a pretty clear goal¹ yet not dilute it to the point of total ambiguity, triteness, or perhaps just propaganda.  For succeeding where so many others have failed, I tip my hat to Charles Spearin.

Charles Spearin is certainly more well known as a membership in and contributions to Do Make Say Think

The Happiness Project by Charles Spearin (Arts & Crafts, 2009)

, Broken Social Scene, Valley of the Giants, and KC Accidental.  In fact, despite the Spearin’s undeniable musical talent, prior to the release his new record The Happiness Project, a Google search for “Charles Spearin” was more likely to take you to fans of his moustache than fans of his music.  This has since changed, and with good reason².

I should mention one quick caveat; Spearin’s Happiness Project falls within the much-maligned category of “concept albums”.  The so-called “project” around which the album centers is a series of seemingly informal interviews to which Charles Spearin subjected his neighbors, friends, and family on the general topic of happiness; Spearin and company then proceeded to arrange music inspired by the interviewees’ responses.  For my own part, before hearing the album I recognized this concept as laudable but likely dubious, at the risk of becoming trite.  However, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the actualization came off as personal, particular, varied, and earnest enough to actually be insightful.  I suspect, also, that the apparent sincerity of the record’s attempt to broach the topic of happiness is not hermetically confined to Spearin’s respondents.  Certainly, if Spearin had much to do with the directional changes evident in Do Make Say Think’s marvellous last record You, You’re a History in Rust (Constellation, 2007), the topic of human happiness and interrelationship has been on the man’s mind for some time now³.

To finally get back to The Happiness Project itself, the album opens with one of the most conceptually simple, musically basic, topically relevant, an–in my view–powerful testamonials of disc.  If I may refer to each track as a case study, the first of these is of “Mrs. Morris” and her simple recipe for obtaining and mainting happiness.  As Mrs. Morris describes her basic application of love–rambling enough to show her sincerity and excitement, her rhythm and pitch are matched closely by a saxophone, forcing the listener to recognize the strange, comforting music flowing from her irrepressably human voice.  Mrs. Morris’s track clocks-in at under a minute and a half, and in a traditional musical sense it is certainly the most raw, sparse track on the whole album, yet she kicks off the album in a saliently meaningful way through her words, mood, attitude, as well as the surprisingly musical correspondence of her voice and mimicking instrumentation.  Although Arts & Crafts Records appears to be promoting the much more tradtional musical composition of track 2, Anna, I hold that Mrs. Morris’s account is the most dense, meaningful, and original–and I like to think that Spearin tacitly endorses my position by reprising Mrs. Morris at the end of the record.

That is not say that Anna lack’s meaning.  Indeed, it is only a testament to the record’s strengths that a track like Anna could be considered below its cohorts on the album.  Anna is a more straightforward song, heavily jazz-oriented with bits sampled bird chirps, based again on the rhythm, and to a lesser extent melody, of the “music” already present in Anna’s voice as she provides a few brief, insightful comments about happiness and her work with challenged young women.  Anna is double the length of Mrs. Morris, with the bulk of the latter half being repetition of the more meaningful first half.

Vittoria, the third song, is a much more light-hearted, yet jazzy track inspired by the stuttering responses of young Vittoria as she talks, apparently, about her schoolwork.  While happiness does not seem to be addressed directly per se, I think we can all learn a little something about happiness from a little child who spits out the brief phrase “you don’t get to do work”–as if she is so uninitiated into the cultural pension for defining our duties as drudgery that she is still able to approach many hated tasks with enthusiasm.

Vanessa–who follows Vittoria–broaches the topic of happiness via a discussion of deafness and coclear implants–a topic certainly foreign to most musical compositions.  My personal experiences made this testamonial come alive, but any music lover without much experience with deaf culture should grab this track and mull for a while.  Musically, this piece moves from the upbeat, jazzier approach to a softer and more Do-Make-Say-Think-like hum with a bit of light piano playing in the background.

Marisa follows next.  Her voice is shadowed by a somewhat unmelodic harp, as if foreshadowing her eventual assertion that her attempt to answer Spearin’s questions was a failure.  Her thoughts focus on human interaction, and though she stumbles a bit, I suspect she does so no more than we all do in our attempts to consider the broad topic of human happiness.  Her track is both serious and fun; like her answer, the music is both melodic and experimental, depending on the moment.  Do Make Say Think fans should be able to invest in this track for the music alone without disappointment.

Next on the record is Ondine, another young girl with seemingly little of relevance to say, but determined and astute syncretizers will find a good way to equate her whining with insight on human happiness⁴.  If nothing else, I managed to glean a little happiness directly from this track, laughing just a little bit out loud as I considered how such a little thing seemed to have such a grand effect on the happiness of this child, while interpreting the violin which follows her voice as a tiny (read: world’s smallest) little instrument.

Mr. Gowrie engages in active conversation, then, with Charles Spearin.  With the exception of Mrs. Morris, Mr. Gowrie’s track seems the broadest attempt to discussing happiness.  Spearin’s accompaniament begins by anticipating Mr. Gowrie’s voice, and then later extends it into a vague, rolling atmospheric melody persisting through the song’s close with quiet assaults from other instruments, especially the violin.  At times in this short song I could not help but reflect soberly, but at other times I was struck by irrepressable smiles.

The Happiness Project closes with another rendition, this one more melodic and more musically complex, of Mrs. Morris.  This brings the album to a nice refrain and close, and I should hope it is enough to cause a bit of pause to encouring a little mulling on the topic which Charles Spearin initiated at the album’s outset.  Despite some of the simple responses that some of the interviewees give, I did not find  any simple answers, but I found a few new interesting questions and a bit more cause to reflect on questions with which I am already long acquainted.  I think many of these questions relate not as much to happiness specifically as they do to humanity in general, and perhaps that philosophical trope “the good life”.  If nothing else, Spearin’s voice-inspired music should give us pause for how to relate to humans in a different self-other relationship.  When others speak, what are we listening to?  What does it mean to “hear” each other?  Does it matter how we approach listening to others?  Perhaps listening to the music of the voice of the other is a romantic exaggeration of the respect we ought to have for our fellow humans.  Or, perhaps this notion is only a distraction from really listening; isn’t it the same as Kierkegaard’s aesthete who entertained himself not by understanding the philosopher’s drivel, but by watching the beads of sweat form and jump from his nose?

At any rate, I implore you to listen to the record and tell me or others what you get out of it.

On 5 September 2001, an organ in 639 year old church in Halberstadt, Germany started

Inside St. Burchardi church, Halberstadt

pumping out silence.  A couple of years later, on 5 February 2003, the organ played some notes for the first time.  This initial musical rest and corresponding set of coordinated musical notes represent perhaps the most ambitious musical project in the history of humanity.  The organ is playing a piece written by the infamous 20th Century American composer John Cage.  His work, appropriately entitled As SLow as Possible is a relatively sparse piece for which the composer deliberately left the duration up to the performer, in order to further discourage the feeling that one is ever able to hear the same performance twice.  Typically, performances of Cage’s work last anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour and a half; this Halberstadt performance is anticipated to last 639 years.  Tomorrow, if the piece is well-played, weights will be shifted on the piano’s keys so that a new chord configuration will begin sounding.

Some of my friends accuse John Cage of being gimicky as it is; I suspect many would only amplify that criticism for this performance put on by this small German parish, but I think that there are real and meaningful considerations to take into account.  Perhaps the most relevant of these, in my mind, was the consequences of the performers’ attempts to take

The Organ

John Cage literally, in asking themselves “How long is ‘as long as possible?’ “.  Perhaps it is because I dwell in The U.S.A. where the age of most of our construction is measured in decades (if not years), but it seems to me something of a miracle that the building in which the performance is taking place has survived 639 years–let alone that the continuation of the performance practically depends upon its surviving twice that long, to 1,278 years!

While the Halberstadt church performance may have attempted to take into account the raw lifespan of materials in the organ and perhaps the building construction, the real wildcards in the vicissitudes of time that threaten this performance’s completion must surely be so-called acts-of-God and the violence of human action and conflict.  That this church has survived not only longer than Germany–with all of its history of destructive war and conflict–but predates even the Prussian state by nearly 200 years is astounding.  Calling for an uninterrupted performance of this sort is not just expressing faith not only in time; it is a laudable statement of hopeful fate about the stability of the future of humanity.

For more information about this fascinating performance, visit the ASLSP/Halberstadt website.  NPR also had a nice write-up on this performance a half decade ago.  Also, if my one-day warning was not enough for you to get your celebration on, the next note-change is scheduled for a little over a year from now, on 5 July 2010.

God: a more concrete version than that for which I will argue

If you are viewing this from facebook, please visit the original article, for better formatting.

Ontological arguments are fun, aren’t they?  I’ve had this one on the back burner for a while now¹, and I had hoped to make some improvements before discussing it with anybody.  However, last night after finishing up an article on Levinas by Roger Burggraeve ², I came to all-too-many realizations which should have been obvious to me long ago.  One of these realizations is that my ideas will not improve substantially if they are not subjected to the unexpected (i.e. the perspectives of Others).

I should begin by mentioning a few caveats:

1. This is an argument, not a proof
2. The product of the argument is not the stereotypical Christian God, nor any other well-defined God with knowable attributes.  In fact, it is a more vague God than even that abstracted object of Anselm’s famous argument³.

My argument is something done for my own pleasure and as an example of my method of applying philosophical categories.  One of my long-standing criticisms of most philosophers and most philosophies, is that they tend to proffer, promote, and perpetuate false dichotomies and sets of categories which hold some of these qualities:

• Categories or alternatives are presented as binary opposites, when they are not.  In fact, I would argue that in most of these cases, so-called binary opposites are not even mutually exclusive.
• Likewise, categories are presented as distinct when they are not necessarily so.
• Categories, distinctions, or divisions are presented as the only available or important options, when in fact the only “only” which these categories have in common is that they were the only categories or distinctions that the philosopher could think of at the time.
• Categories distinguish quantities or qualities based on the assumption that these can be meted out discretely, when in fact it is not clear that they can be.

Note that one mode of categorization that I am explicitly ruling out here, is the classic binary 2×2 table.  I don’t think, in other words, that our perceptions, experience, and reason give us enough information to presuppose that, for example, a thing must either be or not be, a thing must either be good or not be good, a thing must either be one thing or many things⁴

In response to this, I have tried to think up some sort of system of categories which can be applied to the real world, and the only categorization I have been able to think up⁵ is the following, presented in a nice⁶, discrete table:

Note: Please forgive my imprecise/confusing language; I have no real experience yet in formal logic.

Now, this little categorization is fun, because it allows me to get away with a lot.  The “anything else” category includes such gems of possibility as: 1) the given quality is extant, 2) the given quality is both extant and not extant, 3) the given quality is somehow neither extant nor not-extant, , 4) the artificially abstracted categorical quality is not itself measurable, identifiable, abstract-ible, describable, or is otherwise irrelevant, or–my favorite–5) anything else.

The Argument for God’s Existence!

Just for fun, I’ll apply my categorization method to God’s existence.  Take the following possibilities:

1. solipsism: either you and only you exist, in a discretely definable way, or…
2. anything else

I suspect I have already gotten you, by this point, to agree to the equation, and, in most cases, to believe that option #1 is false⁷.  Now comes the controversial part of the argument–the definition of God.  My challenge here is to find a way to get you to accept “anything else” as implying God.  A slight reformulation might help get my point across before I go any further.  Take, now, these possibilities:

1. solipsism: either you know/perceive, all that there is to be known/perceived⁸
2. anything else

A tempting route to go from here is to say “if I do not perceive/know everything that can be known/perceived, what exists which can be, counterfactually, perceived?”, or, in other words, “what is the source of my knowledge?”.  Hopefully there are a few romantic transcendentalists out there who are willing to let me apply Ralph Waldo Emerson’s definition of God/Nature here: the vague not-me⁹.  Of course, this assumes a source is required and that it is the excess of knowledge that makes is disagree with proposition #1.  There is no need, however, to presume any discrete division between a me and a not-me.  It might also be the case, that neither I nor knowledge/perception are discrete in such a way as to fit into the restrictive bounds of option #1.  This is fine, because the fluidity of self-identity jibes well with other definitions of God, such as Spinoza’s great pantheist notion, certain Buddhist and shamanistic approaches, and the like.  Phenomenologists among us will point out that all we need is an Other to demonstrate against proposition #1, and the Other need not be God.  I am rather content, though, to let this Other stand retain the same role as Emerson’s not-me, such that the Other, or indeed an aggregate of others, fulfills the minimum role of God, should no other discrete being be evident.

Okay, whatever…

Alright, perhaps I did not quite get to the grand argument for God’s existence.  What did I learn in the process?  While I have appreciated attempts to give philosophical systems some sort of reasoned foundation, it seems all of these attempts rely on assumptions which do not necessarily hold.  In attempting my own such system, I found really, only one small means of sorting out knowledge which I have been unable to disprove as a tool (my either/or tool used and explained above).  Unfortnuately, this tool, as applied, typically only allows me to say only “okay…so…’anything else’ is the reality”.  In other words, I have found that the strictest standards of scrutiny have shown me that, if we want to say anything, we have to start making precarious generalizations, inadequate analogies, erroneous abstractions, and arbitrary categorizations at some point, if we want to be able to say anything interesting or useful.  Hopefully, time and energy will and has allowed us to demonstrate (with faith in probability as a founding assumption, unfortunately) which of the unprovable tools of logic, perception, and knowledge-making (modus ponens, modus tollens, statistics, calculus, analogies, etc.) give us results that are more true, more often (or at least more beneficial).  Still, I hope my categorization example has gotten someone out there to ponder, in some useful way, the similarity between believing in any not-me and beliving in God.  I do love feedback, if for anyone who has managed to get through this wordy writing.  If you have any rule of logic that you think might survive my scrutiny, I would love to hear about it!

It is apparent that your instinctive approach is philosophical, when you find an epistemological statement on your deodorant stick:

In case my photo is too blurry, the text at the bottom says "Experience is Everything"

Last time, I alluded, in a footnote, to an “elsewhere” wherein William Blake clarifies his mind/body dualism position.  I have since been cadged by the masses into both clarifying myself and citing my sources.  This quote comes from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate IV (which I linked to in my previous post, before getting into the guts of the interpretation):

All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following Errors.

1. That Man has two real existing principles Viz: a Body & a Soul.

2. That Energy, call’d Evil, is alone from the Body, & that Reason, call’d Good, is alone from the Soul.

3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.

But the following Contraries to these are True

1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that call’d Body is a portion of Soul discern’d by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.

2. Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.

3. Energy is Eternal Delight.

You can find the full text of the work here.  I think Blake’s position here augments my previous discussion without much need for further explanation and analysis

Alright, perhaps it is not yet an official holiday (is it?), but November 28th is in fact the anniversary of the death of this remarkable British poet-artist.  It has been far too long since I added a meaningful post here; I have been working on a number of new things which have simply not allowed me to get back to my examination of Rorty’s large, but so far quite readable, work.

a scene from Blake's series on Dante's Divine Comedy

In the meantime, I have not been dormant.  I have taken on a bit of work researching Emmanuel Lévinas.  This work has thus far largely been one of data-mining, if you will; little actual reading and interpretation has yet been done, but I have learned or reacquainted myself with the task of journal-finding and sorting.  My skills had perhaps become somewhat rusty over the past year, but I also suspect that I had come to expect that my web-searching techniques would work just as well for sorting through piles of academic works.  Soon enough, I hope to actually be reading some of these journal articles and books, a task which is understandably more exciting than merely fishing for sources.  Since my first experience with Lévinas, I have found some of his ideas to have profoundly altered my perspective, others to seem prima facie contrary to reason, and a number more to simply baffle me.  I hope to find more clarity and insight, more explanation for the ostensibly nonsensical, and of course a little footing for the confusing material; of course, I suspect I will just find more material that fits into all three categories.

A number of issues probably made my earlier attempts at following Lévinas’ thought quite difficult, and I suspect that the most salient of these obstacles was my total inexperience with Husserl and Heidegger.  I have, since the time of my last writing (over a month ago, it seems) had my first tiny morsels of both of these philosopher’s works.  No doubt these little bits are markedly inadequate representations of these two philosophers’ complex perspectives, but I suspect that having a start will help me re-read Lévinas.

In the meantime since my last post, I have also experienced a few more tiny nuggets from philosophers like Michel Foucault, Slavoj Zizek, Roland Barthes, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Benedetto Croce, Daniel C. Dennett, Francis Bacon, and perhaps a few others whom I cannot now recall.  I suspect, though, that the thinker with the most substantial influence on my thought patterns over the past month has been none other than William Blake.  Therefore, I mean to take a moment to relax here at home, treating my Black Friday outside as if it were the terror its name implies, while I discuss a bit of the influence of Blake’s ideas.

My standard disclaimer applies; I am interpreting, but as an interested party with limited experience, rather than as an authoritative scholar.  I know little about Blake’s life, and have scanned only a few small works of his, so forgive (and correct, point out, or argue against!) my errors and missteps.

I first became interested in William Blake when studying art history.  I was struck instantly by Blake’s unusual forms, style, and color in Elohim Creating Adam.  This, as so many of his creations, depicted deeply religious images with aesthetic beauty and a seemingly converse, irrepressibly sheol-ic gloom.  I saw in Blake’s approach a sort of algedonic theology, maybe even an aesthetic retort to theodicy.  The creation of mankind, as an example, is an admixture of good and evil–at least from the standpoint of mankind today.  The work is a manner of showing mankind’s ability to get beyond good and evil (see also), without resorting the irreverent self-righteousness of proverbial Tower of Babel architects.

Elohim Creating Adam by William Blake

Recently I rediscovered William Blake, this time in the genre of poetry.  I am not much of a poetry critic, and quite honestly I have not experienced the same degree of aesthetic ekstasis from his writing as from his art.  My approach and my interest is in philosophical ideas, a category of thoughts which exist aplenty in these poems.

One thing that struck me immediately when reading Blake was his similarity to Ralph Waldo Emerson.  Both poets have an ostensibly devout affiliation with some form of Christianity, yet each has a fascination with other world religions.  Both adopt a pretty revolutionary form of universalism for their time.  Blake’s All Religions are One poem/print/argument indicates his position in the least-obscured manner:

The Argument    As the true method of knowledge is experiment
the true faculty of knowing must be the faculty which experiences.
This faculty I treat of.
  PRINCIPLE 1st  That the Poetic Genius is the true Man. and that
the body or outward form of Man is derived from the Poetic Genius.
Likewise that the forms of all things are derived from their Genius.
which by the Ancients was call'd an Angel & Spirit & Demon.
  PRINCIPLE 2d  As all men are alike in outward form, So (and with
the same infinite variety) all are alike in the Poetic Genius
  PRINCIPLE 3d  No man can think write or speak from his heart, but
he must intend truth. Thus all sects of Philosophy are from the Poetic
Genius adapted to the weaknesses of every individual
  PRINCIPLE 4.  As none by traveling over known lands can find out
the unknown.  So from already acquired knowledge Man could not ac-
quire more. therefore an universal Poetic Genius exists
  PRINCIPLE. 5. The Religions of all Nations are derived from each
Nations different reception of the Poetic Genius which is every where
call'd the Spirit of Prophecy.
  PRINCIPLE 6   The Jewish & Christian Testaments are An original
derivation from the Poetic Genius. this is necessary from the
confined nature of bodily sensation
  PRINCIPLE 7th  As all men are alike (tho' infinitely various) So
all Religions & as all similars have one source
  The true Man is the source he being the Poetic Genius

(Be sure to see some original prints of this here.)

It looks like we get to do a little metaphysics before we get the theory of religious/spiritual universalism!  Blake is pretty clearly setting up a definition of the self/mind, but it is not clear at first whether this coincides with Cartesian mind/body dualism or not.  Most readers would agree that, at the very least, Blake’s “poetic genius” plays a similar role to that of the mind in traditional Cartesian dualist models, because it is both the source of basic inner consciousness and the originator of thoughts.  I think that the work also implies that the “poetic genius” is also the recipient of experience (or at the very least, revelation); this “poetic genius” can also be said to be a consciousness of as opposed to simple consciousness, and perhaps a force of reasoning, memory, and other trope mental functions.

Blake's Behemoth and Leviathan

However, I think that it is quite unfair say that Blake’s “poetic genius” is simply synonymous with the Cartesian mind; a few important considerations illustrate that this would be an oversimplification.  First, even if it is only a matter of emphasis, Blake uses the term “poetic genius” place weight on the role of creativity being at the heart of the human being, rather than our gamut of cognitive functions and perceptions.  Blake’s education would have ensured that he knew of the term poet in its original Greek sense; the poet (ποιητής) is not simply “creative” (a term by which we typically indicate “original” thought) but an actual force of creating, a maker.  Likewise, the term genius, which to us now implies only high-level cognition, would have been known to Blake also with its Latin connotations; in this case, not simply excellent mental performance, but a sort of spiritual auspice for the individual.  Thus the poetic genius is not just a source of unique thought, but an active participating spirit in the world  A second consideration to note is the mind/body interaction model supplied by Blake.  While it is unclear in this work¹ whether the “poetic genius” and our physical bodies are made up of the same metaphysical stuff, Blake is unequivocal in declaring that the outward body is derived from the core, the poetic genius.  By then associating the poetic genius with that which “by the Ancients was call’d an Angel & Spirit & Demon”, Blake could be saying that the poetic genius is the incorporeal “mental” “spirit”, but he could also just mean that people formerly described features of the poetic genius in erroneous ways.  The middle-way interpretation which I think yields the most interesting results is that Blake is attempting to get beyond the corporeal/incorporeal distinction at this point.  By providing a metaphysical structure which allows not only simple mind/body-like interaction but also posits the excressence of the traditionally material from the stereotypically nonmaterial, Blake critiques this metaphysical distinction.

It is important to observe, though, that Blake still appeals to a metaphysical ideal–that the poetic genius is the “true” man; additionally, he offers another grand metaphysical ideal in the form of the universal poetic genius, which of course has implications for a possible hierarchy of metaphysical relationships between the self-ideal of the poetic genius and inter-poetic genius relationships.  Unfortunately, I never managed to get beyond the metaphysics to my main point about correlations between Emerson and Blake on topics like universalism, human creativity, and freedom (and, on reflection I think there’s an interesting correlation to flesh out between Blake and symbolists like Stéphane Mallarmé).  Perhaps the point is already becoming clear, but if I get the chance I might make another quick post about this topic.  I’ll make no promises this time, though, as that seems a sure-fire way to keep me from completing any post.

By the way, in the last month I have also had the unfortunate experience of rediscovering Librarything.com, a place for bibliophiles such as myself to waste their time online.  If you are likewise afflicted, I invite you to look me up there by my username “jxn”.