Philosophical Friendship

Most of us, sadly, will never know.

But if life itself is good and pleasant (which it seems to be, from the very fact that all men desire it, and particularly those who are good and supremely happy; for to such men life is most desirable, and their existence is the most supremely happy) and if he who sees perceives that he sees, and he who hears, that he hears, and he who walks, that he walks, and in the case of all other activities similarly there is something which perceives that we are active, so that if we perceive, we perceive that we perceive, and if we think, that we think; and if to perceive that we perceive or think is to perceive that we exist (for existence was defined as perceiving or thinking); and if perceiving that one lives is in itself one of the things that are pleasant (for life is by nature good, and to perceive what is good present in oneself is pleasant); and if life is desirable, and particularly so for good men, because to them existence is good and pleasant for they are pleased at the consciousness of the presence in them of what is in itself good); and if as the virtuous man is to himself, he is to his friend also (for his friend is another self):-if all this be true, as his own being is desirable for each man, so, or almost so, is that of his friend. Now his being was seen to be desirable because he perceived his own goodness, and such perception is pleasant in itself. He needs, therefore, to be conscious of the existence of his friend as well, and this will be realized in their living together and sharing in discussion and thought; for this is what living together would seem to mean in the case of man, and not, as in the case of cattle, feeding in the same place.

Aristotle, On The Soul

This dialogue, proposed to Jacques Derrida by the historian Elisabeth Roudinesco, brings together two longtime friends who share a common history and an intellectual heritage. While their perspectives are often different, they have many common reference points: psychoanalysis, above all, but also the authors and works that have come to be known outside France as “post-structuralist.”

Beginning with a revealing glance back at the French intellectual scene over the past forty years, Derrida and Roudinesco go on to address a number of major social and political issues. Their extraordinarily wide-ranging discussion covers topics such as immigration, hospitality, gender equality, and “political correctness”; the disordering of the traditional family, same-sex unions, and reproductive technologies; the freedom of the “subject” over and against “scientism”; violence against animals; the haunting specter of communism and revolution; the present and future of anti-Semitism (as well as that which marked Derrida’s own history) and the hazardous politics of criticizing the state of Israel; the principled abolition of the death penalty; and, to conclude, a chapter “in praise of psychoanalysis.”

These exchanges not only help to situate Derrida's thought within the milieu out of which it grew, they also show more clearly than ever how this thought, impelled by a deep concern for justice, can be brought to bear on the social and political issues of our day. What emerges here above all, far from an abstract, apolitical discourse, is a call to take responsibility—for the inheritance of a past, for the singularities of the present, and for the unforeseeable tasks of the future.

This are Coptic times!

This is a post from my current IT2 journal. You may recall me mentioning the Rothko Chapel in class today and want to know more. If you don't, oh well. It's not my job to force anyone to become interested in life and ideas, only to help those who are even marginally interested at little more interested.

Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria

Click the photo below to see images
of the famous churches of Lalibel, Ethiopia,
which are seamlessly hewn out of solid bedrock.
Yeah, cool and all.  But what's up with them?





In keeping with the topic above, and also
with reference back to Leo Steinberg's
discussion of the austerity of contemporary art,
have a listen to this piece by the important
20th-century composer Morton Feldman, a member
of the famous New York School.




Morton Feldman
(1926-1987)
"Coptic Light" (1986)

For those who care, here is another
piece by Feldman, this one commissioned
for the opening of the Rothko Chapel,
in Dallas, Texas.





"Rothko Chapel (4)" (1971)



Bad Brains
"Coptic Times"

Alexandrianism - Beauty and Cruelty

STUDENT:

If you cage beauty you’re caging mankind and its imagination.

TEACHER:

I'm glad you took the time to read and think about this post. There is a lot in it to digest, and most of it in far from easy to digest. In very large measure this is because so much of the post deals with Oscar Wilde, a late-Victorian figure who, in his own inimitable way, was one of that society's most incisive critics.

Whereas most social critics will attack a society for its hypocrisy, it inability or refusal to do what it means and mean what it says, Wilde instead attacks society in terms which are precisely the opposite. It is not society's hypocrisy which offends Wilde but rather it's wretched excess of sincerity. Everything, for the Victorians, was so achingly, stiflingly earnest. It is the unrelenting morality of the Victorians - their belief in good honest work, and art which is sturdy and meaningful - that Wilde finds so absurd. All aspects of art, according to the Victorians, must be subordinated to good ends, must reflect purposeful labor.




Ford Maddox Brown
Work, 1865

In place of this imperative profundity, Wilde substitutes a view of art which calls for complete superficiality, perfect irresponsibility - both of which vices are transformed into the new "virtues". Wilde's is indeed a world were it is more important to be beautiful than good, more important to be glamorous than substantial, more important to be idle than active. The name for this perspective on life is aestheticism, a sensibility and total lifestyle often referred to as "decadent". Aestheticism is based in the belief that life should be lived as art, and that the only things worth doing are things done purely for their own sake, and purely because they are beautiful. If it takes the suffering of others to allow me to live gorgeously, so be it; or, all the better! This view of things in no respect seeks to cage beauty. Or, if it does cage, bind or shackle beauty, it is only to make it all the more intensely beautiful. Aestheticism fully accepts the fact that the radical liberation beauty - the very highest ideal - may well require the generous application of cruelty. According to this view, precisely because the Beautiful has, for so many generations, been held captive by the Good and, later, by quasi-religious political-economy of the Useful; art must be pruned and polished until it is free of every last unnecessary accretion and imperfection. And though it may strike you as odd, one of the very last, and most persistent of these blemishes is Thought.

One may not choose, in the end, to be an aesthete. The price may seem to high, or the very thing may seem repugnant. Indeed, modern art and modern art criticism arose as a strong reaction to Wilde and his cult of the gorgeous and the futile. Modern painting and sculpture, for instances, established themselves as no longer interested in beautiful results but rather in productions which offer direct evidence of the plastic activity of the Mind. Still, even if we reject Wilde's cultivation of pure Futility as perverse and built upon sadism and the enslavement of others, it nevertheless offers us a valuable view into the culture of Utility, which after Wilde can only appear to us as in large measure built upon masochism and the enslavement of the self.




Michelangelo
Dying Slave, 1516

"Objectivity": Science as a Form of Art and Social Practice

Modern thought begins with Kant.
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

STUDENT:

Scientific thought changes every day, but new ideas will only be valid if they build upon and unite current findings, evidence, and theory. Einstein's relativity is the perfect example. Einstein turned Newtonian physics upside down, but the entry level physics class taught here and at every university in the world differs only in the slightest from what Newton wrote in his Principae four hundred years ago. Why? Because what Newton found is based on empirical evidence and cannot be erased, only seen from a more enlightened angle. Tomorrow physicists may find that the universal gravitational constant isn't universal or constant (which is quite likely), but that will not change the fact that objects fall at 9.8 m/s^2 on the surface of the Earth. The idea that we shoot beams out of eyes, bounce them off objects, and collect them again in our eyes to see will never be true, regardless of how you look at it. Science without empirical evidence is nothing.

TEACHER:

Though I took issue with you in class, which is after all my job, we actually agree on quite a bit. I would certainly agree that science without empirical evidence is nothing. Though I might phrase it as the German philosopher Immanuel Kant did: Concepts without intuitions are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind. Others have translated it this way: Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.




This famous phrase is just one declaration in Kant's very extensive and indisputably brilliant argument, presented in his Critique of Pure Reason, in which he shows and dramatically exposes the radical limitations and previously hidden assumptions underlying both empiricist and rationlist science, the prior focusing on direct observation and the latter on theoretical speculation. The brilliance of Kant's argument derives from his radical rejection of any simple combination or blending of the two methods. Any middle course between the two, Kant argues, must take the a construction, one which necessarily and openly acknowledges the we have no immediate access, either rational or experience, to entities as the really are in themselves.

For Kant, all substances, both external and internal to consciousness, and indeed consciousness itself, are nothing but representation whose existence and comprehension depends in an absolutely fundamental and a priori manner (before all conscious thought) on certain concepts of the understanding and reason which cannot discovered neither through research or logic but must be "transcendentally deducted". In fact, it's only because these categories of mind are operating within us at all times that we are able to do research and logic at all. According to Kant, not only are all objects in the world mere representations, but in fact the entire world itself, experienced as a meaningful totality, is nothing but a grand construct assembled, or to use Kant's term "synthesized" out of the representations from which human experience is composed.






Composition is the key term here. It brings to mind not just the act of writing, which was fundamental to Kant's critical method of arriving at truth, but also because it brings to mind musical composition. Because for Kant all human endeavor, including scientific research, is, like musical composition, conditioned by and expressive of the human will. We do not simply discover the laws of Nature, but as far as Kant is concerned - and the extent of his influence on both the Sciences and the Humanities is quite literally incalculable - we veritably write the laws of nature ourselves, always in accordance to human needs and desires. Nature is neither God's creation nor is it simply a collection of dead parts, but Nature is a symphony which the great scientists of history have written and revised, over and over again, over the course of many centuries.




Though much neglected in our day, one of Kant's greatest disciples was Arthur Schopenhauer, who went on to influence a wide number of thinkers such of Nietzsche and Freud, who we still to consider giants for all time and whose work continues to fuel critical debates such as those taken up by Jean-Pierre Vernant. Famously, Schopenhauer pronounced Music, an art form which previously had been considered merely acoustic ornamentation (i.e., Muzak) to be the supreme form of art, precisely because music most directly reflects the states and movements of the human Mind. But what Schopenhauer says of music is equally true of the sciences. Science, even in its most objective forms, never tells us simply how things really are in actual reality, but rather it expresses the variety of human interests and needs of the culture and society which sustains it.




So much extensive writing on these topics on these topics over the last two hundred years it almost boggles my mind when I consider where I might begin to direct someone who wanted to know more. I'll mention just a very few books below. Trust me, there are thousands more. Do understand this at least, Kant's contribution to the theory of knowledge and the practice of science is, as I said above, quite literally incalculable - by which I mean not only that his influence was immense but also that his ideas through forever into doubt the belief that Cartesian numeracy and calculation can reveal the nature of things-in-themselves.Kant knew this full well, and for that reason he named his abbreviated version of the Critique of Pure Reason the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics - whose title means, that preparatory study which must be undertaking before any meaningful investigation of nature can begin. And what is the fundamental commonsense assumption of which Kant labors in the book to disabuse his reader - the belief that Nature exists at all.

So, what have I been reading on my own lately?

This first book, by the celebrated philosopher Jurgen Habermas, picks up on certain key terms I invoke in my writings above.




This next book is a contemporary classic in the critique of the rational scientific method, written by Paul Feyerabend, a philosopher and historian of science who first trained to be a musician.




This next book was recently issued to great acclaim by MIT Press, one of the finest academic publishers in the world.




This last book, which I'm reading right now on my own, was very recently issued by the University of Chicago Press. It is a passionate but deeply informed and meditated defense of the attack on objectivity, written - perhaps to the surprise of some - by own of today most thoughtful scholars of literature, George Levine.




But, again, to mention these four titles is to scratch just the outermost surface of the surface. I could go on and on and on. Certainly other have: (CLICK!)