Mother's Day

Infrequent blogging ahead

A combination of poor health, writer's block, and the arrival of spring (and thus a need to resume work in the garden) means that I won't be posting entries here as frequently as in the past.

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Despite what some might have concluded from my most recent post, this is not because I've stopped caring.

In that post, I was merely continuing my exploration of the concepts of the interesting and the important, but was looking at their "contraries" as way to bring out some of their meaning.

That's interesting, part 5: a variation on the theme

"I don't care."

It isn't interesting or important.  It's boring.

It doesn't concern me.  Doesn't figure in my plans.   Not my problem.

I don't want to think about it.

It's not something that I want to bring within the circle of my being. 

***

"I don't care."

With these three words, I speak a banishing spell.  I push it away, I cast it out of the light and into the darkness. 

In one word, "Begone!"

Corbin on universals

Henry Corbin, discussing the victory of Averroism from the perspective of the Platonists, Neo-Platonists and Avicennists:

What Aristotelianism considers as the concept of a species, the logical universal, ceases to be anything more than the dead body of an Angel.

-- from the introduction to his Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn 'Arabi

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I've always seen Plato's theory of the Ideas as an attempt to reinterpret and revitalize the Greek pantheon.  Justice isn't merely an abstract concept, she truly is the goddess Δίκη.

By making the forms immanent rather than transcendent, Aristotle contributed to the secular tendency to render the spiritual incomprehensible.   The world of the imagination is no longer a revelation of the divine, but is instead imaginary in the modern sense of the term.  I.e., it is no longer real or true.

Image of the eternal emerging in time

Of course, the rock is only relatively timeless compared to the flowing water.

Eventually the water will win, and the rock will be eroded away.

The truly eternal can never be diminished, because change is a function of time.

That's interesting, part 4

Some more rough notes on the topic of the interesting/important.

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The things (and people) that interest us or are important to us can also be said to concern us.

concern (v.)

early 15c., "perceive, distinguish," also "refer to, relate to," from Middle French concerner, from Medieval Latin concernere "concern, touch, belong to," figurative use of Late Latin concernere "to sift, mix, as in a sieve," from Latin com- "with" (see com-) + cernere "to sift," hence "perceive, comprehend" (see crisis). Apparently the sense of the prefix shifted to intensive in Medieval Latin. Meaning "worry" is 17c. Related: Concerned; concerning. Letter opening to whom it may concern attested by 1740.

Touching, sifting, mixing.  That which concerns us crosses the boundary and touches us in our innermost being.

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By cognition man comes into contact with the world into which he has been cast. Heidegger's existentialia, all consequences of Geworfenheit, are as follows: Fürsorge - Zuhanden-sein, as a particular feeling of protective concern or stewardship over things; Mitsorge - as human compassion; Sorge>, anxious concern over the tragic taste of man's lot, which is ultimately to exist faced toward death zum Todessein. These existentialia raise questions that we must answer.

-- Father Mieczyslaw AlbertKrapiec O.P.

This quotation refers to several of Martin Heidegger's unique terms:

Geworfenheit - literally, thrown-ness.  The fact that we find ourselves cast (without our consent) into a world which already existed before us, and which will continue to exist after we are gone.

Fürsorge - literally, caring-for.  I'm not sure the quotation above has the sense of this term quite correct.  Its association with the next term suggests that it is a "for what?"  We have our projects, and fürsorge is fundamentally a concern for or interest in the ends toward which those projects are aimed.  Our protective concern and stewardship for our environment (both natural and social) comes into it as something related to our proper ends  -- that which ought to concern us.

Zuhanden-sein - literally, being present-to-hand.  The classic example being the carpenter's hammer.  When it is used, a good tool furthers the completion of the task, but without making itself the center of attention.  The musician's attention is on the music, not the piano keys.  Yet both the hammer and the piano are essential to the work.

Mitsorge - literally, caring-with.  Empathy, or as the quotation puts it, compassion.

zum Todessein - literally, being-toward-death.

According to my Cassell's German-English dictionary, Sorge means

grief, sorrow; worry, apprehension, anxiety, care, trouble, uneasiness, concern

The related adjective sorgsam means "careful, attentive; provident; cautious".

"Das ist meine Sorge," that is my worry, I will attend to it, leave it to me.

***

Compare this essay by Schopenhauer, on the sufferings of the world:



In particular, notice how Schopenhauer anticipates many of Heidegger's themes:  existence as suffering, life as project, the uniquely human awareness and orientation toward death, and the need for Mitsorge.

Mystical moments of Grace

There was a day, many years ago now, when I was sitting in the sunporch attached to our house, crying over the fact that my wife had just told me she was leaving me.

It was a typical rainy day in the Pacific Northwest.  How appropriate, I thought, that these gray skies reflect my mood.  This world, and life in it, sucks.

Just then, there was a break in the clouds and a beam of sunlight broke through, caught one of the raindrops sliding down the glass, and twinkled, just so.

It was as if some guardian angel was tickling a sulking child.  Coaxing out a smile.

I had to laugh, and have never since been able to sustain a pessimistic mood.

Nominalism vs. Guénon's traditional metaphysics

In this talk, Matt Johnson explains the impact of nominalism in the modern era and how René Guénon's traditional metaphysics provides a healing response.



Audio only, I'm sorry to say.

I'm thinking about adding some slides to illustrate this talk and make it easier to follow along.

***

I've added this one to a playlist on youtube.

A Conversation with Wendell Berry

Here's a man whose wisdom and humanity I deeply admire.

His Kentucky accent reminds me of my own roots in Western Illinois. Only people in Chicago talk the way they do up there. Most of the rest of the state sounds like Wendell Berry, and that's why I always say *my* Illinois was part of the South.

I close my eyes and can almost believe I'm listening to my father. The drawl, the patient rolling out of the story...

Vallicella on the Impermanence of the Impermanent

The most ephemeral and fragile of things are yet not nothing: a wisp of cloud, a passing shadow, a baby whose hour of birth is its hour of death. And such seemingly permanent fixtures of the universe as Polaris are yet not entirely being.  Both the relatively impermanent and the relatively permanent point beyond themselves to the absolutely permanent.  Each is, absolutely considered, impermanent.  No finite fixture is finally fixed.

-- Bill Vallicella (italics in the original)

There are beings within time, and Being outside it.

Within time, as Heraclitus said, everything flows.  Time is the realm of Becoming, of restless, unceasing change.

Fishing with My Father

His teeth are bothering him
so he has me bite the little lead weights
onto the line.  This is a serious task
and I do it with the respect it deserves,
contemplating the marks I leave in the soft metal.
They have to be tight enough they don't spin around,
but instead grip the nylon line firmly, at the place
he indicates, this far above the hook.

Years later, with my own boys,
I'm still gripping that line firmly,
and just as he placed no importance on the act,
I never know which moments will be meaningful
to them, the ones they will    bite down     on
because I no longer can.

It's enough, I think, that I can reach down
and lay a hand on his shoulder, as if to say,
I'm here, you're part of my life.  There's so much
I could and want to tell him, but know that there
are no words to make him understand.

I have lived too long where there are no words.
I have put too little value on common things,
and it's left me with no vocabulary.
As if my English were a foreign tongue.

-- a poem, also from that 1996 notebook

Airplanes and Deep Water

I remember a warm spring day in Da Nang, when I sat on a bench outside the company HQ and looked up to see a jetliner flying out from the nearby airport.

"They're going home.  It will be my turn soon."

***

For me, airplanes have always represented transition and an opportunity for reflection and formation of a new resolve.

Boarding the plane has always felt like letting-go.

In the air, all things are possible: when I land, I tell myself, it will be different.

But once I'm on the ground again, I find myself relying on my old habits, and airborne resolutions are soon forgotten.

Endings and beginnings are like that.

***

That is why a great sorrow is also an occasion for reflection -- a deeper exploration of our Being.  For these events are unsettling.  They make us strangers in the world, alienated and therefore more receptive to the uncanny.

Yet it's difficult to stay too long in the depths.  To escape the intense pressure, we surface again and lose ourselves in idle talk and the fun-seeking crowd.

-- From my notebook dated 1996.  I was reading a lot of Heidegger in those days.

On gay marriage

About a year ago now, I posted some thoughts about the nature of marriage.

In particular, I said that marriage is a vow that henceforward we shall treat this other person as if he or she were a blood relative.

I also said that, when God blesses the union, our spouse in fact becomes our closest possible relative.  Closer than brother, sister, mother or father. 

To my mind, this is the essence of family and it begins in marriage.

The sacrament of marriage is thus a kind of miracle.  Like the transubstantiation of the wine into the blood of the Savior, in marriage the spouses are literally transformed.  They become "one flesh."

***

My Catholic and other Christian friends often put forward arguments based on natural law, purporting to show that family -- and thus marriage -- is basically about procreation.  Thus they want to restrict marriage and the foundation of families to male/female couples.


I don't find these arguments persuasive.  Even restricting our attention to heterosexual couples, there are obvious problems applying them to elderly, infertile and other childless couples.

I don't see any reason why, if their love is genuine, God could not or would not bless the union of a gay couple in the manner I have described.

Even if their motives are selfish, it still might serve His purposes to join them.

The God of the Old Testament might have a problem, of course.  But there are a lot of prohibitions in Leviticus that we no longer observe.  The God of the New Testament revealed a deeper kind of morality.

It's not for me to judge whether a couple comes to their marriage in a genuine spirit of love -- rather than, for example, wanting to have a day when they're the center of attention, or to get to wear the dress, or whatever silly, selfish reasons many people undoubtedly have for getting married.  Heterosexual marriages often involve that too.

I think that in every case, the charitable thing is to take them at their word, and leave the final judgment to God.

***

I have reached similar conclusions with regard to adoption by gay couples.  I cannot, in good conscience, say that it is impossible for this to result in a loving, healthy family.

***

But none of this should be taken to mean that I approve everything about the so-called gay lifestyle.

Promiscuity is a problem, for example, no matter what sex the people are who are cruising the bars or who they are rubbing up against.

I also still have a problem with the kind of in-your-face transgressiveness we often see from homosexual activists and their supporters.  I think that's disrespectful and unlikely to promote the kind of dialogue that will bring us all closer to the truth.

(To gays who say they're only responding to the prejudices they've suffered under, I respond "Two wrongs don't make a right.")

I'm not going to list all the behaviors that I would find objectionable, just as I'm not going to list all the bad things I see heterosexuals doing.  I think I've already said enough for you to get the idea.

In other words, I'll judge people based on their actions, not their sexual preferences.  Jerks come in all flavors, but so do people who know how to be good, civil neighbors and friends.

I'll support loving commitment wherever and whenever it occurs.

Some advice for college students

Many people have described the poor job market for humanities graduates.
The conclusion I draw from such anecdotes and data is that studying the humanities is something that should be considered a luxury expense, rather than an investment.

Some people enjoy eating in fine restaurants, although they have little to show for it a day or a week later. Attending a live performance at the theater or opera, same thing. It’s an enjoyable experience, then it’s over and you have nothing left but the memories (and perhaps a desire to come back for more.)

But who likes to eat at a restaurant where the food makes you ill? Or attend a play performed by mediocre actors and written by a hack playwright who mocks everything you hold dear?

There's no point in "paying your dues" to a club you probably won't get to join anyway.  If what the professors are offering doesn't give you the kind of enjoyment you look for in a restaurant or at the symphony, take your business elsewhere.

But if you do enjoy their teaching, learn to see it as an ephemeral thing.  That spicy taste it leaves on your tongue will be gone in the morning, and you'll still have the problem of finding a way to make ends meet.

Brownson on first principles

The mistake of most philosophers in modern times is in placing the question of method before that of principles, as if principles were found or obtained, instead of being given. The principles determine the method, not the method the principles; and when once we understand principles are objective, we understand that our method must be objective, instead of subjective. The object determines the form of the thought, and all our faculties are distinguished, and named, as every theologian is aware, from their respective objects. Everybody knows that first principles are and must be a priori, for the mind can neither exist nor act without them.

-- Orestes Brownson,  WARD’S PHILOSOPHICAL INTRODUCTION

h/t Brandon

Carson and Weiss on eros

Cross-posting a comment I left on a fascinating article over at  Memiyawanzi.

The article begins with a discussion of Anne Carson's 1986 essay, Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay.   Here's an excerpt from the excerpt quoted on the blog:

Pleasure and pain at once register upon the lover, inasmuch the desirability of the love object derives, in part, from its lack. To whom is it lacking? To the lover. If we follow the trajectory of eros we consistently find it tracing out the same route: it moves out from the lover toward the beloved, then ricochets back to the lover himself and the hole in him, unnoticed before. Who is the real subject of most love poems? Not the beloved. It is that hole.

Carson's thesis is that eros is about edges or boundaries: the insurmountable gulf that separates us from the other.  When it ricochets back to us, it's that boundary it's bouncing off of.

This is similar to things I've said here about marriage and about loneliness.

As additional evidence, the blog article then brings in a scholarly paper by philologist Michael Weiss on the etymology of eros and other Greek words for love.  One sentence in the discussion of this paper caught my eye:

Weiss makes the case for a possible semantic development from the idea of ‘divide for oneself, take one’s share’ to ‘enjoy’.

This brings out one of the aspects of eros that is hinted at in the excerpt from Carson: it's the desire to possess the beloved -- to bring him/her within our boundaries, as it were. 

To mate, and perhaps just as importantly, to deny others in the tribe the opportunity to mate with the one we have chosen.  To put a fence around her/him, saying "Keep out, trespassers will be prosecuted."

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Perhaps I should underscore the main point of my comment.  I think Carson -- at least in the excerpt quoted on the blog -- is taking too much of a phenomenological approach to the semantics.   While that phenomenology is insightful and worth pursuing, I think the ancients were likely to have been more prosaic in their thinking.

So when I read Weiss's sentence about "dividing for oneself, taking one's share" what it reminded me of was the animal behavior of an alpha male taking the most attractive female(s) for himself, and baring his fangs at any lesser males who dared to approach.

I also thought of Achilles and Briseis.

(But of course, the females are making their own selections too.)

Refugees

Perhaps it's old age and a failing memory.  Lately I've been finding slips of paper in some of my books, with notes written in my own handwriting -- but I don't remember writing them. 

Here's one I just came across in a book I'd pulled down to read in bed:

Not yet to fight against the enemies of the light,
but at this time simply to find that light -- this is our task.

Let others stronger than us guard the rear
while we refugees scramble toward the waiting ships.

The Ark

See the dark night has come down on us
The world is livin’ in its dream
But now we know that we can wake up from this sleep
And set out on the journey
Find a ship to take us on the way

The time has come to trust that guiding light
And leavin’ all the rest behind
We’ll take the road that leads down to the waterside
And set out on the journey
Find a ship to take us on the way

And we’ll sail out on the water
Yes, we’ll feel the sea grow
Yes, we’ll meet out on the water
Where all strangers are known

If you travel blindly, if you fall
The truth is there to set you free
And when your heart can see just one thing in this life
We’ll set out on the journey
Find a ship to take us on the way

And we’ll sail out on the water
Yes, we’ll feel the sea grow
Yes, we’ll meet out on the water
Where all strangers are known

See the dark night has come down on us
The world is livin’ in its dream
But now we know that we can wake up from this sleep
And set out on the journey
Find a ship to take us on the way

And we’ll sail out on the water
Yes, we’ll feel the sea grow
Yes, we’ll meet out on the water
Where all strangers are known

-- Gerry Rafferty, from the 1978 album "City to City"

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"[T]here are things for which a symbolical mode of expression properly so called is the only one possible, and which will consequently never be understood by those for whom symbolism is a dead letter."

-- René Guénon

Here in Middle-earth

It's a rather silly metaphysics, I know, but I often like to think of us as existing in a three-dimensional plane slicing through a four-dimensional space.

Each dimension affords an additional direction.  (x) : Left/Right,  (y) : Up/Down, (z) : In/Out.

... and what about the fourth dimension?  Perhaps it isn't time, as is commonly proposed, but something more like Supernal/Infernal?  Heaven "above" and Hell "below"?

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On this model, could virtue and vice be descriptions of the direction we are taking?

Could we sum up -- in theory, at least -- the vectors of all our virtues and all our vices, in order to calculate the overall direction of our lives?

***

Of course, to actually move along the supernal/infernal axis is to leave our 3D plane.

So if virtues and vices describe our lives here in Middle-earth, they must be only the initial impetus for such 4D movement, which has yet to actually begin.

It's as if they're pulling or pushing us in one direction or the other, but we can't say where we're going until we enter the afterlife.

***

Addendum:

Perhaps it is a mistake to think that our 3D plane remains in a fixed position on the supernal/infernal axis?

Perhaps our virtues and vices have the effect of pulling the world, as a whole, "up" or "down"?

So that the sum of all of our vectors, taken together as the collective impact of every conscious being, makes the world a better or worse place?

As I said, it's silly metaphysics.  But like many silly things, it's amusing to think about.

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Second Addendum, upon waking the next morning:

We could also say that the inertial momentum of the Fall is so great that we cannot, by our own efforts and without divine intervention, arrest the slide into the inferno.

It might be an oversimplification to think of all this as involving only four dimensions.  The "movements" might actually make more sense with an n-dimensional space, where the supernal/infernal axis describes a dimension > 4.

But let's not press the metaphor too far and end up overcomplicating the image!

Morning Chapter

I like this picture, which Michael Gilleland used to illustrate his blog post today:

Charles Spencelayh, Morning Chapter

A soft-boiled egg, freshly-baked loaf of bread, butter, a pot of tea, and a good book.

What more could a man want to start the day?