That's pretty much all I ever knew about Descartes until this class. I had never imagined myself capable of reading these things, always imagining it the province of higher intellects than my own. So I was surprised by three things: first, how thin the book was; second, how readable it actually is; and third, how much I already knew about Cartesian logic from having studied economics.
We also had the great advantage of having Lisa Shapiro come into class to walk us through it. I have about 12 pages of notes from reading the book and the lecture to get through in order to write this journal entry. But as you may have noticed, I try not to regurgitate the book and the class, rather I try to come up with a mini-essay on it, hopefully using both. And so I will try that again, although I fear falling short on such a large thing as this. But then, that's been the reality about my entries for most of these writers. And that failure is partially the point.
"For it is not enough to have a good mind; the main thing is to use it well"
I think that sums up why I'm in this program. Hope it's not already too late. But what does he mean, beyond the obvious aphorism? He's clear that he believes that "good sense" and "reason" are naturally equal in all men, and therefore difference of opinion is exactly that - difference of use of those fundamental qualities - some use them well, some (most?) don't. And like many who have gone before him, he denotes that it is this capacity, the capacity to use our minds, that separates us from beasts. Interesting that it's the use of the mind that separates us, not the possession of one, or the capacity for simple thought. So there is a difference among men in this, much like Plato suggested in Republic: slave/free, beast/man.
Part II is where he separates himself yet again from the secular philosophers by reasoning that anything created by a sole author is better built. Obviously, he'd not met the automobile, airplane, or computer yet, but his reference, nature, is, as it was, the starting point. Therefore, God is better. It's not as passionate as Augustine and Pascal, but he's clearly in the same place.
Then he talks about the radical experiment of taking his life apart, assumption by assumption, reasoning that you cannot change the world - only the way you relate to it.... sounds like the beginning of psychology. But in a way, that is what is so radical: turning philosophy inward. Examining the assumptions of self and being.
Cartesian Laws of Analysis:
1) Never accept anything as true unless I know it is such - avoids hasty judgement and prejudice. (Rule of Evident Knowledge)
2) Divide the problem into as many parts as possible. (Simplification Rule)
3) Solve the problem - simplest first, hardest last. This supposes an order even among things that don't naturally precede one another. (Systemisticity Rule)
4) Make specific analysis of facts and general reviews of the whole. This way, you don't miss anything. (Comprehensiveness Rule)
Would that I could remember to think this way in solving problems.
Saturday, December 5, 2009
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Crazy for Coetzee
This is by far the most interesting book, structurally speaking, that I've read this first semester. It's form, a meta-fiction, poses so many puzzles that it seems, at times, like a rubiks cube; if we can align all the colours, a solution will be found and peace - mental peace - will reign. But I think that the Rubik's cube analogy I've just used is wrong; it's tempting to think that there's a solution, but is there one?
And analogy is the tool used for the greatest effect in the story. As suggested by Marjorie Garber in her post-logue, we are being held in thrall by what Freud called the "the seduction of an analogy".
In class, the two analogies that were most discussed were the one about maze experiments with mice, the idea that we drop mice into sterile mazes, but never question that a lab scientist dropped into the jungles of Borneo wouldn't last a week.
The other, more infamously, compares the slaughter of cows in industrial slaughter houses to the slaughter of Jews in the Nazi concentration camps.
The first thing that occurs to me about the maze analogy is that a mouse bred for lab experimentation dropped into the same jungle in Borneo would likely last far less time than the scientist before being devoured by a snake or bat or other predator. Possibly only minutes, let alone a week. The other thing is that maze experiments were, to the best of my knowledge, constructed to examine learning and motivation in a species whose brain biology closely resembles that of man (sad, but true). I don't know that they were created to test a mouse's ability to survive in a hostile environment. Finally, the maze is a controlled environment, purposefully designed to test specific stimuli, whereas a jungle is, well, by definition an uncontrolled environment.
The point of all this isn't to pick at details, but rather to argue that I don't think the two are even remotely analogous. Further, with the analogy failing, all it really leaves us is a suggestion of moral superiority and revenge. Both, admittedly, seductive things if we are emotionally attached to the argument against animal experimentation.
Then the holocaust analogy. The two are analogous in a very limited sense, but it's a dangerous one in my mind. Because if we do equate the slaughter of cows to the slaughter of Jews, then the only conclusion that we can arrive at is to unequivocally state that the slaughter (by slaughter I mean the killing of cattle for the purposes of processing them into food, as opposed to the slaughter of Jews which was politically motivated and evil in intent and by nature) of cows is under any circumstances, for any reasons, absolutely immoral. To admit to the possibility of moral or ethical reasons the slaughter cattle, as Elizabeth Costello does - say, perhaps a ritualistic killing, or perhaps that we only slaughter in smaller scale, or devise a more humane way of killing them - would necessarily imply that we then might accept the holocaust if, perhaps, they had simply culled the bad Jews out, the ones who were really responsible for evil in Europe, or the bankers, or the ones who wouldn't assimilate the way the German Jews had. Or simply, if the killings had been more humane or ritualized. Ugly arguments indeed, but equally analogous if we accept the original analogy.
It is pointed out by Peter Singer that Issac Bashevis Singer (a character created by Singer the author being used by a character in a story by Singer, the philosopher?) used a similar analogy in a story, but did so to outline that they both share in common the abuse of the powerful over the disenfranchised. But I dare even to disagree with Bashevis Singer, pointing out that he was a survivor of the pogroms in Russia, and that perhaps he didn't want to separate the Holocaust from the other persecutions the Jews suffered throughout history. But that is exactly what Holocaust survivors hold onto so vehemently: that the slaughter of Jews in Europe by the Nazis, for which the work Holocaust was invented, is a singular event in human history, and that any appropriation of the term to other events is done to elevate the other event, deny the Jews any claim to the uniqueness of the persecution, which was and still is part of the politics of antisemitism, and thus denigrates the Holocaust as just another example of genocide. Although, perhaps if we're not diligent, there will yet be another example that will make it seem so.
The other tool that she uses is the idea that we are capable, because of our natural empathy, to imagine the being-ness of other animals, including other humans. But the weakness here is the supposition, argued by everybody from Aristotle to Kant and beyond, that we are at all capable of being so objective as to assume to know a reality outside of our own perceptions. I think the two things I rely on, which put me at odds with academia to a degree, is that I'm challenging the notion to objectivity, and wish to refer to personal experience to do so.
The first notion, that we can be so objective as to imagine another reality separate from our own, seems, on a phenomenological level, impossible. We may wish we can, but how can we ever know, no matter what we feel, that we are indeed seeing the world through anothers' eyes, feelings and thoughts, rather than a version of our own? How can we ever be sure, no matter how complete an out of body experience we feel that we're having, that we are experiencing life as a bat?
As an actor, there's always been a debate, although it's been rendered moot over the past fifty years, of whether an actor, if he is playing King Lear must become the king, or if they must act as if they were a king. For me, I have always felt the more powerful performance comes from using the "as if" because it allows for the possibility of engaging in the reality of the experience, and for expressing something essentially human about the character we play. In other words, rather than trying to reconstruct a human being, we are a human being under specific imaginary circumstances.
I suggested in class that perhaps her anguish at facing what was obviously a deep sense of alienation from the world around her caused her to focus her anxiety on the animals right movement rather than face herself. As a writer and poet who feels what she knows to be an unpopular point-of-view on a subject, she is, in a way is being brought to slaughter by the academic system she is facing. Is this such an objectionable idea? She mentions Kafka frequently; isn't this idea about his personal sense of alienation infused in his work commonly accepted about his writing? Certainly the idea of transference isn't new to psychologists. I'm not arguing that she is sick, or intellectually weak, but merely that she is human, and an artist. Personally, I think this kind of deep use of the imagination is what makes great works of art. It is not our ability to become something else, but our ability to use something else to express something so deep about ourselves. To try to express the alienation and anger she feels directly would make it pedestrian, academic. It would be philosophy, or therapy. Not art.
And this is the point. I think what I'm saying is that she's wrong on so very many different levels. And yet her argument and point of view is also unassailable! As a reader, I can't help but feel that she's right about animals, and that we must become conscious and debate what we do to them and why we do it. Isn't that an irony, that as she suggests that poetry cannot move people to action on the issue, but this story evokes a sense of urgency in us, the reader, to engage with it and ourselves?
Perhaps the real issue, one that seemed to be implicit in the classroom discussion, at any rate, that it is the mass production, genetic modification focusing on yield and industrialized slaughter of animals that we object to so deeply. The way we eat has been radically altered over the past fifty years by the food marketing corporations, and it has all been done simply in the name of profit and market share, rather than sustainability and quality of the food supply.
There are many movements in the food world on this very notion, started and sustained by restaurants... and the food television industry, of all things... and that is now leeching into the public consciousness and many of the places we buy food: How much meat should we eat? Where should we get the meat from? Do you know the source of the food you eat? Was it raised/grown ethically? Was it harvested ethically and brought to market in a timely way that didn't rely on chemical additives? What are we putting in our bodies?
This brilliant story posits all the questions that we've been asking ourselves over this entire course: can we find any answers using only reason, or only passion? Can philosophy raise us to the place of the gods? Does passion separate us from the animals? Rather than a Rubik's cube, this story is more like an Escher drawing. It climbs the stairs, seeming to move up to a higher level, but we end up back at the bottom despite our effort. The basic questions remain no matter how much we progress as a species and a society.
And analogy is the tool used for the greatest effect in the story. As suggested by Marjorie Garber in her post-logue, we are being held in thrall by what Freud called the "the seduction of an analogy".
In class, the two analogies that were most discussed were the one about maze experiments with mice, the idea that we drop mice into sterile mazes, but never question that a lab scientist dropped into the jungles of Borneo wouldn't last a week.
The other, more infamously, compares the slaughter of cows in industrial slaughter houses to the slaughter of Jews in the Nazi concentration camps.
The first thing that occurs to me about the maze analogy is that a mouse bred for lab experimentation dropped into the same jungle in Borneo would likely last far less time than the scientist before being devoured by a snake or bat or other predator. Possibly only minutes, let alone a week. The other thing is that maze experiments were, to the best of my knowledge, constructed to examine learning and motivation in a species whose brain biology closely resembles that of man (sad, but true). I don't know that they were created to test a mouse's ability to survive in a hostile environment. Finally, the maze is a controlled environment, purposefully designed to test specific stimuli, whereas a jungle is, well, by definition an uncontrolled environment.
The point of all this isn't to pick at details, but rather to argue that I don't think the two are even remotely analogous. Further, with the analogy failing, all it really leaves us is a suggestion of moral superiority and revenge. Both, admittedly, seductive things if we are emotionally attached to the argument against animal experimentation.
Then the holocaust analogy. The two are analogous in a very limited sense, but it's a dangerous one in my mind. Because if we do equate the slaughter of cows to the slaughter of Jews, then the only conclusion that we can arrive at is to unequivocally state that the slaughter (by slaughter I mean the killing of cattle for the purposes of processing them into food, as opposed to the slaughter of Jews which was politically motivated and evil in intent and by nature) of cows is under any circumstances, for any reasons, absolutely immoral. To admit to the possibility of moral or ethical reasons the slaughter cattle, as Elizabeth Costello does - say, perhaps a ritualistic killing, or perhaps that we only slaughter in smaller scale, or devise a more humane way of killing them - would necessarily imply that we then might accept the holocaust if, perhaps, they had simply culled the bad Jews out, the ones who were really responsible for evil in Europe, or the bankers, or the ones who wouldn't assimilate the way the German Jews had. Or simply, if the killings had been more humane or ritualized. Ugly arguments indeed, but equally analogous if we accept the original analogy.
It is pointed out by Peter Singer that Issac Bashevis Singer (a character created by Singer the author being used by a character in a story by Singer, the philosopher?) used a similar analogy in a story, but did so to outline that they both share in common the abuse of the powerful over the disenfranchised. But I dare even to disagree with Bashevis Singer, pointing out that he was a survivor of the pogroms in Russia, and that perhaps he didn't want to separate the Holocaust from the other persecutions the Jews suffered throughout history. But that is exactly what Holocaust survivors hold onto so vehemently: that the slaughter of Jews in Europe by the Nazis, for which the work Holocaust was invented, is a singular event in human history, and that any appropriation of the term to other events is done to elevate the other event, deny the Jews any claim to the uniqueness of the persecution, which was and still is part of the politics of antisemitism, and thus denigrates the Holocaust as just another example of genocide. Although, perhaps if we're not diligent, there will yet be another example that will make it seem so.
The other tool that she uses is the idea that we are capable, because of our natural empathy, to imagine the being-ness of other animals, including other humans. But the weakness here is the supposition, argued by everybody from Aristotle to Kant and beyond, that we are at all capable of being so objective as to assume to know a reality outside of our own perceptions. I think the two things I rely on, which put me at odds with academia to a degree, is that I'm challenging the notion to objectivity, and wish to refer to personal experience to do so.
The first notion, that we can be so objective as to imagine another reality separate from our own, seems, on a phenomenological level, impossible. We may wish we can, but how can we ever know, no matter what we feel, that we are indeed seeing the world through anothers' eyes, feelings and thoughts, rather than a version of our own? How can we ever be sure, no matter how complete an out of body experience we feel that we're having, that we are experiencing life as a bat?
As an actor, there's always been a debate, although it's been rendered moot over the past fifty years, of whether an actor, if he is playing King Lear must become the king, or if they must act as if they were a king. For me, I have always felt the more powerful performance comes from using the "as if" because it allows for the possibility of engaging in the reality of the experience, and for expressing something essentially human about the character we play. In other words, rather than trying to reconstruct a human being, we are a human being under specific imaginary circumstances.
I suggested in class that perhaps her anguish at facing what was obviously a deep sense of alienation from the world around her caused her to focus her anxiety on the animals right movement rather than face herself. As a writer and poet who feels what she knows to be an unpopular point-of-view on a subject, she is, in a way is being brought to slaughter by the academic system she is facing. Is this such an objectionable idea? She mentions Kafka frequently; isn't this idea about his personal sense of alienation infused in his work commonly accepted about his writing? Certainly the idea of transference isn't new to psychologists. I'm not arguing that she is sick, or intellectually weak, but merely that she is human, and an artist. Personally, I think this kind of deep use of the imagination is what makes great works of art. It is not our ability to become something else, but our ability to use something else to express something so deep about ourselves. To try to express the alienation and anger she feels directly would make it pedestrian, academic. It would be philosophy, or therapy. Not art.
And this is the point. I think what I'm saying is that she's wrong on so very many different levels. And yet her argument and point of view is also unassailable! As a reader, I can't help but feel that she's right about animals, and that we must become conscious and debate what we do to them and why we do it. Isn't that an irony, that as she suggests that poetry cannot move people to action on the issue, but this story evokes a sense of urgency in us, the reader, to engage with it and ourselves?
Perhaps the real issue, one that seemed to be implicit in the classroom discussion, at any rate, that it is the mass production, genetic modification focusing on yield and industrialized slaughter of animals that we object to so deeply. The way we eat has been radically altered over the past fifty years by the food marketing corporations, and it has all been done simply in the name of profit and market share, rather than sustainability and quality of the food supply.
There are many movements in the food world on this very notion, started and sustained by restaurants... and the food television industry, of all things... and that is now leeching into the public consciousness and many of the places we buy food: How much meat should we eat? Where should we get the meat from? Do you know the source of the food you eat? Was it raised/grown ethically? Was it harvested ethically and brought to market in a timely way that didn't rely on chemical additives? What are we putting in our bodies?
This brilliant story posits all the questions that we've been asking ourselves over this entire course: can we find any answers using only reason, or only passion? Can philosophy raise us to the place of the gods? Does passion separate us from the animals? Rather than a Rubik's cube, this story is more like an Escher drawing. It climbs the stairs, seeming to move up to a higher level, but we end up back at the bottom despite our effort. The basic questions remain no matter how much we progress as a species and a society.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Pascal with Bacon on the side.
So, looking at these three books, I decided to start with Bacon as it was, superficially at least, the slightest of the three. And I have to say, it went very much over my head. I got the idea: it's an allegory, as any utopic vision must be, for a new order. But the weight of it, as I've been told exists, was lost on me. Originally, when I finished, I wrote a glib little summary of the book.
"The Great and Perfect Christian State, where white men worship God with perfect humility and, in following the teachings of Christ, behave with charity and love toward each other and strangers (as long as they are Christians), cherish chastity, marriage, and family that centers on reverence for the father, are whole with nature, pursue science in the name of God, and view knowledge as the ultimate good (tempered with the belief that God created all things). In this, men can live happily and well together. And women are there too. And Jews are allowed, as long as they love Christ, or even just like Christ. But they've got us beat in the after world, regardless."
I do accept that my thin take in it is no doubt due to my modern perspective. But like each of these books, I've got turn the corner and see that my modern perspective wasn't invented by me and me alone. And it was in this and the other two books that it indeed was created. I still don't think that Bacon was the heavyweight of the three, if only because it didn't argue it's point with much subtlety, or if it did, I missed it.
But I do get the discussion notes that he was theorizing a world of grace, and postulating that science is the way to negate the fall. It also seems, and this was borne out in the discussions, that he was proposing a form of democracy, which was inherent in the Utopian ideals that were floating around at the time of his writing.
These ideas, that there should be a merger of industry, science, and church/state, and that man should dominate and control nature to create it's ends, are the very foundation of the world we've been living in since that time. And that Bacon was part of the intellectual revolution that lay the ground for it.
I've come to understand, if only on a simple level, that this movement of philosophy was divided into three eras: the ancient philosophers, the christian philosophers, and the romantic philosophers. (Nussbaum)
We are leaving the ancient philosophers and now dealing with the Christians. Which introduces us to a new concept: the concept of Grace or Faith, that falls outside of Reason and Passion. And here is where I find Pascal so interesting. Rather than deny the difficulty of achieving a state of Grace (as compared to Bacon who, through his Utopia, is able to assume man's ability to rise above the Fall) Pascal seems to be very aware of how difficult it is.
He presents a view of reason and "imagination" as being both a gift and a curse to mankind. He states clearly that Man has been quite right to make these two powers (reason and imagination) into allies, because they bring us to beauty, justice, and happiness, which are the world's 'supreme good". But at the same time, he warns that the war between sense and reason are also "the most absurd cause of his errors". (II 44)
I think this is important, because it is in the contradictions inherent in man that we find a "proof" of God. Man's greatness is that he knows that he is wretched, and thus there must be hope that he can rise to Grace through faith in Christ.
And this is where I liked Pascal so much. The idea is that we must choose to believe in God because choosing to believe gives us the better chance of a good result. He is laying out, in a very elegant form of argument, that Reason, or proof, can only lead us to the door of Faith, and our knowledge of Good, Justice, and the happiness that come, but it is faith and faith alone that move us toward the "divinity" that Grace promises.
I found this to be a very humanist argument. Unlike the previous works, from Plato through Augustine, which reserve this "god-likeness" for a reserved few, Pascal's view seems, in it's attempt, at least, accessible to all. There are certainly those who are possessed of a "God given" Grace, the Jensenists to whom he belonged, no doubt, but it wasn't their exclusive territory. But we can ourselves strive toward Grace.
Re-reading the class notes, and after re-reading Pascal for our papers, I'm impressed with how difficult it is to get a grasp on everything that he was saying. The sheer difficulty of the text, with so many arguments not laid out but in note form, and the curse of our course which is a thin historical context for the works that we're reading, I'm not sure that I'm really scratching the surface of what Pascal was after.
Who were the Jensenists and what was his relationship to them? Did he really believe that he was 'chosen" for grace? He died so young, and accomplished so much, but can the life of seclusion and study he lived really lead him to any insight into human nature other than an Academic/christian point-of-view?
It's the historical context of his time that I find illuminating. Knowing that he, Descartes, Bacon and Gallileo were more or less contemporaries, knowing that the bridge between science and faith was being formed, at great peril, in some cases, shows me, in my brief glimpse, that Pascal was a man of great faith and humility, in spite of his sense of his own importance as a thinker and scientist. That he was so clearly aware of the nature of his intellectual abilities compared to his peers, makes his insistence on the limits of reason, even his ability to reason, in accepting God,so very unlike Descartes. Perhaps it was his early death and the health problems he faced that allowed him to see himself as human and limited.
Ultimately what he gives me is a great sense of hope that a life spent at least in the pursuit of grace, is a good life. Perfection is not an option.
"The Great and Perfect Christian State, where white men worship God with perfect humility and, in following the teachings of Christ, behave with charity and love toward each other and strangers (as long as they are Christians), cherish chastity, marriage, and family that centers on reverence for the father, are whole with nature, pursue science in the name of God, and view knowledge as the ultimate good (tempered with the belief that God created all things). In this, men can live happily and well together. And women are there too. And Jews are allowed, as long as they love Christ, or even just like Christ. But they've got us beat in the after world, regardless."
I do accept that my thin take in it is no doubt due to my modern perspective. But like each of these books, I've got turn the corner and see that my modern perspective wasn't invented by me and me alone. And it was in this and the other two books that it indeed was created. I still don't think that Bacon was the heavyweight of the three, if only because it didn't argue it's point with much subtlety, or if it did, I missed it.
But I do get the discussion notes that he was theorizing a world of grace, and postulating that science is the way to negate the fall. It also seems, and this was borne out in the discussions, that he was proposing a form of democracy, which was inherent in the Utopian ideals that were floating around at the time of his writing.
These ideas, that there should be a merger of industry, science, and church/state, and that man should dominate and control nature to create it's ends, are the very foundation of the world we've been living in since that time. And that Bacon was part of the intellectual revolution that lay the ground for it.
I've come to understand, if only on a simple level, that this movement of philosophy was divided into three eras: the ancient philosophers, the christian philosophers, and the romantic philosophers. (Nussbaum)
We are leaving the ancient philosophers and now dealing with the Christians. Which introduces us to a new concept: the concept of Grace or Faith, that falls outside of Reason and Passion. And here is where I find Pascal so interesting. Rather than deny the difficulty of achieving a state of Grace (as compared to Bacon who, through his Utopia, is able to assume man's ability to rise above the Fall) Pascal seems to be very aware of how difficult it is.
He presents a view of reason and "imagination" as being both a gift and a curse to mankind. He states clearly that Man has been quite right to make these two powers (reason and imagination) into allies, because they bring us to beauty, justice, and happiness, which are the world's 'supreme good". But at the same time, he warns that the war between sense and reason are also "the most absurd cause of his errors". (II 44)
I think this is important, because it is in the contradictions inherent in man that we find a "proof" of God. Man's greatness is that he knows that he is wretched, and thus there must be hope that he can rise to Grace through faith in Christ.
And this is where I liked Pascal so much. The idea is that we must choose to believe in God because choosing to believe gives us the better chance of a good result. He is laying out, in a very elegant form of argument, that Reason, or proof, can only lead us to the door of Faith, and our knowledge of Good, Justice, and the happiness that come, but it is faith and faith alone that move us toward the "divinity" that Grace promises.
I found this to be a very humanist argument. Unlike the previous works, from Plato through Augustine, which reserve this "god-likeness" for a reserved few, Pascal's view seems, in it's attempt, at least, accessible to all. There are certainly those who are possessed of a "God given" Grace, the Jensenists to whom he belonged, no doubt, but it wasn't their exclusive territory. But we can ourselves strive toward Grace.
Re-reading the class notes, and after re-reading Pascal for our papers, I'm impressed with how difficult it is to get a grasp on everything that he was saying. The sheer difficulty of the text, with so many arguments not laid out but in note form, and the curse of our course which is a thin historical context for the works that we're reading, I'm not sure that I'm really scratching the surface of what Pascal was after.
Who were the Jensenists and what was his relationship to them? Did he really believe that he was 'chosen" for grace? He died so young, and accomplished so much, but can the life of seclusion and study he lived really lead him to any insight into human nature other than an Academic/christian point-of-view?
It's the historical context of his time that I find illuminating. Knowing that he, Descartes, Bacon and Gallileo were more or less contemporaries, knowing that the bridge between science and faith was being formed, at great peril, in some cases, shows me, in my brief glimpse, that Pascal was a man of great faith and humility, in spite of his sense of his own importance as a thinker and scientist. That he was so clearly aware of the nature of his intellectual abilities compared to his peers, makes his insistence on the limits of reason, even his ability to reason, in accepting God,so very unlike Descartes. Perhaps it was his early death and the health problems he faced that allowed him to see himself as human and limited.
Ultimately what he gives me is a great sense of hope that a life spent at least in the pursuit of grace, is a good life. Perfection is not an option.
Monday, October 12, 2009
Lucretius and Sappho: The Poetic Discourse
Nice Title. I will write more about Lucretius here, mainly because I take the point that Sappho was simply to be read for it's beauty without an analysis of it's time and structure and it's place in our debate between Reason and Passion. To me, fragment 31 stands out as the signpost for why we read her today: a dismissal of politics and mythology as things that stand for love in her world. She then celebrates, oddly, not a love she shares with someone, but her sadness at not being able to see her friend who is gone. The heartbreak in the poem is so poignant, small and so human.
Some say an army on horseback,
some say on foot, and some say ships
are the most beautiful things
on this black earth,
but i say
it is whatever you love.
It's easy to show this. Just look
at Helen, beautiful herself
beyond everything human,
and she left
her perfect husband and went
sailing off to Troy
without a thought for her child
or her dear parents, led astray
lightly
reminding me of Anactoria,
who is gone
and whose lovely walk
and bright
shimmering face
I would rather see
than all the chariots
and armed men in Lydia
but it cannot be
humans
pray to share
unexpectedly
Simple images like "this black earth" and "bright..... shimmering face" compose a picture of ourselves so powerful and undeniable that it's hard to imagine arguing with it. Hard to imagine denying it as an expression of it's, and our time.
I suppose that that is what I liked most about the poetry, and the answer to the big question, for me: "Why do We Read This Book?". I think we read it for the same reason we read any poetry: to understand our selves as human beings. It gave me an insight into just how human they were in those times. No different, no less complex than we are today. We like to imagine that technology is the great divide between our times and all others, but it hasn't changed our essential human needs, desires, and means of relating to the world and each other.
It still comes down to guns and butter.
And so now comes Lucretius. A poem about the foundation of our universe and our race. Swinging for the fences, he is. However, his main goal can be simplified, if possible, to the notion that he wishes to remove man from his fear of death which he feels drives us to evil (ambition, envy), and that we can rid ourselves of it by "observing Nature's laws and looking at her face" 1-91.
I suppose for the purposes of a "book report", I should go through my notes first. It's interesting in one sense, coming back to the work a week or two after we've moved on. My impressions have shifted now that we're reading Christian philosophy. So I won't stick to my notes too long.
But I did start with the Big Question: Why Are We Reading This?. And I wrote that little is known about Lucretius except that he was Roman and wrote this one poem. He most likely wrote other things, but they are lost, and that is most likely because he seemed to make very little impression on his immediate culture and time. He didn't organize his philosophy, it is from the Epicurans; nor did he imagine his science, much of it coming from the ancient Atomists, although he did add the notion of the" swerve". He didn't invent the didactic poem, although he seems to have perfected it's use in Roman literature along with Homer. So why do we read it?
Like Sappho, I think the answer lies in the undeniable humanity expressed in the form he chooses. By humanity, I mean the indivisible combination of Passion and Reason that describes us best. (Isn't this the point of this whole thing?)
Even though he rails against religious superstition and calls fervently for man to adopt a philosophical life, he does so with intense passion, vibrant imagery, logic, humour, and moreover, he does it all in rhyme. He tries to dismiss his use of the poetic form (1-932) as a necessary panacea to get people to swallow a bitter medicine, but I don't believe that a cold, passionless mind could sustain the exercise with nearly the success that Lucretius does.
It feels as though Lucretius, bound by the demands of his age - a culture of superstition and fear, an insecure warlike State, early, often violent death, a rigid hierarchical society - was trying to create an expression of his inner humanity. His belief system writ large. It feels like a way of extending himself to a larger world in hopes of finding an audience, and of moving them the way he was moved in his life. He wanted to be free, and free his fellow man as well:
"The mind seeks explanation. Since the universe extends forever out beyond those ramparts at which our world ends, the mind forever yearns to peer into infinity, to project beyond and outside itself, and there to soar free." (II, 1045)
I think I'd like to leave it at that. I will post notes from the class discussion which cover the questions asked and answered. More and more we're seeing the discussion on Reason and Passion lead us to their intrinsic need for each other in order that we may understand ourselves and our world. The Christians are bringing in a new idea, the idea of Faith, or Grace. But, and I'm reading Nussbaum now too, although I doubt I'll even get close to finishing it, but the need for both emotion and reason to help us make sense of ourselves is the point.
Perhaps passion, in the age of Plato, was a dangerous thing. Maybe it led to murder, mayhem and superstitious ritual. We have television and football now, which are regulated forms of stupidity, but without regulation, would football be a blood sport? The Greek plays we've read point to deeply violent, tragic results of passion. Perhaps it was in this climate that Plato's call for reason comes. After all, as Lucretius says, "Nothing comes from Nothing". Context is King.
Two ideas that I loved from "Nature of Things":
The idea that "Motion has impetus in thought". II-250-270
And the discussion of animals having feelings too.
The latter is an idea that comes well before it's time. Indeed, it seems that philosophers went well out of their way to deny animals any feelings, only recently to have the idea come back in the past couple of hundred (more or less?) years. Does admitting this notion change or challenge our ideas, as propagated by the biblical texts, of man's dominion over animal. There's a lovely equality of the species, at least on a level of our common experience of being living creatures on the same planet, subject to pain, suffering, birth, death, and possibly even love and grief, even of only at a primitive level.
The former idea shocked me, in a way, with the notion of having "Freewill", as he calls it, being an entirely physical construct, rather than something granted by God, or by intellectual choice. Choice is about the origin of motion: thought precedes action, action creates reaction which is emotion. I suppose as an actor and acting teacher I'm somewhat more interested in these ideas, which is why I'm trying to read Nussbaum. But I'm fascinated with the notion of the role of emotion in our decision making, and thought processes. Do we ever ask ourselves what emotion is? Why does the Cow seem to mourn her calf? When do emotions rise? Nussbaum believes they arise in/from the narrative form. As an actor, I understand that to be true. You can't create emotion from nothing, it comes in reaction to a story. Context which translates into action. Response which informs decision. Passion and Reason as a necessary combination of events that lead us through our lives.
I think this is why I'm so attracted to Lucretius, Mencius, and even Seneca, who I've yet to address, but will later. There's a sensuality, if that's the word, to their writing, perhaps because of the forms they choose - poetry, letter, story - a narrative that leads me through ideas in a way that I relate to emotionally as well as intellectually. Perhaps not each in perfect balance, but that's the advantage of time: I can thread them together for new meanings.
Also, these three books seem so relevant to our time today. This idea came up in the discussions of Lucretius as well as Seneca. Are we in a modern Epicurean/Stoic age? I still can't articulate why yet, but I think the answer is "yes". We are very much concerned with our relationship to nature. We are very suspicious of superstition/Religion. We have left our focus on the public sphere. In fact, politicians now tailor their messages to appeal to us in our private spheres: home, family, taxes/income, private good over public service as exemplified by the re-hashing of Adam Smith and the so-called 'free market" or trickle down effect of the economy. If we leave you alone to do as you think best in private, it will be better for the public good than if we try to orchestrate the public good itself. Most of all, live for today. Borrow and spend, don't save. Learn to cook and eat well, get therapy, be happy, and it will benefit society indirectly. Advertising directs us to feel good about living for ourselves.
Nothing comes from Nothing.
But like the recent collapse of the financial markets, are we setting ourselves up for another kind of fall? Are we in danger of living in complacent, only semi-functioning social structures that do not grow and support change? Are we in danger of a new kind of tyranny because of our ambivalence? 8 years of Bush would seem to say so. But maybe the strange Nobel prize for Obama says we don't want to.
Some say an army on horseback,
some say on foot, and some say ships
are the most beautiful things
on this black earth,
but i say
it is whatever you love.
It's easy to show this. Just look
at Helen, beautiful herself
beyond everything human,
and she left
her perfect husband and went
sailing off to Troy
without a thought for her child
or her dear parents, led astray
lightly
reminding me of Anactoria,
who is gone
and whose lovely walk
and bright
shimmering face
I would rather see
than all the chariots
and armed men in Lydia
but it cannot be
humans
pray to share
unexpectedly
Simple images like "this black earth" and "bright..... shimmering face" compose a picture of ourselves so powerful and undeniable that it's hard to imagine arguing with it. Hard to imagine denying it as an expression of it's, and our time.
I suppose that that is what I liked most about the poetry, and the answer to the big question, for me: "Why do We Read This Book?". I think we read it for the same reason we read any poetry: to understand our selves as human beings. It gave me an insight into just how human they were in those times. No different, no less complex than we are today. We like to imagine that technology is the great divide between our times and all others, but it hasn't changed our essential human needs, desires, and means of relating to the world and each other.
It still comes down to guns and butter.
And so now comes Lucretius. A poem about the foundation of our universe and our race. Swinging for the fences, he is. However, his main goal can be simplified, if possible, to the notion that he wishes to remove man from his fear of death which he feels drives us to evil (ambition, envy), and that we can rid ourselves of it by "observing Nature's laws and looking at her face" 1-91.
I suppose for the purposes of a "book report", I should go through my notes first. It's interesting in one sense, coming back to the work a week or two after we've moved on. My impressions have shifted now that we're reading Christian philosophy. So I won't stick to my notes too long.
But I did start with the Big Question: Why Are We Reading This?. And I wrote that little is known about Lucretius except that he was Roman and wrote this one poem. He most likely wrote other things, but they are lost, and that is most likely because he seemed to make very little impression on his immediate culture and time. He didn't organize his philosophy, it is from the Epicurans; nor did he imagine his science, much of it coming from the ancient Atomists, although he did add the notion of the" swerve". He didn't invent the didactic poem, although he seems to have perfected it's use in Roman literature along with Homer. So why do we read it?
Like Sappho, I think the answer lies in the undeniable humanity expressed in the form he chooses. By humanity, I mean the indivisible combination of Passion and Reason that describes us best. (Isn't this the point of this whole thing?)
Even though he rails against religious superstition and calls fervently for man to adopt a philosophical life, he does so with intense passion, vibrant imagery, logic, humour, and moreover, he does it all in rhyme. He tries to dismiss his use of the poetic form (1-932) as a necessary panacea to get people to swallow a bitter medicine, but I don't believe that a cold, passionless mind could sustain the exercise with nearly the success that Lucretius does.
It feels as though Lucretius, bound by the demands of his age - a culture of superstition and fear, an insecure warlike State, early, often violent death, a rigid hierarchical society - was trying to create an expression of his inner humanity. His belief system writ large. It feels like a way of extending himself to a larger world in hopes of finding an audience, and of moving them the way he was moved in his life. He wanted to be free, and free his fellow man as well:
"The mind seeks explanation. Since the universe extends forever out beyond those ramparts at which our world ends, the mind forever yearns to peer into infinity, to project beyond and outside itself, and there to soar free." (II, 1045)
I think I'd like to leave it at that. I will post notes from the class discussion which cover the questions asked and answered. More and more we're seeing the discussion on Reason and Passion lead us to their intrinsic need for each other in order that we may understand ourselves and our world. The Christians are bringing in a new idea, the idea of Faith, or Grace. But, and I'm reading Nussbaum now too, although I doubt I'll even get close to finishing it, but the need for both emotion and reason to help us make sense of ourselves is the point.
Perhaps passion, in the age of Plato, was a dangerous thing. Maybe it led to murder, mayhem and superstitious ritual. We have television and football now, which are regulated forms of stupidity, but without regulation, would football be a blood sport? The Greek plays we've read point to deeply violent, tragic results of passion. Perhaps it was in this climate that Plato's call for reason comes. After all, as Lucretius says, "Nothing comes from Nothing". Context is King.
Two ideas that I loved from "Nature of Things":
The idea that "Motion has impetus in thought". II-250-270
And the discussion of animals having feelings too.
The latter is an idea that comes well before it's time. Indeed, it seems that philosophers went well out of their way to deny animals any feelings, only recently to have the idea come back in the past couple of hundred (more or less?) years. Does admitting this notion change or challenge our ideas, as propagated by the biblical texts, of man's dominion over animal. There's a lovely equality of the species, at least on a level of our common experience of being living creatures on the same planet, subject to pain, suffering, birth, death, and possibly even love and grief, even of only at a primitive level.
The former idea shocked me, in a way, with the notion of having "Freewill", as he calls it, being an entirely physical construct, rather than something granted by God, or by intellectual choice. Choice is about the origin of motion: thought precedes action, action creates reaction which is emotion. I suppose as an actor and acting teacher I'm somewhat more interested in these ideas, which is why I'm trying to read Nussbaum. But I'm fascinated with the notion of the role of emotion in our decision making, and thought processes. Do we ever ask ourselves what emotion is? Why does the Cow seem to mourn her calf? When do emotions rise? Nussbaum believes they arise in/from the narrative form. As an actor, I understand that to be true. You can't create emotion from nothing, it comes in reaction to a story. Context which translates into action. Response which informs decision. Passion and Reason as a necessary combination of events that lead us through our lives.
I think this is why I'm so attracted to Lucretius, Mencius, and even Seneca, who I've yet to address, but will later. There's a sensuality, if that's the word, to their writing, perhaps because of the forms they choose - poetry, letter, story - a narrative that leads me through ideas in a way that I relate to emotionally as well as intellectually. Perhaps not each in perfect balance, but that's the advantage of time: I can thread them together for new meanings.
Also, these three books seem so relevant to our time today. This idea came up in the discussions of Lucretius as well as Seneca. Are we in a modern Epicurean/Stoic age? I still can't articulate why yet, but I think the answer is "yes". We are very much concerned with our relationship to nature. We are very suspicious of superstition/Religion. We have left our focus on the public sphere. In fact, politicians now tailor their messages to appeal to us in our private spheres: home, family, taxes/income, private good over public service as exemplified by the re-hashing of Adam Smith and the so-called 'free market" or trickle down effect of the economy. If we leave you alone to do as you think best in private, it will be better for the public good than if we try to orchestrate the public good itself. Most of all, live for today. Borrow and spend, don't save. Learn to cook and eat well, get therapy, be happy, and it will benefit society indirectly. Advertising directs us to feel good about living for ourselves.
Nothing comes from Nothing.
But like the recent collapse of the financial markets, are we setting ourselves up for another kind of fall? Are we in danger of living in complacent, only semi-functioning social structures that do not grow and support change? Are we in danger of a new kind of tyranny because of our ambivalence? 8 years of Bush would seem to say so. But maybe the strange Nobel prize for Obama says we don't want to.
Saturday, October 3, 2009
Journal Update: Antigone and Medea
Well, we were warned not to leave the journal too long as it was hard to go back and write about all the books we've read and of course, I didn't listen. It's only been two weeks but it feels like a long time since I read Antigone/Medea and Sappho/Aristotle. Reading that and it strikes me how very large each of these works is. It occurred to me today in the Lucretius seminar: each of these books has spawned entire industries of academic work, and here we are attempting to wrap our heads around them in quick succession, two at a time, week after week.
But that, in a way, helped me with Lucretius. I realized that the point is to read the books for a progression of the larger idea, passion vs. reason, and the balancing act that man has been struggling with since the beginning of written thought. We are by nature passionate beings and also thinking beings, and the two live in an uneasy balance within us. So how do/have we define(d) ourselves as a species? How have we negotiated our relationship with the world around us which is so incapable of organizing itself as well as we can? How do we create and regulate social order when our emotions and fears can get the better of us and threaten to topple it? How do we create room for ourselves to still be sentient beings within the demands of order and a moral society?
So taking this idea, rather than replicating my notes from the readings and discussions, I will try to fill in the blanks from the past two weeks.
Antigone/Medea
I had read and seen Medea before and was familiar with it. We were getting a visit from Zoe Caldwell when I was in theater school and she had recently starred, to enormous acclaim and a Tony award, in a production of Medea that her husband, Robert Whitehead, had directed. We watched a video of the performance and studied her carefully. It was odd for me, having never seen classical theater before except for a high school production of Iphegenia in Aulis that my father directed and in which I performed as a six-year old. I don't remember much except that I had to be carried on stage asleep but held up my entrance because I had to pee. We all wore tunics and I saw the full breast of the girl playing Iphegenia.
Ms. Caldwell's Medea indeed sported the same tunics, but I was struck by one extraordinary thing: her voice. It was so full and deep and pained, like a wail from an animal being sent to slaughter (I grew up in the country and unfortunately have heard such a thing). It seemed to emanate from somewhere deep in her groin, which indeed it must have, because she spent most of her performance clutching and rubbing what I could only imagine was her womb. I've never heard anything like it since on stage, or anywhere for that matter.
When she spoke, she talked about the difficulty she had each night as she sat for dinner with her sons before the show. She said she couldn't look at them without crying, a feeling that persisted until the end of the run. She admitted that she was using them to prepare for her performance each night, imagining slaughtering them with her own hands as they ate quietly. I thought my mother was the only one who did that kind of thing.
The play was a deeply moving meditation on a woman who had been grievously betrayed. There was no sense of Jason being right. He had obviously scorned his wife, and her grief had turned inward to rage, and then outward to murder. It was the story of the first wife scorned by a callow husband for a younger woman. The sense of great injustice was palpable and righteous. And she wasn't taking it lying down. No wonder New Yorkers loved it. (I'm joking, but the point is that the production was very much of it's time).
It was interesting to read the play again with this experience in hand. This time I saw (forgive me) Jason's side of things. Perhaps it's because I've been through a divorce myself, but I saw a world in which Jason was also trapped by circumstance. He didn't handle it very well, and to me that was the mistake. If he had a master plan, he should have made her a partner in it. But perhaps, in that age, a man needn't but assume that his wishes stood for the best interests of his family. But still, the drama of "natural" law, versus social norm, the law of man, plays out like a time-bomb.
But that is nature of great drama, especially tragedy. There is no "bad guy", certainly a hero and a villain, but we must have empathy for both or the drama sinks! (or it's a tv series) Circumstances and time are the true enemies. Perhaps this is the nature of the struggle? We contain within us the struggle between passion and reason, but are victims, if we fail, of time and circumstance.
Antigone astonished me. I had never read it before, nor seen a production, and I left it thinking it was one of the great tragedies I had read. I thought that Arthur Miller would have written it, had he been around back then. It was as didactic as anything that he had ever written, but like the best of his work, it's essential humanity soared over the moral lesson it tried to teach.
Like Joe Keller or Willie Loman, Creon has a tenuous hold on power over his family, and the fear of failure and threat from within drives him to inflexibility and rage. Caught in his own egotistical trap, he is forced to condemn his son's fiance for doing what all acknowledge to be "the right thing", burying her brother to save his soul.
Antigone as well is caught by the same inflexibility, and that is the stuff of both comedy and tragedy. Two rigid characters caught in a circumstance that demands they negotiate change. And like all great tragedies, from Hamlet to The Crucible, it ends in the physical death of the hero, and the moral (emotional?) death of the villain.
And again, the lesson is the same, a man of reason is reduced to an emotional wreck, and an emotional heroine makes a treaty of reason with her soul, removing herself from fear of death. They change places, as it were. In both these plays, the marriage of Passion and Reason fails. And I think that's the point: in marriage, each partner must be able to accommodate the other. They must strive for balance. The stuff of marriage, I suppose, but a little dull for a Greek Tragedy.
But that, in a way, helped me with Lucretius. I realized that the point is to read the books for a progression of the larger idea, passion vs. reason, and the balancing act that man has been struggling with since the beginning of written thought. We are by nature passionate beings and also thinking beings, and the two live in an uneasy balance within us. So how do/have we define(d) ourselves as a species? How have we negotiated our relationship with the world around us which is so incapable of organizing itself as well as we can? How do we create and regulate social order when our emotions and fears can get the better of us and threaten to topple it? How do we create room for ourselves to still be sentient beings within the demands of order and a moral society?
So taking this idea, rather than replicating my notes from the readings and discussions, I will try to fill in the blanks from the past two weeks.
Antigone/Medea
I had read and seen Medea before and was familiar with it. We were getting a visit from Zoe Caldwell when I was in theater school and she had recently starred, to enormous acclaim and a Tony award, in a production of Medea that her husband, Robert Whitehead, had directed. We watched a video of the performance and studied her carefully. It was odd for me, having never seen classical theater before except for a high school production of Iphegenia in Aulis that my father directed and in which I performed as a six-year old. I don't remember much except that I had to be carried on stage asleep but held up my entrance because I had to pee. We all wore tunics and I saw the full breast of the girl playing Iphegenia.
Ms. Caldwell's Medea indeed sported the same tunics, but I was struck by one extraordinary thing: her voice. It was so full and deep and pained, like a wail from an animal being sent to slaughter (I grew up in the country and unfortunately have heard such a thing). It seemed to emanate from somewhere deep in her groin, which indeed it must have, because she spent most of her performance clutching and rubbing what I could only imagine was her womb. I've never heard anything like it since on stage, or anywhere for that matter.
When she spoke, she talked about the difficulty she had each night as she sat for dinner with her sons before the show. She said she couldn't look at them without crying, a feeling that persisted until the end of the run. She admitted that she was using them to prepare for her performance each night, imagining slaughtering them with her own hands as they ate quietly. I thought my mother was the only one who did that kind of thing.
The play was a deeply moving meditation on a woman who had been grievously betrayed. There was no sense of Jason being right. He had obviously scorned his wife, and her grief had turned inward to rage, and then outward to murder. It was the story of the first wife scorned by a callow husband for a younger woman. The sense of great injustice was palpable and righteous. And she wasn't taking it lying down. No wonder New Yorkers loved it. (I'm joking, but the point is that the production was very much of it's time).
It was interesting to read the play again with this experience in hand. This time I saw (forgive me) Jason's side of things. Perhaps it's because I've been through a divorce myself, but I saw a world in which Jason was also trapped by circumstance. He didn't handle it very well, and to me that was the mistake. If he had a master plan, he should have made her a partner in it. But perhaps, in that age, a man needn't but assume that his wishes stood for the best interests of his family. But still, the drama of "natural" law, versus social norm, the law of man, plays out like a time-bomb.
But that is nature of great drama, especially tragedy. There is no "bad guy", certainly a hero and a villain, but we must have empathy for both or the drama sinks! (or it's a tv series) Circumstances and time are the true enemies. Perhaps this is the nature of the struggle? We contain within us the struggle between passion and reason, but are victims, if we fail, of time and circumstance.
Antigone astonished me. I had never read it before, nor seen a production, and I left it thinking it was one of the great tragedies I had read. I thought that Arthur Miller would have written it, had he been around back then. It was as didactic as anything that he had ever written, but like the best of his work, it's essential humanity soared over the moral lesson it tried to teach.
Like Joe Keller or Willie Loman, Creon has a tenuous hold on power over his family, and the fear of failure and threat from within drives him to inflexibility and rage. Caught in his own egotistical trap, he is forced to condemn his son's fiance for doing what all acknowledge to be "the right thing", burying her brother to save his soul.
Antigone as well is caught by the same inflexibility, and that is the stuff of both comedy and tragedy. Two rigid characters caught in a circumstance that demands they negotiate change. And like all great tragedies, from Hamlet to The Crucible, it ends in the physical death of the hero, and the moral (emotional?) death of the villain.
And again, the lesson is the same, a man of reason is reduced to an emotional wreck, and an emotional heroine makes a treaty of reason with her soul, removing herself from fear of death. They change places, as it were. In both these plays, the marriage of Passion and Reason fails. And I think that's the point: in marriage, each partner must be able to accommodate the other. They must strive for balance. The stuff of marriage, I suppose, but a little dull for a Greek Tragedy.
Monday, September 14, 2009
Mencius. Emotion, reason and Plato's world. The beginning of the "Limits of Reason"?
I'm finding that I'm getting more out of reading the books AFTER the seminars. The rush to read everything for class leaves huge gaps in comprehension and even larger ones in finding specific ideas about passion and reason. It seems that afterwards, as I read the discussions and do some secondary source reading, that I start to find some more meaning and being to pull ideas together.
And then, of course, I've got to keep plowing through for the next class. So I thought I'd try reversing the trend this week and read some secondary stuff as I read the primary text. As to be expected, I'm behind in the readings, but I'm seeing a better picture of what I have read.
The main article that I've read is David Wong's "Is There A Distinction Between Reason And Emotion in Mencius?". The title certainly led me to believe that there were answers to my questions lying within, and there are. But there's also a treatise for a new way to understand emotion. Much of the article was tough sledding for me, having not read any of the ideas that it was referring to, but I did get a very sure sense of where Mencius takes the argument of reason and passion.
Unlike Plato, Genesis and The Qur'an, Mencius doesn't create any contrast between the two, rather arguing that the two work together, drawing a connection between "emotion and recognizing reasons to act.." Moreover, he is very clear that men should strive to live with benevolence and compassion without thought of reward from without, except contentment in this life. All men, that is, except Kings.
The idea, as illustrated by the story of the King who saved the oxen from sacrifice because he couldn't stand the thought of it cringing as it was being led to it's death like a man to his execution. (Book 1A7)
The idea, it seems, is that the emotional reaction, or compassion, that the King shows is an inborn, natural condition, which allows the King to then identify by importance, the salient facts that lead to his decision to spare the oxen. In the story, the King substitutes a goat for the oxen and is reminded both that he didn't wince at the thought of the goat dying simply because he had never seen the goat, and we can't feel compassion for things we don't see. The other lesson is that the King, having the capacity for compassion for the oxen, can also therefore have the capacity for compassion toward his people who suffer greatly from his attempts to expand his kingdom.
This goes toward Mencius' vision of the "True King", one who rules by compassion.
But there seems to be a split in the moral world between Kings and common men. Common men should feel compassion without any thought of their own reward, whereas Kings should expect to gain greater wealth and rule their kingdom more effectively if they become a True King. Do we then make exceptions for the exigent circumstances facing the person? Do Kings face a greater burden than commoners and therefore have less burden to be selfless?
I think, from what I've read, that the key to Kings and the extra burden of discretion they carry, as well as the extra, what, gift?, of striving for rewards outside themselves, lies the key to men's ability to live in harmony. Mencius seems to be saying that good social order is the way for men to live fully in "The Way"
iiiA3: "Those without constant means of support will not have constant hearts... to punish them after they have fallen foul of the law is to set a trap for the people."
Mencius does go a long way to speak against profit over "well-being" of the social order.
In this way there lies another difference between Plato and Mencius. There seems to be a sense that men are all equal (except for Kings) and can all achieve benevolence and equality in their mortal lives.
What I'm gathering here, from the argument made by Wong, is that there are indeed limits to Reason and the rational life posited by Plato. The argument is that reason, void of emotion, is not enough to choose between all the facts available to make a proper decision of action. Emotion helps us understand what is important and how to move forward.
A child has fallen into the well. I feel compassion and am driven to making a decision. Can I help? Will I fall in too and thus not be of help? Do I have a broken leg? Do I have to get to the hospital where my own child's life is in danger? The facts around me are used to make a decision, but it is the response to the situation that drives me to make it.
And that response is "God-given", and so naturally good.
Mencius 2A6:
"No man is devoid of a heart sensitive to the suffering of others.....The heart of compassion is the germ of benevolence(Jen); the heart of shame, of dutifulness(i, righteousness); the heart of courtesy and modesty, of observance of the rites(li, propriety); the heart of right and wrong, of wisdom (ch'i).... For a man possessing these four germs to deny his own potentialities is for him to cripple himself... If a man is able to develop all these four germs that he possesses, it will be like a fire starting up or a spring coming through."
and "Benevolence is the high honour bestowed by Heaven and the peaceful abode of man. Not to be benevolent when nothing stands in the way is to show lack of wisdom"
And then, of course, I've got to keep plowing through for the next class. So I thought I'd try reversing the trend this week and read some secondary stuff as I read the primary text. As to be expected, I'm behind in the readings, but I'm seeing a better picture of what I have read.
The main article that I've read is David Wong's "Is There A Distinction Between Reason And Emotion in Mencius?". The title certainly led me to believe that there were answers to my questions lying within, and there are. But there's also a treatise for a new way to understand emotion. Much of the article was tough sledding for me, having not read any of the ideas that it was referring to, but I did get a very sure sense of where Mencius takes the argument of reason and passion.
Unlike Plato, Genesis and The Qur'an, Mencius doesn't create any contrast between the two, rather arguing that the two work together, drawing a connection between "emotion and recognizing reasons to act.." Moreover, he is very clear that men should strive to live with benevolence and compassion without thought of reward from without, except contentment in this life. All men, that is, except Kings.
The idea, as illustrated by the story of the King who saved the oxen from sacrifice because he couldn't stand the thought of it cringing as it was being led to it's death like a man to his execution. (Book 1A7)
The idea, it seems, is that the emotional reaction, or compassion, that the King shows is an inborn, natural condition, which allows the King to then identify by importance, the salient facts that lead to his decision to spare the oxen. In the story, the King substitutes a goat for the oxen and is reminded both that he didn't wince at the thought of the goat dying simply because he had never seen the goat, and we can't feel compassion for things we don't see. The other lesson is that the King, having the capacity for compassion for the oxen, can also therefore have the capacity for compassion toward his people who suffer greatly from his attempts to expand his kingdom.
This goes toward Mencius' vision of the "True King", one who rules by compassion.
But there seems to be a split in the moral world between Kings and common men. Common men should feel compassion without any thought of their own reward, whereas Kings should expect to gain greater wealth and rule their kingdom more effectively if they become a True King. Do we then make exceptions for the exigent circumstances facing the person? Do Kings face a greater burden than commoners and therefore have less burden to be selfless?
I think, from what I've read, that the key to Kings and the extra burden of discretion they carry, as well as the extra, what, gift?, of striving for rewards outside themselves, lies the key to men's ability to live in harmony. Mencius seems to be saying that good social order is the way for men to live fully in "The Way"
iiiA3: "Those without constant means of support will not have constant hearts... to punish them after they have fallen foul of the law is to set a trap for the people."
Mencius does go a long way to speak against profit over "well-being" of the social order.
In this way there lies another difference between Plato and Mencius. There seems to be a sense that men are all equal (except for Kings) and can all achieve benevolence and equality in their mortal lives.
What I'm gathering here, from the argument made by Wong, is that there are indeed limits to Reason and the rational life posited by Plato. The argument is that reason, void of emotion, is not enough to choose between all the facts available to make a proper decision of action. Emotion helps us understand what is important and how to move forward.
A child has fallen into the well. I feel compassion and am driven to making a decision. Can I help? Will I fall in too and thus not be of help? Do I have a broken leg? Do I have to get to the hospital where my own child's life is in danger? The facts around me are used to make a decision, but it is the response to the situation that drives me to make it.
And that response is "God-given", and so naturally good.
Mencius 2A6:
"No man is devoid of a heart sensitive to the suffering of others.....The heart of compassion is the germ of benevolence(Jen); the heart of shame, of dutifulness(i, righteousness); the heart of courtesy and modesty, of observance of the rites(li, propriety); the heart of right and wrong, of wisdom (ch'i).... For a man possessing these four germs to deny his own potentialities is for him to cripple himself... If a man is able to develop all these four germs that he possesses, it will be like a fire starting up or a spring coming through."
and "Benevolence is the high honour bestowed by Heaven and the peaceful abode of man. Not to be benevolent when nothing stands in the way is to show lack of wisdom"
Sunday, September 13, 2009
More Plato
So my attempts to eneter the discussion on the group page feel very much like the way Stephen described his potential forays into Chinese History: I canget away with saying all kinds of stupid things as I lack any background or context. But I figure the education comes in the attempt. That being said, I'm getting a lot out of the dialogue as it is forming and moving on into the next readings.
The one question that I wrote down in my notes while reading and thought too stupid to ask, is still perhaps the best question: how do we define 'reason" and "passion"? The answer, I think, is to being with the definitions in the texts.
Genesis and The "Q", seem to have it all focused on "good" and "evil". But the players in the dramas of Genesis seem to need to be told by God what the distinction is. And while they are presented with choice, it seems to imply that there is or will be no inherent understanding of the difference by mankind, only a knowledge that punishment follows for disobeyance, reward for good behavior. "God's Will" seems to trump "Man's Better Nature". I suppose that might be the fallout of having eaten the apple and been cast out of the Garden of Eden.
A very clever posting implied that there is no inherent tension between good and evil in Plato's system, but that it was made up of varying, circular degrees of good. I'm not sure I understand that, though. It seems clear that there is a tension between "equilibrium" and "disequilibrium", and that "disequilibrium" is the natural state, and "equilibrium" the desired state, to be sought but never accomplished in life.
This tension, while it doesn't resonate with the big sways of good and evil the way the bible and the Q do, does seem be accompanied by a reward system: a star for the achievers of intelligence, and womanhood or animal-hood or dung-beetledom for those who, by lack of education, lack of god-likeness, fall short.
I couldn't help but feel, albeit in my first-ever reading of Plato, that there was an underlying passion to his argument. I've ordered a book on the concept of intelligent design in Plato from the library. I'll see if I can expand on this notion in some kind of (hopefully) intelligent way.
The one question that I wrote down in my notes while reading and thought too stupid to ask, is still perhaps the best question: how do we define 'reason" and "passion"? The answer, I think, is to being with the definitions in the texts.
Genesis and The "Q", seem to have it all focused on "good" and "evil". But the players in the dramas of Genesis seem to need to be told by God what the distinction is. And while they are presented with choice, it seems to imply that there is or will be no inherent understanding of the difference by mankind, only a knowledge that punishment follows for disobeyance, reward for good behavior. "God's Will" seems to trump "Man's Better Nature". I suppose that might be the fallout of having eaten the apple and been cast out of the Garden of Eden.
A very clever posting implied that there is no inherent tension between good and evil in Plato's system, but that it was made up of varying, circular degrees of good. I'm not sure I understand that, though. It seems clear that there is a tension between "equilibrium" and "disequilibrium", and that "disequilibrium" is the natural state, and "equilibrium" the desired state, to be sought but never accomplished in life.
This tension, while it doesn't resonate with the big sways of good and evil the way the bible and the Q do, does seem be accompanied by a reward system: a star for the achievers of intelligence, and womanhood or animal-hood or dung-beetledom for those who, by lack of education, lack of god-likeness, fall short.
I couldn't help but feel, albeit in my first-ever reading of Plato, that there was an underlying passion to his argument. I've ordered a book on the concept of intelligent design in Plato from the library. I'll see if I can expand on this notion in some kind of (hopefully) intelligent way.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Plato's Timaeus
I'm starting my journal here, after the first class, mainly because I wasn't really sure how to start before. I took notes as I read but found that they let me down during the discussion. This is the case, I think, because I was reading the text for basic comprehension, rather than any kind of critical eye toward the ideas of passion and reason. The next post will have some thoughts about the texts, both as they came up during my reading, but more specifically in response to the questions and discussions held in the class.
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