Temple Grandin: The world needs all kinds of minds | Video on TED.com

Temple Grandin: The world needs all kinds of minds | Video on TED.com

Patsy Rodenburg: Why I do theater | Rousseau on the Arts.

Patsy Rodenburg: Why I do theater | Video on TED.com

Progress and children's rights

Itard's "...The Young Savage", and Rousseau's "Politics and the Arts."

Fascinating class. First there was Itard. We began by watching some clips from Truffault's film "The Wild Child" which I, as I always have, found very moving. Truffault found such empathy for the young boy, and he was played so brilliantly by Jean-Pierre Cargol, not, as I said in class, Jean-Pierre Leaud, although the film is dedicated to him.

What was interesting about showing the movie is not that we saw the film and could comment on the story, but rather that we saw another interpretation of the story of the Wild Child, one which understood him as being alone and scared in the world, and facing " institutionalization, a big theme for Truffault. In comparison to Itard's book, which attempts to be a more philosophical/scientific view of the boy, it underlines the one problem of the subject: the boy could not express himself in our context and so was left to be "used" towards the ends of the interpreters.

Itard's project, to examine "man in his natural, primitive state", was quickly shot down in class as having no scientific footing to stand on. The boy is now thought to have been abused and autistic, and his sample size of one hardly allows extrapolation to a general concept.

In spite of Michael's attempts to get us to focus on Itard's project, we couldn't. But perhaps it is not Itard's project that matters. What matters is our fascination with the figure of the social outcast, the child thrown out of our midst to fend for himself. Whether it is Truffault, Itard, or us reading the book, we couldn't help but feel a fundamental empathy for him, lining up our sympathies so clearly in defense of his nature and situation. We felt pity for his "alone-ness", his disadvantage. We took responsibility for it: he was abused and cast out, he was autistic, learning impaired. It wasn't his fault. Somehow, we innately feel that being in civilization is the only possible way to survive and be happy and feel anxiety about those who are left out.

So Itard may very well be right: "that moral superiority which has been said to be natural to man, is merely the result of civilization, which raises him above other animals by a great and powerful stimulus" (Itard, p.144) Our pity for him was raised by our sense of empathy for his isolation. It's how we would feel if we were cast out of society, man's natural state.

Rousseau was fun. Such a flawed and powerful document. The big questions it raised were: "how do we create good citizens," and "if family is no longer the core of society, then what is (can be)?"

The problem, to me, is how do you "create" a citizen without a totalitarian government? The failed communist states whose demise bred the faction-ism Rousseau apparently feared, is example enough of the problem of trying to accomplish this task.

The only remaining example is the USA, which poses another set of problems. I think that advertising is the very thing that Rousseau was arguing against in this text. Without foreseeing it, he imagines that any medium so connected to pleasing the audience and citizenry could never instruct. Society would be too consumed with vanity and desire for the "spectacle-makers" to risk offense. The US, and indeed the rest of the western world, although Europe's long histories help galvanize people in their identities to an extent not found in North America, is driven by the consumer culture, which is fueled by the control of desire and stimulation of growth by advertising. But what growth? I think that we've seen in recent events that this growth was false, a balloon of wants built on borrowed money. A pyramid scheme that ran out of time. And so what kind of citizens are we? Are our core values based on our relations to each other and our society? Or are they related to our possessions and ambitions?

I rather detest much of Rousseau's "Solution", but can't help to recognize the problem he outlined as being alive and well and living 250 years later, undoubtedly on a scale not even he would have anticipated. Although I'm sure I sell his imagination short.

But what to do? The Conservative government would like to legislate taste, but the idea is abhorrent to me, mainly because their taste is a throwback to a time that can't survive out of the enclaves that this particular government comes from. They want our culture to reflect the world of the straight, married family. A world I don't see thriving around me anymore. And one which excludes very good people from having, what?, franchise or agency in the world simply because they differ from the "norm".

Moreover, there's a challenge brewing in court over polygamy. The government tried unsuccessfully to prosecute on the grounds of Canada's anti-polygamy laws. The case was struck down as being un-prosecutable. The lawyer representing the government in the case told me the problem, as he saw it, is that there are more people living in what could be seen as poly-amorous relationships in Vancouver than there are in Bountiful, B.C. Cluny's story is case in point. If her boyfriend were to move in, or even stay there three nights a week with her, her ex-husband and children, the government would then have grounds to investigate, going firmly against Trudeau's famous dictate that "The government has no place in the bedrooms of the nation." But this is the power that the government seeks! The case has since been refered to the BC Supreme court for a ruling on the constitutionality of the anti-poligamy laws. If they are struck down, the only legal recourse would be to prosecute on behalf of the young girls co-opted into marriages and sex before the age of 16 (this is the preferred course of my lawyer-acquaintance).

The family as the core of our legal and moral structure is on its last legs.

So how do we structure our society if not on the family? I think the beginning of the answer lies as much in the last case as it does in the Wild Boy of Aveyron: children's rights. We're now seeing a global movement to enshrine the rights of children. Not only are they entitled to human rights as all are, but they entitled now to special rights: the right to a level of care that supersedes the parents individual authority. These rights are interesting because they do two things: they grant rights without a demand of responsibility from the rights-holder, and they legislate duty. Perhaps it's in these two poles that the beginning of a new understanding of citizenship can begin.

Government

I think our guest lecturer hit it on the head when, after talking about Confucius, said, ".. and we're only barely reaching out to scratch the surface".

In brief, my feelings about Locke are this: it's not a very deep look into the true nature of human society and nature. It felt, to me, like a political tract, as though it were using the frame of a narrative about the nature of man and civilization to justify an argument for private property and its' legal and violent defense.

Unlike Freud or Darwin, I don't think he was trying to answer a big question so much as he was trying to build a case for an idea, or belief.

I'm much more prone toward Rousseau's assessment of private property from his Discourse on Inequality:

"The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying 'This is mine', and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society."

In other words, private property is not a product of labour and an extension of Man in Nature, but a cynical product of civilization, built on the shoulders of bullying and imbalance of power.

I am fighting with my neighbor over a fence line, determined not to allow him one inch of what I think is mine. He, likewise, is determined to expand his reach to the last possible inch. Fucker. He's wrapping his property in chicken wire, built a locked gate, and has parked an ugly RV in his backyard. I don't want to see it. I hate the chicken wire. He brought in a backhoe and tore out the natural hill in front of his house (which is actually municipal property, not his), and replaced it with a horrific stone wall that bears no aesthetic connection to our surrounding landscape. He wants to cut the tops off the hundred or so trees in front of his place that denies him a view of the ocean (guiltily, I admit that most of the trees blocking my view were taken down many years ago.) Doesn't matter, he has no taste. That is, he doesn't share mine. In my opinion, he's ruining what is lovely about our rugged pieces of land on our little island.

But it's his property. He can do with it what he will.

I hate private property. But, even if we held all land in common, we would still have to deal with people who would lay claim to things and try to form an advantage over others, or just basically ruin the party for everybody. This, I think, is man's true 'State of Nature'.

There's a development on the other side of the island where all the lots have been created to make the least impact on the natural lay of the land. All owners must adhere to a strict building and use code. All amenities are shared and paid for by the strata. And no fences are allowed to be built. I want to live there. Of course, it's extremely expensive. So I'm stuck here with my RV-and-Chicken-wire loving neighbor, and absolutely no recourse but to try and get along with him.

I'm going to build a fence. As tall and long as I can, and blot him out of my life. This is the true nature of the social contract: not that we must agree to get along, but that we can't kill each other, so we're best to build walls and stay separate.

This is the legacy of Locke.

I wish we had more of Confucius in us. I wish virtue was defined by our conduct toward each other and not by our possessions. I wish the social contract governed our feelings about living together on a crowded planet, rather than our right to build fences to protect that which is ours from the use of others. I wish we had a society built on humility rather than aggressive acquisition.

Of course, I'm only scratching the surface. I know.

Violence

The readings this week were wonderful and challenging for me. I had read All Quiet before but had never read Arendt. In fact, I've never read any political theory before this year and have found it a fascinating challenge. Along with philosphy, I didn't anticipate an interest as deep as I have for them.

Unfortunately, I missed the class on this topic, but I got some of the notes. It seems like the class, an interesting phenomenon this semester, veered into the personal on this topic as well. Like dislocation, many people in the class have had experiences with war and violence in their lives that I have escaped in mine.

But I can see where "All Quiet..." would provoke that response, however. I found it such a deeply personal, deeply felt, account of soldiering that it was impossible not to respond personally. What was of great interest, of course, where the dynamics of rage that accompanied the violence. Firstly, as Arendt makes very clear, the implements of war had already begun to outstrip and outsize the human scale, reducing the soldiers to the size and vulnerability of bugs on the battlefield. While they still went into hand-to-hand combat, they seemed to view their enemy with a certain bureaucratic distance. The only thing that really provoked anger was when an enemy was "unfair", and used "cruel" weaponry like a jagged bayonnet. Otherwise, they charged and killed each other out of a certain dumb, autonomic response, winning and losing small patches of meaningless ground, and only after being rendered senseless by artillery. Violence is possible only with implements, and emerges from rage, which can only be triggered by a sense of injustice. But since there is no injustice in an imperialistic impulse, one must be created by the commanders and channeled toward an un-characterized enemy.

And so the personal rage was directed at their superiors and the army, the "Tyranny of none", as Arendt calls it. Most likely this happens because they are the only identifiable, personal target for rage available to the soldiers. But it fits perfectly with Arendt definitions of power and violence. And they also had only one outlet for feelings of love and bonding in the face of death, which were with each other. Their past life had been relegated to sentiment, which Arendt refers to as "the perversion of feeling" (p. 64).

And this is the interesting thing, for me. This junction between death and the political is a fork in the road. Arendt describes it clearly as a differentiation between the Greek quality and the modern one: To the Greeks, "it was the certainty of death that made men seek immortal fame in deed and word and that prompted them to establish a body politic which was potentially immortal" (p.68). But to us in the Western world, it seems that "Death, whether faced in actual dying or in the inner awareness of one's own mortality, is perhaps the most antipolitical experience there is." (p. 67)

We're watching this play out right now in "The War on Terror". We have an enemy that has created a pantheon of heroes who find immortality in death and have created an immortal order to rule on earth, versus us, who or not so political, but who fear death to the point that we will band together to fight them, focussing more on our own common bond and desire to survive. "Support the Troops", even if you hate the war.

This last point was also of interest to me in terms of Freud. Freud's theory that man has a natural destructive instinct, which even he had trouble supporting wholeheartedly, is given life by Arendt with her definition of violence begetting from rage which begets from a sense of correctable injustice. Rather than a primal urge, it is one now engaged in a specific circumstance. Rage becomes a tool for change, rather than just an impulse.

Relativity

I loved the Persian Letters. It made great bed-side reading. Every night, I read a few letters and fell asleep. I don't mean to dismiss the book. I genuinely did enjoy it. It wasn't a complex or dense argument, but the structure allows it to create an argument in a simple, effective way. Irony and humour are great tools. So is fiction. I kept thinking of the resent movie "Borat" as being a step-child of this book. I'm not sure that any film could have outlined the problems and contradictions of America and the "American Dream" in so concise a form as that movie, and perhaps the same can be said of "Letters" in it's time.

I loved the biting analysis of French culture and politics at the time. Letters 26 and 27 are my favorite in this regard. 26 tells of a visit to the theater where the best performances are the wordless ones from the actors in the boxes who "are visible only to the waist, and as a rule, their arms are modestly concealed in a muff." As for the real actors, they are seen to simply exchange insults with the people on the floor. In the end, he receives a letter from an Opera singer he has met, begging him to take her to Persia so she can escape the shame of her rape and illegitimate pregnancy and make a living better than the one she foresees as an aging actress.

In one short letter, he undermines French culture and high society, and underscores the deep hypocrisies faced by the lower classes and women. It reminds me of the opening scene of Cyrano de Bergerac, which accomplishes the same thing in a heroic tale. But that is the question here, is he really condemning French society? It was discussed in class that the whole storyline of Usbek's problems with his Seraglio were a cautionary tale about effect of the vacuum of leadership and repression of the classes that characterized Louis IV reign. But is it also a reminder of the freedoms available to people, especially women, in French society that don't exist elsewhere. In many letters, like 25, he comments through Usbek in a seemingly derisive tone that the women of France have neither modesty or virtue, but he describes an enviable level of freedom compared to the indentured slavery of the women of the harem. Are they truly lacking in virtue? Like much of this book, the definition of virtue lies squarely in the cultural perspective. With these men as our narrators, we develop a sympathy with their point-of-view, especially when they brilliantly and humorously critique the institutions they are witnessing, like the theater of the the church, or even the intellectuals of cafe society. But is their perspective right?

I suppose this is where the idea of relativity comes in... and it's a very Humean idea too: how do we negotiate the differences between cultures? How do we describe virtues, morality and ethics when we are faced with large cultural divides? It's where Hume fails in some respect in that he describes moral agreement among homogeneous cultures. But how do you describe the rights of women, or argue the moral quality of slavery in the gulf between two cultures as different as the Paris of Usbek's mind and the Persia of Montesquieu's imagination? Religion fails us, the law falls short because if it's necessarily local quality.

Perhaps humor is the only way to describe the differences and to undermine authority. As Arendt writes in "On Violence": "The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter" (p. 45).ot

Dislocation

So here's the confession: I didn't read Ali's "Brick Lane".

But I woke up Saturday morning and decided to go to class regardless. I was exhausted from lack of sleep, demoralized due to my inability to read more than two pages without falling asleep. But I thought: "I wonder what everyone else has to say?" And more importantly, I wondered why this book was the only book being covered in the seminar.

What I found in the classroom, was one of the best discussions I've heard. Not so much about the book, but about our lives. It was a discussion in which I participated deeply as well. Everybody, either directly or indirectly, has had a deep experience with dislocation in their lives.

The obvious ones were people like Nash, Havi and Nooshin who had immigrated to one, or, in a few cases, several, foreign lands. Their experiences and the palpable pain they described was something that we've each lived with and near.

I have been fascinated by the experience of World War II most of my life. Not so much by battles and machinery or the political history surrounding the time, but by the notion of how shocking it must have been to come face-to-face with the enemy. They didn't speak the same languages or look the same, especially in the Pacific theater. Movies that I've watched over the years have made those encounters seem horrifying. A blur of screaming, confusion. Faces that were masks of fury. Nothing recognizable. Movies, even recent ones like Eastwood's series about Iwo Jima, and Saving Private Ryan, seems to me to be more about the horrors of encountering a foreign culture than about the horror of war itself.

And I wonder what it must be like for veterans of these wars to walk around now, in a modern world, and see so many different faces and hear so many different languages in places that only reflected their own image back to themselves a single generation ago. The Germans I've know seem so unconnected to the SS soldiers of the movies. The many Vietnamese I've known in the past seem nothing like the crazed sadists portrayed in "Deer Hunter", or "The Killing Fields". This sense of the "foreign-ness" of other people has disintegrated visibly, even over the course of my life-time.

My point is, this experience of mass dislocation is so new. How much movement was there between cultures one hundred years ago? It was, I imagine, for the most part an exceptional experience. Now it's a common one. Although, it appears to have been an important aspect of the Roman Empire. Many different races became "Roman", and slaves from foreign lands were part of the culture.

In Israel, I saw workers on buildings who were asian. As a cook, I met Asians who spoke with Indian accents because they learned their english in India.. following the trail of economic breadcrumbs to a hoped-for prosperity, or only to escape the oppression of poverty.

In my own life, I was deeply involved, through my ex, with the orthodox Jewish community, most of whom had survived the camps only to find no families, towns, or countries to return to, and who were now deeply torn between recreating their old worlds and navigating the new one. One man came to the Holocaust center in Montreal, where I volunteered, to give a video testimony of his experience in the holocaust. His only condition for doing so was that we not allow his family to know about it until after his death. He had come to Canada, changed his name, married, had children and grandchildren, and no one even knew he was Jewish, let alone a camp survivor.

My former father-in-law was born into a Hassidic community in Czechoslovakia. He was trained as a Cantor, the person who sings the prayers at service. Because of the holocaust, he no longer practiced his faith, in fact he was openly skeptical. He lived a very secular life as a doctor. But he sang all the high holiday services at the make-shift synagogue at the hospital every year. It always seemed to me not that he was attempting to find God or faith again with his singing, but rather to bring to life the ghosts of the past life that he was cut off from so violently.

This is the world we live in today. And so how do we define ourselves after the rupture of leaving our homes? How do we define ourselves as people and citizens when we live in a foreign land and are reminded of our foreign-ness every time we speak, or eat? How do express ourselves in the different languages we learn? These questions are still a struggle for us. We know this because of the reactions that are taking place more and more around the world. The far-right christian/political movements seem on the surface like sophisticated (some not-so-sophisticated) segregation movements. Like the Spanish Inquisition, they are racial cleansing under another name.

It's remarkable to think that the world has blended so much in such a short time. But it makes one wonder how far it can go without exploding, and also what the possibilities are, the great ones, I mean, for a future.

Coetzee wrote in "Elizabeth Costelloe" that the novel is the course of human civilization and thought, one case at a time. It sounds like Brick Lane is indeed that. I will read it when time permits.

Repression

I'm afraid my journal will reveal all too plainly the paucity of time I've had to do the readings. But, I'll continue as best I can. Who knew that two 10 lb babies could absorb so much time and energy? That being said, I'm no longer sleep deprived, only reading-time-deprived and even that is getting better.

I enjoyed the readings in this weeks' theme. Especially Freud. I'd never read him and of course had many of the cliches about his work in my head, but was deeply impressed with what was more than just - although to say "just" about this is a little trite - a theorization of the human psyche. What I saw instead was a "system" for understanding the development of man and civilization. Unlike, say, Rousseau, who's philosophy was based on a romantic notion of the development of man, Freud builds a logical understanding not just of our minds and or social structures, but more importantly of the deep tensions that do and must exist between individual man and the society that he must live in.

Hume's writings come to mind in that he describes in very similar fashion the necessities of civil society and the benefits of their structure, but he doesn't explain the conflicts that arise inside them in a satisfactory way, most likely because he describes a fairly homogenous social grouping. Freud's notion that we must invariably be in conflict with ourselves and with society in order to stay within social structures, families, tribes, towns and cities, is more appealing to me.

Even his description of The Pleasure Principle describes the need for conflict:

"We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things". (p.25)

This idea of living in a state of tension between opposing forces, the personal and the public, will come up again with Kant in a later entry. I quite like the more complex idea of how we must each individually negotiate the relationship between ourselves as individuals and the whole of our societies.

"Happiness, in the reduced sense in which we recognize it as possible, is a problem of the economics of the individual's libido. There is no golden rule which applies to everyone: every man must find out for himself in what particular fashion he can be saved." (p.34)

This pertains to Kant as well, but it seems that freedom lies not in the unfettered pursuit of individual happiness, but the choices we make in negotiating the space between personal desire and public necessity. Love and Necessity, the two poles of Freud's dialectic of civilization. However, Freud is very clear that this balance can be dangerously precarious.

"It is not easy to understand how it can become possible to deprive and instinct of satisfaction. Nor is doing so without danger. If the loss is not compensated for economically, one can be certain that serious disorders will ensue." (p.52)

There is, of course, more to be said... And I should talk about Conrad, as well. I liked Conrad. But really, it's up there with 1984 and Atlas Shrugged as "books that have been read too deeply by high-school students". But I don't dismiss it. Conrad's imagery and language is quite extraordinary and lush... part of the reason it has lasted so long as a masterwork. But I'd rather leave it alone for two reasons: firstly because I'm so far behind with everything else that I have to become more efficient if I'm going to catch up let alone get ahead; and secondly because like Freud, the book has so deeply informed me in unconscious ways, that reading them both seemed repetitive. Freud, Darwin... we still live in the world that they revolutionized and I have a harder time understanding myself outside the context they provide than inside.

Perhaps that's the best reason of all to be taking this degree: to see the forces that have built me, and possibly allow me to question the things that I presently assume as given. As my old therapist would have said, "awareness is the first step".

Hubris

I had the fortunate/unfortunate task of giving the first presentation on the subject of Hubris. This semester differs from the last (and by way of apology, I didn't finish my journaling last semester due to the birth of my twins) in that rather than follow the long line of Reason v. Passion through a series of old books, we're looking to address smaller themes as they relate to man's struggle to define himself... through a series of old and some new books.

My subject was hubris and the texts were Marlowe's "Doctor Faustus", and Euripides' "The Bacchae". The idea for both was man challenging the power of the gods, and being punished for doing so.

The seminar was led off by Michael who described his experience as an anthropologist in West Africa and a similar myth in the regions depicting man's downfall at the hands of the gods when he challenges them. What was interesting was the notion that this myth permeates many cultures and traditions of story-telling. We seemed, as a species, very concerned about our limits in the face of God.


We also discussed the idea of Prometheus, the god who gave man fire and was punished for doing so. We spoke about him in relation to Robert Oppenheim's quote "Now I am become Death". Truthfully, we didn't discuss the text of the Bacchae much at all, except to note that it was a poor (read old) translation, and that the plot concerned corrections to the excesses of human power; the relationship between kings and gods.

For this entry, I'm going to focus mostly on Faustus, because it's a theme that will come up again and again as we read the later texts.

The first thing that caught my eye was the notion of Faustus as a renaissance man, or rather, a man of the renaissance. This notion, new to the age, of the emergence of the individual, is actually a tough one to pick out on it's own, because it's still so prevalent today. The notion of the world centered around man, and of the internal world of man himself, is hard to separate from my understanding of man and the world. It's hard to imagine that other ideas exist. But here, in this nascent period, were very new, very radical ideas.

And Faustus is a very modern character. He's obsessed with his inner life and his accomplishments. He is driven by ambition and self-gratification. His relationship to the gods is also new in that he can negotiate it, rather than have it handed down in absolute terms.... or at least he thinks he can. Even other people are there for his pleasure and whim.

Where he seems to depart the philosophers of the past, is in his blindness, willful blindness it should be said, to morality, to good and evil.

When Mephistopheles first appears, he is so hideous and distasteful, Faustus demands the he change his shape and "return an old Franciscan Friar." These surfaces are important to Faustus. That Meph appear to be good is all Faustus requires. It makes you question his ability to discern true knowledge from trivia as the play progresses.

And indeed, this happens, for it seems that Faustus believes that true knowledge lies in magic: "'tis magic, magic, that hath ravished me". Why magic, over law, medicine, philosophy or religion? Is the ability to conjure Helen of Troy as an object of beauty and desire a real power? or does the act's requisite skill construe true knowledge? But I think that that is the point: what is our goal here? what makes us happy? Well, certainly, lovely women, outsmarting kings and knaves, gaining riches and power and fame are "fun", but is this all the point of our lives? Is it worth our souls to achieve some or all of these things?

Faust does fly into space to see earth from above, which I suppose at its' time must have been quite a thought. As we know that Copernicus had only recently published his theories about the universe, the very challenge to the religious hegemony about the construction of space must have seemed shocking at the time. But what of it? He did nothing of consequence with his knowledge. We figured out how to split the atom... knowledge... but it's what we did with it that makes us question ourselves.

Maybe that's the point of the allegory, like all these allegories about challenging the gods: it's what we do with our knowledge that matters. It's the care we take with our discoveries that will build us an empire or bring us to rubble. Neither Faustus, nor Marlowe for that matter, question what Faustus does with his ill-gained knowledge, only that he bargained with the devil to get it. It's seems like a sign of the immaturity of our species that we're more concerned with parental disapproval than consequence of our actions.

God can't place the world at our feet and then chide us for figuring it out. It must be a question of what we do with it all.

Perhaps the nuclear bomb represented the beginning of man's maturity and separation from his parental figure. Maybe the bomb represented the death of God, and the ascendancy of man to god-hood. "I am become death", Oppenheimer quotes. Perhaps he really meant "I am become God".

As for Faustus, he deserved hell, not because he made a deal with the devil and never repented to god, but because he didn't do anything that smelled of greatness with the power and knowledge he found.

"Hope and Fear; Dialogues on Death and the Immortality of the Soul". End of term essay

I

Mary Wollstonecraft knocked firmly on the door of the lighthouse. She was consumed, inexplicably, she admitted to herself, with anger at the lighthouse keeper who, having undoubtedly seen the pilot light beckoning from the ship, refused to come out and row her to shore. After convincing the captain to depart from the norm and allow the crew to bring her, she immediately set out to expostulate or even scold the keeper.

The old man who opened the door was very glad to see her, the art of hospitality strong as it was in the men and women of the country.

“I go many days and weeks without greeting a body at the door. I would, I wish, have such occasion as to welcome many more!” he said with great cheer.

“Did you not see the pilot light calling to you from our ship?” was her crisp reply.

“Come up into the tower and see with your own eyes, that which I saw, and you will think not that I lie.”

Angry as she was, she followed him up the ladder and into the light tower. And there, plain for any but the blind to see, was her ship's pilot light burning in full view, as the boat churned and rocked in the cold, grey, choppy sea.

“I now have no doubt that you saw the light and so must reason that you chose not to come. How do you defend such selfishness, such recalcitrance of your duty?” she demanded.

He smiled kindly at her. “Is it not sweet to watch from dry land when the storm-winds roil a mighty ocean's waters, and see another's bitter toil – not because you relish someone else's misery – rather, it's sweet to know from what misfortunes you are free.”

The anger she had carried from the boat to shore now rose from her chest to her cheeks in a torrent of heat. Tears stung the corners of her eyes. “Do you mock me?” she heard herself say, although her ability to reason had long since fled and she was in no way certain, when recalling the conversation as she wrote her letters later that night, of what her actual words might have been.

“Your anger at my answer is not anger at me. 'Tis the Dread Of Death, from which your heart must flee! But if instead, we see these things are laughable, mere jokes, why doubt that reason alone can quench this terror with its spark?”

The storm of feelings in her body was thrown into an uproar by his words. How had he seen this in her? This fear of annihilation she had carefully hidden from the view of civilized company – so she thought – that had swelled and swayed in her heart like the very sea they were watching from the tower, now lay bare for examination by any and all.

“You can't possibly know the nature of my feelings in such fleeting a moment as this,” she retorted.

He would not relent. “You feel heaviness upon your mind, it's plain to see, that weighs you down. If you could grasp the cause of this ennui, this heap of misery and care that hunkers on the heart, you would not lead the life you do, not knowing what you want, ever seeking a change of place – as if you could lay down your burden by travelling through space!”

“How fallacious!” she replied. “ This dread of death that you deride, I ask you in turn, what, if not either hope or the fear of annihilation, is to sustain life?”

“There is the answer, in the question you ask. This misery must take you no more to task. For 'tis hope and fear which cause the pain, you see, and their end is the end that you truly must seek.”

For the next hour, Mary sat spellbound as he explained that the body and the soul are made of indestructible atoms, and as life is born, these atoms collide and bond to form bodies which, after death, the bonds dissolving, return to individual atoms. The soul, which he termed as the union of mind and spirit, is formed, too, of atoms of a different nature. And they, like the atoms of the body, at death return to their natural form to be swept out into the infinite sea of atoms.

Mary was shocked. “I cannot bear to think of being no more – of losing myself – though existence is often a painful consciousness of misery; nay, it appears to me impossible that I should cease to exist, or that this active, restless spirit, equally alive to joy and sorrow, should only be organized dust – ready to fly abroad the moment the spring snaps!” she argued.

He looked at her sadly, like a doctor giving his patient some bad news. “If the nature of the soul is immortal, and it creeps into the body as we're born, why is it no one keeps a memory of time before? For if the mind has undergone a transformation vast enough to cancel out all the remembrance of things past, that is a state approaching little short of death, I'd say. Therefore you must admit that what it was has passed away.”

“And what of hope?” she asked. “What of God? Is there nothing to desire in life but misery and the sadness of a broken heart?” The sorrow lodged in her throat made no pretense of receding anymore.

“Religion! Superstition!” he hissed, shocking Mary to take a step back. “It is Religion breeds wickedness and that has given rise to wrongful deeds!” His face grew red with fury. “It is the turn of Superstition to lie prone, trod underfoot, while by philosophy's victory we reach the heavens!”

His voice echoed around Mary as she hurried down the ladder and out the door of the lighthouse to the waiting party.

That night, as she wrote her account of the conversation, she struggled again with her feelings. It seemed they would never leave her a moment’s rest.

“Ah, let me be happy whilst I can,” she said aloud to no one. But the tears started as she thought of it. “I must fly from thought, and find refuge from sorrow in a strong imagination – the only solace for a feeling heart”, she wrote. “But surely something resides in this heart that is not perishable – and life is more than a dream.”

And she was asleep.



II

Mary stood in a recess of the church in Tonsberg looking at the coffins. The bodies inside she knew to be preserved, an abominable art. Preserved. Is this my fate?, she thought. How futile to term it a preservation when the noblest parts are immediately sacrificed merely to save the muscles, skin and bone from rottenness. It is a treason against humanity, thus to lift up the awful veil which would fain hide its weakness.

She then spoke aloud without taking notice, as she did with growing frequency on this journey of solitude and so little affection. “Life, what art thou? Where goes this breath? This I, so much alive?”

“A philosopher, or an actress?” a weak voice behind her hissed. She turned to see a young, pallidly complected minister observing her from the back of the church. He bore the affect of a bookish man who rarely stepped outdoors from his studies.

“Neither,” she replied, embarrassed at being caught speaking in such dramatic tones. “A traveler.” Looking back at the coffins, she asked, “Who lies here, inside the church?”

The young minister coughed hoarsely as he stepped forward. “Those who are close to God. Those who were granted grace in this life. The fortunate few.”

“And those who were not so fortunate? Those who defy God with ambivalence or perhaps unnatural death?” she inquired, trying to seem intellectually curious.

He looked past her out the window at the rear of the church. She followed his eyes to the land in the distance. A rugged and dreary road lined with nothing but bare, grey rocks, leading to a forest that appeared to have been burnt in time past. Desolation and gloom beyond measure.

“How unfortunate” she smiled. Her attempt at humour was ignored. He stared at her, unblinking. She turned back to the coffins. “Do you have an answer to my questions, then? Is this death? Our tissue frozen against time? Our soul lost for eternity?”

“If that is what you choose to believe, then that is what is true.”

Such riddles, she thought. “And if I desire to believe more? How does one find grace? How do I believe in that which I cannot see, know what I cannot know?”

“You are wise to know that you cannot know, but you must at least get it into your head that, if you are unable to believe, it is because of your passions, since reason compels you to believe and yet you cannot do so.”

“Does reason compel me to believe?”

“Yes,” he raised his finger to make his point as he moved closer to her, “but if we submit everything to reason our religion will be left with nothing mysterious or supernatural. Yet, if we offend the principles of reason our religion will be absurd and ridiculous.”

“You speak in circles,” she laughed. He stopped walking and clasped his hands behind his back, visibly offended by her remark.

“If it is reason you seek, then here it is: God either exists or He doesn't. If you choose to believe and He does exist, you will live in eternity. If He does not and yet you choose to believe, then you will at least be faithful, honest, humble, full of good works, a sincere, true friend. So reason gives but reason to believe.”

“You, sir, appear to be the philosopher of the two of us. Can you answer the question: 'How does one achieve grace if not by reason?' Passion? What of love?”

“Cleopatra's nose!” came the odd reply. “Love is vanity! And passion only leads you further from God. If there were only reason without passion! If there were only passion without reason! But since he has both, man can only be at peace with one when he is at war with the other. Concentrate not on convincing yourself by multiplying proofs of God's existence, but by diminishing your passions, for they are vanity!”

She wondered who between them was the actor. “So neither reason nor passion can bring me closer to happiness? We're left in a wretched place, then, aren't we?”

“Happiness is man with God. Unhappiness is man without God. Man's greatness is in knowing that he is wretched. Our desire for happiness is punishment for our fall from grace.” He smirked at her, as though he had beaten her at chess with one bold move.

“More circles!” she protested. He was wearing thin her patience. “I'm beginning to think you mad!”

“Men are so inevitably mad that not to be mad would be to give a mad twist to madness.” He laughed for the first time – a human being after all. He continued, his voice growing weaker as his obviously heartfelt conviction rose. “The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing. It is the heart which perceives God, and not the reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not by the reason.”

With that last riddle, the minister began coughing uncontrollably. A young woman rushed in from outside. Clearly, she had been listening close by.

“My brother is ill, he cannot be brought to agitation!” She snapped at Mary as she walked him out of the church. “Stay if you will, but question him no more.”

And they were gone, leaving Mary alone to contemplate the strange encounter. How could there be faith without reason, reason without passion, yet faith that could only be found in the heart? She reasoned and reasoned, but her heart was too full to allow her to remain in the church, so she determined to walk the road in the dead forest beyond the church till she was wearied out, to purchase rest – or rather forgetfulness.

She walked through the forest of grey, cobweb-like pines; the fibres whitening as they lost their moisture, imprisoned life seemingly stolen away. “Death” she thought, “under every form appears to me like something getting free – to expand in I-know-not-what element; nay I feel that this conscious being must be as unfettered, have wings of thought, before it can be happy.”

She soon reached a cascade. The impetuous dashing of the rebounding torrent mocked her exploring eye, producing an equal activity in her mind. “Why am I chained to life and its misery?” she lamented aloud, sure this time not to be heard by some unseen observer over the rush of the water. Her deserted heart felt the weight of her sorrow and loneliness, but still, the tumultuous emotions this sublime object excited were pleasurable; and viewing it, her soul rose with renewed dignity above its cares. And she stretched her hand to touch the spray of the water – to eternity, bounding over the dark speck of life to come.

Thinking of death always made her cling tenderly to her affections.



III

Mary had purposely sought out the town of Larvik, a metropolis, relative to the towns her recent travels had taken her. Her thoughts had flown from the wilderness to the polished circles of the world. She hoped to rub off the rust of thought, and polish the taste which the contemplation of nature had rendered just. Her encounters of late had left her in a state of furious contemplation. As a woman of taste and education, how was she to rationalize the upheaval of passion that pushed her, unwillingly at times, into the deepest of sorrows only then to pull her to the highest of joys? What was she to think of her deep desire to cling to life when some days every step she took felt so heavy and laboured that the very thought of another step reduced her to weeping and made her desirous of an end to her mortal struggles?

A letter of introduction had brought her into the company of a warm and amiable man, a lawyer, and one who clearly passed much time in contemplation on matters of the human mind and soul. He sat with her at his club, a gentlemen's club, her entrance to which, he assured her, would not be questioned under his patronage. She found herself in the midst of a group of lawyers. Her head turned round, her heart grew sick. Regarding the visages of the men sitting nearby, she felt not nearly so welcome as her benefactor insisted.

She recounted to him her previous conversations in the lighthouse and the church in as much detail as she remembered. He listened with great care and interest as she reasoned through the arguments that had been presented to her and, although she tried desperately to refrain from allowing her passions to surface, she could not fully prevent it. Such was the temperature of her soul. She ended her story by posing the question, or rather, lament, which had driven her to this place and this moment: “Considering the question of human happiness, where, oh, where does it reside? Has it taken up its abode with the unconscious ignorance, or with the high-wrought mind?”

The gentleman studied her tortured face for a moment, weighing his reply. He felt compassion, the most natural of human impulses, for her struggle, but insisted to himself that he should answer her as rationally and truthfully as possible.

“The topic of human misery has been insisted on with the most pathetic eloquence that sorrow and melancholy could aspire.” He began. “But in misery, there is no virtue. It has neither utility nor enjoyment to either you or society. And while I commend you for allowing your passions to lead you, for reason can and should only ever be their slave, this misery must end itself either by imagination” he hesitated a moment, “or by force.”

She looked into his eyes. They were warm and filled with the best of human kindness, for he was, she saw, a man with a great portion of common sense, and heart – yes, a warm heart.

She smiled, barely covering the sadness held within her breast. “Here I came to talk of anything but the pangs arising from the discovery of estranged affection, and the lonely sadness of a deserted heart, and yet I cannot stop. My imagination arrests any other subject and forces misery's cruel hands upon my neck, which it holds without mercy or quarter.”

Her hand trembled as she said the next words, their sound echoing in her mind, to be heard again and again forever after. “So then, what of force?”.

He shifted slightly in his chair and looked down for a brief moment. “So great is our horror of death, that when it presents itself under any form besides that to which a man has endeavored to reconcile his imagination, it acquires new terrors, and overcomes his futile courage. But when the passions play, when the judgment dictates, when the limbs obey, this is all the operation of God. Men are entrusted to their own judgment and discretion, and may employ every faculty with which they are endowed, in order to provide for their ease, happiness, or preservation. But what is the meaning of that principle, then, if we say that a man who has tired of life, is hunted by pain and misery, bravely overcomes his terror of death, and makes his escape from this cruel scene? That he has incurred the indignation of his creator and disturbed the order of the universe?”

“Is there a principle to be found?” Mary stammered, trying to laugh. “These are perhaps the vapourings of a heart ill at ease – the effusions of a sensibility wounded almost to madness.” She could scarce believe she had revealed her soul so deeply and irrevocably.

He continued, unmoved by her diversion. “Has not every man the free disposal of his own life? It would be equally criminal to act for the preservation of life as for its destruction. Suppose a malefactor is justly condemned to a shameful death – can any reason be imagined why he may not save himself all the anguish on thinking on its dreadful approaches? He invades the business of Providence no more than the magistrate did who ordered his execution.”

“I know of a similar story,” said Mary, fighting against the powerful reason that spoke so seductively to the darkness in her heart. “A wretch in Portugal who had been imprisoned several years, during which period lamps had been put up, was at last condemned to a cruel death; yet, on his way to execution, he only wished for one night's respite, to see the city lights.”

“Are you possessed of a similar hope?” he inquired.

“I hope for the immorality of my living soul,” she answered. It was yet true.

“I'm afraid in that regard, I must agree with your lighthouse keeper. Reasoning from the common course of nature it must be said that what is incorruptible must also be ingenerable. The soul, therefore, if immortal, existed before our birth; and if the former existence noways concerned us, neither will the latter. This is merely the metaphysical argument, which must presume dominance over the argument of the First Cause. We must also examine the moral argument, which would assure you of punishment. But punishment, according to our conception, should bear some proportion to the offence. Why then eternal punishment for the temporary offences of so frail a creature as man?”

“How dare I assume to know the quality of Divine moral judgment?” asked Mary.

“Precisely, you cannot!” he replied sternly. “The chief source of moral ideas is the reflection on the interests of human society.” He leaned forward and covered her trembling hand with his. “Death is in the end unavoidable; yet the human species could not be preserved had nature not inspired us with an aversion towards it.”

He caught himself, withdrawing his hand and sitting back in his chair. But it was too late, for the conversation around the room had all but ceased; and every man was looking in their direction. Mary had never been more aware of being a woman in her life. She straightened herself in her chair, imitating his manner, and, controlling her emotions, decided to conclude the conversation and leave the club, which had become for her as objectionable a place as she had ever been. She brazenly returned the stares of the men in the room, who's wits had been sharpened by knavery, who here undermined morality, confounding right and wrong. These locusts will probably diminish, as the people become more enlightened, she thought.

She turned to her companion. “Your reason and compassion are the soundest, most sincere argument I have heard. But my heart, as the young minister proposed, my heart cannot deny its cry to God for mercy upon my soul; for grace,” she said.

He smiled after a moment of reflection, and reached for a cigar. He admired her courage. He leaned forward and spoke quietly, as to ensure that none in the room but her could hear. “Nothing could set in a fuller light the infinite obligations which mankind has to Divine revelation, since we find that no other medium could ascertain this great and important truth.”



IV

The evening was extremely calm and beautiful. Not being able to walk, she requested a boat, her only means of enjoying free air. The view of the town was extremely fine. A huge, rocky mountain stood up behind it, and a vast cliff stretched on each side, forming a semicircle. In the recess of the rocks was a clump of pines, amongst which a steeple rose picturesquely beautiful.

“I should rather choose,” she thought “did it admit to a choice, to sleep in some of the caves of the rocks”. For she had become better reconciled to them since she climbed their craggy sides, listening to the finest echoes she had ever heard. The night air brushed lightly over her face as the sound of the oars passing rhythmically through the water lulled her into a dream. Spirits unseen seemed to walk abroad, and flit from cliff to cliff, soothing her soul to peace. And to the echoes, she raised her own voice – a song from her heart – dance from cave to cave. She cared not if she were overheard.

Shimmering,
iridescent,
deathless Aphrodite,
child of Zeus, weaver of wiles,
I beg you,
do not crush my spirit with anguish, Lady,
but come to me now, if ever before
you heard my voice in the distance
and leaving your father's golden house
drove your chariot pulled by sparrows
swift and beautiful
over the black earth, their wings a blur
as they streaked down from heaven
across the bright sky –

and then you were with me, a smile
playing about your mortal lips
as you asked,
what is it this time?
Why are you calling again?
And asked what my heart in its lovesick raving
most wanted to happen:

“Whom now
should I persuade to love you?
Who is wronging you, Sappho?
She may run now, but she'll be chasing soon.
She may spurn gifts, but soon she'll be giving.
She may not love now, but soon she will,
willing or not”

Come to me again now, release me
from my agony, fulfill all
that my heart desires, and fight for me,

fight at my side, Goddess.

Rene Descartes is a drunken fart (I drink therefore I am) This is an incomplete post

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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"

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.

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.