Story of a Vocation: There and Back Again

A Story from My Fifteen Year Old Self
I was fifteen years old: naive, mischievous and lonely, awkward with my body, my voice ~ and my words - my very being. The gash of Mom and Dad's divorce was still raw; I felt ripped apart inside, hurt and distanced, unsure how to appease the increasing emptiness in the pit of my middle. I read novels in a walk-in-closet. Nicholas, my little brother, would peek in on me and wonder what the hell I was doing! When I wasn't absorbing the back of a cereal box or a Vonnegut, I used my bicycle to broaden my geographical horizons. I befriended a beloved librarian, a resilient French survivor of the guerre mondiale, a cassocked conservative priest and an existential liberal Jew. Those were my comrades. Even, very briefly, a traveling antique salesperson who voyaged in a Volkswagen van became my friend. In between visits with all my friends I took refuge in the church, hugging the venerable wood pew, using my spiritual imagination to conjure some image of a future. I would ask my reluctant mother to bring me to Sunday Eucharist - at first she thought it was a phase, like my recent attempts to collect every matchbox car ever made, then she became more hostile when I told her I wanted to be confirmed. Then I told my family I wanted to be a priest!

A Warm Christmas Fire Was Burning

Maybe it was in those bike rides to confirmation class, or in those angry

battles with my parents about my life, about our life, about freedom. Or with my

great friends, the realization that someone outside your clan can love and accept

you for who you are - you grow to love and accept them, that I realized in a

process (that is still continuing) churning away inside of me like a warm Christmas

fire was the hearth of calling.

Now I teach philosophy and write about art. Is this my new religion?

Learning About Folk's Faith Journey I am interested in people's journey of faith. Where did it lead you? Are you the same "faith" as you were when you were younger? Why or why not?

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Why do people despise religion because it is, “man-made”?

In this post, I think about why religion is often disparaged because "it is man-made" — a claim often made by evangelicals who espouse their own brands of religion that typically vilifies mainstream faiths to bolster their own belief systems.

Saint Peter's Square, Vatican City image: bbc news

Why do people despise religion because it is “man-made”? Does this presuppose a form of worship that is not man-made? Doesn't it sound odd to you that someone would tout this idea that their religious practice is not religious at all but is protected from man-made shenanigans?

Conversation With a Fundamentalist Christian

I was in the Safeway the other day. Someone was talking about the Catholics next to the $1.00 jug of Sweeeeet Tea for sale.

“I pray my rosary.”

“The rosary is idolatry. It's man-made.”

“So, what isn't man-made?”

“But, it is religion. Not true Christianity.”

“Throw out that statue of Mary in your room; that's man-made and not of God.”

Is Christianity Man-made?

It seems that the crux of the conversation revolved around getting rid of 2000 years of Christian history because it is all man-made.

Don't people realize that religion, no matter what package it comes in: non-denominational, Pentecostal, Wiccan, Zeus, Anansi, Sikh, Tao — it is all man's approach to the concept of God?

Religion Is More Pervasive Than You Think

As far as I know God has not torn apart the skies and told us how she thinks. So, even if you believe your holy writ is God's word it does not place you in a nice cocoon of impunity. You're man-made like the rest of us even if you pray to God in the comfort of your room and eschew organized religion like most people eschew post-dated dairy products.

Religion and Power

Religion is about power. By religion I mean a body of knowledge that supports belief in some form of theism. Religious people bristle at the claim that religion is about power. “Religion? Sure,” they say, “religion is about power. But I'm spiritual. Religion is man-made.”

On Whiskey Bottles, Trail Mix and Walker Percy

In this post, I recount a story of when I found a bottle with a message tucked inside of it.

Shaking Off a Feeling of Emptiness

   Do you ever get this empty feeling you just can’t shake?  It’s like the person who pulls up to their house, sits in their car and lets the engine run when they get home from work, to breathe again, before easily letting go of the ignition, sighing as the car dies.  Not that the person hates his life.  He just needs to breathe.  Again.

This reminds me of Walker Percy, a writer who searched out answers to the odd questions of everyday life – like, “what do I do with myself?” He won the National Book Award for The Moviegoer in 1961, about Binx Bolling, a disconsolate everyman in New Orleans who ostensibly has a good life, a girlfriend, a steady well-paying job, but nevertheless feels this emptiness inside the pit of his gut that he just can’t shake. One day it occurs to Binx to embark on a “search,” to discover what is missing in his life.  

As A Monk I Would Walk in the Woods
The summer of my first year in the monastery, I was twenty-two years old. I was on a search.  I escaped the monastic schedule to hike with a fellow monk who had joined the community at the same time as me. Our plan was to climb the fence along the cemetery to reach a tiny creek, full of white sand, like an ocean's front, that meanders to the Bogue Falaya River. I think we did this once or twice: took off our shoes and socks and donned a bathing suit, crinkling our toes gingerly over rough patches of pine needles and dried up Water Oak leaves until we reached the banks of the creek. A soda for each and a bag of trail mix from the house – one for each – drank 'em and nibbled on fleshy banana bits and salted cashews on the banks, on a Sunday afternoon, when the everydayness gets heavy. We knocked back a few dried apricots into your mouth; take a swig of Orangina, to reduce the despair of the early twenty-first century. The water was cool, even in the summer, and the sand was supple, sinking a few feet past our ankles, making it difficult to walk, careful to avoid the odd shard of glass or roping water snake that patrols the shallow waters. When the bag of trail mix emptied and the sodas had gurgled in our bellies, we hurried back to the monastery to attend evening prayer. To enter back into the rhythm of monastic life. On days like this, as a friend of mine told me once, you feel on par with existence.
Walker Percy's Empty Bottle 
Coming out of the woods, I spotted an empty bottle next to Walker Percy’s grave. He is buried in our cemetery. Usually, there is a flowerpot on the edge of his grave: WALKER PERCY 1916 - 1990. So not to see the usual flowerpot, but an empty bottle struck me as peculiar. At first, I thought that it could have been leftover by rowdy teenagers from the neighborhood, but on closer inspection, I saw that it was an Early Times whiskey bottle, Percy’s favorite brand; an admirer had left behind a note stuffed inside. This intrigued me. 

Why would someone come to a Benedictine monastery to leave behind “a message in a bottle”?  What search were they on?  Did they find themselves at a difficult time in life, seeking answers? Or was it an inside joke, a jocund sentiment left for a friend? Or a prayer left unanswered? Coming out of the river and finding someone else’s message situated me at a crossroads, a place of tension where the monk meets the world – a place where my disconsolation and anxiety struggled with a sense of place and meaning – for I was very much not at ease all the time, in my skin, in my monastic habit, in this place I called home – and the questioning of another seeker confirmed for me that we are both searchers on this planet, seeking and groping for answers.  For aren’t we all searchers? Aren’t we all castaways on an island? For Percy, “to be a castaway is to search for news from across the seas.”

The Self as a Castaway
I think this is the self in any generation: a castaway on an island, searching for news from across the seas, salt in his face and hair, thirsty and desirous. But at every juncture, we are not at ease in our skin, with our station in life. We do not know how to sift through the avalanche of information that bombards us, not knowing the difference between the Good News and the Daily News. Coming out of the woods is a messy business. We emerge as castaways, hoping to decipher a message in a bottle.

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Repost: The Relationship of Truth and Relativism by Marian Larman, O.S.B.

I came across this essay in my personal files. It is written by Marian Larman, a Benedictine priest who taught philosophy. This essay has a personal import for me. Larman wrote it during the last year of his life. He had retired as pastor of a small church in Saint Benedict, Louisiana. Because of declining health, he moved into the infirmary at the monastery where I was a monk. On some mornings I would visit the infirmary. Two parakeets inhabited a birdcage in the solarium, a rectangular room that allowed in plenty of sunlight. Father Marian would sit in the solarium reading a newspaper or a newly acquired book on Saint Thomas Aquinas. While an ardent Thomist, he did not hold to the belief that there we through faith we have access to an overarching truth. There may be an absolute truth but finite beings are limited to what we can know. We would have quiet conversations sometimes. I mainly listened as he told me about his ideas. Father Augustine, who took care of the infirmary allowed Father Marian to write in the infirmary. He acquired a small manual typewriter on which he wrote the following essay. While he equates truth to adequation in the following piece, a position I find difficult to swallow, since I have difficulty with the concept of absolute truth (especially in regards to theology), the following essay is a fine example of a Thomist attempting to square his views with relativism and the charge that all is merely subjective and everyone has their own version of truth (or, the verso, all is objective and all there is absolute truth). I have simply typed his essay as it appeared in the typewritten manuscript.

No, Lady Gaga Is Not Friends with Marxist Philosopher Slavoj Žižek - Entertainment - The Atlantic Wire

I just had to post this on the blog:

No, Lady Gaga Is Not Friends with Marxist Philosopher Slavoj Žižek - Entertainment - The Atlantic Wire

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The Function of the Other in Lacan

In this post, learn about Lacan's analysis of Edgar Allen Poe's short story "The Purloined Letter".

Jacques Lacan, French Psychoanalyst, and Theorist

According to Jacques Lacan (2006), “the subject’s unconscious is the Other’s discourse” (p. 16). Lacan’s correlative thesis is “the unconscious is structured like a language” (1998, p.2).
Lacan sees in Edgar Poe’s short story “The Purloined Letter” (1844) a privileged illustration of the Other’s discourse in relation to the unconscious and the structure of a letter to always contain the possibility of return. In the Poe detective story the interrelationship between the primary characters: the Queen, the King, the Minister D., and Dupin (a French version of Sherlock Holmes) are each in turn inhabited by a letter and its undisclosed contents, seen first as a compromising piece of evidence against the Queen, and then, as becomes evident in Lacan’s reading, a metaphor for the function of the Other modulated by the presence and absence of the letter and the way in which the Other, which does not “exist,” inhabits and is inhabited by the subject. The plot of the Poe story is thus: the compromising letter is displayed in full sight when the King enters the royal boudoir, “the primal scene.” Hoping to avert the King’s eye from the incriminating letter, the Queen places the letter face down so as not to attract undue notice. The Minister D., at that moment, walks in and is able to discern the Queen’s deception because of his “lynx eye.” Producing an identical looking letter from his breast pocket, the Minister concocts a discourse with the King while at the same time nonchalantly placing the facsimile letter on the bureau. The Queen can do nothing. When the conversation between Minister D. and the King is terminated, the Minister picks up the Queen’s letter and leaves the room. The Queen is dispossessed of the letter by the crafty Minister. By possessing the letter, the Minister is in hold of power over the Queen. The Queen promises a sum of money to the person who can retrieve the letter and return it to her. The detective Dupin orchestrates a plot to retrieve the letter from Minister D. Once he determines the location of the letter -- between the jambs of the fireplace -- he craftily replaces it with a facsimile and is able to restore the letter to its proper place and reap a reward.

The Other functions in what Lacan terms the symbolic order. Lacan’s “Seminar on the Purloined Letter” is part of his larger reading of Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In this book Freud speculates on the existence of an inextricably charged compulsion in each human being to repeat past, original trauma (Widerholungszwang). Lacan claims repetition compulsion is to be understood as a structure of repetition based on the insistence of something like a letter in a long signifying chain. The letter is a material signifier in the Poe story. According to Lacan’s developmental model of human subjectivity articulated in his “Mirror Stage” essay (1942), the self, upon leaving dyadic union with the Mother is captured into a “symbolic dimension” which hitherto “binds and orients” it (Lacan 28). Schooled in the thought of Alexander Kojève’s reading of Hegel, Lacan’s theory of intersubjectivity is based upon a theory of alterity that is spelled out by the equation “the I is the Other.” Rimbaud, the boy poet, put it nicely, "Je est autre." In other words, there is no subjectivity without intersubjectivity. I cannot name myself as an “I” in the symbolic order without an embedded relationship to something outside myself which defines me. The birth of the subject arises out of an imaginary misrecognition which in turn is sublimated under the domain of the symbolic order, so that it is “the symbolic order which is constitutive for the subject” (Lacan 29).

The subject is divided between a mirror image of its self, what Lacan calls the imaginary, the topos of images, dreams, and libidinal desires, and the symbolic order, the purview of language, the law, thought, and desire for an Other. The subject is thus barred from access to a signified, written out in the formula S/s, and is circumscribed under the auspices of the signifier. The realm of the imaginary is related to the symbolic but there is a bar wedged between the gestalt of the spectral image and the name of the father, the law, of the symbolic order. What constitutes the self is an intractable search to locate the lost wholeness of the Other. In this way, Lacan rewrites Freud’s observation that the little child realizes his mother (the m/Other) does not have the phallus. Upon realizing that the mother does not, in fact, have the phallus, the child cognizes that the phallus must be lost and goes in search of it in order to restore it to its proper place. We have here the Lacanian explanation of symbolic desire built upon Freud’s idea of the Oedipal Complex as well as the repetition compulsion. The search for the mother’s phallus is forbidden by the Father/Law. The law intrudes in the form of the symbolic father who cuts a decisive “no” into the child’s forbidden desire.

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References

Lacan, J., & Fink, B. (2006). Ecrits: The first complete edition  
in English. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.

----, & Sheridan, A. (1998). The four fundamental concepts of
psychoanalysis: the seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XI. New  
York: W.W. Norton & Co.

Muller, J. P., & Richardson, W. J. (1988). The Purloined Poe: Lacan, 
Derrida & psychoanalytic reading. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Will I Shine Among the Shades in Hades Like Tiresias?

Henry Fuseli, Tiresias appears to 
Ulysses during the sacrificing (1780-1785) 

Yesterday I was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for my bi-monthly one hour visit. I go to the museum immediately after psychoanalysis. I'm sure there is a connection to that somehow. Reliving painful experience followed by the need to be absorbed by beauty seems like a rational explanation. Also: proximity. Dr. X's office is on the Upper East Side so it is not too far of a walk to attend a visit to one of the world's most voluminous holders of art. I checked in my bags. Bag attendant: "Do you have any electronic devices?" I answer a laconic "no." "Do you mind if we inspect your bag, sir?" I am secretly relieved my latest issue of Wet and Wild is absent. Just kidding. This is a kid-friendly blog. So I will say, "just kidding." Although I am sure there are a few number of kids who do read this blog. And if they do and they are scandalized then I am sure I can rightly join the ranks of Socrates's who was charged with "corruption of the youth." In fact, I just had a conversation about Socrates's trial in class last Thursday. Most students agree that Socrates is a cool cat. But, I wonder if they would have liked him if they had actually met him. I too think Socrates is a cool cat but I have a suspicion that I would not like him very much. I think it is the passage in the Meno that compares him to a stingray. Meno tells him that his frequent and accumulating questions without answers numb him like a sting ray's sting (or a jellyfish?). Why be so numbing Socrates? It goes against educational practice today. We are not supposed to overload our students with too many questions. Socrates asks Meno one question after another. Without answer. And more complicated. Can virtue be taught? He does not like Meno's answer so he asks him more questions. How can we get at the heart of virtue? Do we even know what virtue is in its essence? I don't think Socrates is satisfied that strength tells us anything about courage as a whole or that healthy bones tell us anything about health. Socrates wants to get at the heart of the matter. We don't know anything about the essence of a virtue. In fact we know nothing for certain about wholes in of themselves. We know via recollection. We remember knowledge. Since we existed before this life (our souls are immortal) we come into corporeal existences with the memory of our past existence buried deep within us. Knowledge is memory recall. The puzzle is the access to our soul's knowledge is not an open flood way. It is more like a dam with tiny holes allowing a minuscule of seepage to pass through. Damn transmigration of souls. How can I know anything if I do not even know that I must remember to know? That is the stingray part. At least for me. How do I access the treasure trove of knowledge from above? Do I look at beautiful things to stimulate my mind to recollect? Socrates suggests it is all by mere chance. So remember and some don't. The son of a wise man is not necessarily wise. The key is the tether. When you got it — hold it down. Don't let a morsel of knowledge get away and be able to distinguish the dross from the good stuff. I like how the Meno ends. Odysseus was able to identify Tiresias among the shades in Hell because Tiresias shone with a special light. He was a flitter of glory among shadows. In other words who knows when we will "get it"; maybe never, but the thing is, when we do in fact see it, we will know it.

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Why I Like Wanderers (Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Just Love the Epic!)

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Just Love the Epic!
On Loving the Greek Epic Form

Odysseus slays the suitors (while Penelope and Telemachus Look On)

I have a penchant for Greek epic. It's the absolute in the epic I adore. The epic form does seem outdated. But it lives on in presidential speeches and high arching ontologies. Odysseus is an epic wanderer. He's clever. He's stubborn. And he risks the lives of others for his own gain. That's who he is. I think they call it an archetype. Odysseus the man of many wiles. They don't call him that for nothing. I don't like the epic for all those reasons, though: I like the epic form simply because I like to think of the stories of Homer and so forth as unmoored from traditional metaphysics.

Living Life Like I Am a Character in a Novel
I live more like a novel. Or at least when I read novels, especially contemporary novels, that is the vibe I feel. Maybe I should say I want to live my life novelistically rather than epically. Or maybe I should say to live one's life like an epic is foreclosed to us. To think of the world metaphysically has never been all that simple, or might I say, successful. We see in the novel something akin to what it means to live day to day in our modern life. We see in the epic something "satisfactory" to quote the Wise Men in T.S. Elliot's poem about the former dispensation of gods forgotten.

A New Dispensation: God is Dead
I would say the new dispensation is the forgetting of God. Of absolutes. God is still around. We just forget to not believe in him so he sticks around, lingers, like a photograph of a former boyfriend you keep for memory's sake.

I am not saying this mantra "God is dead," in a purely Nietzchean sense, but maybe more like God has been dead (no one killed him), and we like to keep his poster still tacked to the wall.

I'm The Type of Guy Who Likes to Wander 'Round
Which is why the wanderer is an apt modern trope. For Odysseus, it is a mark of human fragility and the inevitable consequence of a man who forsakes God. For the modern wanderer, it is not so much the case we wander because of something the Greeks called excessive pride (hubris). Still, instead, it is a search for different authority unrelated to a top/down structure of power. To wander is more like to stumble about looking for what authorizes existence.

We wander because to stay still is too Medieval.

We keep it going. Kierkegaard's category of immediacy, it turns out, is not a definition of despair but rather an accurate depiction of humanity. If the immediate man is the despairing man, then I would have to claim that all men are despairing.

Growing Up and What That Means for Me
What happens to philosophy when it grows up? Does it become a wanderer sans the narrative script of Greek verse?

I only say all this to mask a more autobiographical story.

I've been in flux. I am in between apartments. Moving from one place to another always unsettles me.

Or maybe it's the tracts passed out in the subway stations announcing the end of the world on May 21, 2011.

And, Finally a Dedication to Walker Percy and György Lukács
I dedicate my homelessness to Walker Percy and György Lukács. No, don't worry, I am not writing a doctoral dissertation on those two guys. It would be fun. I am lucky if I can land a teaching gig this summer. Pay my rent. Eat hot dogs on Coney Island and manage to subsist on anything that can be stir-fried in a wok.

Peace out.

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Book Review - Pursuits of Happiness: A Short Response

Stanley Cavell in his book Pursuits of Happiness writes about remarriage comedies in movies made after the advent of talkies (1934-1949). Cavell's list is as follows: The Lady Eve (1941), It Happened One Night (1934), Bringing Up Baby (1938), The Philadelphia Story (1940), His Girl Friday (1940), Adam’s Rib (1949), and The Awful Truth (1937).

Philosophy With Friends: Chat Transcript On What Constitutes the Good Life

On Facebook, a friend posted on her wall, “wouldn't mind a little more certainty in an inherently uncertain world.” She then asked me on Gchat (Gmail’s in-chat messaging service) “will life ever become clear, or will it just continue onwards until the end in an unsettled state?”
Here is the rest of our chat conversation which ran like this:
Greig (9:14:50 PM): I think life has the potential to become clearer. But, most events, including life, are a combination of good luck, and good decisions. I'm not sure clarity is a given.

Uncertainty (9:17:30 PM): =)

G (9:17:49 PM): That’s one answer. I call it my virtue/luck answer

U (9:19:08 PM): In that case, I guess I'll focus on making good decisions, and try to worry less about the clarity.  I guess - it's just sometimes difficult to know if the decisions you're making are good. Some are clear.  Like - meth is bad.

G (9:20:18 PM): The other answer would be to restate the question. It's not the end of life that's unsettling: to reach the end is a given. The real question is the beginning: how did I get here! I mean not birth. That's a given. But here: in this state of affairs. What is it to be here.

U (9:19:56 PM): But most things are more up in the air. I don't know; I don't think we can know.

G (9:21:21 PM): I think there are multiple ways to live a life.

U (9:21:22 PM): See my earlier comment about being unsettled =)

G (9:21:27 PM): Ok

U (9:21:28 PM): What ways?

G (9:22:05 PM): I'm straying from your original question. Wait. I'm going to write a blog post about this. Let me think about this

U (9:22:28 PM): Ok =)

G (9:22:58 PM): Your question about an unsettled life is a great question. It hits on a more fundamental question: What is the good (life). What makes life good (or not)? Is a good life possible?

U (9:24:25 PM): I like to think so. I suspect that a good life would be unstressful, but avoiding all stress might make the life I lead less good =) Maybe useful versus enjoyable?

G (9:25:45 PM): You're hitting on major aspects of the issue. 1. Useful 2. Pleasure (hedonism). The useful argument goes like this: the greatest good for the greatest number. That's utilitarianism. You get efficient subways but no art. The pleasure argument: eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow you may die. But it dismisses the reality principle. The god argument is not an argument. [This last comment alludes to a fb post on U’s wall that read: “You don't need it because you only have to rely on God. TRUST!”]

U (9:29:40 PM): Are we very good at judging what's useful?

G (9:30:41 PM): Good question.

U (9:30:41 PM): Right.  Although it may help us to experience less personal stress by removing our sense of responsibility.

G (9:31:13 PM): Then then there's the Protestant argument: adversity breeds life. Without stress, there's no possibility for the possibility of something new If life is all vanilla

U (9:32:03 PM): Well, yeah, but too much is *stressful*.

G (9:32:04 PM): Is that the good?

U (9:32:16 PM): Probably not.

G (9:32:28 PM): The good is not easy to grasp. If it's not pleasure, it's not unstress. ??? Is it something like a combination of fulfillment and attaining the golden mean. Like take any virtue. Courage. We say the courageous man is a good. [And I am taking this from Aristotle. God I sound like a teacher in this chat]. But there's a spectrum

U (9:34:13 PM): And it depends on what he's up to when he's out being courageous.

G (9:34:25 PM): If I'm too courageous I'm foolhardy and if I'm not courageous enough I'm a coward. And if im only courageous once. I'm not a life long lived courageous. So it seem if the attainment of virtue Leads To the good It's a life long project of hits and misses. Aristotle once said no one can know the good unless he lived ir *it Which is a clever way of saying nothing  Lol

U (9:36:09 PM): =)

G (9:36:34 PM): So at the end of the day I'm not sure if there is a guarantee on happiness  Or the good Plato said the unexamined life is not worth living But I'm not sure if he knows Paris Hilton

U (9:37:25 PM): Well, how do you know she doesn't examine her life?

G (9:37:33 PM): Maybe I'm being sexist

U (9:37:34 PM): Ah. She's a pretty successful business woman.

G (9:37:42 PM): Strike against me. Bad example. You're right

U (9:38:08 PM): So, Plato is saying that there's no point if living if we don't worry about whether we're living well?

G (9:38:16 PM): Kinda lame huh?

U (9:38:28 PM): Lil' bit.

G (9:39:18 PM): Paris Hilton doesn't have to an examined life to be successful

U (9:39:30 PM): True.

G (9:39:38 PM): If that were true we'd all want to be philosophers

U (9:39:44 PM): =)

G (9:39:58 PM): Which is a profession made to support examiners

U (9:40:24 PM): Do you examine yourselves or mostly other people?

G (9:40:45 PM): I tend to examine ideas. But if I'm going to examine myself. I do it psychoanalytically. Gah.

U (9:41:33 PM): I'm just going to mention that I'm not sure that I have a technical understanding of that word.

G (9:41:34 PM): Gah!

G (9:41:47 PM): I go to Freud.

U (9:41:54 PM): Wasn't he kind of a jerk?

G (9:42:27 PM): Basically psychoanalytic thinking is trying to uncover unconscious motivation for why we do stuff. While Freud is truly not the paradigm of Christian virtue I think he is dead on about that. But anyway uncertainty.

U (9:44:25 PM): Is [it] just uncertain, and we all have to just learn to deal with it?

G (9:45:00 PM): Gah! Let me get back to you. Lol!

U (9:45:19 PM): =) Ok.  I'm gonna get back to plotting [Marking plots of data for analysis purposes]. And less worrying about uncertainty in an unpredictable future. It's always nice talking to you, G.

G (9:46:21 PM): You too! Ttyl.

U (9:46:28 PM): Bye! =)

G (9:46:44 PM): Yah yah yah tah tah

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Notes on an Idea: Cavell On The Star

For the American philosopher Stanley Cavell (The World Viewed, Pursuits of Happiness, Contesting Tears) actors on the silver screen are embodied representations of themselves thrown up on the movie screen, for all us to gaze.

Emerson's Star that Stands the Gaze of Millions
The star, to use Emerson's phrase, "stand the gaze of millions." We gaze on Cary Grant, for example, because we recognize him as Cary Grant who happens to naturally represent the roles he plays in the film. We appreciate Cary Grant (and Irene Dunne, or Elizabeth Taylor, or George Clooney) in the movie because they naturally “are themselves.” It is as if we treat the stars as persons we would encounter in everyday life. If the star does not appear to be himself we call his performance inauthentic. We judge the actor in the movies as authentic portrayals of themselves rather than as a convincing actor performing a role (as in the theater).
Questions of Authenticity and Inauthenticity
For Cavell, this propensity to view the film as authentic or inauthentic is characteristic of modern art. Would we ever call a performance of Chopin inauthentic? If we did we would be addressing our indictment to the performer and not to the piece itself. Art becomes treatable in the same way we treat persons. Are you authentic to the role you play? If not, you are not fit to stand the gaze of millions.
See my post on Cavell's other book about philosophy and movies: Pursuits of Happiness.

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Preparing for My Graduate Schools Oral Exams: On Phronesis

I am writing this right now because I need the motivation to care about the practical:

Aristotle brushed his teeth and had time to think?! #mindblown

On Thursday mornings for the past month, I have been meeting with a fellow graduate student to study for the Philosophy department's oral exam. She is preparing for Aristotle. Although Ancient Philosophy is not my specific area, I find myself going back to the Ancients. My study buddy was explicating Aristotle on phronesis which is found in these two works: the Ethics and the Politics. Aristotle develops this cool idea about wisdom which I think makes sense. We tend to think of wisdom as something disconnected from practical everyday life. Or, we tend to think the attainment of wisdom has nothing to do with practical matters. The wise man just is wise. Right? Wisdom appears to be totally inactive and geared towards contemplation. Nothing to do with everyday stuff like brushing your teeth and getting rid of head lice. Aristotle has this groovy notion that if a person really wants wisdom what he first needs to do is get his practical affairs in order. To achieve the leisure time to reflect one has to do the boring, tedious stuff first. Scheduling, being to work on time, replying to email, making money, and all the stuff we associate with the humdrum must be accomplished, or at least those things ought to be managed well by us if we ever want time to reflect on the good stuff.

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Quotation: Alfred North Whitehead on Great Ideas

A great idea, says Whitehead, "is like a phantom ocean beating upon the shores of human life in successive waves of specializing."

— Alfred North Whitehead

Source: Whitehead, Alfred North. Adventures of Ideas. United Kingdom, Free Press, 1967.

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Lyotard's Caution on Taste

image credit: © Greig Roselli 

"There could be no greater misunderstanding of judgments of taste than to declare them simply universal and necessary."

Jean-François Lyotard, Analytic of the Sublime, p. 19.

Derrida's Definition of Western Philosophy

Derrida writes in "La Différance," in Margins of Philosophy, "For the middle voice, a certain nontransitivity, may be what philosophy, at its outset, distributed into an active and a passive voice, thereby constituting itself by means of this repression" (9).

On Wonder

 An essay by Greig Roselli reprinted from Canon Magazine

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In the Theatetus Plato writes, “philosophy begins in wonder” (155d). The Greek is θαῦμα which translates as “puzzle,” “problem,” or simply, a “marvel”. The definition suggests to wonder is “to solve a conundrum.” In this sense, θαῦμα carries with it an active puzzle-solving. Wonder is open to activity but is also somehow passive in its reflection. I say this because to wonder means both to reflect, to bring a thought into motion, and also, the active thinking of the thought, which we call roughly, the idea. The quip, then, “Philosophy begins in wonder,” seems to suggest a something that originates in a person who wonders, like the birth of an idea, and rises to the surface — call it consciousness, and it is there, an eureka moment, “ah ha!” I got it! Archimedes sat in his tub, noticed that the water level rose equal to the volume of his own body. Before Archimedes’s discovery, an object’s displacement of water was a mystery, something to be puzzled out. Is wonder then what allows us to rise above Baudelaire’s animal who is stupid in his sleep? Wonder, then, is the origin of an eureka moment. Isn’t this what we do when we attempt to puzzle out questions of being?

Archimedes in the bathtub, "Eureka!" image credit:strongnet

Lesson Plan: World's Most Valuable Thing

See the end of this post for a
printable version of the World's Most Value Thing.

It's very simple to use this game designed by the folks at The Philosopher's Magazine. A few years back they did an issue devoted to children and philosophy. The issue has a game a teacher can organize with their students called "The World's Most Valuable Thing."
    I provided a scanned image of the handout above you can use, or if you are feeling creative you can use your own handout with your own world's most valuable things.
The rules are simple (click the link to read more):

Philosophy Thought Experiment: Nietzsche's Allegory of the Demon

Friedrich Nietzsche's most famous articulation of eternal recurrence of the same is imagined as a thought experiment.
The question Nietzsche poses is, ‘Would you live this life over again under the same conditions?’
After reading the quote, think of Bill Murray in the movie Groundhog Day and the allegory makes more sense.

 

Here is an excerpt from the text:

The greatest weight.— What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence - even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!"

Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?... Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?

- Friedrich Nietzsche

The Gay Science, s.341

translated by Walter Kaufmann

Source: Nietzsche, Friedrich W, and Walter Kaufmann. The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs. New York: Random House, 1974. Print.

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image source: fractal ontology