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Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying
Jan. 9th, 2010 03:17 am
Currently at Toronto Pearson: -12. High today: -8. I will refrain from commenting on today's "Extreme Cold Alert".
This term I have decided to convert from the Trinity College library to the St. Michael's College library. Once you've gone Anglo-Catholic, you might as well go all the way. Actually, I stay at St. Mike's for the quiet, but I went for the book sale. It has a cafe (which sells Starbucks tea, and I hate to say this and am really surprised by it, but Starbucks' "Awake" tea is awfully good), and in its cafe it has a table of books culled from the library, on sale for $0.50 each. (L. has it on good authority that books that are left on the table when it's cleared bi-weekly are recycled. Recycled.) Yesterday I picked up the 1928 edition of the Oxford Book of Carols, edited by R. Vaughan Williams and a couple of other guys (one of whom has the last name Drearmer for some reason). It has a preface, which says among other things that the carol began modern music and that the carol never recovered in England after Cromwell banned Christmas. But my favourite parts are this:
The typical carol gives voice to the common emotions of healthy people in language that can be understood and music that can be shared by all. Because it is popular it is therefore genial as well as simple; it dances because it is so Christian, echoing St. Paul's conception of the fruits of the Spirit in its challenge to be merry--'Love and joy come to you'. Indeed, to take life with real seriousness is to take it joyfully, for seriousness is only sad when it is superficial: the carol is thus all the nearer to the ultimate truth because it is jolly. So, on the one hand, the genius of the carol is an antidote to the levity of much present-day literature, music, and drama, made by men who are afraid to touch the deeper issues of life because seriousness is associated in their minds with gloom; for its jubilant melodies can encircle the most solemn of themes: on the other hand, it is an antidote to pharisaism, the formalism of which is always morose ...
and this:
One carol ... has recently obtained a certain vogue because it was ascribed to a famous historical personage (a man, by the way, who would have been surprised to find his work associated with so slight a tune): it was evident that the words as they stood were at best but an unskilled translation remote from the supposed original, but a long search had to be made before we could be sure that the historical personage was entirely innocent of the thing in any form whatever.
They don't identify the guilty carol, but "Away in a Manger" is conspicuously absent from the book, and Uncle Wikipedia pretty much confirms that that's what they meant (as well as noting that it's Britons' second-favourite Christmas carol).
Their notes to the carols, many of which say that the words are dumb but the tune is a carol all right so we had to include it, are excellent, particularly the one that says the verses in the Wassail Carol about beer and mouldy cheese should be omitted in church and the one that says Good King Wenceslas doesn't make sense and they hope its lovely tune can someday be rescued from the wretched lyrics recently imposed on it.
"In the Bleak Midwinter" was written by Gustav Holst. How about that.
Today I read a book in the library. I do not often read books. I mean entire books. I couldn't tell you the last book I read. But I saw this book there yesterday and feared that it might say any number of things I've been meaning to say about the Republic, and so I read it today. It is Beautiful City: The Dialectical Character of Plato's Republic by David Roochnik, and actually it says only about three of the things I've been meaning to say about the Republic, so that's pretty good. The first is that the "tripartite theory of the soul" that's introduced in Book 4 gets extremely complicated in Books 8 and 9, such that, among other things, reason can be drawn in different directions (which, on Book 4's terms, would mean that there are different "parts" to reason). It's funny, typing the latter point, I'm struck by how it's obviously true, and yet it destroys what appears to be one of the most important points the Republic makes: that the just life is the best life because the just life is a life ruled by reason, and reason alone unifies the soul. The second thing is that there would be no philosophy in the Republic's supposedly ideal city. These two things are related: philosophy is dialectical, which means that philosophy works by reason being pulled in different directions. In the supposedly ideal city, the philosopher-king's reason is pulled in one direction only, toward the revealed good, and so dialectic ceases. (Actually, I think this probably isn't true, because the good can never be revealed once and for all--this is why the philosopher has to return to the cave, not for the good of the cave, but for the good of the philosopher. The good is only ever revealed in a dialectic between theory and practice.)
That first idea about reason being pulled in different directions is something I've been dwelling on lately, and the phrase "purity of heart is to will one thing" kept drifting into my head in relation to it, until I was compelled last week to set out into the world to try to find Kierkegaard's Purity of Heart is to WIll One Thing. That will be the next book I read.
One thing Roochnik says that I like is that Cephalus--the old guy who doesn't stick around for the philosophy--"wants to be among the eukoloi, the easygoing (but literally, 'those who have good digestion')." Dialectical philosophy is not good for the digestion. Quite literally. I am feeling this right now. (It doesn't mean I should quit. I can't quit.) I was hoping to write a paper, until the relevant deadline passed a few days ago, on gut feelings. I get a lot of gut feelings. They're mostly something to do with anxiety, and anxiety is mostly something to do with uncertainty. (This prompted me to go pick up Beckett's The Unnamable the other day, the one that ends "you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on." Anxiety is so much having to go on and not knowing how, not being sure how, seeing different hows and seeing through them--seeing that I can't defend them, not convincingly (the evidence is non-persuasive, as Sartre says--bad faith might save your life, or at least your digestion). I can only talk when the conversation is open. This is probably why I have tended to connect with immigrants, crazy people, and other aliens. I can't talk with anyone who is certain, although I have a hard time with people who are similarly defensive against certainty, too.) But these gut feelings--this TERRIBLE CRUSHING that I have right now--they are, most basically, aversions. They are intelligences, they intend something (in the phenomenological sense of intention--they are ways of apprehending something, of bringing it into experience). This crushing wordlessly screaming no no no stop stop stop--I feel like it's bad to be writing this though I think it's good to write it when I'm not. Conscience is, literally, in the gut. And nothing but, I don't think. (Nietzsche hated conscience and had notoriously bad digestion.) Well, no--sometimes it's somewhere back of my nose, that feeling that's closer to crying, although the crushing doesn't have a completely different flavour from crying. (It's not that bad, seriously ... but it is serious.)
I would've liked to put down here all the things I've learned about the Republic teaching it again this year--the main one being that teaching the Republic became incredibly difficult this year because I learned so much more about it. I got to worrying that if I teach this Republic course again, I might learn so much that teaching it will be impossible. Apart from that, I think the most important general thing is that the tyrant and the philosopher are the same person, and the movement of political generation in Book 2 and the movement of political degeneration in Books 8 and 9, beginning with the oligarchical constitution, are the same movement: the necessary movement from a polis serving necessary appetite to one serving unnecessary appetite necessarily yields either philosophy or tyranny.
Actually, the most important thing might be this: at the end of the myth of Er, at the end of the Republic, the ultimate reward for having lived a just and philosophical life (after the delightful bullshit about heavenishness and hellishness) is that one knows which life to pick for one's next incarnation--namely, a just and philosophical life.
The reward of philosophy is more philosophy. I think maybe the most important thing that happens in the Republic is that, at one point in Book 7, it's ambiguous whether Socrates is talking about dialectic or about the good. It's the most important thing that happens if the point is that dialectic--philosophy--is the good. The good is supposed to be sought dialectically, but the dialectical seeking is the good. The dialectical seeking, spiralling, opening up, ever-expanding engagement--the point is not to transform gnosis into episteme, knowing you into knowing about you; the point is to continually jump off from that settling into episteme into new gnosis. (If this is so wonderful, why does it give me such a stomachache? Hell really is other people--though other people aren't necessarily hell. Socrates's trick is that they can kill him, for all he cares. But as Adelman used to say, Socrates is a monster. People can't live like that, or at least they shouldn't. Well, anyway, as Nietzsche says, Fresh air! Fresh air! There's so much bad air at the end of teaching (and lo, it is ended now for me, for eight months to life). I was thinking the other day, I don't know why academics generally have so little sympathy for cops, when so much of teaching is being the police.)
This term I have decided to convert from the Trinity College library to the St. Michael's College library. Once you've gone Anglo-Catholic, you might as well go all the way. Actually, I stay at St. Mike's for the quiet, but I went for the book sale. It has a cafe (which sells Starbucks tea, and I hate to say this and am really surprised by it, but Starbucks' "Awake" tea is awfully good), and in its cafe it has a table of books culled from the library, on sale for $0.50 each. (L. has it on good authority that books that are left on the table when it's cleared bi-weekly are recycled. Recycled.) Yesterday I picked up the 1928 edition of the Oxford Book of Carols, edited by R. Vaughan Williams and a couple of other guys (one of whom has the last name Drearmer for some reason). It has a preface, which says among other things that the carol began modern music and that the carol never recovered in England after Cromwell banned Christmas. But my favourite parts are this:
The typical carol gives voice to the common emotions of healthy people in language that can be understood and music that can be shared by all. Because it is popular it is therefore genial as well as simple; it dances because it is so Christian, echoing St. Paul's conception of the fruits of the Spirit in its challenge to be merry--'Love and joy come to you'. Indeed, to take life with real seriousness is to take it joyfully, for seriousness is only sad when it is superficial: the carol is thus all the nearer to the ultimate truth because it is jolly. So, on the one hand, the genius of the carol is an antidote to the levity of much present-day literature, music, and drama, made by men who are afraid to touch the deeper issues of life because seriousness is associated in their minds with gloom; for its jubilant melodies can encircle the most solemn of themes: on the other hand, it is an antidote to pharisaism, the formalism of which is always morose ...
and this:
One carol ... has recently obtained a certain vogue because it was ascribed to a famous historical personage (a man, by the way, who would have been surprised to find his work associated with so slight a tune): it was evident that the words as they stood were at best but an unskilled translation remote from the supposed original, but a long search had to be made before we could be sure that the historical personage was entirely innocent of the thing in any form whatever.
They don't identify the guilty carol, but "Away in a Manger" is conspicuously absent from the book, and Uncle Wikipedia pretty much confirms that that's what they meant (as well as noting that it's Britons' second-favourite Christmas carol).
Their notes to the carols, many of which say that the words are dumb but the tune is a carol all right so we had to include it, are excellent, particularly the one that says the verses in the Wassail Carol about beer and mouldy cheese should be omitted in church and the one that says Good King Wenceslas doesn't make sense and they hope its lovely tune can someday be rescued from the wretched lyrics recently imposed on it.
"In the Bleak Midwinter" was written by Gustav Holst. How about that.
Today I read a book in the library. I do not often read books. I mean entire books. I couldn't tell you the last book I read. But I saw this book there yesterday and feared that it might say any number of things I've been meaning to say about the Republic, and so I read it today. It is Beautiful City: The Dialectical Character of Plato's Republic by David Roochnik, and actually it says only about three of the things I've been meaning to say about the Republic, so that's pretty good. The first is that the "tripartite theory of the soul" that's introduced in Book 4 gets extremely complicated in Books 8 and 9, such that, among other things, reason can be drawn in different directions (which, on Book 4's terms, would mean that there are different "parts" to reason). It's funny, typing the latter point, I'm struck by how it's obviously true, and yet it destroys what appears to be one of the most important points the Republic makes: that the just life is the best life because the just life is a life ruled by reason, and reason alone unifies the soul. The second thing is that there would be no philosophy in the Republic's supposedly ideal city. These two things are related: philosophy is dialectical, which means that philosophy works by reason being pulled in different directions. In the supposedly ideal city, the philosopher-king's reason is pulled in one direction only, toward the revealed good, and so dialectic ceases. (Actually, I think this probably isn't true, because the good can never be revealed once and for all--this is why the philosopher has to return to the cave, not for the good of the cave, but for the good of the philosopher. The good is only ever revealed in a dialectic between theory and practice.)
That first idea about reason being pulled in different directions is something I've been dwelling on lately, and the phrase "purity of heart is to will one thing" kept drifting into my head in relation to it, until I was compelled last week to set out into the world to try to find Kierkegaard's Purity of Heart is to WIll One Thing. That will be the next book I read.
One thing Roochnik says that I like is that Cephalus--the old guy who doesn't stick around for the philosophy--"wants to be among the eukoloi, the easygoing (but literally, 'those who have good digestion')." Dialectical philosophy is not good for the digestion. Quite literally. I am feeling this right now. (It doesn't mean I should quit. I can't quit.) I was hoping to write a paper, until the relevant deadline passed a few days ago, on gut feelings. I get a lot of gut feelings. They're mostly something to do with anxiety, and anxiety is mostly something to do with uncertainty. (This prompted me to go pick up Beckett's The Unnamable the other day, the one that ends "you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on." Anxiety is so much having to go on and not knowing how, not being sure how, seeing different hows and seeing through them--seeing that I can't defend them, not convincingly (the evidence is non-persuasive, as Sartre says--bad faith might save your life, or at least your digestion). I can only talk when the conversation is open. This is probably why I have tended to connect with immigrants, crazy people, and other aliens. I can't talk with anyone who is certain, although I have a hard time with people who are similarly defensive against certainty, too.) But these gut feelings--this TERRIBLE CRUSHING that I have right now--they are, most basically, aversions. They are intelligences, they intend something (in the phenomenological sense of intention--they are ways of apprehending something, of bringing it into experience). This crushing wordlessly screaming no no no stop stop stop--I feel like it's bad to be writing this though I think it's good to write it when I'm not. Conscience is, literally, in the gut. And nothing but, I don't think. (Nietzsche hated conscience and had notoriously bad digestion.) Well, no--sometimes it's somewhere back of my nose, that feeling that's closer to crying, although the crushing doesn't have a completely different flavour from crying. (It's not that bad, seriously ... but it is serious.)
I would've liked to put down here all the things I've learned about the Republic teaching it again this year--the main one being that teaching the Republic became incredibly difficult this year because I learned so much more about it. I got to worrying that if I teach this Republic course again, I might learn so much that teaching it will be impossible. Apart from that, I think the most important general thing is that the tyrant and the philosopher are the same person, and the movement of political generation in Book 2 and the movement of political degeneration in Books 8 and 9, beginning with the oligarchical constitution, are the same movement: the necessary movement from a polis serving necessary appetite to one serving unnecessary appetite necessarily yields either philosophy or tyranny.
Actually, the most important thing might be this: at the end of the myth of Er, at the end of the Republic, the ultimate reward for having lived a just and philosophical life (after the delightful bullshit about heavenishness and hellishness) is that one knows which life to pick for one's next incarnation--namely, a just and philosophical life.
The reward of philosophy is more philosophy. I think maybe the most important thing that happens in the Republic is that, at one point in Book 7, it's ambiguous whether Socrates is talking about dialectic or about the good. It's the most important thing that happens if the point is that dialectic--philosophy--is the good. The good is supposed to be sought dialectically, but the dialectical seeking is the good. The dialectical seeking, spiralling, opening up, ever-expanding engagement--the point is not to transform gnosis into episteme, knowing you into knowing about you; the point is to continually jump off from that settling into episteme into new gnosis. (If this is so wonderful, why does it give me such a stomachache? Hell really is other people--though other people aren't necessarily hell. Socrates's trick is that they can kill him, for all he cares. But as Adelman used to say, Socrates is a monster. People can't live like that, or at least they shouldn't. Well, anyway, as Nietzsche says, Fresh air! Fresh air! There's so much bad air at the end of teaching (and lo, it is ended now for me, for eight months to life). I was thinking the other day, I don't know why academics generally have so little sympathy for cops, when so much of teaching is being the police.)
