三島 由紀夫

I missed this yesterday, but 40 years ago on November 25, 1970, Mishima Yukio committed seppuku at the Tokyo headquarters of the Eastern Command of Japan's Self-Defense Forces.

I can't honestly say I know much about Mishima beyond a couple of short stories I read in university and some things my driving instructor here in Miyazaki told me one night while we were drinking. (Yeah, my driving instructor! He was an admirer of Mishima. He was also very interested in the philosophy of Foucault. In fact, my driving instructor was maybe the most interesting person I've met in Japan. We had some lively conversations, even though we were, philosophically speaking, pretty much at odds.)

I'm basically with Camus with regard to the taking of human life: if it's wrong to commit murder, then it must be wrong to murder oneself.  Still, though, if actions speak louder than words, then we know this much about Mishima: he was no bullshitter. And that says a lot about a man, whether you agree with him or not.

Not Left, Not Right

Came across this quote while idly surfing the web VIA]:

Being a leftist is to first think of the world, then of your country, then of your relatives, then of yourself. Being a rightist is the reverse.

I don't like either/or philosophical propositions, and I especially hate false dichotomies (think, for example, of "nature vs. nurture").

There may very well be people who "think of the world first." Perhaps more observably, there are people who think of themselves first.

I respectfully suggest that both types are assholes who probably don't have many friends (for what should be fairly obvious reasons). Facebook "friends" and Twitter "followers" don't count.

Arthur Ganson

Until quite recently I'd never heard of kinetic sculptor Arthur Ganson. I think, now, that he may be my favorite "artist." I use the quote marks here only because I don't think "art" is a big enough term to contain what he does.

You'll rarely see/hear me blathering about art and meaning and all that stuff, but when I look at Ganson's pieces I'm utterly mesmerized and feel as though I'm as close as humanly possible to gazing at meaning itself. (Yeah, I'm blathering.)

If you're not familiar with what Ganson does, you should check out his YouTube site. Here are a couple of clips. Maybe you'll get what I'm on about.

Each scrap is activated in two places. The mind is very acute and recognizes instantly the manner in which energy flows through a system. Here, the center point always leads the peripheral point. This is vitally important in allowing the scrap to feel as if it is flying.

"This is vitally important in allowing the scrap to feel as if it is flying." Damn. I realize that not everybody looks at the world the same way I do, but, but... Damn...

If you find that philosophically depressing (I don't--what's the point!?), the next one may cheer you up a bit. It's a variation on a theme, but it strikes me as looking at things a bit more optimistically.

In this machine, the chair is passive and all motion is due to interference by the cat. The large disk at the back serves to both counterbalance the arm and give more mass to the chair itself. The motion of the chair is complex and will never repeat.

I think it was Susan who pointed me to Ganson's stuff, but I can't remember when/where/how/etc.

See also Arthur Ganson's Machines (official website).

An Eye-Opener

From Roger Sandall, Plato vs. Grand Theft Auto:

It had been just an ordinary day at the office, metaphysically speaking, but it looked like ending with a bang. In a sunlit grove at the foot of the Acropolis, close by the Academy, Plato was showing Aristotle something he'd found on the web...

[...]

Aristotle looked concerned but not alarmed. He was an early adopter himself, he told Plato, adding that his well-known remarks about theatre were not meant to legitimate coke dealing or running folks over or robbing vulnerable women. Nothing nasty like that. Theatre had a noble heritage, and would doubtless survive the deliriously fun straight-up thugs of Grand Theft Auto IV.

As insanely jealous as an article like this makes me, I still wish there were more writers doing stuff like this. If only because I get it, even though I've never actually played Grand Theft Auto myself. I know what GTA is, I know what video games are, I know what theatre is, and I sure as fuck know who Plato and Aristotle were and probably have a better idea than most about what they said and thought about things. That last is not bragging, it's just what I spent 6 years studying at university (yeah, yeah--and then I entered 2nd year, ha ha ha etc.).

Sandall has, in a very short article, quickly and accurately identified the basic positions of Plato and Aristotle. Plato is a moralist and Aristotle is an observer. I suspect that many (most?) university grads identify more closely with Plato because--and there's no question about this--he was much easier to read. Plato's dialogues are like stories, and are relatively easy to follow. (There's a real irony in this. If you've read Sandall's article, maybe you get it.) Aristotle, on the other hand, reads like the instructions of the made-in-China tent that you're trying to set up out of the box and in the dark. He's damn near impenetrable in many places. Unlike the tent... [whoa! better rein in those extended metaphors, Rick!]

Aristotle is much harder to read. As a fellow grad student once put it, "there aren't as many laughs." But then there wouldn't be if one were merely describing what he observed as opposed to describing the way he thought things should be. Aristotle is pretty ruthless in his deconstruction of every philosopher that came before him (including his teacher, Plato). Plato is a great primer for philosophy, but Aristotle is the shit...

I remember spending an entire day (24 hours!) reading, over and over again, one page of Aristotle's Metaphysics until I finally understood what the fuck he was talking about. It was an epiphany of sorts, and I wouldn't recommend it for everyone. I had a paper deadline. (I got an "A" by the way.) Anyone reading this who thinks maybe I wasted my time on a useless exercise for a useless grade in a useless subject has, I would argue, no concept of what an education is. They probably suck at Grand Theft Auto, as well...

Quote of the Week

"All I know is that I know nothing."
--Famously attributed to Socrates

Socrates never said any such thing. Finally the record has been set straight.

A Dialogue Between Hylas and Philonous

Hylas: Hey Phil, you know what I like about blogging?

Philonous: Well, Hylas, I've blogged too, so I might have some idea.

Hylas: Exactly!

On Orthodoxy

Another nice quote from 1984 (Chapter 5):

"[...] Orthodoxy means not thinking -- not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness."

Personally, I quite like thinking...

Kant Be Done...

Last night I had this dream...

Phriday Philosophy and Phootball

Hell, why not?

This Month in Existentialism

Not Even Wrong

Umm... what the fuck does "existentialism" mean again?

As the Joni Mitchell song says, options traders are looking at life from both sides now. This bout of existentialism follows Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke's decision to lower interest rates by 50 basis points (a half-percentage point).

In English we are learning about existentialism. In this philosophy, life is meaningless.

When all those spirited mental wrestling matches you have about existentialism start growing old (yeah, right!), you can always put an end to the debate with cogito ergo sum [sic]. René Descartes, the 17th-century French philosopher, coined the phrase as a means of justifying reality. According to him, nothing in life could be proven except one's thoughts. Well, so he thought, anyway.

Try This

At bottom, every human being knows very well that he is in this world just once, as something unique, and that no accident, however strange, will throw together a second time into a unity such a curious and diffuse plurality: he knows it, but hides it like a bad conscience why? From fear of his neighbour who insists on convention and veils himself with it. But what is it that compels the individual human being to fear his neighbour, to think and act herd-fashion, and not to be glad of himself? A sense of shame, perhaps, in a few rare cases. In the vast majority it is the desire for comfort, inertia - in short, that inclination to laziness [...]

Stumbling across quotes like this reminds me why I am the way I am. I am...

The Funniest, Most Interesting Thing I've Read Today

Screw the Halt and the Lame.

"People who don't realize that Ayn Rand was insane." Good one, P. Drano

At the Novelty Shop

This is what I thought: for the most banal event to become an adventure, you must (and this is enough) begin to recount it. This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell.

--Jean Paul Sartre, Nausea (Trans. Lloyd Alexander. New York: New Directions Publishing, 1964. p. 56)

Sigh... this is the kind of crap that passes through my mind these days whenever I sit down to "blog". Although I'm essentially an existentialist myself [yes, yes, I know already!], I think Sartre was a bit of a whiny wanker. I mean, look at the title of the book I took the above quote from. Nausea. Nausea? Was he gut-punched or something? Well, yeah, but only "figuratively". Personally I've never had too much trouble telling the difference between myself and a rock on the ground (although I'll have to concede that others may have more difficulty), but if I were gut-punched (literally or figuratively), I somehow doubt that "nausea" would be the first word to spring to my lips to describe the attendant emerging sensations. More likely I would utter something involving the words "puke" or "barf". But that's just me.

Quote(s) of the Week

Truth is simply a compliment paid to sentences seen to be paying their way.
--Richard Rorty, New York Times Magazine, 1990



(1) [An ironist] has radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses, because she has been impressed by other vocabularies, vocabularies taken as final by people or books she has encountered; (2) she realizes that argument phrased in her present vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve these doubts; (3) insofar as she philosophizes about her situation, she does not think that her vocabulary is closer to reality than others, that it is in touch with a power not herself.
--Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, p.73

Greek of the Week: Nomos and Physis, Pt. 3

Picking up where we left off with Callicles last week, we observed that many of his ideas were indicative of a certain mood which found varying expressions in fifth century Athens.

We've already seen, in Aristophanes' Clouds, for example, the notion of holding animals up as models for "natural" human behavior. And as for nature as the basis of international relations we need not look any further than Thucydides (The History of the Peloponnesian War 5.105.2 (quoted below) and 4.61.5): in the course of trying to negotiate peace between rival Sicilian cities, Hermocrates of Syracuse warns the other delegates of the dangers of internal fighting amongst themselves while Athens sits waiting to move in (4.60). He finds the Athenian strategy to be perfectly understandable, and says that he lays no blame on those who are resolved to rule, because "it has always been human nature (for the stronger) to rule over those who submit" (πέφυκε γὰρ τὸ ἀνθρώπειον διὰ παντὸς ἄρχειν τοῦ εἴκοντος).

Continuing with Callicles, what justification, he goes on to ask, did Xerxes or his father have for invading foreign lands, if not that they were acting according to the nature of right (κατὰ φύσιν τὴν τοῦ δικαίου), indeed according to the law of nature (κατὰ νόμον γε τὸν τῆς φύσεως), though this is not a law that humans have made (483d6-e4). Here we have the first coinage of the paradoxical term "law of nature". For the sake of clarity it should be mentioned that the sense in which Callicles uses the term should not be confused with the later Stoic lex naturae ("natural law"), nor with the "laws of nature" with which modern scientists are concerned.

This formulation does have an earlier parallel in Thucydides 5.105.2 ("The Melian Dialogue") where we see the Athenians inform the Melians that he should rule who can as a matter of natural and eternal necessity:

ἡγούμεθα γὰρ τό τε θεῖον δόξῃ τὸ ἀνθρώπειον τε σαφῶς διὰ παντὸς ὑπὸ φύσεως αναγκαίας οὖ ἄν κρατῇ, ἄρχειν· καὶ ἡμεῖς οὔτε θέντες τὸν νόμον οὔτε κειμένῳ πρῶτοι χρησάμενοι, ὄντα δὲ παραλαβόντες καὶ ἐσόμενον ἐς αἰεὶ καταλείψοντες χρώμεθα αὐτῷ...

From our opinion of the gods and of human nature we hold that clearly it is a general necessity of nature to rule where one is able. We did not make this law, nor were we the first to utilize it once it was made. It existed when we received it, and it will continue to exist forever when we have left it behind...

There is no denying the similarities between the positions of Callicles and the Athenians in the Melian Dialogue. Particularly striking is the notion of some principle in nature which says that the strong rule the weak regardless of any human-made laws. It is also obvious that both positions can be reduced to one of self-interest. Where they part ways, however, (and the difference is perhaps a subtle one), is in the Athenians' lack of any appeal to a consideration of "right".

The Athenians are "realists": "we are doing this because that is just the way the world is." Callicles, on the other hand, is not arguing that just because it happens this or that way in nature it is better (he is not reducing "ought" to "is"). In his rejection of conventional in favor of natural "right" as something better and morally superior he is saying that clear thinking individuals have come to judge that what is right by nature is superior because it is the nomos of nature, it is what nature prescribes (P. Shorey, What Plato Said (1933) 154).

...

Quote of the Week

Our loathing of dirt may be so great as to prevent our
cleaning ourselves--"justifying" ourselves.

--Friedrich Nietzsche
Beyond Good and Evil (Chapter IV, Apophthegms and Interludes, 119)

'Nuff said...

Greek of the Week: Nomos and Physis, Pt. 2

For the character of Callicles in the Platonic dialogue Gorgias, nomos and physis are, for the most part, opposed or contrary to each other (ὡς τὰ πολλἀ δὲ ταῦτα ἐναντί᾽ ἀλλήλοις ἔστιν, ἥ τε φύσις καὶ νόμος) (482e5-6). Callicles, however, goes well beyond anything known to have been said by either Hippias or Antiphon.

For Callicles, laws are made by the majority (ὁι πολλοί), who are the weak (ἀσθενεῖς, 483b4-6). Because they fear the strong (δυνατοὺς ὄντας) they make laws for themselves and to their own advantage (συμφέρον). In order to prevent the strong from gaining an advantage (πλέον ἔχειν), the many try to frighten them by telling them that it is shameful and evil to claim a larger share (πλεονεκτεῖν), and that injustice consists of seeking (τὸ ζητεῖν) to have the advantage over others (483b7-c5). Callicles supposes that, because they are inferior, the many enjoy their "equality" (τὸ ἴσον), and that it is for this reason that they call it shameful and unjust to have advantage over them (483c5-8).

Callicles does not think, however, that this is the way that things are supposed to be:

ἡ δέ οἴμαι φύσις αὐτὴ ἀποφαίνει αὐτὸ ὅτι δίκαιόν ἐστιν, τὸν
ἀμείνω τοῦ χείρονος πλέον ἔχειν καὶ τὸν δυνατώτερον τοῦ
ἀδυνατωτέρου. δηλοῖ δὲ ταῦτα πολλαχοῦ ὅτι οὕτως ἔχει, καὶ ἐν
τοῖς ἄλλοις ζῴοις καὶ τῶν ἀνθρώπων ἐν ὅλαις ταῖς πόλεσι καὶ
τοῖς ψένεσιν ὅτι οὕτω τὸ δίκαιον κὲκριται, τὸν κρείττω τοῦ
ἥττονος ἄρχειν καὶ πλέον ἔχειν.

But to my mind nature herself shows us this: that it is right for
the better to have more than the worse, the strong more than
the weak. And it is clear in many instances that this is so
among animals and among races of men and in entire
nation states, that right has been judged in these terms:
the stronger have more than and rule over the weaker.
(483c8-d6)

Although Callicles ultimately surpasses everyone in the extreme nature of his formulations, many of his ideas are indicative of a certain mood which found varying expressions in fifth century Athens...

Greek of the Week: Nomos and Physis, Pt. 1

For many later sophists nomos [law;custom] appeared not simply as a constraint on human nature, but as a tyrant over it, which ran contrary to nature. And so Hippias (Plato, Protagoras 337d), for example, could say that "nomos is a tyrant over human beings: in many ways it constrains us contrary to nature" (... ὁ δὲ νόμος, τύραννος ὢν τῶν ἀνθρώπων, πολλὰ παρἀ τὴν φύσιν βιάζεται...). The same sentiment is echoed in a fragment of Antiphon's (Diels and Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker 87A 44): "the majority of just acts according to law are prescribed contrary to nature" (τὰ πολλἀ τῶν κατὰ νόμον δικαίων πολεμίος τῇ φύσει κεῖταἰ). In these passages the antithesis between nomos and physis [nature] appears clearly enough. Whereas earlier sophists, however, had seen nature as being essentially "what is," and nomos as being "what ought to be," later sophists sought to elevate physis above nomos, and from nature derive valid norms. Some would take this idea to radical extremes, and in the process set about the destruction of all traditional notions of law and convention and posit a "right life according to nature."

Greek of the Week: Natural Law?

We have an interesting fragment this week from the Pre-Socratic Anonymous Iamblichi (Diels and Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 89.6.1), in which the writer not only appears to deny that nature and human constructs are antithetical, but goes so far that it could be called an attempt to reconcile the two ideas.

εἰ γὰρ ἔφυσαν μὲν οἱ ἄνθρωποι ἀδύνατοι καθ᾽ ἕνα ζῆν, συνῆλθον δὲ πρὸς ἀλλήλους τῆι ἀνάγκηι εἴκοντες... [εὕρηται] σὺν ἀλλήλοις δὲ εἶναι αὐτοὺς κἀν ἀνομίαι διαιτᾶσθαι οὐχ... διὰ ταύτας τοίνυν τὰς ἀνάγκας τόν τε νόμον καὶ τὸ δίκαιον ἐμβασιλεύειν τοῖς ἀνθρώποις καὶ οὐδαμῆι μεταστῆναι ἄν αὐτά. φύσει γὰρ ἰσχυρὰ ἐνδεδέσθαι ταῦτα.

If men were by nature unable to live alone, but yielding to
necessity they communed with one another... yet they
discovered that they could not live with one another without
laws, we can conclude that because of these necessities law
and justice rule as kings among men, and that in no way could they change, for these things have been firmly fixed by nature.

"Law and justice rule as kings... fixed by nature"... I like the sound of that...

[Note: Anyone familiar with classical Greek or with fonts (fontography?) and typography has probably noticed that the Greek text in these posts has a less-than-perfect appearance. I'm aware of the problem and have been trying to fix it. I have, however, been stymied in my efforts. It doesn't seem to matter what I do. It looks like shit in Blogger's html editor, then it looks quite nice in "compose" or "preview" mode, finally it looks like shit after I hit the "publish" button. I've even tried copying and pasting very nice looking Greek from other sites, but it comes out of Blogger looking like crap. I continue to work on the problem...]

Greek of the Week: On the "Prescriptions" of Nature

There's an amusing moment in The Clouds by Aristophanes. In the play the character of Pheidippides has been sent by his father to partake of the "New Learning" (i.e. the teachings of the "Sophists") so that he can learn how to make "wrong into right" (i.e. learn the art of "Rhetoric"). He learns too well it seems, because he returns home and beats his father, offering the following theoretical justification for his act:

σκέψαι δὲ τοὺς ἀλεκτρυόνας καὶ τἄλλα τὰ βοτὰ ταυτί,
ὡς τοὺς πατέρας ἀμύνεται: καίτοι τί διαφέρουσιν
ἡμω̂ν ἐκει̂νοι, πλήν γ' ὅτι ψηφίσματ' οὐ γράφουσιν;

Observe the rooster and all of the other animals,
and how they punish their parents. How, in fact,
do they differ from us except that they do not pass laws?
(1427-29)

To which his father Strepsiades replies:

τί δῆτ᾽, ἐπειδὴ τούς ἀλεκτρυόνας ἅπαντα μιμεῖ
οὐκ ἐσθίεις καὶ τὴν κόπρον κἀπὶ ξύλου καθεύδεις

Well then, since you imitate the rooster in all things,
why don't you eat shit and sleep on a perch?
(1430-31)

Have I ever mentioned that I'm quite fond of the Greeks?

Greek of the Week

Just because I can...

...ὁ δὲ μὴ δυνάμενος κοινωνεῖν ἢ μηδὲν δεόμενος δι᾽
αὐτάρκειαν οὐθεν μέρος πὸλεως, ὥστε ἢ θερίον ἢ θεός

One who is unable to live in a community, or does not need to because he is self-sufficient, is no part of the polis, and is therefore either a beast or a god.

--Aristotle, Politics 1253a27-29

More in the days ahead...