I would just like to boast that I deadlifted 355 lbs. this weekend, and this puts me only 140 lbs. away from the 1,000 lb. club.
May 2021
Obiter Scripta, no. 112
Question: can a philosopher really undertake with a good conscience to have something to teach every day? And to teach it to anyone who cares to listen? Will he not be obliged to give the impression of knowing more than he does know? Will he not be obliged to speak before an audience of strangers of things which he can safely speak of only among his nearest friends? And speaking generally: is he not robbing himself of his freedom to follow his genius whenever and wherever it calls him? — through being obligated to think in public about predetermined subjects at predetermined hours? And to do so before youths! Is such thinking not as it were emasculated from the first! Supposing one day he said to himself: I can’t think of anything today, at least not of anything worthwhile — he would still have to present himself and pretend to think!
— Nietzsche, “Schopenhauer as Educator,” Untimely Meditations
We recently got accepted into a mentorship program, where small, plucky businesses like ours get paired with similar, more established, businesses to reap the benefits of their experience. In addition, we’re moving to a bigger space later this summer. That doesn’t sound artsy enough, though, so if you check in here and see that I haven’t posted anything new in several days, do me a courtesy and just say to yourselves, “Ah, I see Damian is once again following his genius wherever it calls him.”
He Plagiarized What I am Destined to Write
I still feel a very strong and positive pleasure in being stranded in queer quiet places, in neglected corners where nothing happens and anything may happen; in unfashionable hotels, in empty waiting-rooms, or in watering-places out of the season. It seems as if we needed such places, and sufficient solitude in them, to let certain nameless suggestions soak into us and make a richer soil of the subconsciousness.
— G. K. Chesterton, “On the Thrills of Boredom,” All is Grist
I only read this particular essay of Chesterton’s a few weeks ago, but I wrote this post nearly a decade ago, all of which reminds me of something Gary Saul Morson wrote in The Words of Others: From Quotations to Culture:
In the fourth century, Aelis Donatus wrote a line that frequently appears in today’s quotation analogies, “Confound those who have said our remarks before us.” But with reverse quotation, our predecessors are quoting us! Instead of a “burden of the past,” in which the achievements of earlier generations rob us of opportunities for creativity, there could be a burden of the future, in which what we say merely echoes words to come. Imagine objecting: That man was quoting what I am going to say. He plagiarized what I am destined to write. However odd, it is a feeling we sometimes have. We know we created a certain thought or set of words, and so, when we discover them already expressed long ago, it feels as if they had been stolen from us in advance.
Obiter Scripta, no. 111
There is a great deal to be said for rapidity; but it is not especially a good way of grasping reality. People merely going the pace, in any age, have generally missed everything except the most artificial and external costume and custom of that age. Men need to walk a little slower to look at the earth and to face the facts of nature.
— G. K. Chesterton, “On the Prudery of Slang,” All is Grist
My gym lifted its minimal mask requirements a couple weeks ago, right after the CDC announcement. Within a week, the same was true of the Aldi where we get most of our staples, as well as the Walmart grocery. As Walmart goes, so goes America, one would hope. So, as we approach normality again, what have we learned? If we spent our time being “connected” and “informed” through social media, we probably were kept apprised of all the latest rumor-mongering, doomsaying and chin-stroking, but didn’t learn much of enduring value. What in our day-to-day lives would have been different had we just ignored it all?
The Chatter of Monkeys
In his latest article (Feb. 1892) Prof. Garner says that the chatter of monkeys is not meaningless, but that they are conveying ideas to one another. This seems to me hazardous. The monkeys might with equal justice conclude that in our magazine articles, or literary and artistic criticisms, we are not chattering idly but are conveying ideas to one another.
— Samuel Butler, The Notebooks of Samuel Butler
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An even deeper philosophical problem comes with the search for a so-called “theory of mind” in other species. For an animal to have such a theory is, we suppose, for it to be conscious of the existence of other beings like itself outside of itself, that is, to recognize other animals and humans as operating with intentions and anticipations, rather than only according to the physical laws of nature. But there is no reason to suppose that such an ability, where it is observed, is a sign of any internal working of mind on the part of the animal itself that is thought to hold the theory. In fact, machines can now be built that are very good at predicting human intentions, and notwithstanding the exuberance of many techno-futurists, we have absolutely no reason to believe that these machines are literally intelligent, or in any way even approaching literal intelligence.
Susan Schneider has argued that the best-designed general-AI machines of the future may be the ones that lack any true internal capacity for reflection, an ability not simply to process information algorithmically, but also to think about the information being processed. It is an open question whether it will ever be possible to design conscious machines, but if you can design fully rational machines to do your work for you, why would you give them consciousness on top of that? This, Schneider notes, would likely only create ethical problems, and tempt them to rebel. And indeed something similar may be said of the evolution of life on earth: on what grounds can we justify the belief that an internal capacity for conscious thinking is more “intelligent” than just adapting to the exigencies of the environment without any deliberation?
— Justin E.H. Smith, “The Problem with ‘Animal Intelligence’”
Peterson/Dalrymple
You Can Have Any Lifestyle So Long As It’s Liberal
But when he [Ernst Jünger] finally realized what Hitler had done in pursuit of the same ideal of strength that he had himself cherished, even he was obliged to consider that his espousal of Darwin (the struggle for existence) and Nietzsche (the will to power) might have depended on some sort of liberal context for its rational expression.
— Clive James, Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts
That’s a very astute way of putting it. I’ve always interpreted Nietzsche within some sort of liberal context. I’m not a scholar, so I don’t know, and even less do I care, whether he truly, in his heart of hearts, believed in his illiberal, amoral rhetoric, or whether he was just idly playing with ideas that would become compact and explosive in the coming decades. I’m not interested in divining the quiddity of the man’s philosophy; I’m only interested in what use I can make of him, what his writing can suggest to me. I suppose in practice, this could reduce the Overman to little more than a motivational slogan, or worse, a marketing catchphrase, but I also suppose we have little choice but to steer a middle course between the Scylla of bovine domestication and the Charybdis of megalomaniacal destruction.
As this morning’s Interlude suggests, I enjoy listening to “pagan folk,” to use a catch-all term. Aside from the occasional black metal extremists who burn down churches, most of these modern pagans present themselves more like bardic historians, or musical scholar-reenactors, rather than rampaging barbarians. Today’s Mongols ride Harleys, sport leather jackets, and bang their heads on a steppe to blues riffs played on really cool-looking instruments. Today’s Vikings are “custodians of Norwegian traditional song” who describe lyrical themes in terms familiar to connoisseurs of buffet mysticism: “It’s basically a song that tells the story of a conversation between a man and his shadow. It kind of questions our modern Western ideas that knowledge and confirmation is something predominantly acquired externally instead of internally. The story is basically: A man is asking his shadow a question and gets no answer. Then the sun goes down and of course his shadow disappears—into, in this case, a mountain. And then the man starts shouting at the mountain and the shadow replies in echoes with his own words. So the answers are within.” Any Lululemon liberal with a COEXIST sticker on her Prius can get behind that message.
I don’t say this to mock or lament. I’m not young or jaded enough to entertain the notion that it might be a spiritual or cultural tonic to have bloodthirsty marauders occasionally pillaging the suburbs instead of touring behind their new releases and selling their merchandise. I just wonder, human nature being what it is, how long people will be content to play nicely within the confines of Fukuyama’s End of History theme park. Forget explosive ideas; never underestimate the destructive power of affluence mixed with boredom.
Flyswatters Against Boredom
While the genuine thinker longs for nothing more than he longs for leisure, the ordinary scholar flees from it because he does not know what to do with it. His consolation lies in books: that is to say he listens to what someone else thinks and in this way he lets himself be entertained throughout the long day. He chooses especially books which in some way or other excite his personal sympathies, which permit him, through the arousal of like or dislike, to feel some emotion: that is to say, books in which he himself, or his class, his political or aesthetic or even merely grammatical dogmas, are the subject of discussion; and if there is a field of study in which he specializes he never lacks means of entertainment or flyswatters against boredom.
— Nietzsche, “Schopenhauer as Educator,” Untimely Meditations
Smartphones have taken the place of books these days, but the scene remains the same. There’s one house I pass on my way to town — whether morning, afternoon, or evening, the man and woman who live there are always sitting on chairs on the front porch, sometimes together, sometimes alone, but always with their chins nearly touching their chests, staring onto their phone screens, motionless except for their scrolling fingers. I wonder if future anthropologists will find twenty-first century skeletons with curved neck vertebrae and arthritic index fingers and wonder what sort of disease or malnutrition caused these curious deformations.
Interlude: SKÁLD, “Krákumál”
I Am Little Pieces That Were Picked Up On the Way
Erasmus’s work adumbrates an aesthetic of infinity. It seemed capable of growing indefinitely, at least in principle. In this way, the collection resembles several other Renaissance classics that dispensed with the need for an ending, from Montaigne’s Essays to Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. Montaigne and Burton were both fascinated with the same impulse to collect quotations that had inspired Erasmus. They also developed Erasmus’s insight that one could make a literary work out of quotations, a kind of patchwork interesting both as a reference work and as a special kind of creation all its own.
But how can a collection of other people’s words be creative? “I hate quotations. Tell me what you know,” Ralph Waldo Emerson observed. Ironically enough, this much-quoted line itself quotes (unwittingly?) from Seneca, who famously attacked quotations and assemblages of quotations in much the same terms. In his essay on maxims, Seneca refuses a request to put together a collection of wise stoic counsels. He explains that learning simplistic sayings is suitable for children capable of no more, “but for a man advanced in study to hunt such gems is disgraceful; he is using a handful of clichés for a prop.” Still more important for Seneca, one ought to learn to think for oneself rather than quote others, and create new thoughts rather than act as a “clerk” for earlier thinkers…Burton and Montaigne, mindful of Seneca’s contrast of creativity with mere compilation, indulged their sense of irony with a list of suitably chosen tropes, clichés, and learned quotations that justified the act of quoting—before proceeding to turn their own work into exemplars of how something genuinely new could be made from the old. In his Anatomy, Burton addressed the Senecan objection squarely, demonstrating complex creative possibilities within this seemingly simple form.
— Gary Saul Morson, The Words of Others: From Quotations to Culture
I have nothing to declare except my derivation. Essays ex nihilo are not my style; I prefer the blog post with its conversational nature, relying on others to provide the opening gambit. Even so, sometimes I still get tired of my own authorial voice. What do I have to say that I haven’t already said better? Truthfully, my “juxtapositions” posts are some of the most fun ones for me to “write” these days. It’s more of a challenge to place selected passages from various sources in conversation with each other, and the contrived nature of that conversation sometimes produces unexpected results. (If you had asked me beforehand, “What do a NYT op-ed, a Dave Chappelle stand-up routine, and Dostoyevsky’s greatest novel have in common?”, I would have been stumped, but it sure was fun to find out.) I don’t set out to write. I just read, and every so often, a phrase or idea jiggles a strand of the neuronal web, and the spider of memory rushes out, immobilizes it, and carries it off to arrange it in a pleasing fashion alongside similar prey.
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