May 2021

Obiter Scripta, no. 112

By in books, nietzsche, obiter scripta, work

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

By in books, foolosophy

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

By in books, foolosophy, obiter scripta

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

By in animals, bricolage, foolosophy

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’”

You Can Have Any Lifestyle So Long As It’s Liberal

By in books, foolosophy, music, nietzsche

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

By in nietzsche, socmed, the geist of the zeit

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.

I Am Little Pieces That Were Picked Up On the Way

By in books, writing

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.

The Boring Surfeit of Knowledge

By in books, bricolage, foolosophy

Writing about the cosmology of the Trobriand islanders, anthropologist Susan Montague tells us that the Trobriand universe is a vast disembodied space filled with both minds and energy. Cosmic minds are all-seeing, all-knowing, and all-powerful, able to manipulate the energy of the universe toward whatever end they desire. But in spite of, or rather because of, these remarkable endowments, cosmic minds have a problem: cosmic boredom. They have the power to do anything they wish, but because they have no needs, that power has no purpose. They may be all-knowing, but to be all-knowing means there’s nothing to think about. So they sit around bored to death or, rather, bored to life, because as it happens, they have invented a way to relieve cosmic boredom: it is to play the amusing game of life. To play, you must be born into a human body, and to be born as such, you must forget the fullness of what you knew and work only with what can be known through the body. A human being is someone who has abandoned the boring surfeit of knowledge so as to come alive.

— Lewis Hyde, A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past

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Soon after TIA was initiated, a similar DARPA program was taking shape under the direction of a close friend of Poindexter’s, DARPA program manager Douglas Gage. Gage’s project, LifeLog, sought to “build a database tracking a person’s entire existence” that included an individual’s relationships and communications (phone calls, mail, etc.), their media-consumption habits, their purchases, and much more in order to build a digital record of “everything an individual says, sees, or does.” LifeLog would then take this unstructured data and organize it into “discreet episodes” or snapshots while also “mapping out relationships, memories, events and experiences.”

LifeLog, per Gage and supporters of the program, would create a permanent and searchable electronic diary of a person’s entire life, which DARPA argued could be used to create next-generation “digital assistants” and offer users a “near-perfect digital memory.”

…Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower, notably warned in 2019 that Facebook is just as untrustworthy as US intelligence, stating that “Facebook’s internal purpose, whether they state it publicly or not, is to compile perfect records of private lives to the maximum extent of their capability, and then exploit that for their own corporate enrichment. And damn the consequences.”

Snowden also stated in the same interview that “the more Google knows about you, the more Facebook knows about you, the more they are able . . . to create permanent records of private lives, the more influence and power they have over us.” This underscores how both Facebook and intelligence-linked Google have accomplished much of what LifeLog had aimed to do, but on a much larger scale than what DARPA had originally envisioned.

— Whitney Webb, “The Military Origins of Facebook”

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Social scientists dream of situations immune to interference by unpredictable human factors. But it turns out that in human affairs no situation is manproof. However high the degree of automation and however overpowering the nonhuman factors, the human elements of enterprise, courage, pride, faith, malice, stupidity, sloth, and the capacity for mischief remain decisive.

— Eric Hoffer, Before The Sabbath

Obiter Scripta, no. 110

By in aphorisms, books, obiter scripta

51 The art of letting things alone: to be practiced the more so the wilder the waves of public or of private life. There are hurricanes in human affairs, tempests of passion, when it is wise to retire to harbor and ride at anchor. Remedies often make diseases worse: in such cases one has to leave them to their natural course and the moral suasion of time. It takes a wise doctor to know when not to prescribe, and at times the greater skill consists in not applying remedies. The proper way to still the storms of the vulgar is to hold your hand and let them calm down of themselves. To give way now is to conquer by and by. A fountain gets muddy with but little stirring up, and does not get clear by our meddling with it but by our leaving it alone. The best remedy for disturbances is to let them run their course, for so they quiet down.

— Gracian, The Art of Worldly Wisdom

The online world seems to exist in a tropical climate. Storms of the vulgar, hell; it’s a years-long rainy season out there. I’d love to believe things will quiet down on their own, but I suspect we’ll just have to move to a temperate internet zone, if there are any.

The Playground of Another’s Thoughts

By in books, bricolage, jests japes jokes jollies, nietzsche

When we read, another person thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process. In learning to write, the pupil goes over with his pen what the teacher has outlined in pencil: so in reading; the greater part of the work of thought is already done for us. This is why it relieves us to take up a book after being occupied with our own thoughts. And in reading, the mind is, in fact, only the playground of another’s thoughts. So it comes about that if anyone spends almost the whole day in reading, and by way of relaxation devotes the intervals to some thoughtless pastime, he gradually loses the capacity for thinking; just as the man who always rides, at last forgets how to walk. This is the case with many learned persons: they have read themselves stupid.

— Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms

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To become a thinker. — How can anyone become a thinker if he does not spend at least a third of the day without passions, people and books?

— Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

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Well, I typically do my reading in the couple of hours before bed, so I guess I’m keeping it within proper limits. I don’t know that I do any worthwhile thinking, or perhaps I should say woolgathering, during the rest of the day, but then again, I don’t have an inheritance (Schopenhauer) or a small pension (Nietzsche) to keep my time and thoughts free of more prosaic matters.

Nevertheless, it is true that we do well to not allow our thoughts to be captured by the inane ruckus made by peers and events. For my part, when I have a little spare time during the workday, rather than waste it on seeing what everyone on social media is shouting about, I like to browse a site like Redbubble and see what sorts of clever or amusing creations can be found under favorite topics. So, for example, what do you find if you do a search for G.K. Chesterton?

“The CHE you respect.” OK, I admit, I’d wear it.

My favorite Greek philosopher. So human, so relatable.

I may have already ordered a sticker of this one for my laptop.

I find myself captivated by this artwork. It speaks to me. What’s the story behind this? Is there a group I can join?

The Merry Duchess

By in books, history

While reading Ian Mortimer’s The Time Traveller’s Guide to Regency Britain, I came across a brief portrayal of a woman I’d never heard of before, Harriot Mellon. To summarize what Mortimer says: In 1777, she was born the illegitimate daughter of an Irish peasant woman. She makes an early living tending to the clothes of a group of traveling actors, which leads to her first role on stage at the age of ten. By her late thirties, she is making six hundred pounds a year from acting — “pocket money” for her at this point, Mortimer says. For she has attracted the amorous attention of Thomas Coutts, the principal partner of Coutts Bank. After his wife dies of dementia, the seventy-nine-year-old Thomas and the thirty-seven-year-old Harriot are married, and spend seven evidently-happy years together.

Coutt’s three adult daughters are unkind to her, fearing the possibility of being disinherited by this gold-digging tramp, and through this unkindness, they bring about, in a downright Greek-tragic twist, their fate: Thomas, dismayed by their attitude, leaves everything to his wife, including his partnership in the bank. Yet Harriot is not vengeful; she continues to provide her “stepdaughters” with an annual allowance of ten thousand pounds.

High society is no more welcoming to her, especially when, in 1827, she marries again, this time to the duke of St. Albans, twenty-three years younger than her. Society ladies shun her for rising above her station, but this marriage too is evidently a happy one. From penniless peasantry to life as a duchess with a personal fortune of two million (which she controls herself through her partnership in the bank) — quite a compelling story, I thought. I’m surprised she hasn’t been adopted as an inspirational heroine by popular culture. Wikipedia says there is one biography of her by Joan Perkin, The Merry Duchess, though Amazon also shows a public-domain printing of her memoirs, as well as this account of her life.

Mortimer’s series of “time-traveller” guidebooks to British history are always entertaining as well, if you’re unfamiliar with him.