My dad stopped a fight today

On the way home from the metro. On a related note: my father is a badass.

Meme-y meme

Today just a silly meme, because I'm exhausted, and I'm trying to post for Conley before bed.


. Put your iTunes, Windows Media Player, etc. on shuffle (I used my mp3 player)

2. For each question, press the next button to get your answer

3. YOU MUST WRITE THAT SONG NAME DOWN NO MATTER HOW SILLY IT SOUNDS!

4. Tag 20 friends.

5. Everyone tagged has to do the same thing

6. Have Fun!

1. IF SOMEONE SAYS 'ARE YOU OKAY' YOU SAY?
Light My Fire

2. HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE YOURSELF?
Pulling Teeth

3. WHAT DO YOU LIKE IN A GUY/GIRL?
Helpless

4. HOW DO YOU FEEL TODAY?
Hold on Hope

6. WHAT IS YOUR LIFE'S PURPOSE?
People as Places as People

7. WHAT'S YOUR MOTTO?
Man Outta Time

8. WHAT DO YOUR FRIENDS THINK OF YOU?
The most Wonderful Girl

9. WHAT DO YOUR PARENTS THINK OF YOU?
Impatient

10. WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT VERY OFTEN?
Runaway

11. WHAT IS 2 + 2?
Cuntry Boner

12. WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR BEST FRIEND?
Shit Luck

13. WHAT IS YOUR LIFE STORY?
Last Caress

14. WHAT DO YOU WANT TO BE WHEN YOU GROW UP?
Where Idols Once Stood

15. WHAT DO YOU THINK WHEN YOU SEE THE PERSON YOU LIKE?
Top of the World

16. WHAT SONG WILL YOU DANCE TO AT YOUR WEDDING?
Tunnel Vision

17. WHAT WILL THEY PLAY AT YOUR FUNERAL?
Can’t Heal You

18. WHAT IS YOUR HOBBY/INTEREST?
My HEAVEN

19. WHAT IS YOUR BIGGEST FEAR?
Disconnected

20. WHAT IS YOUR BIGGEST SECRET?
Sons of Apollo

21. WHAT DO YOU WANT RIGHT NOW?
Marchin On
22. WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR FRIENDS?
You’ll Rebel to Anything (as long as it’s not challenging)

23. WHAT WILL YOU POST THIS AS?
Winterborn

A short list of things I want

Things I want to do
Teach in a foreign country
Be a peace corps volunteer
Contribute positively to higher education, either by starting my own school or similar
Receive my phD
Understand how the brain works, as far as anyone does these days
Write a biographer of a philosopher (Dante?)
Write a pop technical science/philosophy book
Make my parents happy in some lasting way/free them from their crappy circumstances
Be the inspiration that helps my lover find his passion
Inspire and coach a brilliant student
Get a motorcycle license…and a motorcycle (driver’s license unnecessary)
Successfully learn basic first aid/be an EMT for a year
Publish a YA novel

blargh

I feel like I should have accomplished something by now.

Why am I not already David Foster Wallace? Why haven't I already started my own humanitarian aid company? I'm serious.

I'm lying in bed now. What a stupid waste of time. Most of the things I do are complete wastes of my time; either I'm at my job, which requires compensation in the clearest sense of that word, or I'm trying to convince myself that my job isn't so bad by entertaining myself after my job, usually by reading books that, while often very good, are...being read, and so are necessarily passive.

I should be writing more. Just that would be better. Maybe I should start doing daily writing exercises. Or start a writing project. I like having writing projects. Nonfiction. Maybe I could do some research. What thread do I want to follow...maybe I could pick a question, something I actually want to know, and see what I can find with research? That sounds like something I'd enjoy doing.

Topics of interest: love and marriage. Pride. Memory and the role of memory in self image. Memory and personality. <--specifically, what we remember as oriented in who we are. I became interested in this thinking about the kind of memory I have; I tend to shed a lot of information I know a friend of mine keeps; thinking about the differences between she and I, one difference that seemed important was that she cares a lot more about people and being social than I do, while i spend most of my energy thinking about things she doesn't care about (as shown by the fact that she isn't particularly interested in conversing with me on those topics). I wonder if there's a link, more particularly, between attention and memory. That seems obvious, of course, but I wonder what the actual link is.

Because I've already learned that the fact that I don't know I've looked at something doesn't mean that what I actually saw isn't imprinted in my short and long term memory. I've heard things like that smell is the strongest sense to be recorded in memory (long term memory), but I have no idea why that would be so (it doesn't make actual sense when we consider how little we think about our sense of smell).

Hm. It seems like I'm interested in memory right now. ...Might as well pick something related to that. How to tilt and narrow it. Memory and love? I know of a particular mental disability where the person afflicted believes that the people he loves are imposters, even though he knows rationally that they look, smell like, are identical in every way to the people he loves. This has to do with the fact that the part of his brain that creates light physical changes when he sees people he likes (light sweating in palms, slightly elevated heartrate, things that cause the 'warm' feeling when you see someone you love) has been damaged. His brain rationalizes that because he no longer receives the emotional response to his mother, the personhe sees must not actually be his mother.

I'm interested in that kind of memory. I know that that wouldn't usually be called memory, per say, but I'm very interested in subconscious learned emotional and physical reactions to loved ones.

'His very presence calms me.'

How do people do that to us, without saying a thing, or necessarily even being near us? How does the learned reaction work? I don't want some simplistic pavlovian learned response crap. I know very well how complex the simplest responses become in the human mind.

I've lost my train of thought. Gotten far away from it, and in the process I've become rather unintelligent. Reigning it back in, past the past few paragraphs (which are filled with nothing all that interesting), something related to memory.

Or--I'd like to write a biography of Dante. There seem to be really bad ones out there...

or right a popular account of the philosophy of love. I've already sort of started that one.

I'd also like to write about some number of essays and works a student going into college should read before he/she thinks he/she has an opinion on anything, or just write something for hte beginning philosophy student warning against different kinds of douchery.

I'd also like to write a few short stories, I have some ideas.

I don't know. Somewhere in the middle of this I lost my energy and just got sore.

Yay, Omelets!

http://blog.jimmyr.com/Yay_Omlets_Wait_What__29_2008.php

Bummer

Man.

I might have to have surgery next week.

...Bummer.

People I'd like to meet

Secondary post today, more self-indulgent because...it's my personal blog, shut the fuck up, this isn't for anyone to read, I just like having it.

I keep saying this, but I seriously need to meet new people. Maybe some who actually share interests of mine...heh, quite a concept, yeah?

I'd like some people like the following:
--talk about books with, and have someone have also read the book in question, or be willing to read it with me
--someone I can go hiking, rock climbing, and caving with
--someone to go dancing with in the city (who drinks, and preferably has a car)
--someone who actually enjoys the theatre, and doesn't just sit through it so we can talk later.
--someone who likes weird science experiments, and would play mad scientist with someone (me) who knows almost nothing about chemistry.
--someone who just is quirky and intellectual, and preferably isn't a pretentious boor convinced that anyone with empathy, who thinks that everything isn't a relativistic mess of nothing, is clearly a neanderthal.
--someone who likes debate, and rides that thin line where they care and have real opinions (not just playing devil's advocate), but can debate without feeling like every slight against their position is clearly an unwarranted attack on their person.
--someone who likes cocktails and is an adventurous eater.
--Someone willing to volunteer downtown with me, who isn't doing penance, community service, or just coming along because they want to talk to me about their problems.
--someone who's just honestly a good person--human, and curious--and preferably a huge dork, but one who doesn't make the fact that they're a dork their entire life.

Any of those would do it, really.

Four Quotations

Philosophy is the strangest of subjects: it aims at rigor and yet it
unable to produce any results; it attempts to deal with the most
profound questions and yet constantly finds itself preoccupied with
the trivialities of language; and it claims to be of great relevance
to rational enquiry and the conduct of our life and yet is almost
universally ignored. But perhaps what is strangest of all is the
passion and intensity with which it is pursued by those who have
fallen in its grip.
--Kit White

Philosophy needn’t be vain: it helps us understand the world, and
sometimes it changes it for the better. But its pull is not in its
utility. As Adam Smith said: ‘wonder…and not any expectation of
advantage from its discoveries, is the first principle which prompts
[us] to the study of philosophy.
--Rae Langton

Progress in philosophy consists, I think, in a clearer delineation of
the conceptual options, not in reaching determinate conclusions.
--Kwame Anthony Appiah

If Jim is playing dice and needs a six, then proceeds to roll one, we don't say that he rolled a six on purpose. If he loads a bullet into a revolver, spins the chamber, and proceeds to shoot John, his mortal enemy, we say that he shot the man on purpose. In both cases he desired a certain result against identical odds. If he didn't intentionally roll a six, why did he intentionally shoot John?
--my friend Steve


I posted the third quotation here, and I agree with it to some extent, however--I'm honestly a bit short with people who are content to simply delineate more questions; I agree more with Wittgenstein on that one.I think philosophy can be, perhaps should be, studied like a businessman, to some extent. I believe in real, concrete answers, the actual settlement of questions.

but I suppose utility isn't what leads anyone to philosophy; that part I agree with.
I think the best reason to be a philosopher is that...you'll never get any sleep, you'll never have a moment's peace unless you are

Boring life update

I start my new job on Monday. Pays pretty well, but after shadowing the guy who's quitting yesterday--it's going to be really boring. It looked like he spent most of the day surfing the web and reading books.

I guess...that's fine. They'll be paying me to finish my graduate school applications and rp all day, then. Could be worse, as an interim thing.

Man, I miss people (a couple of them anyway). I'm just lonely. As if responding to my universe, the universe had this dog dart into the road right in front of me. I ran out after her, and this car, and nearly got hit, but I was screaming and waving my arms and it was really storming hard--so I'm lucky the driver saw me.

And the dog just looked at me, completely trusting. ...So I brought her home, toweled her off, and pet her for awhile. She's sleeping in the garage, and I'm going to find her owners tomorrow. I really hope she's just fat and not pregnant. Puppies would be adorable, but bad (I'd so keep one, though).

I'm hoping to turn in immigration forms this week, work up a budget, sign up for a specific date to take my GREs, make sure my three professors are still willing to write me recommendations, get up a working list of graduate programs--all that next week.

I joined the gym (birthday present), starting tomorrow. That'll make working out easier, though I've lost five pounds (bringing me to 123--still not exactly where I want to be).

Other minutiae about my life.

Reconnecting with more high school people. They're tools, I miss intellectual conversation.

Good dancing may be sign of male health, scientists say

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11223473

εἶπεν δὲ αὐτῷ ὁ θεός, Ἄφρων, ταύτῃ τῇ νυκτὶ τὴν ψυχήν σου ἀπαιτοῦσιν ἀπὸ σοῦ: ἃ δὲ ἡτοίμασας, τίνι ἔσται;

 

— Luke 12.19, the Parable of the Rich Fool. Translation from the NRSV: “God said to him, You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?” In the Vulgate: “dixit autem illi Deus stulte hac nocte animam tuam repetunt a te quae autem parasti cuius erunt”. My translation of the key phrase: “this very night they are claiming your life back from you.”

Heh

http://dcisgoingtohell.com/?p=638

august 23rd

Not doing so hot.

It’s good I’m not online, and there’s no one in my space. I would punch the first person to whine at me.

Rekindled some old friendships, in that wary ‘oh, yeah, you still kind of look like an asshole but I’m bored, let’s go see a movie, keep your hands where I can see them’ way.

August 5th.

Don’t waste my family’s money by having three hour long conversations with your slag ex-girlfriend. Kthx.

I find it difficult to go into the self-congratulatory whinefest that people get into when they write blog posts. <—oh wait, look, I got it right

So there’ll be no flowery avowals today. I wish I could dissapear with someone for a couple weeks, camp out. I wish there was a handprint sized bruise on my upper arm, and I wish my lip was split.

The end.

So you want to take a pro-free speech stance by drawing a picture of Muhammad, do you? Read this first

Amplify’d from newsweek.washingtonpost.com

Muslim cartoonist on “Draw Muhammad Day”

by G. Willow Wilson

This is the central tragedy of these endless cartoon scandals. No one is looking for a resolution. Drawing insulting depictions of the Prophet Muhammad has become a favorite pastime of hipster racists, whose bulbous-nosed bushy-bearded ‘satire’ resembles the anti-Semitic cartoons of the Third Reich. Thanks in no small part to the vigorous, often violent outcry from hardliners in the Muslim world, these artists are elevated to a kind of freedom-of-speech sainthood whether their work has any real merit or not. Death threats are issued, lives pointlessly imperiled, careers of pundits—never themselves in any danger—made overnight. Noted American Muslim leader Imam Zaid Shakir put it best: this isn’t the clash of civilizations. It’s the clash of the uncivilized.

What Norris failed to understand is that by creating events like “Draw Muhammad Day”, artists hurl rhetorical stones that go straight through their enemies and hit Muslims like me. Al Qaeda isn’t hurt by Draw Muhammad Day. Its entire PR campaign is built on incidents like these. Without the Molly Norrises and Jyllands Postens of the world, Al Qaeda would have to get a lot more creative with its recruitment strategies. Artists who caricature the Prophet inevitably claim, as Norris has done, that they never meant to hurt ordinary Muslims, but ordinary Muslims are the only ones who are hurt. As a Muslim in the comics industry I spend more time than is good for my mental health defending the art and the religion I love from each other. Events like the fallout from Draw Muhammad Day make me think I’m wasting my time—the hate runs too deep on both sides. My conscience won’t let me support the criminalizing of art, but neither will it let me support a parade of cartoons depicting lurid, racist stereotypes of Arab men and passing them off as satire of a holy figure.

July twentieth twenty-ten

Productive day. Sent in cover letter and resume, made contacts, set up a LinkedIn account, cooked some pretty kickass cajun catfish for dinner with Mediterranean couscous and peas (and beer).

This is Your Brain on Music continues to be awesome.

Fuck, I’m tired.

July nineteenth, twenty-ten

Very pleasant day with my mom. I always enjoy the few chances we have when we’re both fully awake and only with each other. Kind of the best.

Read a paragraph of ancient Greek today—haltingly, and with reference to the alphabet for pronunciation tips—but it happened, and I’m happy about it.

--

“If we go forward, we die; if we go backward, we die. So let’s go forward and die.”

— Proverb from Africa, quoted by Malidoma Somé in an interview with Leslee Goodman, “Between Two Worlds: Malidoma Somé on Rites of Passage, The Sun Magazine, no. 415 (July 2010).

--

I learned today that the key to a good cover letter is to do a lot of research on the company you want to be hired to work for. Find specific people, treat the resume/CL process like you’re a salesperson specifically looking to solve a specific person’s problem.

So…I did research on the Advisory Board. Now I want the job even more. I’ll be semi-crushed if I don’t get it, but I know how these things go.

Still? Silly mummer

I'm not going to say anything against any rude, unnecessary commentary you feel the need to expel in my direction--you're too delusional to understand exactly how pathetic your attacks really are--

I wish you only what you will invariably receive--a lonely, mediocre life filled with self-entitlement and regret.

--

Ancient Greek is proving challenging, but fun.

Five slogans

1. Reveal your hidden faults.
2. Approach what you find repulsive.
3. Help those you think you cannot help.
4. Anything you are attached to, give that.
5. Go to the places that scare you.

— The five slogans of Tibetan yogini Machig Labdrön (1055-1149), given as instructions from her teacher Pha Dhampa Sangye (d. 1117), as popularized by Pema Chödrön

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIeetlSjwvg

Not to revel in my sadness or anything…

But this has been fairly bad already.

I find myself really not caring about other peoples’ drama, especially the bits that are—well, revelling in the past, rehashing it over and over. I can’t—deal with that right now, when I need so much to look forward, move forward, act, keep momentum, get it done, or I’m liable to collapse into a ball of hatred and distaste.

Tomorrow I do real work. I don’t care if I’m still sick. I was laid out today and yesterday, and that’s already way too long.

Lead by example. Discipline, hard work, the correct ordering of priorities.

I miss him, and I’m liable to start leaking if I stop moving. Being sick isn’t helping, since it forces me to lie down and not move. I feel a little better when I can try to keep another person moving too, I guess.

Should children have a best friend?

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/17/fashion/17BFF.html?hpw=&pagewanted=all

This is some freaky stuff…

Ravelstein

“The challenge of modern freedom, or the combination of isolation and freedom which confronts you, is to make yourself up. The danger is that you may emerge from the process as a not-entirely human creature”

--Saul Bellow, “Ravelstein,” p. 132

Christ, I love this book. I like it more knowing that Ravelstein is more or less Bloom in literary form. I like thinking about such amazing, brilliant friendships, like Bellow and Bloom’s. The brilliant political philosopher and the nobel-winning author. Both such prodigious figures.

I need to go hunting for interesting people. I assume this will be easier when I’m not in Damascus, but it’s not impossible from here. After all, I have the internet.

Went to Richard and Renee’s bakery today, Sweet Sin. Richard offered to give me all the wall space I wanted if I ever wanted to sell art. I think I’ll take him up on it.

Man, I really need to get my hands on more Greene

“When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity — that was a quality God’s image carried with it. When you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how their hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.”

— Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory (NY: Viking, 1940, 1971), p. 131.

Venus of Urbino

Yeah, I was there. All day. (well, I went to see it a bunch of times, anyway)

Two of my favorite comments on the painting (found on a professor's page):
As for Titian’s Venus — Sappho and Anactoria in one — four lazy fingers buried dans les fleurs de son jardin — how any creature can be decently virtuous within thirty square miles of it passes my comprehension.

Source: Algernon Swinburne, letter to Lord Houghton, March 31, 1864. Published in Swinburne’s Letters: The Yale Edition, vol. I: 1854-1869 (S.l.: Yale UP, 1959), no. 55, pp. 96-99, p. 99.

[T]here, against the wall, without obstructing rag or leaf, you may look your fill upon the foulest, the vilest, the obscenest picture the world possesses — Titian’s Venus. It isn’t that she is naked and stretched out on a bed — no, it is the attitude of one of her arms and hand. If I ventured to describe that attitude, there would be a fine howl — but there the Venus lies, for anybody to gloat over that wants to — and there she has a right to lie, for she is a work of art, and Art has its privileges. I saw young girls stealing furtive glances at her; I saw young men gaze long and absorbedly at her; I saw aged, infirm men hang upon her charms with a pathetic interest… Without any question it was painted for a bagnio and it was probably refused because it was a trifle too strong. In truth, it is too strong for any place but a public Art Gallery.

Source: Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad (1880), chapter L, at Project Gutenberg.

Mary Karr

"Minoring in religious studies and thinking you know about religion is like watching porn, reading gynecology textbooks, and thinking you know something about pussy."

— Mary Karr, quoted in Boris Kachka, “Why Author Mary Karr Struggled Writing Her Third Memoir ‘Lit’,” New York Magazine (Nov. 8, 2009)

Georgia O'Keeffe

Artist Georgia O’Keeffe walking with her dogs, Abiquiu, New Mexico, 1966

Photographer: John Loengard, LIFE

Maus and Coltrane

Samuel Beckett once said: ‘Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.’”
“Yes.”
“On the other hand, he said it.”
“He was right. Maybe you can include it in your book.”
— Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, II: And Here My Troubles Began (NY: Pantheon, 1991), p. 45. (http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0679729771)

...

"I had heard, just before meeting him, some cassettes of his latest compositions, and I said, “John, if you don’t mind, I will ask you a question. I just heard some recordings of your new compositions and I was very intrigued.” He looked perplexed. I continued, “I was so impressed and found it amazing and touching as well. But in places I felt you were crying out through your instrument, and it was like a shriek of a tormented soul. I have heard the same from many other great jazz performers, which is quite understandable because of their pain, and the hurt of generations comes out in their music. But seeing and knowing you I thought that the interest and love of our tradition and music has helped you to overcome this.” I will never forget the expression on his face, and the words which he said with such a deep feeling which brought tears to my eyes. He said, “Ravi, that is exactly what I want to know and learn from you, how you find so much peace in your music and give it to your listeners.”
— Ravi Shankar’s memories of John Coltrane, recorded in 2001. They first met around 1964; Coltrane died in 1967. Source: The Ravi Shankar Foundation webpage.

...

I'm pleased when songs I love remind my friends of me.

My Dinner with Andre

"I mean, isn’t it amazing how often a doctor will live up to our expectation of how a doctor should look? I mean, you see a terrorist on television: he looks just like a terrorist. I mean, we live in a world in which fathers, or single people, or artists, are all trying to live up to someone’s fantasy of how a father, or a single person, or an artist, should look and behave! They all act as if they know exactly how they ought to conduct themselves at every single moment. And they all seem totally self-confident. Of course, privately people are very mixed up about themselves. They don’t know what they should be doing with their lives. They’re reading all these self-help books."
--André Gregory, speaking in My Dinner with André (dir. Louis Malle, 1981)http://www.allmovie.com/work/my-dinner-with-andre-34015

The Leucotome

"This surgical instrument is called a leucotome"--(attributed source: advertisement in Brain, A Journal of Neurology, 73.3 [1950]). A leukotomy is a prefrontal lobotomy, i.e., an incision into the white matter in the frontal lobe, usually resulting in major personality changes. The procedure was formerly used as a surgical treatment for extreme depression, but is no longer in use.

Ted Solotaroff

"Writing itself, if not misunderstood and abused, becomes a way of empowering the writing self. It converts anger and disappointment into deliberate and durable aggression, the writer’s main source of energy. It converts sorrow and self-pity into empathy, the writer’s main means of relating to otherness. Similarly, his wounded innocence turns into irony, his silliness into wit, his guilt into judgment, his oddness into originality, his perverseness into his stinger."
— From Ted Solotaroff, “Writing in the Cold: The First Ten Years,” quoted in Dani Shapiro,http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/arts/la-ca-endurability7-2010feb07,0,4119789.story,The Los Angeles Times (Feb. 7, 2010).

Doctor Rafa has a Crush on Oscar Wilde...Doesn't Everyone?

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation. Christ was not merely the supreme individualist, but he was the first individualist in history."

— Oscar Wilde, “De Profundis” (letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, written from Reading Gaol, written Jan. through March 1897, available online at http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/921)

EDIT: So, I might go to Seattle for a week after I graduate for post-graduation adventures. Friends offered to pay the brunt of the ticket, so...that's pretty cool.

Doctor Rafa and Remembering Purgatorio

Gustave Doré’s illustration of Dante’s conception of the Empyrean Heaven, titled “Rosa Celeste: Dante and Beatrice gaze upon the highest Heaven, The Empyrean,” illustration for Canto 31. Source: Henry Francis Cary, ed., The Divine Comedy by Dante, Illustrated (London: Cassell, 1892). Seen at Wikipedia.

Doctor Rafa Bids Farewell to her Undergraduate Career

"This essay is about many things. Primarily, it is about how Plato and Rousseau use fictional students in their works for the purpose of educating the reader. However, it is also about my own philosophic education that developed while pursuing this project, because, I too, am a reader of these books.

It is often said that philosophy is not useful. This could not be further from the truth; the political philosophy classes at Ursinus have taught me a great deal about myself, and I am a better person for it. We read theses texts believing that either Glaucon or Emile is being educated, but really it is we, the readers. I believe an adequate defense of this subject can be demonstrated not simply by the degree to which I know the texts, but rather how much I have learned about myself.

The first section of this essay is meant to be a joke, because we should always be able to look back on our more ignorant selves and laugh. It is filled with many references to how I was raised by my family, remnants of high school education, and supposed moments of enlightenment.

The second section is about how mistakes that are made in ignorance lead to knowledge. Another way of saying this is that often something true can be derived from faulty premises. I explain Socratic Irony through example rather than definition.

The third section is probably what many would consider the formal paper, and is therefore the greatest in size. It discusses exactly why and how Plato and Rousseau engage the reader in private education. First I deny that they are truly interested in “politics” as it is now commonly understood. Secondly I consider their respective historical contexts as explanations for why their rhetoric often makes it appear otherwise.

The fourth section returns to your humble author, now looking forward to the real world with a politics degree in hand. The hope is that by demonstrating a student who can interpret self into a text – who compares values with the models that are being offered – that the study of political philosophy is vindicated to all who question its value.

Some useful definitions before proceeding,
Kallipolis - the city that Socrates and his interlocutors outline in the Republic. It is constructed with the intention of making it perfectly just. It is often referred to as “the city in speech”.
Eudaimonia - I understand this term to be defined as “human flourishing” from some objective standpoint.


“Philosophy, to me, has always been a very personal thing.”
I
The first memory I have of philosophy is watching a Monty Python skit in which the Greek philosophers play the German philosophers in a game of soccer. The joke is that all of them stand around thinking until the final minute, at which point Archimedes shouts “Eureka!”, only to forward the ball to Socrates. The master thinker scores off of a header. Being 5 years old I thought that the joke was that the guy with soccer in his name was the best player. I was wrong, but at least I got to laugh.

Sometime in early high school I remember picking up one of my mom's college books entitled Introduction to Philosophy printed by the University of Chicago Press. I read the first few chapters on freedom and determinism, so I suppose the fact that I am now a philosophy major settles that question. I remember developing a love of “the truth”, as well as a reputation for being an argumentative asshole in English class.

Next thing I know I am sitting in a circle with the Ursinus philosophy department as a prospective student with my mother. She made sure to ask, “What can someone do with a philosophy major?” Kelly Sorensen responded that the department likes to refer to the major as pre-comedy. I should have taken the hint that my life was about to become a complete joke.

And now I stand before you, delivering a presentation on my final philosophy paper. The culmination of 4 years, or perhaps a lifetime of philosophical education seems to hang in the balance:

* * *

Rousseau sustained that education begins with mothers. My mother, like most others, always instilled in me that honesty is the best policy. Therefore, I believe the best way to explain my “thesis”, or rather, my “hypothesis”, or perhaps even my outright “guess”, as well as the results that developed from it, is to recount my method as precisely and as honestly as I can recall. Moreover, if reading the Republic taught me anything, it is that truth is best conceived through dialectic, so I will treat my readers as if I were discussing the matters plainly before you. I have read countless pages (that is to say, if one cannot count to 2000) in support of this undertaking, and as the works of Rousseau and Plato are enormous, my citations in this first section, or references for that matter, will be consistent in the following manner: I have none.

Great works of political philosophy should be printed with pages made of gold as an indication of their value and to save me the cost of highlighting. I have accrued easily 40 pages of typed notes, and at this point there are too many quotations to choose from. I am like Friedrich Nietzsche demanding that horizons on knowledge be established in his Untimely Meditations; I know not where to begin and feel myself confronted with the abyss. Fortunately, however, likely no amount of reading could completely solve the questions I originally set out to answer; I can at least say in my defense that if I have not by this point read all that my nature will allow, I have read at least enough to begin filling in that infinite hole with books from the Myrin Library. Thus, I take this paper as an opportunity to pour out my mind in its pure and present state in regard to this daunting subject. If I crash and burn into a miserable failure of stream-of-consciousness and scatterbrained strategies, I retain the opportunity of a second draft as a more formal approach to this paper. If I do not begin by writing this informally, I fear I will never begin writing at all.
Running out of time on both my college career and this particular deadline, I must confess: If the words do not flow loosely at this juncture, I have learned not a thing at all:

As a freshman I read much of Plato’s Republic and walked away with certain opinions of what it was about. For example, I remember that I believed it was a great book, that it contained many themes, that Socrates’ arguments often made no sense, that in spite of this he taught his interlocutors a great bit, and, perhaps most vehemently, did I opine that the absolute communism of family was nothing short of absolutely absurd. The first opinion, namely that the book is “great”, is really only a consequence of the second opinion, that it had many themes: Discussions of the goodness of justice, the function of philosophy itself (it really is a very vain subject, philosophy, constantly praising, blaming and defending itself again!), and the “best” regime were the big draws. These meta-themes carried all sorts of lovely philosophical baggage that included music, poetry, and the passions, all causing quite a stir among the class.

In particular, however, I remember quite distinctly being surprised that many students thought that the kallipolis had significant merit as a practical political solution. Equally was I surprised of the fury with which the others claimed that the kallipolis could not be established because it violated “human nature”… whatever that means! It was clear to me, even as a foolish freshman, that such a “city in speech” served only as a model for the interlocutors to contrast against their own Athens or – perhaps as applied to we moderns – capitalist, liberal democracy. It is true that the kallipolis offends our human needs to the point of its impossibility, but can one really conceive that Plato was not cognizant of this as well? The book is a masterpiece and inspiration for an entire field of inquisitive thought but – no – today we are going to sit here in class and argue about whether Plato was a fool or not. Something smells funny.

What if this is a complete fabrication and I did not in fact initially interpret the kallipolis this way? What if I am merely putting together pieces after reading someone else’s (ahem, Allan Bloom's) answer? I have convinced myself that this is not the case by the following proof: A) I had not read Plato since freshman year and B) I assumed this interpretation as part of my thesis before I began researching this paper. That’s called a syllogism, and it means you have to think for a second. Apparently I remember some of Aristotle, too. The point is, at least in this case, that I have preserved some level of intellectual hygiene. I have come to, perhaps with the tiniest bit of guidance, my own conclusions from my own premises. I think...

II

Let us jump forward in time three earth-revolutions around the Sun. In a capstone course on Rousseau, urged only by a single-sentenced-suggestion by the late, great, Allan Bloom, from a point I cannot recall in his texts, I began to consider an analysis of the Republic in light of Rousseau’s Emile to be a worthy endeavor. Fortunately, one does not have to go far to discover a connection between the books, although one may need to be equipped with a philosophical jet-pack to discover all of them.

Within the first five pages of his Emile, Rousseau claims that the Republic is the most “beautiful treatise on public education ever written” (See, quoted straight from the old noggin). Additionally, Rousseau states that those who think the Republic is about politics are not only entirely mistaken, but must be the type to judge books solely by their titles. There are a few major questions an attentive reader must ask him or herself at this point.

The first question is why, if the Republic is as spectacularly beautiful as Rousseau suggests, does this Frenchmen decide to write his own treatise on education? Why not print a reissue that includes a massive interpretive essay instead? Secondly, why—perhaps in part due to high school English teachers from whom I was demanded multi-layer interpretations of text, or, perhaps from hearing the answer from a professor at a point I have since forgotten—did I feel as if the reader should need no clarification that the Republic was in fact about education? For what reason would Rousseau possibly decide to be explicit to his readers that Plato’s magnum opus was about public education, even though it was so clear to me, a now educated and wise senior – unlike those silly freshmen who see contradictions in Rousseau – that this was in fact the case? Who the heck is this guy talking to, idiots?

Initially, my rationale for why the Republic must primarily be a book about education was that the main characters all have their perceptions of justice, philosophy, and the good wildly reordered by Socrates. Socrates brutally rakes these young men’s prejudiced minds over the coals of dialectic. This education points out their prejudices as Athenians and teaches the comrades that injustice is not so clearly superior to justice. As aforementioned, the communism of families makes the political suggestions absurd to a point where the kallipolis can only be understood as a model for some educational purpose. From this perspective I laughed and said to myself, ‘The Republic is not about a republic!’ patting myself on the back while continuing to churn through the monolith that is Emile. I did not look back for quite some time...

But that is only to consider half of what Rousseau claimed, and upon this second reading of Emile I needed to write a paper about it, so I probably needed to consider the other half. Rousseau stated not only that the Republic is the most beautiful educational treatise ever written, but that it is the most beautiful public treatise on education ever written. What now to make of this annoying and additional adjective? First, I considered the possibility that by public Rousseau was referring to the method of rearing children in the kallipolis, for it was the only example I could remember of people being educated en masse in the dialogue. However, if the Republic cannot be a discussion dedicated to politics precisely because the kallipolis is not meant to be taken seriously, it is hard to believe that the education that it enumerated would be worthy of being labeled as beautiful. How could something that is not meant to be taken seriously be considered beautiful? Jokes are funny. They are not beautiful.

I had never read a book analyzing Socratic Method or Platonic rhetoric until approximately yesterday. But, somewhere along the line, some little bird whispered the phrase “Socratic Irony” into my ear. I cannot give you a textbook definition of what Socratic Irony is, but if I had to guess, no one really can, and I would also assume that it is one of those things that cannot be explained without some kind of ceremony and a reference to things that simultaneously exist and do not. But again, I fearlessly return to my wonderful education as a high school English student: I remember irony explained in the particular form of dramatic irony, in which an audience knew what was happening to a character in a play all the while the character had not the slightest inkling of – for example – impending sexual relations with his mother. Regular irony is more of an obvious conflict of a falsity standing in perfect darkness next to a contradicting truth, without necessarily maintaining the oblivious actor that distinguishes it from dramatic irony.

Therefore, unless we take the interpretation that Socrates is completely and utterly deranged, it is safe to assume that Socratic Irony refers to points when contradictions are unabashedly obvious to a reader during a Socratic dialogue.

For some reason I developed a hunch, a hypothesis if you will. Could this conception of Socratic Irony that I had built from iron-clad reasoning with potentially false premises explain Rousseau’s peculiar relation to the Republic? Rousseau called the Republic beautiful, but yet he did not call it perfect. I wondered: perhaps the education of Emile is a supplement to the intractable problems in the dialogue that seemed to be blatantly tagged by Socratic Irony? Maybe Plato left a to-do list of philosophical paradoxes marked by obvious moments of confusion for some thinker with new insights to resolve? I was getting warmer, but I still did not have a definitive answer to why Emile was a necessary creation in the eyes of Rousseau. Nonetheless, such a lofty description as “beautiful” implies that there was something that Rousseau must have retained from the Republic. This common element must have needed some sort of update, furtherance, or modernization from its original idea to impel Rousseau to deliver the 500 page birth that is Emile. The obvious solution would be to suggest that the Republic is simply about public education and Emile is simply about private education, as Rousseau literally stated. Careful understanding of the texts demonstrates that this is certainly not the case, and that much of Plato is reborn in Rousseau.

I can now set the jokes and contradictions aside. The point has been made that humor can entice, and contradiction is a powerful assistant in the learning process. Apparent contradiction is what makes us question – and thus potentially transform – our opinions. My wondering mind has thus arrived at a sensible thesis.

III

In this essay, I hope to demonstrate a single thread that extends from Classical Antiquity to Modernity in the minds of Plato and Rousseau in terms of their respective treatises on education, a thread that is essential to Political Philosophy if it is to be defined as the study of how to live a good life. This commonalty consists in that Emile and the Republic are parallel displays of private education, each for the purpose of producing “just” souls: it is a style of writing that allows for multiple interpretations based upon the character of the reader to reflect upon oneself using the student of the text as a mirror. By private education, I mean the common definition: the instruction of either one or a very few students by a similar number of teachers. By a “just” soul I mean a soul in which each of its constituent parts receives precisely what it needs, barring a starvation or conquest of the others that would destroy the whole. To be a masterful teacher one must know one’s audience; not only do Socrates and the Governor know their students better than the students initially know themselves, but Plato and Rousseau incorporate rhetorical devices into their educational treatises because they are aware of the various types of readers. Such readers are necessarily engaged in a kind of philosophical education simply by picking up their books. Without being able to know one’s pupil ahead of time, an author must write in such a way as to teach any student or to guide that student to the path of self-examination. I believe that this solves the riddle of why Rousseau labeled the Republic a book on public education even though the text itself describes the private education of Glaucon and his cronies: Any reader who picks up the dialogue will be forced to understand his own soul in relation to the various models that are offered. In this sense, Emile operates the same way, and both texts can be rightly understood as true Political Philosophy. As texts, both the Republic and Emile describe private educations. Considered as physical books, or perhaps more precisely considered as media, the Republic and Emile are publicly available vehicles for personal education and transformation of society, one soul at a time. The Republic is beautiful to Rousseau because it artfully gave the public a way to privately educate themselves. His goal as an author was to do for early modernity what Plato did for the ancients: reorient human beings towards a better balance of the soul.

This essay is divided into three main sections. The first explains why political reform is not an effective means for making better lives in the eyes of both Plato and Rousseau. This can begin to account for their emphasis on private/individualistic education with variable student-types in mind, specifically as an alternative to political revolution. The second section explains why Rousseau had to write his own educational treatise by examining his rhetoric for his Enlightenment-era audience. The concluding section expounds upon the actual teachings in the Republic and Emile, demonstrating a distinct similarity between Plato and Rousseau's conception of the just soul.

Plato and Rousseau’s Qualms with Macro-Progressive Politics

The Republic maintains a thematic chicken and the egg dilemma: Does the character of a people determine the regime and its laws, or does the regime, through its laws, determine the character of the people? This is tantamount to asking “what is to be done?” if one is searching for a better life. Although it is more or less common sense that political reform itself cannot be guaranteed to change historical and cultured minds, Socrates plays the devil’s advocate by advancing the kallipolis. By doing so he is putting a question to the reader of whether the properly ordered soul, for the purpose of a citizen’s eudaimonia, is the same as the properly ordered city for the sake of its own eudaimonia. The suggestion that the interlocutors are searching for a city to achieve its own eudaimonia instead of a city in which citizens themselves experience eudaimonia should be one of the first perplexing premises of the kallipolis, as well as the first glaringly ironic Socratic attack against it. We construct cities for the benefits of the humans that populate them. We do not construct cities for the benefit of cities themselves.

Before this poor argument is even made, however, the kallipolis truly begins to seem implausible with Socrates' particular delineation of his noble lie:

“...I'll attempt to persuade first the rulers and the soldiers, then the rest of the city, that the rearing and education we gave them were like dreams; they only thought they were undergoing all that was happening to them, while, in truth, at that time they were under the earth within, being fashioned and reared themselves, and their arms and their other tools being crafted...(414 d)”

If the noble lie is to be believed, it would probably be best that it were believable. However, the suggestion that twelve year olds would find this plausible is outlandish. Is a guardian really going to be able to convince a child that every person, place, and thing that he sees is now above ground, while formerly they were below the surface of the earth? Children are curious and not easily satisfied. No amount of propaganda could convince a child that the world as he now sees it is real while previously it was a dream without some wild transformation actually taking place—such as physically being below ground only to climb through the surface and see the light of day. Even if it were to work on some particularly gullible lad, the lie would undoubtedly damage him; the child would be perplexed at the nature of reality and would always be on edge, always expecting the next life-changing revelation. The guardians would essentially be telling their young ones, “Everything you used to know was a lie,” a statement that hardly seems conducive to feelings of trust and respect for the authority of their word as rulers.

A third example of Socratic Irony is the suggestion of how the kallipolis will defend itself when attacked by foreign invaders. Adeimantus is concerned in book IV as to how a city can raise an army if it is to have no wealth as Socrates suggests. After putting forth the ideas that the kallipolis' army will be spartan in nature and take on enemies one at a time, Socrates continues by asking:

“What if they sent an embassy to the other city and told the truth? 'We make use of neither gold nor silver, nor is it lawful for us, while it is for you. So join us in making war and keep the others' property.' Do you suppose any who hear that will choose to make war against solid, lean dogs rather than with the dogs against fat and tender sheep? (422 d)”

At this point Socrates has essentially offered his army up to any city that could use some assistance in battle. An army of this sort would be decimated in little time, although not due to war for its own defense, but due to constant offensive alliance with others for the purpose of not defending itself, a strange tactic indeed. Considering the difficulty of raising citizens with such high character, the reader should begin to balk at the level of responsibility the guardians have in protecting society compared to how many of them could actually be produced.

In his The Paradoxes of the Republic, William Chase Greene states the following concerning these types of moments in the dialogue: “Plato wishes us to share with him some conviction which he holds deeply, and which he will even overstate deliberately in order to shock us into accepting its main import, though not necessarily in details or all its implications; he may not even be sure himself that it can ever be fully grasped or fully implemented by imperfect inhabitants of this sorry world.” The interlocutors accept Socrates' premises not only out of respect for his age and wisdom but because they are curious of where the argument will lead them, even if the premises themselves are faulty. Socrates makes claims that are so far-fetched one cannot help but want to hear him continue. Ultimately, his conclusions are often accepted because there are pleasing or beautiful, while the premises along the way have been forgotten (or forgiven). As his mouthpiece, Socrates does indeed make broad generalizations of political solutions for Plato that are deliberately exaggerated; whether or not the impossibility of these solutions indicates that our world is “sorry”, however, may not be so easily established as Greene thinks. As the essay proceeds, we will see a much more optimistic – or at least constructive – view of humanity from Plato's Socrates.

But first, the most damaging cracks in the walls of the kallipolis must be examined. The communism of families that Socrates advocates ends up warranting a serious objection from Adeimantus. In the famous book V, Socrates must fight against the “three waves” of objections, which to any considerate reader compounds the impossibility of the kallipolis, as George Klosko puts it, “not arithmetically, but geometrically,” e.g. multiplying slim ratios against each other until the plausibility approaches nil.

The first wave is the objection to shared roles of male and females, and consequently, a sharing of public spaces between the sexes while nude. The second wave is the abolition of families in favor of arranged, sacred marriages creating a community of people who see all their peers, quite literally in some cases, as brothers and sisters. And finally, the third wave is the suggestion that the only way the kallipolis can exist is if the philosophers are also rulers, or alternatively, the rulers are also philosophers.

The interlocutors are suspicious of this phase of the kallipolis because of the pride men possess when in comes to their wives and their children. It is unfathomable to them that there will be arranged mating based purely on the will of the philosopher kings; sexual relations with a woman is one of the most compelling reasons to be good or honored by society as a man. Although Socrates eventually concedes that the best men will be rewarded with the most sex, the path along the way still seems ridiculous.

For example, the first two waves in fact contradict each other. If men and women are to dwell together in the nude, then they certainly will not be able to abstain from sex as the guardians expect them to. As Bloom suggests in his interpretive essay, the nudity of men in the locker room may be convention because it can be desexualized, but public nudity between the sexes is impossible if reproduction is to be controlled by the guardians. Men and women cannot deny their sexual urges in such situations.

The third wave—that the philosophically enlightened must rule if the city is to be just—is implausible because of the inherent difference between intellectual and political clout. One who pursues truth is not guaranteed the monopoly of force that is necessary for maintaining power, and conversely one who possesses all the wealth or capital in the world cannot be assured a mind directed towards eternal truths. If anything, a king will become fixated on the control, conquest, and distribution of all earthly things, the furthest values from those of the true philosopher.

So if the kallipolis is so laughable, what is the real point of this particular discourse? The obvious problem with the kallipolis is that it has ignored bodily needs in favor of a city that is ruled by total wisdom. This serves to contrast two opposing kinds of life, the practical and the theoretical, the “vulgar” and the “philosophical”. Every reader must lay somewhere on the line between these two opposing world views; the quantity and types of objections he or she has to the furtherance of the philosophical life enlightens the reader as to exactly where his or her nature stands on this line. If the kallipolis seems ridiculous, then the reader is not prepared to make the sacrifices of bodily desires for the procurement of intellectual ones. If one finds the kallipolis to not only be good for the masses but as enabling the highest life of the theoretical man, then that reader likely has a nature that can only be fulfilled by a closer approximation to the latter.

Bloom states, “To become either a member of a city—or a philosopher—one must break with one's primary loyalty. The bodily or blood ties are not the only thing that is natural to man; nor are they the most important thing... The communism of women and children, by suppressing family ties, serves to emancipate men's love of the good (385).” Both the citizen of classical antiquity and the philosopher of whom Bloom speaks suppress parts of the soul that we, the masses/bourgeoisie of the democratic era, find non-suppressible. Or, as Laurence Cooper explains it in reference to Rousseau, “[Rousseau] also knew that the city in speech was created as a sort of soul writ large, and that what is said about the city is supposed to be true in some sense of the soul—indeed, that at least some of what is said of the city may be true only of the soul (112).” Eudaimonia and a devotion to the theoretical life are not attributes of a city, but by supposing they are, Socrates is able to entice Glaucon with a way of life that is an alternative to the unjust and pleasure seeking man. In the quest for justice it is established that wisdom through philosophy is necessary for “justly” distributing goods to the various parts of one's nature, and thus a kind of philosophical education is necessary for Glaucon's maturity. This is why I disagree with Laurence Cooper's assessment that the Republic is about public education for Rousseau for its “education of citizens”: Glaucon is certainly not a classical citizen as a Spartan or Rousseau would consider him; he is capable of much more and not denatured, Glaucon maintains an eros for something besides honor.

My stance on the kallipolis thus far should indicate exactly where I lay on the aforementioned line between the “vulgar” and the “philosophic” lives, but this is to jump ahead to the conclusion. First we must consider why Rousseau, too, has qualms with regime change as a method of improving the lives of human beings.

Rousseau was staunchly against regime change and certainly an anti-revolutionary, despite what any text of the Social Contract seems to offer as contradiction. The epistle dedicatory to his Second Discourse is filled with praise of stable and long-lived regimes: “If they [the masses] attempt to shake off the yoke, they move all the farther away from freedom because, as they mistake unbridled license for freedom, which is its very opposite, their revolutions almost always deliver them up to seducers who only increase their chains.(115)” Rousseau goes on to suggest that constant changing of laws inhibits legitimacy in the public's eye, that tradition is authority, yielding an almost sacred power. From Arthur Melzer's Rousseau's Mission and the Intention of his Writing we receive the following picture:

“Rousseau explicitly and repeatedly condemned revolution, describing himself as 'the man in the world who has the greatest respect for the laws, for national constitutions, and who has the greatest aversion for revolutions and plotters of all kind. Even if a revolution could be salutary, it remains 'almost as much to be feared as the evil which it could cure; it is blameworthy to desire it and impossible to foresee it.'”

Melzer further points out that in his Letters Ecrites de la Montagne Rousseau suggested that even if the gains of a revolution were “incontestable” no one in their right mind would try to overturn a stable, 1300 year old French regime. Melzer cites additional text demonstrating that, for “Rousseau the conservative”, social mobility can be a problem, the misery of the masses are due to their own vices, that the people do not understand how different governments are good for different situations, and that “Above all, one must respect local customs and inherited institutions”. Christopher Kelly echoes similar arguments for inherited institutions in his Rousseau and the Case for (and against) Censorship, in which he shows Rousseau's respect for civic religion:

“Most crucial is the area of shared moral opinions of the society, its morals, and beliefs, or what Rousseau calls 'sentiments of sociability.' These sentiments are in a certain sense what constitute the community and give it an identity. They differ from fundamental principles because they lack any ultimate rational grounding or because they are not consciously examined by most members of the community. Rousseau insists that a community can demand conformity to these sentiments of sociability in form of adherence to a civil religion (1241).”

From this evidence it should now be clear that neither Plato nor Rousseau are serious about regime change as political solutions, regardless of what the Republic details for various regimes or what the Social Contract defines as legitimate. Suddenly these eminent political philosophers are not so political and the Republic and Emile can be seen together for what they really are: treatises on education.

Fighting to educate the youth in order to give them just souls, Plato and Rousseau share a common enemy: The sophist. Now we must explain how Plato and Rousseau are striving for the same ends through opposite means due to their respective places in history, fighting sophistry in its many forms.

From the Republic and his own sentiments regarding revolution Rousseau knew that private education is the only hope for creating just souls. However, he was living in a very different time than Plato. In Athens, philosophy was under threat of exile, but with the arrival of modernity, philosophy had ascended to the throne with every laymen believing he was king. The sophists – the Thrasymachi of the world – now ruled. Hobbes had made us matter in motion, Adam Smith had made us self-interested, and Locke made nature horrifying. There was no longer anything beautiful or external to the world; merely calculating, wealth-gathering, pain-avoiding individuals crawling along. Rousseau, the hero, was bent on reestablishing the goodness of man, even if it meant attacking his own kind in the philosopher – or worse – lying. Christopher Kelly points out Rousseau's anti-philosophical tone early on in his career:

“First, within his discussions of the sciences or what he also calls learned activities, Rousseau accuses all philosophers past and present—with virtually no exceptions—of holding opinions contrary to popular beliefs in such things as the existence of God, immortality of the soul, the conscience, friendship, patriotism, and the sanctity of marriage...Even in the best cases, he argues, philosophy tends to form bad citizens either by making its adherents indifferent to social life because it attracts them to solitary contemplation or by making them disgusted with social life because it teaches them to despise nonphilosophers. In short, the study of philosophy tends to an antisocial, misanthropic activity. (1238-1239)”

Interestingly, this description of the philosopher sounds very similar to the charges that were leveled against Socrates by the Athenians when he was put on trial for being an atheist and a corrupter of the youth. Although there may be reason to be suspicious of the faith of Socrates and Rousseau, the Republic, the Second Discourse, and Emile each offer teachings of benevolent gods/universe. Plato, through Socrates, changes all of poetry such that the gods are truly gods and not reflections of mankind's worst passions. Similarly, Rousseau uses his “physiodicy” in the Second Discourse and the profession of faith of the natural religion in Emile, in the first case to put culpability in mankind’s hands and in the second case to maintain faith in the supernatural. It cannot be said that the authors are attempting to create atheists; rather they are simply trying to form better believers by creating something better to believe in. Athens would not let Socrates critique the ethics of the poets so he cried “More philosophy!” Decadent Europe had lost and manipulated its faith in god due to rational self-interest, so Rousseau shouted “Burn your libraries!” In both cases the goodness of man is being sought, but the authors must take opposite approaches to get there.

This raises a difficult problem for Rousseau, however. In the Republic it is established that philosophy is good for determining what is just: a statesman must be wise to put each man in his proper place, and an individual must be wise as to know the various parts of his soul in order to adequately feed their needs. Rousseau is thus forced to defame philosophy in the name of the “sublime science of simple souls” even though it is necessary for other, perhaps not so simple souls. For this issue, I am back on Laurence Cooper's side, for he suggests that a kind of veiled philosophical education is taught to Emile without focusing on the word itself throughout book V of Emile. Those who wish to remain unphilosophical will read over this portion maintaining the perception that Emile is a simple lad, dedicated to family, hard work, and virtue. Readers who identify with an Emile who is more philosophical cannot deny that much of his education was myth or cleverly unmentioned truths, but they can point to his sense of right and wrong, his scientific education, and the politics he observed through travel as depicting a man well on his way to a more contemplative life.

Rousseau, like Plato, has clearly demonstrated himself as a master of irony. The physiodicy that suggests nature has no part to blame in mankind's vices and misfortunes, all the while maintaining that evolution is the product of a series of natural accidents, can be seen through as a hoax by any careful reader. The capacities that Emile wields could hardly qualify him as a simple soul; his sentiment and virtue make him a rare breed indeed. Nonetheless the full spectrum of humans, from the simplest to the most philosophically voracious, will find in Emile, just like Glaucon or Adeimantus, a student that is undergoing the process of education. This event is a chance to reevaluate and reattempt one's own education: we must use the lessons of the teacher in our own reasoning and the characteristics of the student for mirroring and thus discovering our own nature. When I first read Emile I once said that it is important to see yourself as both the Governor and Emile, and I believe this is still true. We are capable of both rationally giving ourselves ethics to improve the quality of our being and discovering what the unchanging parts of our nature are in relation to the student being taught, allowing us to reorganize our actions such that they are in accordance with the nature of our soul.

IV

It is a Friday morning and the Sun has risen to about 30 degrees over the south-by-southeastern horizon. It is truly a beautiful thing. For the first time, in what is perhaps my entire life, I can write that I am perfectly happy. At particular moments at Ursinus, and often while lying awake in bed, I would not have wished the things I felt on my worst enemies. And yet, if I could do it all over again, I would not change a thing that I have done.

In many ways I feel as if writing this paper has saved my soul. At Ursinus College, I have seen and been offered the lives of many different kinds of people. Every part of my soul was pulled in various directions by the plurality of values and ways of life: scientific geniuses, money makers, social workers, pleasure seekers, artists, and all sorts of wild combinations. Nonetheless it is time to graduate and to return home. It is time to return to and accept my natural self, a self that I have only come to understand through comparison to those around me and the models offered by philosophic education. I have seen Thomas Hobbes everywhere except, ironically, my Political Philosophy classes, and maybe that is a good thing. I have been enticed by Schiller, and I have imitated him. Nietzsche has been my copilot, and I have laughed at him. I have read Plato, and I have learned from him. I have reread Emile, and I grown to admire him. He is a young man of hard work, self-sufficiency, dedication to family, and virtue. He is the fictional model to which my nature is most closely aligned. I can feel at peace knowing a model that is not torn between duty and inclination in the way I previously felt for so long.

The Governor has no overwhelming reason to help Emile. Emile is not the Governor's next of kin; he is essentially an orphan of common, perhaps degenerate, mind. The Governor has acted purely out of love of mankind. Fruitfully, Emile has seen various ways of life and ultimately ended up good. He has denied his vanity: he has refrained from the honor of the soldier, he has refrained from the fame of the actor. He has denied his appetites, both of sexual and simple pleasures. Emile is most certainly a man of virtue and of dedication to family, but the question remains: is Emile a philosopher?

I believe I am in accordance with Laurence Cooper in that Emile received a kind of philosophical education, but is not yet a philosopher. Emile has travelled and considered many walks of life; he is capable of discussing useful sciences, natural right, and even love, but he is by no means the philosopher that Socrates, or Allan Bloom, suggests: one that thrives off of contemplation of eternal truths with a relative disinterestedness towards society, one who is good by being solitary and not necessarily through proactive virtue. However, even Socrates communicated enough to have his ideas written down by others, and consequently, we could know no such theoretical man, as he would by definition not be part of society, we can only imagine him. If logic were to have its way – if a ruler were to only be a ruler if he ruled without flaw, if a doctor were only a doctor if he cured every patient – then we have never known a single philosopher in the history of mankind; not Plato, not Rousseau, not Socrates, and not even the Solitary Walker. These are all certainly closer approximations to the Form of a philosopher than Emile, but none of them are truly philosophers in the strictest sense because they require the companionship of other human beings. That is not to say that these characters went without sacrifice, but it does demonstrate that they were somewhere along a line, and therefore not necessarily at a particular extreme. Emile is exactly the same, just not as far along that line.

And that is where we stand as readers: at the consideration of a life lived somewhere between the practical and the common and the theoretical and the impossible, continuously slipping to the latter in age. Between the denatured Spartan who lacks a self and the most detached and solitary dreamer, we must discover ourselves on the line of human possibilities. For now Emile is my guide, and he will make a fine one. You can laugh, but he should have been the history of my species. I thank Rousseau for this most constructive work. At this point, I can only hope that my thankfulness is not mistaken for obsequiousness.

Philosophy is not a subject for me; it is a way of life. The texts I read are new modes of thinking and of understanding myself in relation to the world around me. I cannot say I am a proper philosophical scholar, I am no expert on Rousseau or Plato, but I can say that I now know how to become an expert on myself. And, without reading much Plato, I believe that in the process I have answered one of Socrates' riddles:

I have heard it said that Political Philosophy is both the study of how to live a good life and also learning how to die, I now know this is the same thing stated two different ways. For what could allow one to die in peace besides the honest, self-reflecting knowledge that one has lived a good life? I cannot put a price on such wisdom, even it is wrong. I leave Ursinus with an education that I believe will allow me to live such a life. As a final proof of my education, consider a bit of dialectic between myself and a friend from just the other night, truth in its natural state:

“Walking down the hall, I suddenly remembered a quote from Professor Dannhauser and laughed. He once said in the course on Nietzsche that, 'ugliness is its own counter- argument.' I rushed downstairs amongst the party to tell my closest friend. He said, 'I feel like what you are saying must be circumstantial,' gesturing his arms towards the spilled beer bottles and reckless students, shouting in drunken reverie. However, that scene was not in fact what I had in mind, so I responded, 'Only if circumstantial is the same as universal.' He said to me that I had spoken the truth. I felt fulfilled, I told no one else, and I returned upstairs to go to bed.”

My education in philosophy is rooted in circumstance; acts that were out of my control or moments of complete misinterpretation have guided me along the way. Nonetheless, I cannot help but think I have discovered something true. Ultimately, the use of rhetoric within these great texts on private education serves the same purpose. It may seem as if Emile, Glaucon and his associates are all receiving some sort of enlightenment, but that would be total nonsense; Emile, Glaucon, Adeimantus, and perhaps even the Solitary Walker are all fictions – but they are good ones – and they exist only in the mind. In truth, the only person who has received an education is you—the interpreting, self-reflective, and considerate reader. "

I will miss you, Ursinus. I will miss you Stern, and Kelly, and Florka. I will miss my own frustration over supposed scholars and their veils of disinterest. I will miss my friends, the kind of friends who are working on the same projects I am, who are at a similar intellectual moment. I will miss the ease of simply appearing in a beloved professor's office and presenting, bold and inquisitive, whatever problems of the universe have been plaguing me today.

I'll miss you, Ursinus, final chapter of my childhood. From here, I attempt to take up my mantle. I look forward to it; the struggle, the active.

But I'll miss you.

Doctor Rafa Gathers

"If you look at the hopes and dreams from 1992, it didn’t pan out that quality would rise because of marketplace accountability… It turns out you need government accreditation to drive quality, and the human capital to make schools go. The hard lesson is, it is so dependent on human capital."

— James Merriman, head of the New York City Charter School Center, conceding that “the intellectual premise behind school choice — that in a free market for education, parents will remove students from bad schools in favor of good ones — has not proved true.” Source: Trip Gabriel,http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/education/02charters.html?pagewanted=4&src=tp.

...

What about your life?”

“Hah! That’s a good one.”

“What about your past?”

“What about it?”

“When you look back, what do you see?”

“Wrecked cars.”

“Any people in them?”

“Yes.”

“Who?”

“People who are just meat now, man.”

“Is that really how it is?”

“How do I know how it is? I just got here. And it stinks.”

“Are you kidding? They’re pumping Haldol by the quart. It’s a playpen.”

“I hope so. Because I been in places where all they do is wrap you in a wet sheet, and let you bite down on a little rubber toy for puppies.”

“I could see living here two weeks out of every month.”

“Well, I’m older than you are. You can take a couple more rides on this wheel and still get out with all your arms and legs stuck on right. Not me.”

“Hey. You’re doing fine.”

“Talk into here.”

“Talk into your bullet hole?”

“Talk into my bullet hole. Tell me I’m fine.”
— Denis Johnson, “Steady Hands at Seattle General,” in Jesus’ Son (NY: FSG, 1993; rpt. NY: Picador, 2009), pp. 110f.



Reasons to live today: Roleplays, coffee cups the size of my head and free refills.

Doctor Rafa

I came out of Philebus class today in the oddest state of mind.

Arms limp--they still feel so weak. Lump in my throat. I could feel--not tears, but the tightness of emotion that accompanies tears, in my eyes. A soft, vulnerable feeling, but also a fierceness.

I came out, tried to leave, but found myself upstairs at Stern's office. My voice was so soft, so tentative...

I think I may actually have gotten past...something. The same place these conversations end up, always. in every class.

I might--I feel...good. This is what I want to do with my life.

hm

Jeffrey Kirpal’s blurb for Jorge Ferrer’s edited volume, The Participatory Turn: Spirituality, Mysticism, Religious Studies (Albany: SUNY Press, 2008).

What a truly hopeful and beautiful book this is. Skillfully negotiating between the Charybdis of a reductive but precious rationalist contextualism and the Scylla of the profound but not always sufficiently critical religious traditions, these authors propose a new, more dialectical path for the future of Religious Studies — a path of participation that recognizes in a rare fashion the truly creative nature of that fundamentally mysterious process of human consciousness we so mundanely call ‘interpretation.’ Catalyzed by a marvelous opening essay on the history and meaning of this participatory turn, the volume promises to become for a new generation what Katz’s and Forman’s pioneering volumes were for earlier ones.

Is this seriously the kind of shit I want to do with my life.....?

Doctor Rafa and the Good Soldier

"It is a queer and fantastic world. Why can’t people have what they want? The things were all there to content everybody; yet everybody has the wrong thing. Perhaps you can make head or tail of it; it is beyond me. Is there any terrestrial paradise where, amidst the whispering of the olive-leaves, people can be with whom they like and have what they like and take their ease in shadows and in coolness? Or are all men’s lives like the lives of us good people—like the lives of the Ashburnhams, of the Dowells, of the Ruffords—broken, tumultuous, agonized, and unromantic, lives, periods punctuated by screams, by imbecilities, by deaths, by agonies? Who the devil knows?"

— Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier (NY: John Lane, 1915), p. 273.

http://books.google.com/books?id=-KtaAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA273#v=onepage&q&f=false

Doctor Rafa Is Graduating With Honors

That's right, bitches!

Just finished my thesis defense. It was satisfyingly grueling, and my friends showed up to add their own questions.

All in all--I am awesome.

Doctor Rafa Is Tired Lately

I've been writing this--

Your Arms Too Short to Box with God: False Pleasures in Plato’s Philebus

At a certain point in the dialogue, Socrates asks Protarchus whether “in the case of the experiences of any ensouled beings,” that is, in the case of human beings, “the one experiencing them is always aware of all of [our pleasures and pains]” (43b). This question points to the beginning of a discussion on the role of attention and cognition in the realization and categorization of pleasures and pains, a role that turns out to be very large indeed. In answering Socrates’ initial question, Protarchus replies that no, of course it is not so that we are aware of all them. Indeed, as says, we are “almost entirely unaware of everything of the kind” (43b). This seems correct as, to a large degree, we do categorize pains and pleasures according to a cognitive classification.

For example, knowing that our muscles are tense and stiff, we undergo painful massages, and seem to greatly enjoy the experience. The enjoyment of a massage depends on recognizing that one is being healed, knots released from our muscles, or we could easily surmise that we were being injured. Even more straightforwardly, we are often unaware of some of the vast number of stimuli, pleasant and painful, that flit across our bodies, due to the overwhelming number of sensations that we are constantly being exposed to. It requires a shift in attention to the sensation in question, along with the second, already stated judgment, to determine whether any sensation or action is indeed pleasurable or painful. Quite a complex apparatus for such an apparently simple, passive act such as perception.

Continuing on this point, once we have been shown the cognitive element in our perception of pleasure, the possibility of false pleasure can be raised. If perception requires cognitive processing, a failure to process correctly could lead to falsely perceiving something painful as pleasurable. If we base our cognitive analysis on a false premise, for instance, we might wrongly say something we feel is pleasurable, when it really should not give us pleasure at all.

This type of false judgment is what Socrates is getting at in naming the series of false pleasures he does. He names a list of feelings that include: “anger, fear, longing, dirge, eros, emulation, envy, and everything of the kind” (47E), all of them examples of false pleasures. It is unnecessary to discuss every one. Even taking one examples, anger, sufficiently capture the sense in which these can be said to be cases of mistaken cognitive judgment. In describing anger, Socrates asks: “Isn’t it the case that we’ll find [anger] full of indescribable pleasures?” (48a). It is not immediately obvious that anger is a pleasure, in all or even most cases. Anger is generally thought of as a negative emotion. Someone wrongs me. The injustice causes a welling up of emotion, along with physical symptoms that are rather like being ill. Perhaps the stomach drops, the face pales, the fists shake, and the jaw tightens painfully. Certainly none of these are pleasant sounding, or feeling. What, then, is the pleasure involved?

Socrates goes on, as if in response, that if we are doubtful about the pleasure of anger, we “have to recall” a certain set of phrases, taken from Achilles: “which sets even the very wise to anger/And is far sweeter than dripping honey” (48a). There is something familiar about the idea of anger being sweet, even as it scorches the one feeling it. In many cases of anger, there is a pleasurable feeling rather like a rush of adrenaline. In our moments of rage, we imagine that we are powerful, strong in response to the wrong that harms us. In our anger, it is not uncommon for us to imagine that the one who has wronged us is in pain, or punished. Thus, the pleasure of anger lies chiefly in imagining that we have the power to see those who wrong us punished, even if it is simply in our minds and we never attempt any physical action.

It is this pleasure, the pleasure that comes from imagined power, that leads to the falsity of the pleasure. When we imagine the pleasure of righting a wrong against us, we imagine that there is an injustice to which we are deserving of reparation. We imagine that we have the power to right the wrong, in the retributivist sense, by causing the one who wronged us to be punished. This imagining, however, is based on the idea that we actually have the power to right wrongs done to us. In most cases, we do not have that power. Say there is a hurricane that causes my expensive sports car to flip over and bash itself against a telephone pole. When the storm is over, and I see my car destroyed, my anger is directed at—what? The pleasure comes in imagining the situation righted, but who or what exactly do I imagine is being punished for destroying my car? The storm? The anger in this case seems to be directed at the world in general, a world which should seek to treat me justly. But why would I think the world is structured that way, to give me a special place in its order where my wishes are never to be countermanded? To think so appears to be a kind of egoism impossible to sustain.

This is true even in so-called cases of “righteous anger.” Elie Wiesel describes the moment when American soldiers came to liberate Auschwitz . Upon entering the camp and seeing the devestation inside, one of the American soldiers falls to his knees and flies into an absolute fit of rage, rising and tearing at everything around him, screaming and swearing. This case of seemingly pure anger, regarded by Wiesel as a sign that humanity had returned to his life, is a case of anger at broad human injustice, stemming from a sense of empathy and human brotherhood—the sense that humanity itself has been wronged. The anger here appears to have a clearer, more human target—the Nazi party, perhaps especially the SS guards who kept the concentration camp running, the kapos who made the prisoners’ lives even more hellish, or even Hitler himself. But this anger too seems to assume that there can be an undoing of such a horrific situation. The idea is that this should not be allowed to happen: “I care about this, so it should not have been allowed;” or perhaps, in this case, more “this should not have been allowed” more generally. But to say that is to think that one had the power to stop it. Clearly, no single American soldier, including the one in this story, had that power.

Stepping back, what then is the falseness of the pleasure? It is based on a mistaken view of human power. Rather, if the one feeling anger realized the truth of his own limitations, what he can do and what is impossible for him, he would receive no pleasure. The processing of something that happens to him, something that should be a pain (the pain of being wronged, being hurt, having one’s plans fail, etc.) becomes a pleasure due to a mistaken sense of self.

Saying that the pleasure of anger is based on incorrect assumptions about the world seems correct, but to say that, because the pleasure is based on incorrect knowledge, it is somehow not true is a strange idea. Surely when I feel pleasure, though I may be imperfect or even twisted, the pleasure itself is real. Right? Imagine another scenario in which someone were to say that the pain I feel is incorrect. Imagine that I broke my knee, an activity that assuredly is quite painful. If someone were to come up to me as I yelled (“Oh God, my knee!” or something to that effect) to tell me that I was incorrect, that I was not in pain and my knee was fine, I would surely think that man mad (or perhaps simply in very bad taste). Similarly with pleasure. Though the object of the pleasure felt in anger may be nonexistent (as my broken knee in the above example was not), to say that the feeling itself is invalid should strike the reader as odd. How could Socrates truly say that something straightforwardly perceived is false?

To say that it is false is to say that a true perception of the world would erase the pleasure. We have seen how pleasures and pains are inseparable from cognition. We see here how inseparable they are, and if our cognition is based on false pretense, then the pleasure is false, or mistaken. If we are to base our observations and pleasures on the truth of the world, then surely the pleasure would be absent with proper understanding.

But to say that they cloud the truth—is that to say that they are escapable, or undesirable? Imagine someone without such emotions. Is there not something inhuman about such a creature? A creature who is unaffected when wronged, unmoved when those close by die.

Pre-Socratic philosopher Anaxagoras was confronted with his son's death, he replied stoically, I knew my child was mortal.

Surely these false pleasures are negative in that they cloud our sense of the truth, keep us from knowing and feeling in a way that is congruent with nature.
But is the point that anger would cease, that sorrow would cease, or that they would simply lose the tinge of pleasure that is based on our incorrect assumptions. What would they change about our humanity? We would feel emotions still, simply emotions with true targets. There would still be anger and sorrow, perhaps, but without the hints of pleasure that make the emotions so powerful. That seems to be a more powerful suggestion. In this way we retain the affective nature of our humanity and the importance of reacting to our loved ones, oriented on a correct acknowledgement of our limited scope of power in the world. By acknowledging the limits of our power, we can know in a way that we might not be capable of without knowing our limits. We can see the truth, and come closer to our own truth, perhaps.


It's not done, as you can see, but I find the question interesting. Can we actually say that the pleasures are "false?" Incorrect, sure, but false? They wouldn't exist with a proper view of the world, sure, but they don't exist now? I still have my doubts.

Doctor Rafa's Nodding Off

I really like taking a mug full of dry red wine, mixing in honey, and warming it up until it's steaming. It's really delicious like that.

I'm back in MD for the weekend, trying to finish up my thesis for good. That would be quite a load off my shoulders, gotta say...

I'm too tired to do much today. I'm just--exhausted.

Trying to hang in there awake in case andrew comes on, but I can only keep it up for probably...another hour or so, tops.

Doctor Rafa, Nose to the Grindstone

The ending to Emile was surprisingly--sweet. I found myself moved, and am now going back through the text in a slightly more hopeful spirit.

I don't think Rousseau is an idiot, and I avoid the presumption that he's -simply- a chauvinist, though to a certain extent that is clearly inescapable. Still, I feel slightly better about my project.

I will need to work very, very hard in the next three days. I have gotten behind due to my own laziness.

This is just not acceptable, so I'm not going to accept it.

I can catch up, if I actually do it.

So I'm going to do it.

Simple, right? I look forward to crowing over my success.

Doctor Rafa On Fourfold Nature

Heh.

I told my lover a few days ago that he had been my first man. Looking at it, it seemed so personal, I didn't want anyone else running into it accidentally. I deleted it, after I'd been sure he'd seen it, and waited for some reaction.

When none came, no discussion, no acknowledgement, I wondered if I'd been mistaken. Was it not important after all? Not even enough to have any real--anything?

Perhaps it was amiss to expect a thank you, but now to treat it as a confused aftershock of a previously misleading relationship...I don't know. I thought it was important.

Maybe people just can't read subtext at all. I'm starting to think that more and more. It's definitely true of my non-lover friends. Everything has to be either explicit, or a private joke to myself. I don't mean that as a statement on intelligence; I don't think it has anything to do with intelligence. With those other friends, I suppose it must mean they don't know me very well. With my lover--who knows. These things happen.

I slept too much last night. I had hoped to be done working by this point in the day, but I've barely started.

An hour ago, I had a drink with a friend. He made cocktails, because I like them, and lay back on the sticky floor of his suite to ignore them as people came in and out.

It's harder to connect to people these days.

I'm trying to understand the Philebus version of nature.

We begin, along with Socrates, with three parts to the whole: the unlimited, the limited, and the mixed. We begin with the unlimited, which includes the entirety of the universe in its undifferentiated whole. The unlimited is the beginning of our experience, and there are endless gradations to the unlimited. “In a certain way,” Socrates expands, “the unlimited is many” (24a), calling to mind a continuous problem that should be on our minds when reading Philebus, the problem of the one and the many that is at the heart of this discussion of nature, as well.

As an example of the endless gradation, Socrates uses heat: “in the case of hotter and colder” Socrates states, “see whether you could ever conceive of some limit, or would the more and less…disallow to the genera an end” (24b). Protarchus, right again, states that he cannot. The very notions of heat and cold admit of endless gradation, going from the temperate to the infinitely hot and vice versa.

Looking at the full spectrum of hot to cold, however, and even to introduce the idea, it is necessary to begin to talk about limit. To begin to speak about the unlimited spectrum of temperature, we begin to talk about specific temperatures, to divide them into two realms: in this case, heat and chill. Thus we see how, to understand anything, we have to begin to limit the gradation, to take out specific instances from the whole and separate the totality into pieces. This separation is the second part of the whole, the limited.

Having defined the limit as a division having to do with our understanding makes the limited sound like a tool; this is not inaccurate. Having been introduced to the limited in this way, however, even before delving into its nature we are left with something of a problem. Is the limit entirely imposed by us on the unlimited, so that we may understand what we can of that whole—or is it also natural in some way, brought to us already limited, the universe naturally divided into parts that we only sense?

The limited is a tool to understanding anything unlimited—it is also natural in some way? Things that are” (26c)There is a problem here in deciding how we shape the world to force the limited for our own understanding, and what is inherently limited and divisible by nature. Do we impose the limit? How do we cut it up?

The limited is twofold“the offspring of the limit” (25d) is more problematic than the singular nature of the unlimited. Indeed Socrates does not resolve the problem of the limited , leaving the question on the table for us as it expands into the problem of cause and maker and hinges on the personal question of our humanity—there is a quantitative sense of limited (measure, numerical, homogeneous) “the equal and equality, and after the equal the double, and anything that is related as number to number or measure to measure” (25a) “by the insertion of number render them commensurate and consonant” (25e), and qualititative (heterogeneous, kind)
When we apply the limit to the unlimited , we get the mix. How can we have the limited without the unlimited? “once we see that each of the two has suffered a split and splintering into many, by a bringing together once more of each of the two into one” (23E), “the third is not just of some two things, but of all unlimited things that have been bound by limit” (27d)

The problem of the twofold nature of the limit and its application to the unlimited forces us to look at cause, to try to explain how the two reconcile into a single anything (particularly, a single human, which is what we should always be talking about in philosophy). However, this problem is only confounded at the causal level, where we see the same twofold nature. Why would we go to the causal level? “all things that come into being come into being on account of some cause?” (26e) But what is the cause?

Socrates says: “Isn’t it the case that the nature of the maker does not at all differ…from cause, and the maker and the cause would rightly be spoken of as one?” (26E). Protarchus should not simply agree with this assumption. We assume then that the cause is apart from the thing itself—nothing makes itself.

Then it becomes fourfold: Unlimited, limited, mix, cause

Cause versus maker—how do we understand the cause of the universe—is it qualitative of quantitative? Is it will or force?

This problem allows the specifically human--This problem makes virtue possible—how can something the same (human, quantitatively) be better or worse than another? We need to involve a qualitative understanding. Makes art, in the same sense of better and worse, and more generally, be possible.

What is art but the ability to restructure the limit? What do I do when I create –fiction,- a reality that doesn’t exist, where I can create characters you care for who do not exist. What do I do when I use language—I generalize about a world that you can picture, but to picture it is not for it to exist. When I write about a landscape, or a person, I pick out features. I pick out qualities that are important or evocative—I war too with this problem. Anyone trying to portray a person or any object in any artistic way will find oneself with a representation that is the result of this problem. What do we stress about the human form? What makes it beautiful? Is it the form itself? The character of the person?

Things impress themselves on our senses without our having to call them to us. To exist is to sense, and this is not something we turn off. But when we sense, we necessarily do so through the lense of our own experience. To create art solidifies that subjective glance at what we generally think is an objective universe. Art revels in the subjective and the objective.

We value well-done form. We marvel when we see an artist accurately, lovingly sculpt the human form in all of its complexity (as in David, for example), but would we value it if it were without the artist’s passion, what makes the art subjective? We value too the non-objective artist, the Picassos of the world, who invite us into a different way to see.

When we create art, we choose how to limit in a way that is most evocative of this problem. We see the contrast between the two kinds of limit, and we end up with a sort of mix as well.

Humans are all artists. We are both allowed a great deal of latitude in our world (we see how humans can influence our world) and we must worry at the depth of that latitude, for there seems to be very little innately to guide us. We have to worry to what extent we are artists, which has great importance in how we see ourselves related to our world (something that cannot help but be relevant to any human life).

It would be helpful if Stern would assign more papers, so I could get my head around it.