Reading.
I haven't been reading as much as I normally do lately. The past week or so I've been reading in order to develop a particular example, which always makes reading seem less interesting. The example, though, allows me to read philosophy that I'm not using directly for my thesis (i.e., Nietzsche). I'm trying to craft a little bit of a biography-theory hybrid relating the development and decline of Nietzsche's friendship with Wagner with his notion (in The Gay Science) of 'star friendship'. I then use the narrative I outline to provide an example of the way in which we connect the self-analysis, the analysis of others, and an understanding of prevalent social institutions (like friendship, marriage, etc.) in order to arrive at a judgment regarding the appropriateness or reasonability of a particular emotional experience or response. I'm spending more time on the narrative aspect of it than my actual argument and I've been reading some interesting bits of Nietzscheana I haven't read before. Most interestingly, Elizabeth Foerster-Nietzsche's edition of The Nietzsche-Wagner Correspondence. Of course there are anti-Semitic, nationalistic insertions on her part, but the idyllic anecdotes she relates of Nietzsche and Wagner in the early days are hilarious and enjoyable. In fact, I quite like her vision of Nietzsche when she doesn't endeavour to discuss his thinking. I've also been reading a mediocre version of Nietzsche's Unpublished Letters, most of which I've read elsewhere. Supplementing this are Nietzsche's own more personal remarks in Ecce Homo and The Gay Science (in addition to section 297 on 'star friendship').Aside from the Nietzsche I've also been instrumentally re-reading Philip Roth's Patrimony, mining it for examples.
Some quotes from The Nietzsche-Wagner Correspondence edited by Elizabeth Foerster-Nietzsche and translated by Caroline V. Kerr (Duckworth and Co., London, 1922):
- "Wagner's chief problem: Why am I not able to make others what I feel myself?" (N-W Corr. 201).
- "One of Wagner's chief characteristics: lack of discipline and moderation. Carries everything to the limit of his strength and feelings." (N-W Corr. 201-202).
- "(Nietzsche) once said that one of the most important elements of self-discipline was to be able to raise the veil and to draw it down again when it became necessary, and that one's feelings should be the best judge as to whether this had been done at the right moment or not. He felt that the time had not yet arrived for him to lift the veil and disclose his real feelings for Wagner, and upon realizing this, he sorrowfully drew it down again, or at least endeavoured to draw it so closely that no one shoud learn the state of his mind" N-W Corr. 204.
- (In a letter to Baron Carl von Gersdorff, who threatened to force Nietzsche to Bayreuth)
"We both know that Wagner is naturally very suspicious, but I should not have thought it a wise thing to encourage this feeling. Finally, I beg of you not to lose sight of the fact that I have obligations towards myself, and that these obligations are difficult to discharge on account of my none too robust health. Really, no one shall force me to do anything...." (N-W Corr. 222)
- (After Wagner threw into a rage when Nietzsche brought the score of Brahms' "Song of Triumph" to Bayreuth)
"But later I came across this sentence inmy brother's note-book: "The tyrant admits no individuality other than his own and that of his most intimate friends. The danger is great for Wagner when he is unwilling to grant anything to Brahms or to the Jews" (N-W Corr. 223)
Item: The books I read don't do what I want them to. As step-ladders and waystations they are poor incarnations; they're already old hands at tripping me up when we first meet.
My friend, Jeremy, gave me a The Death Ship by B. Traven, which is one of his favourite books. He gave it to me perhaps 7 months ago and I tried to read it but it was awful. I told him as much and he said that he's leant it to 10 or so people and it has always been returned unread but that if I get past the first 50 pages I'll be convinced. So I read the whole thing. It's by the same author who wrote the script for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre which I liked, so I just pictured Bogie playing the leading role in order to get through it. I think it's just one of those books that, if you've read it at a certain age it sticks with you. Robert Heinlein has something like that kind of affect on me: I know he's not much of an author, and even when I try to re-read the books I once loved (Stranger in a Strange Land particularlu) I never feel what I once did. But I still think they're good books, and there's nothing I can do about it. The Death Ship is basically an unveiled hymn of the working man and against bureacracy in all forms. I can't stand messages sheathed in a thin layer of narrative very often. It's not my thing, and the reason why I hate 'philosophical novels' like Camus' and Sartre's. After you've got the idea, they lose their interest for me, and you get the idea of The Death Ship in about the first 4 pages. In any case, it's finished.
I'm reading all the John Titor stuff, it's probably more stimulating than anything else at the moment. Titor seems like a nice guy.
Not really recently, but in the last month I read the rest of Henry Chadwick's excellent History of the Early Church (or The Early Church; I can't really remember). This is one of the better books I've read lately. I didn't read it in sequence and, as a consequence, I don't remember very much of it. But, regardless, I have a much better understanding of how the church moved from a small apostolic movement to the monolithic entity it became only a few hundred years after Christ's death. Chadwick is funny at times, and chastises ancient historians at times, which I find hilarious.
Loving someone doesn't mean that you have to forgive them every trespass. It means you want to and you're ashamed that you want to.
Events
I'm unhappy, though not unlucky, in love. Things have ended up this way. We'll see what the future awaits! I feel as though my resignation (here as everywhere) exhibits me at my most arrogant. It's entirely true that I hate in others what I most despise in myself and its arrogance of any kind.
School
Poor supervisor choices. I'm nearly complete my minum opus, tentatively entitled Emotional Formation (it's the least pretentious thing I could accomplish). Comments recieved today suggest it is has not been rejected as entirely unphilosophical. Despite the fact that I haven't recieved any particularly insightful feedback, I am happy to have my writing and argumentation scruitinzed and deemed clear and, even, interesting. The first two chapters actually make me worry much more than the third, most complicated chapter. Since I'm engaging in self-absorption, I might as well explain why. I feel like writing tonight. The first chapter is largely exegetical and is original only in combining two unrelated ideas (Heidegger's "relational" account of human experience and an account of emotional rationality derived from Ronald De Sousa) and linking them to a historically produced blindness in much traditional philosophy and even common sense. The problem I have here is one I've constructed for myself. Rather than using a lot of stuff from Heidegger's later work (which I'm pretty comfortable with and which I can navigate without much research) I've chosen to use Being and Time almost exclusively. The problem is that I really only know a few sections of Being and Time (mainly section 29 and 30 really), and I make pretty bold claims about Heidegger that I haven't substantiated with anything other than my reading of late-Heidegger and my limited reading of early-Heidegger. Which isn't to say that I think I'm wrong, just that I may come off as amateurish because my reading of Being and Time isn't as subtle and worked out as the most recent literature. This is a problem but I also think it's a good thing for me to have done: only engaging these major texts through other people's thoughts and established interpretative trends can dull the risk I think is necessary in reconstructing the history of philosophy and in learning more generally. In the third chapter I really don't use any other philosophers at all. I don't really think that what I say is separate from what I read or that it's radically original, but I think there is something to be said about saying what one thinks without the academic encumbrances of footnotes and respect for the most up to date literature (all of which has its place, mind you).
Item: Take Matt's example and read some Nancy. But perhaps not any Lacoue-Labarthe!
Aside from thesis concerns, which are not as pressing at all now that I'm near completion, I have a whole new school and department to look forward to in the coming September. I'm looking forward to filling in some serious gaps in my understanding of philosophy and deepening a lot of the shallownesses that have crept into my readings of some of my favourite writers (Hegel, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Kant, Serres). I've reconciled myself to four more years of the classroom with the understanding that my activities at school and at whatever job I have have rarely undermined what I think to be important in my life and are unlikely to do so in the future. Here: to the goodness in all things!
Externals
I'll be moving at the end of the month. After taking leave of la belle province I'll make a two-month sojourn to the homeland before I move to Ottawa. The shift from Montreal to Halifax To Ottawa should prove interesting and pleasant as I like all three cities for different reasons and people. My top concerns at the moment in the world of externals are: getting my various objects from here to Ottawa, which is nearly half complete. Actually that's about my only concern on that score. I'd like to get rid of a lot of my junk, which I think the remainder of the packing process will facilitate. I'll certainly miss the people who surround me like a bright-coloured halo in Montreal. But, as Ottawa is a scant 2-hour drive away, I'm likely to see them often.
Clearance
Since I'm no longer much enamoured of E2, and I rarely get a chance to do much formatting (which I used to enjoy), I just store up snippets on my homenode to one day be cleared off and formatted into a fake-poem of half-witticisms. This is the current result. I think I'll enforce more order than my homenode has yet allowed these exiled thoughts.
#1: Links
Link: My Fascinatingly Detailed Teen Angst Bullshit Day Log - Part 5
This is one in a series of amusing spoofs on teen angst. I linked it on my homenode so I could remember where it was to finish reading the series.
#1: Pithy Remarks
- The poisonous and petty violence concealed by my good will.
- Admiring an elegant turn of phrase even to one's own ruination: culture.
- The result of culture: incapacity for fellow-feeling.
- The confusing thing is that love and hate aren't opposites. Or, more generally, that nothing is opposed.
- Sometimes I'm better than you expect me to be. Sometimes I'm not. Things have a way of ending up correct
- Fooling yourself is what you are
- Don't be what you are.
- (Don't be what you have to be)
- The Get Real Jerks Dun Got Realed
#1: Good Advice from E2
Borgette has good new years resolutions:
1) Don't get into other people's business.
2) Try not to talk about other people.
3) Try not to exaggerate.
#1: Insights into the human condition
AN INSTINCT FOR CATASTROPHE
Today is different than other days past.
#1: Yet more items
- Read Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
- Labour History (The Fall of the House of Labour)
- U.S. Foreign Policy in the 1930's (relation to domestic policy and to Cuba particularly)
- Further northern Siberian history (specifically Kolmya and more Vilnui river bend stuff)
- American pragmatism and Emerson (Cavell on Emerson after that)
- Revisit legal history (Roman, and not Medieval takes on Roman, law and the practice of law)
- The relationship between Greek culture and early Roman Republican culture (literacy issues if possible)
- Post-Roman northern African history
- Early Moorish history
- More primary documents: National Security Archive mail list!
- Computational Linguistics (Dylan)
- Madagascar
- Polar islands (well, maybe not Polar but strange and far south or north: Bouvet, Novaya Zemla, etc.)
- Kamchatka
- Read some more Midrash (Get the Chofetz Chaim book: buy it)
- http://www.salon.com/sept97/wsb2970902.html (Some good lines about moralism in fiction that could prove helpful)
- http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/sciencefiction/story/0,6000,1245664,00.html (same as above)
#1: Suggestive
People might be geniuses.
Item:
Go from The Counterlife to The Facts to Operation Shylock. (In a Goldilocks/Derrida fashion.
http://www.csulb.edu/~bhfinney/Roth.html
The site of this olde read DRESS
Don't act surprised
So don't act surprised if it happens to occur that I fall asleep
100,000 False Starts
Eight hundred thousand trillion false starts
I don't like anything that I like because I'm a bad person. I repent and I fail to repent.
#1: The only thing I know:
True statement: Repent sinner
Things get harder and heavier
"But all thing which that schyneth as the gold
Ne is no gold, as I have herd it told."
Everything always looks like what it is though
#1: A Conversation whose truth and usefulness have evaporated
Sara mint tea + cocoa tea = addictive says:
how's the thesis?
Developmental.. PSYCH! says:
well, im all caught up in this developmental crap now so ill let you know when im done that
Developmental.. PSYCH! says:
haha
Developmental.. PSYCH! says:
i think i might call it "emotional formation" as a reference to sabina lovibonds book (which i like) called "ethical formation" as it is along the same lines but more specific
Sara mint tea + cocoa tea = addictive says:
so explain the premise again -- you are talking about emotions and how they are formed and how outside forces (literature, schooling) informs this process?
Developmental.. PSYCH! says:
ill put it in more general terms, cause i always tell you what im thinking about at the moment
Developmental.. PSYCH! says:
my main aim is
Developmental.. PSYCH! says:
to show how and that emotions are involved in our ethical lives (and, even more generally, are part of our "rational" project as human beings, and not some extra/irr/arational phenomena that just interfere with "thinking")
Developmental.. PSYCH! says:
to do that im following this guy ronald de sousa, who has a theory roughly like this:
Developmental.. PSYCH! says:
we come to learn emotions by acquiring "paradigm scenarios" (which are like little emotinoal set-pieces for each emotion), we can then judge any instance of emotion by measuring it up against its particular paradigm scenario
Developmental.. PSYCH! says:
what i want to do is develop his account further by showing how this sort of schematic paradigm measuring thing is really too schematic for complicated emotional responses
Developmental.. PSYCH! says:
its more suited to children's more simplistic way of guaging the rationality of an emotion
Developmental.. PSYCH! says:
i want to show that emotional maturity is a continuum and that paradigm scenarios in the simple form are on the less mature end of the spectrum
Developmental.. PSYCH! says:
and when we get more complicated relationships it requries different ways of thinking
Developmental.. PSYCH! says:
and that literature (for example) is good at helping us in this regard
Developmental.. PSYCH! says:
though it isnt simply a matter of making literature an "Example" (which would be too simplistic and too much like de sousa's paradigms)
Developmental.. PSYCH! says:
thats basically it
Sara mint tea + cocoa tea = addictive says:
how do you involve literature if it is not as an 'example' ... i get what you're saying but I don't
Developmental.. PSYCH! says:
i mean if something is an "example" it can sort of be reitereated very easily in another context, but that isnt really what it does, unless you want it to be paradigm-y which i dont think it is
Developmental.. PSYCH! says:
like when i read philip roth im not like
Developmental.. PSYCH! says:
oh
Developmental.. PSYCH! says:
thats a good example of how a son and father interact
Developmental.. PSYCH! says:
its subtler than that
Developmental.. PSYCH! says:
Wittgenstein has this line about "the dawning of an aspect"
Developmental.. PSYCH! says:
i think its more like that
Developmental.. PSYCH! says:
its like you come to see things differently than you did before
Developmental.. PSYCH! says:
does that make sense? its not a rigid distinction, its a continuum, but i think its still a difference
Developmental.. PSYCH! says:
and an important one
Developmental.. PSYCH! says:
ps: that tea sounds like a good idea
Sara mint tea + cocoa tea = addictive says:
sort of like... you internalize the 'example' without really thinking (like you said), oh, now I understand this is how it happens
Sara mint tea + cocoa tea = addictive says:
?
Sara mint tea + cocoa tea = addictive says:
tea - I thought it would be groddy but it is not
Developmental.. PSYCH! says:
well no, not like that, its more like, its like if you were in a room where three of the windows were open and you didnt know there was a fourth one but someone told you a poster was covering the fourth one, youd have to uncover the poster yourself and look outside, and their telling you about the poster doesnt exemplify you taking the poster off the window...thats a terrible example
Developmental.. PSYCH! says:
hahaha
Developmental.. PSYCH! says:
its not really internalizing something external as coming to see things from a different perspective
Sara mint tea + cocoa tea = addictive says:
okay
Sara mint tea + cocoa tea = addictive says:
I thought it was more complex than that
Sara mint tea + cocoa tea = addictive says:
but that was sort of how I was thinking abou tit
Developmental.. PSYCH! says:
tit
Developmental.. PSYCH! says:
haha
Sara mint tea + cocoa tea = addictive says:
not that it's not complex
Developmental.. PSYCH! says:
you said tit
Sara mint tea + cocoa tea = addictive says:
HAH
Developmental.. PSYCH! says:
well its not just seeing things from a differnt perspective
Developmental.. PSYCH! says:
but thats a simple way of putting it
Sara mint tea + cocoa tea = addictive says:
robert and hannah keep saying "intercourse" randomly for the shock value
Developmental.. PSYCH! says:
its like "why reading novels is important"
Developmental.. PSYCH! says:
intercourse
Sara mint tea + cocoa tea = addictive says:
Developmental.. PSYCH! says:
tell them to say ovarian cyst
Developmental.. PSYCH! says:
thats groder
#1: Recommendation never followed:
the Blasphenaut, from Winnipeg
Closing Remarks
"The life unexamined is not worth living." But the examined life isn't much better!" Sleeping in and all the subtle irritation of the morning: life's value! Forgive what you can, love what you can't.
And a hymn
...by way of an admonition to those who rule themselves:
Serve the Lord in fear!
Repent in terror!
Give sincere homage!
Otherwise he will be angry,
and you will die because of your behavior,
when his anger quickly ignites.
How happy are all who take shelter in him!
No God but that without a God! The rulerless measure of all things and times. To the arrogance of submission and to friends!