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News & ArtsThursday, July 9, 2009
Books That Feeling
Posted by Charles Mudede on Thu, Jul 9, 2009 at 8:55 AM
The reason why I love philosophy can be found in this passage from Whitehead's difficult but emotionally intense book Process and Reality:
Life is a bid for freedom: an enduring entity binds any one of its occasions to the line of its ancestry. The doctrine of the enduring soul with its permanent characteristics is exactly the irrelevant answer to the problem which life presents. That problem is, How can there be originality? And the answer explains how the soul need be no more original than a stone.
Deleuze famously compared the experience of reading Spinoza to being on a witch's broom and feeling "a gust of air from behind." Reading Whitehead this morning (I began around 4:51 am), and seeing the sky slowly brighten (the world in slow motion), I felt as if I were in an ancient spaceship that moved just as easily through infinitely small spaces as through infinitely large spaces. Very few feelings can match the one you get from the ideas in a great book. It is a feeling of tremendous transformation. You can feel the words on the page changing the ground of your being.
It is believed that photons take a 150,000 years to get from the dense and disturbing core of the sun to the surface of our world. The light that arrived this morning was generated long before humans had anything like a city to live in or even a written language to communicate complex ideas with. It was an ancient light that fell on the pages of this marvelous book.
What is life? The best answer ever: "[A] bid for freedom..."
The house of being a stone.
Image from jsome1.
1
Ever eager to survive, one's idea of impermanence is invalid to the self at first. It's a trick of the psyche. Otherwise, you are tempted by self destruction to think everything is dust. Nothing lasts. But nothing lasts is the perfect answer. The ultimate freedom.
2
That is a great selection, Charles. For some reason it depresses me in the way that great philosophy should. My favorite philosophers are always mathematicians.
3
What is best in life?
To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of the women.
To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of the women.
4
Sorry, can't look at that house without imagining the picture dissolving to an interior shot of Wilma vaccuuming the floor with a small mammoth on a frame, sucking up the dust in his trunk (he'll look at the camera and say "Eh, it's a living").
6
Respectfully, this is why I hate most philosophy. My observation (a weak metric) tells me it's often a string of powerful words and assorted facts that lead to 'conclusions' that are based on the ambiguities in natural language, usually trying to solve problems that aren't very well-defined in the first place.
This on its own isn't bad, but many of it's practitioners regard these 'truths' as sound as mathematical truths, when really it is as true as fiction (which isn't lower than math, rather orthogonal. Both are designed for different lessons. But fiction comes with the disclaimer that the truth you derive is personal.).
My favorite philosopher was Bertrand Russell, who spent more of his time answering what life isn't rather than what it is. His tools weren't based on natural language or poetic but non-rigorously substantiated arguments, but mathematical logic. Natural language was only used as a communication medium.
Despite all this: precisely for what I have written above, I should read more philosophy.
This on its own isn't bad, but many of it's practitioners regard these 'truths' as sound as mathematical truths, when really it is as true as fiction (which isn't lower than math, rather orthogonal. Both are designed for different lessons. But fiction comes with the disclaimer that the truth you derive is personal.).
My favorite philosopher was Bertrand Russell, who spent more of his time answering what life isn't rather than what it is. His tools weren't based on natural language or poetic but non-rigorously substantiated arguments, but mathematical logic. Natural language was only used as a communication medium.
Despite all this: precisely for what I have written above, I should read more philosophy.
7
Pablo @6: Good conclusion! Specifically, you should check out more poststructural philosophy, or post-philosophy, like Lacan or Derrida (read summaries first; they are VERY esoteric). To grasp how their use of language illustrates the fiction of philosophical "truth" is most definitely to "feel the words on the page changing the ground of your being".
8
Great post, Charles. And, @6, you're performing philosophy. I share your desire to better understand the fluidity of ideas and language. Can there be one without the other?
What philosophy has done for me is to help me understand what is possible to understand (not much). I agree that many in the reason arena treat their faith like a bedrock foundation when it is often every bit swirling ocean. Still, I prefer that paradigm to the foundation of religious faith, which is most often just political philosophy combined with art.
Charles...great posts over the last few days. Brush the haters aside, and keep bringing us good stuff. In fact, I'd love it if you were to convene a regular salon in Seattle.
What philosophy has done for me is to help me understand what is possible to understand (not much). I agree that many in the reason arena treat their faith like a bedrock foundation when it is often every bit swirling ocean. Still, I prefer that paradigm to the foundation of religious faith, which is most often just political philosophy combined with art.
Charles...great posts over the last few days. Brush the haters aside, and keep bringing us good stuff. In fact, I'd love it if you were to convene a regular salon in Seattle.
9
PIG FAT HATE CRUNKS. DON'T INVOKE THAT NAME EVER. YOU DON'T DESERVE IT KARLES MUDDY LUV!!! DONTCHA KNOW? CAN'T WAIT TO SHOW YOU WHUT ALL THAT IS ABOOT. CAN'T WAIT TO SMACKY AND MASH FOR U.
LUV,
HAWWWWTEEEEEEE
LUV,
HAWWWWTEEEEEEE
10
Charles, you are on a role with recent posts, as another commenter said.
Ideas expand consciousness into the abyss - there is no end - but with understanding (and awareness that complete knowing is not possible) there is also a kind of brilliancy that is like sunlight glimmering off of water, or maybe coming through your window at dawn. It makes the abyss somewhat bearable, maybe even gives it meaning, and, as a bonus, occasionally helps inspire interesting bloggings.
Ideas expand consciousness into the abyss - there is no end - but with understanding (and awareness that complete knowing is not possible) there is also a kind of brilliancy that is like sunlight glimmering off of water, or maybe coming through your window at dawn. It makes the abyss somewhat bearable, maybe even gives it meaning, and, as a bonus, occasionally helps inspire interesting bloggings.
11
I'll admit that I didn't really read much of the post (not in a philosophical mood atm), but I really like the house. That is, until I read @4's comment and burst into laughter. However, I'd now like to live inside a boulder at one point in my life, elephant vacuum or no.
12
This is a great post but I have one nitpick. 150,000 year old lights really is not ancient light at all. You have to remember that the marvelous book itself is made of stardust that is billions of years old. The sunlight that falls on the pages really is a brand new illumination on something very old in its own way.
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