fanciefull diary

Reading God against gods by Jonathan Kirsch, I can't help thinking of another difference between polytheism and monotheism, that is, another besides his notions of tolerance vs. intolerance, open-mindedness vs. close-; or besides notions I had encountered elsewhere, (Nietzsche) that distinguish between the pagan religions as concerned with the welfare of mankind during lifetime and the Judeo-Christian as concerned with the afterlife. Specifically, I am thinking of the superimposition of the notion of 'true' to the notion of 'faith' in the Judeo-Christian tradition. True, these musings have their source in Kirsch's text, but I am thinking here not of the way he views this co-mingling of the two notions as an illustration of the intolerance of Judeo-Christians compared to the tolerance of the pagans. No. What I'm driving at is the superimposition of the epistemological category of truth on top of the theological discourse. When this happens, the religious discourse takes over a new sort of gravity, of seriousness: beside its essential function as preserver of the natural and moral order of the world, religion now becomes, or attempts to become the describer of the universe. The reason this happens is because now the religious discourse attempts to motivate its restrictions and regulations of human behavior in terms of that picture of the universe. Mankind has to act in a certain way because this is the way ordained by the Creator of the Universe. This is an unfortunate connection, and a totally unnecessary one. For millennia before, mankind had lived in a world where moral codes were not necessarily tied to the idea that they were ordained by the creators of the universe: true, the current masters of the universe were in most religions viewed as enforcers of a certain morality, but that morality had little to do with the actual creation of the universe; (I will return to this later); in the Judeo-Christian tradition on the other hand, the idea of morality is intertwined with the very creation of the Universe: here we don't simply have an abstract entity, like the Night or the Chaos or the metaphoric image of the Sun creating the cosmos without any ulterior motive or without any explanation; rather God creates the world and the birds and the animals and the fish so that Man may rule over them and Man so that he may imitate God.

(In saying this I ignore the prelapsarian stage, because it seems to me a mere pretext; in his almightiness, God could easily have removed all sources of temptation for Adam, so that he could never taste the fruit of knowledge; the fact that God chooses not to remove the temptation, but rather to point to it and place it out of bounds I take to mean that in fact Adam was from his very creation potentially 'lapsed' or potentially 'victim of temptation', and that God not only knew but even desired this. That in tasting the forbidden fruit Adam was merely fulfilling God's expectation, sort of like a test that God wanted to submit his creature to, in order to make certain that he had succeeded in creating the sort of being he had intended to, that is one capable to make choices. I take it (and though I never read anywhere anything like this, I don't imagine that I'm the first to view this episode in this way) then that the pointing of the tree of knowledge and the prohibition attached to it by God are in fact quite the opposite, pointers meant to insure that Adam quickly finds it and (with a little help from his helper...) tastes it.)

So if (freely) imitating God is what the purpose of Man on Earth is, if moral codes are viewed in this exalted light where they are tied to the creation of the Universe, it is obvious that for these moral codes to endure that story of the creation of the Universe has to be true. This is where the epistemological dimension of religion comes into play: if faith is wrong in its story about the universe it follows that it is wrong in its prescriptions for a good life. But as mentioned before, there were countless religious (or philosophical) cosmogonies that were in no way tied with the idea of a Moral Being creating a universe governed by like-minded creatures. And that disconnect of course did not make the enforcement of morality less stable, because while the creation of the universe doesn't need to be related to a moral act, the preservation of the universe could still be viewed in terms of such moral terms, and the moral codes could still be granted the importance of actually preserving the world, which is in fact of an even greater urgency than the Judeo-Christian notion is: for in truth, I am more likely to obey the moral codes if I am fearful that my disobeying might provoke the end of the world than I am to obey the codes if disobeying them simply means I come in discord with the Creator of the Universe and His universal mandates. Truly, by stressing the inscrutability of the ways of the Lord, Judeo-Christianity in effect chips away the notion of moral preservation of the universe: the universe endures through the grace of God, we are so small that we can't even effect the destruction of the world we live in. And while this has the positive result of placing us in a more correct position in the universe (at least up until the advent of atomic bombs, though, in effect from what I have read there are disputes as to whether an all-out nuclear war would destroy life on the planet or merely provide for a fresh start in totally new directions, that would end up with totally different beasts than us: I mean, if cockroaches survive the nuclear holocaust I would imagine other living things do too, and the smaller the likelier to, because the smaller the shorter the lifecycle and the shorter the lifecycle, the oftener the reproduction and generation of offspring which in turn increases the chances for mutations in what to us seems like extraordinarily short periods but which for the concerned beings would be ages, but I digress), it also has a host of unfortunate consequences, first of which is that it paradoxically discourages the more straightforward reason for moral behavior, and thus requires a further rationalization of the reasons why it is good to be a moral being. Aside from taking away one of the essential reasons to be moral, or rather internalizing it (for what happens is this: we are now taught that ok, the world may not end if we are not obeying God's commandments, but we will eventually find ourselves in a hell of a lot of trouble), this new vision of morality as tied to the truth of the tale about the birth of the Universe has the unfortunate consequence of eventually bringing the religious and the scientific discourses in conflict. Truth is of course the province (or rather the besieged city) of other discourses, the scientific and the philosophic ones. Rather, what it is is the fact that the picture of the universe keeps changing: five thousand years ago, we had one, and that came to be incorporated into the Bible and tied to its moral code. (Boorstin I think makes this point too: the truth of religion is merely dated scientific truth.) Things changed in the meantime, but morality did not, and because it is tied to that dated scientific truth of yore, that dated scientific truth is held, by most strict readers of the Bible, to have also stayed valid. There is of course no direct relationship between the rising of the Sun every day and the goodness of people on earth: to the pagans the relationship was from the people to the sun: if the people are good the sun will continue to rise; to the Judeo-Christian it is the opposite: the sun is rising that the people may be good. In the former case the disconnect can easily be proved either by practice (of not being good) or by science. In the latter of the cases however, there is no way to disconnect the two statements: the sun is rising that the people may be good. Replace the sun is rising with some other observed truth about the universe, one that is actually correct in scientific terms of yore: the Earth is at the center of the universe that the people may be good. In other words, there are two statements: one is that God created the universe in a certain way; the other is that he created it that people may be good. So any feature of the universe is by definition meant to advance (though implicitly) the goodness of mankind. There is no way to disconnect these two statements, and there is really no way to disprove them both; one can disprove the first (the x or y truth about the universe) but not the second. (At least not scientifically.) What this should mean is that religion should simply adapt to the new scientific view: because the relation between the two statements is not one of reverse-conditionality (if the Earth is at the center of the universe people are good; if we are descended from Adam and Eve rather than from apes, people are good); nor one of causality: the rising of the sun or the central position of the Earth are not the causes of the goodness of people; rather the relationship is merely circumstantial, in other words the result of hazard, (or, to be more accurate, of ignorance). But accepting this circumstantiality is a big issue for religion. So to sum up (more for myself and to verify that I didn't get quite lost....) the pre-Judeo-Christian religion conceives the universe as preservable through moral behavior; the Judeo-Christian world however views the universe as created by the creator of the moral codes; as such the story of the creation and the story of the moral codes receive similar justification; this results in the disconnection of morality from the endurance of the universe, which is a good thing to the extent that it places us in our more peripheral place in the universe; but it is also bad because it does that only unawares; more significantly, the Judeo-Christian approach has the result of placing epistemological statements on the same footing as moral statements; and it mistakenly assumes the former to justify the latter, or at least it fears that undermining the former would mean undermining the latter, as though the epistemological statements were in a relation of causality (and not mere of circumstantiality) with the moral statements.

Yet another way to sum this up would be: the pagan religions connect morality with existence; Judeo-Christians connect morality with knowledge; the pagan morality is ontological; the Judeo-Christian is epistemological. The problem appears because ontology (just like a certain morality) never changes. Being is always the same, just as Goodness is always the same, within the same moral system. Knowledge of Being however does change, and connecting an (unchanging) ethical system to a changing body of knowledge is sort of like Parmenides trying to build his house in Heraclitus's river.

A belated review of the movie Stepford Wives.... Not really, really. More like some thoughts on the movie and on the feeling of nostalgia for a bygone era. The notion that life in the suburb is an approximation of that era (generally represented as 'the fifties') which itself was an approximation of an yet older era, the Victorian time, with a dash of (or the first awakenings of) mass-produced, consumerist pop-culture. The strangeness of the fact that there are people (of both sexes) that view that age of the fifties as some sort of golden age. It reminds me of the Eastern European nostalgics. The EEN are those people (generally older generations) who long after the bygone days of communism. To everyone else such a feeling of longing is an aberration of human mind, a terrifying example of forgetfulness and stupidity. But to those who have it it is merely the longing after a well-settled set of values, a black and white that our existence has in the meantime lost. The movie makes its points (most of them along some of the lines above) in a comical manner, and thus at the same time it sweetens and dilutes the pill. The pill however should be taken in all its bitterness, I think, because we no longer, really no longer, have the luxury of black and white. And pretending otherwise, as happens lately in the American politics, is dangerous and counterproductive. There is a very serious public discourse (or a public discourse that takes itself, and as such is taken by many seriously, too seriously I think) that disparages the 'relativisms' and their promoters. As a matter of fact, however, the genie is out of the bottle, and we've played with it too long, and it enjoys the out-doors too much for it to even conceive of getting back inside. All attempts thereat are mere pretense, or enforcement of theories we no longer deeply and totally believe in. And though we may be forced for a while to accept them as a matter of public discourse, when there is a division between the private and public truths, eventually the private wins, because the public is generally wrong and comes to be viewed as such by an ever increasing number of people; case in point: the Bush Administration itself had for the longest time (just about since 9/11, if not before, in the throes of its otherwise hands-off approach to the painful Middle East conflict) assumed, or pretended to, or asked us to, that our enemy is insanely evil: they are motivated, it was said, by a pathological hate for the freedom we enjoy. Recently however there was a change where they admitted that the enemy has goals much more mundane than the mere (idealistic, let's admit it!) destruction of our freedom: what they want is their own territory in which to make the law according to their own wishes. This, as it happens, comes in conflict with our wish to have those territories governed in a friendly manner to us. I dare say both goals are within the normal range of the human urge to dominate. Surely some methods of acquiring that power are more hateful (even insanely hateful) than others: killing innocents either by flying planes into buildings or by dumping white phosphorus (or atomic bombs) on them I would guess qualifies among those insanely hateful methods of gaining the power. Though I'm sure one can easily find justifications for each of them, because after all we are good at rationalizing even our most horrendous acts; the fact is and remains that as a human being, no matter how dire the straits, how tempting the success, and how forgetful our species generally is, there are things one should NEVER do in the struggle for power, no matter what. (As to the why or wherefore of this, perhaps another time.) Other methods of gaining the power and domination have come to be accepted, though I guess it was more as a fait accompli than as the result of some theoretical discussion amongst individuals and nations. In other words, it's because 'everybody does it and did it since the beginning of time' that some things have come to be accepted. Though of course this is as flimsy a motivation as one can find. Be that as it may, acknowledging finally that our enemy is just as goal-oriented as us, rather than merely some mad and abstract 'entity' that we can only hope to defeat by destroying, and we can only destroy by the full force of our military power, acknowledging this, I say, is the first step in really defeating the enemy, because it always pays to know your enemy. And this acknowledgement, though not fully accepted as such is after all the realization that they, just like us, are motivated by goals that have little with morality and a lot with Darwinism, the same Darwinism that some in our camp spend too much time attempting to deny exists. This acknowledgement is a result (or symptom) of the abandonment of one type of black-white posturing, though of course it will never be described as such by people who came or (were forced) to it. And these are my thoughts on the Stepford Wives...

"The scope of the practical control of nature newly put into our hand by scientific ways of thinking vastly exceeds the scope of the old control grounded on common sense. Its rate of increase accelerates so that no one can trace the limit; one may even fear that the BEING of man may be crushed by his own powers, that his fixed nature as an organism may not prove adequate to stand
the strain of the ever increasingly tremendous functions, almost divine creative functions, which his intellect will more and more enable him to wield. He may drown in his wealth like a child in a bath-tub, who has turned on the water and who cannot turn it off." (William James, Pragmatism)

Philosophers and prophets deplore man's tendency to deem himself immortal. To forget life is merely a journey on earth, and to build castles forgetful that God's justice or Nature's whim is all that stands between himself and total nothingness. From this tendency to build comes the impulse to claim ownership over the building or the creation, with which both prophets and philosophers (not to mention ideologues) also didn't always quite see eye to eye. But, much as they tried to uproot this innate (it appears) drive to own, they didn't succeed. The reason, it would seem, is simple, and it has to do with the option homo sapiens made many millennia back, to live a sedentary life, devoted to agriculture rather than hunting and gathering. For in hunting and gathering the human tribe was always (almost) on the move, whereas, as Jared Diamond says "sedentary living was decisive for the history of technology, because it enabled people to accumulate nonportable possessions." (Guns, Germs, and Steel, p. 260) In upbraiding man, therefore, for his perceived greed and blindness (see particularly the Sermon on the Mount for one of the best examples) wise (or inspired) men were really not addressing the true root of the problem. Even if Jesus and his disciples were not themselves sedentary, they were addressing a sedentary, agriculture-oriented civilization, and their abandonment of the Old Law didn't go so far as to enjoin mankind to forsake completely its ways (though this fragment: "Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?" would certainly seem to point in that direction, if taken literally and without any of the shrewd interpolations of a thousand 'wise' men that came after Jesus.) Jesus is of course not the only one to address the problem. With him the argument is most dramatic though, because for him the stake of the human blindness is greatest: what man stands to lose in his eyes, because of mere blindness is eternal happiness and life next to the Father. For others, like Marcus Aurelius, the Roman Philosopher-Emperor or Epictetus, the Roman Philosopher-Former-Slave, what's at stake is merely unhappiness here on Earth, discontentment with the things that turn out otherwise than we would have them, discontentment even in the middle of all our possessions when we realize that they too will fail in prolonging our life eternally. For it is truly hard to decide which it is more difficult: to die leaving behind a good life or to die leaving behind a life you hate? Truly a difficult question to answer. For Marx, to continue the development of this idea, the desire of Man to own signifies his appetite for domination of his peers and the unhappiness the latter will derive from being first of all oppressed by one of their own, secondly enthralled to the same urge to gather stuff and oppress the meeker ones. It would seem then that the stake of what man stands to lose by his acquisitiveness keeps shrinking. Philosophy, it would seem, keeps coming up with more and more pale reasons for trying to make us relinquish our possessions, to return to the true way to live, to exist like the bird in the sky. Some poets have tried the same too, I'm sure. Interestingly, and ironically, the communes of the sixties, predicated upon the idea of small communities of people living in the middle of nature failed to discover the true roots of the urge to own. They tried to give up possessions in a political way, by embracing free love and communist ideals. Yet, they stayed put. And to the extent that they did that, they stayed within the all-too-narrow confines of the agricultural society, the one that first encouraged and made possible the tendency to own stuff. Another development of the contentious sixties, the hippie buses, came somewhat closer to crossing that ultimate frontier, yet it did so in such a ridiculously conventional way: what is more conventional, more establishment-like, less 'revolutionary' than leaving civilization behind by driving away from it? Oh wait, I forgot the buses were kitschily colored... Yep, that changes everything...

Honestly though, it is in the failure of those people to understand human nature (as it was forged by the first husbandmen and sowers thousands of years ago) as well as in the failure of philosophers to understand this ultimate reality, and in the uncanny ability of religious people of all denominations to squeeze the life out of their master's statement (as quoted above), it is in all these that we find the sources for some of the political troubles of today. Not because ownership is evil. That would be a stupid thing to claim: ownership, being part of our natural (rather than our social) being can't belong to the same realm as the moral notions of good or evil, the same way that any other survival strategies of other species can't be categorized as morally good or evil. Rather our problems arise because ownership is not just ownership of things. It is also the ownership of ideas, of gods and of other such things. But more than anything else, the notion of ownership of our planet, our life, our destiny. More than anything, because no matter if we ascribe it to a benevolent or just God or if we consider it the result of sheer hazard, the truth is we have no good explanation for our existence on this planet, because, after all, even the Lord moves in inscrutable ways. Again and again one has to return to Heidegger who put it so well: we're simply thrown here. To pretend to know anything else about our condition is merely presumption, when not something worse. To pretend that in the name of this supposed knowledge of our condition we can lay claim to our existence, and to those things that surround it and co-exist with it and which, it would seem, facilitate or promote it, is a normal act, but not a moral, not an intellectual, not a God-inspired act. Merely the normalcy of what defines Life: the urge to self-preservation. And pretending that it is otherwise merely provides us with grounds for doing all those terrible things we are doing to each other. Pretending we act in the name of a higher authority or value-system, or 'for the better' is all an excuse that is ultimately tied to our feeling (illusion?) that we are ultimately capable to be masters of our life. An illusion that may be helpful in a thousand other ways, but which also proves pernicious in this particular respect.

“Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and shells. You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short times of space. Five, six: the NACHEINANDER. Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the audible. Open your eyes. No. Jesus! If I fell over a cliff that beetles o'er his base, fell through the NEBENEINANDER ineluctably! I am getting on nicely in the dark. My ash sword hangs at my side. Tap with it: they do. My two feet in his boots are at the ends of his legs, NEBENEINANDER.” (James Joyce, Ulysses)

"The great majority of the human race never use these notions, but live in plural times and spaces, interpenetrant and DURCHEINANDER." (W. James, Pragmatism, Lecture V)

"In Boston, for example, the weather has almost no routine, the only law being that if you have had any weather for two days, you will probably but not certainly have another weather on the third. Weather-experience as it thus comes to Boston, is discontinuous and chaotic. (...) But the Washington
weather-bureau intellectualizes this disorder by making each successive bit of Boston weather EPISODIC. It refers it to its place and moment in a continental cyclone, on the history of which the local changes everywhere are strung as beads are strung upon a cord.
Now it seems almost certain that young children and the inferior animals take all their experiences very much as uninstructed Bostonians take their weather. They know no more of time or space as world-receptacles, or of permanent subjects and changing predicates, or of causes, or kinds, or thoughts, or things, than our common people know of continental cyclones. A baby's rattle drops out of his hand, but the baby looks not for it. It has 'gone out' for him (...) The idea of its being a 'thing,' whose permanent existence by itself he might interpolate between its successive apparitions has evidently not occurred to him. It is the same with dogs." (W. James)

Take this and combine it with what Epictetus says about how little we should care whether or not this temporary existence of (h)ours continues, and it becomes evident that the ideal for the Stoic philosopher is in actuality a return to innocence, to that unquestioning state of infancy where, as James suggests, we have yet to discover the substance of this world. What to one philosopher is the path to happiness or at least contentment, to the other is, unsurprisingly, the sign of an inferior or yet undeveloped nature. But this also shows the impossibility of the Epictetus' enjoinment, for it truly is impossible for man, once he has outgrown the unquestioning child, to ever return to that state, to put the genie of inquiry back into the bottle, and throw the bottle into the ocean. The mark of a developed nature is, according to James, creating a narrative of the world, which sometimes involves establishing or inventing causes. Being able to tell a story of the world. And even if I already knew this, by instinct and by the Book: (Εν αρχή ἠ̂ν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἠ̂ν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεὸς ἠ̂ν ὁ λόγος. --“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” John 1:1) it still gives me the pleasure one might feel at finding a different, more scenic, route to a previously known destination.

What kind of stupid thing is that, one might say, to talk about the 'unquestioning state of infancy'? Isn't it obvious to anyone that of all ages of man, that of childhood, early childhood in particular, is the most inquisitive one? To this I would reply with two observations: first, that James only refers to a very early stage of childhood, as I said, that of infancy, and even that viewed from a very narrow perspective; otherwise, it is clear to anyone who has seen the wide-open eyes of infants even before they can speak, the way they follow every move of their mother or father, that they are quite obsessed with getting to know what this mess all is into which they somehow found themselves immersed; but even more important is this: the questioning spirit of childhood has very little to do with actually getting to know the world. It is merely a survival skill, it requires, and obtains, the kind of information a tourist might look after upon first arriving into an unknown city. The tourist would not form a definitive impression on the essentials of the city merely by asking where the parks, the grocery stores and the City Hall are. To form that impression, the tourist will have to actually live in the city and see for himself whether the city is worth living in or not, what its good and its weak points are and so on. Similarly, the questions of a child don't really question the world, they just rely upon the newly found, and often poorly founded, authority of the parent to get the first bearings into the world. The confidence the child shows in the answers the parent provides is the real expression of what I had in mind when I thought of the 'unquestioning state of infancy'. I remember that Leonard Shlain (Sex, Time and Power) says something about myelination not being complete in boys even by the time they reach puberty.

I am not sure whether this has anything to do with the 'unquestioning state of childhood' but it would only seem normal that as the child's left brain finally myelinates, that is, as the side in charge of language and logic (of stories and causification) reaches its full operational strength, the child should become more reluctant to accept the stories and reasonings of others, whether they are parents or teachers, just as it is normal for the young toddler to be so enthused by the newly discovered gift of walking or talking.

(And, to maintain the metaphor above, of the tourist finding a more scenic route to the known destination, I can't help notice, just like the same tourist might spot an alley that he has the sudden realization will take him to the same place, and which he promises himself to follow some other day, that the late myelination of the language-logic side of the brain is yet another path to arriving at the same conclusion from above: to be able to tell the story of the world is to create the world. I can only start my own 'clearing of Being' once I learned how to tell the story of Being. Of course we learn to tell tales long before the myelination of the left side is complete. There was another study done on children ages five and up, that aimed to prove how early children start realizing they are separate from the world, i.e. that what they know may not necessarily be known by other parties. But that is not what I had in mind, though I will perhaps think of that type of tale-telling one day too, and how it relates to the larger tale, the bigger picture of Being.)

"Je sais que tout ce qui est né doit mourir, c'est la loi générale ; il faut donc que je meure. Je ne suis pas l'éternité ; je suis un homme, une partie du tout, comme une heure est une partie du jour. Une heure vient et elle passe ; je viens et je passe aussi..." (Epictet)

"We all have some ear for this monistic music: it elevates and reassures. We all have at least the germ of mysticism in us. And when our idealists recite their arguments for the Absolute, saying that the slightest union admitted anywhere carries logically absolute Oneness with it, and that the slightest separation admitted anywhere logically carries disunion remediless and complete, I cannot help suspecting that the palpable weak places in the intellectual reasonings they use are protected from their own criticism by a mystical feeling that, logic or no logic, absolute Oneness must somehow at any cost be true. Oneness overcomes MORAL separateness at any rate. In the passion of love we have the mystic germ of what might mean a total union of all sentient life. This mystical germ wakes up in us on hearing the monistic utterances, acknowledges their authority, and assigns to intellectual
considerations a secondary place." (W. James)

"LXXIV. LES philosophes enseignent que l'homme est libre. Ils enseignent donc à mépriser l'autorité de l'empereur. -- Non. Nul philosophe n'enseigne à des sujets à se révolter contre leur prince, ni à soustraire à sa puissance rien de tout ce qui lui est soumis. Tenez, voilà mon corps, voilà mon bien, voilà ma réputation, voilà ma famille, je vous les livre. Et quand vous trouverez que j'enseigne à quelqu'un à les retenir malgré vous, faites-moi mourir, je suis un rebelle. Ce n'est pas là ce que j'enseigne aux hommes ; je ne leur enseigne qu'à conserver la liberté de leurs opinions, dont la divinité les a faits seuls les maîtres. "

I am conflicted on reading this; on one hand I really like the notion that liberty has not much to do with possessions; this is important not just from an idealist (or buddhist) point of view, according to which to be free is to be free from desire; it is a lot more important in a democracy where certain citizens choose to vote with a certain party just because that party promises them tax breaks, ignoring that the tax breaks come with strings attached, many of which have at the other ends puppet masters intent upon restricting all other liberties of the people except for the liberty of not paying one penny more than absolutely, positively necessary in taxes. It seems to me very important to recognize that the freedom of thought and expression are a much more important part of the general abstraction named freedom. That in preserving it we should not spare any effort and that perhaps a good way to start understanding it for what it truly is is to separate it from the other types of liberties, including those having to do with the material possessions. Yet, having lived the first twenty years of my life in a totalitarian regime, I am also well aware that a hungry man doesn't have freedom of conscience on his mind, that, of all the circles of the totalitarian inferno, the hungry enslaved man occupies the lowest, that his first impulse in taking on the establishment is not to ask for freedom but for bread. That if you can keep him thinking about how to obtain his bread you will keep him from thinking of his freedom of conscience. There is then this paradox: a certain material comfort is required for true freedom, at least in a Western-style, modern society. Yet too much of this, and especially focusing too much on increasing that comfort is damaging to the pursuit of individual liberty. J.S. Mill and others before him were convinced that the two were connected in a univocal way, but that turns out not to be the case; evidence for this is the de-clawed US press, owned by corporate entities that donate millions of dollars to those politicians whom the press is supposed to keep a check on.

Which reminds me... the other day, pondering the overwhelming quantity of commercials during an episode of the Simpsons (I truly believe that the minutes of advertising during the Sunday episodes come close to equaling the minutes of actual show) I went mentally up (or down) the ladder of the need for so much advertising...It took me to the need for money that the tv stations have, which in turn took me to the high salaries paid to its 'players'. The technology of making tv shows, though expensive, has been getting cheaper all the time. On the other hand, programming has become more and more lazy (i.e. less original). So that the only direction where all this money is being funneled has to be salaries and corporate profits. In other words, we are paying with time of our life for the benefit of watching mostly watered down programming (let's face it, even the Simpsons ain't what they used to be) and at the same time we get a tv-environment where news people are not motivated to be guardians of society against the abuses and ineptitude of politicians of all stripes, but instead sort of rub shoulders in the same crowds. A rotten deal if ever there was one.

One other thing that annoys me at the US media is its sentimentalism. After every disaster it wallows in presenting us with 'stories of survivors', 'heartbreaking tales of suffering' or 'of joy' or 'of hope' ...We are conditioned, after every disaster, to feel as if the earth just shattered and it's going to kill us all, and the sole Adam and Eve that will be left will suffer from eternal post-traumatic stress disorder. We are truly expected to be unable to 'move on' with our lives, to suffer perpetually, and even though psychiatrists keep on saying humans (and their minds) are very resilient, we end up believing the hogwash the media keeps on throwing at us. And then we behave accordingly. That is not to say that there are not a few people who, in a certain disaster, will experience serious psychological trauma. It's just that they are not that representative for the rest of the population to make the news. Then again, neither are airplane accidents representative for the air industry... In covering Katrina's aftermath the US media was great while the government was AWOL. Then, slowly, things began to turn for the better, and the story began to become a non story. Well, instead of focusing on other goings-on (there are plenty both here and in the big world outside our doors), the media started parading the 'stories'... the 'tales'... the junk... I had to turn it off, again. Unfortunately, it seems like too many people have been conditioned to relish this fare.

In his third lecture, W. James discusses a few philosophical problems purporting to settle them from a pragmatist's perspective; thus, he settles that, in so far as its opposite is merely the source of despair while it is the source of hope, the idea of God is a valuable (read 'true') idea, pragmatically speaking; same goes for free will: free will allows for the hope that we can do better in a world that is obviously far from perfect; whereas if we were predetermined there would be no hope for us to do better or worse than the world in which we are, with Heideggers's term, thrown in. And this is where I find this sentence that gives me shivers:

"'Freedom' in a world already perfect could only mean freedom to BE WORSE, and who could be so insane as to wish that?" (emphasis in the text)

In other words, all an ideologue has to do is to state that the world he has created for his citizens is perfect, and force them to say so too, and with that he might dispense with liberty. The ideologue wouldn't even have to lie. If he believed the world is perfect and if he had the power to enforce the principle above on the citizens, then he could in theory do just that. Not to mention the possibilities of genetic abuse by well-meaning parents and societies.

"You must not lose heart, or be like men without any experience, who fail in a first essay and ever afterwards fearfully forebode a future as disastrous." Nicias talking to his troops right before the attempt to break the blockade the Syracusans instituted at the mouth of the great harbor, (where the Athenian ships were moored) and return to Athens. Failed.

"Meanwhile occurred some claps of thunder and rain, as often happens towards autumn, which still further disheartened the Athenians, who thought all these things to be omens of their approaching ruin."

During the land retreat the Athenians attempt. Yet another example of the overwhelming superstition of the Athenians. It makes for a striking contrast with the reasoned discourses that the generals give in front of their troops prior to engagements, peppered with philosophical (or at least general) observations on human nature, on human psychology and on matters of tactics and strategy. It's as if, for all their civilizational prowess, for all their culture and their philosophy, for all their art and wealth, the Athenians were, when it came to natural phenomena, in the same position a caveman would have been: fearful, without any glimpse of understanding, totally in awe and shock. Shocking.

"This was the greatest Hellenic achievement of any in this war, or, in my opinion, in Hellenic history; at once most glorious to the victors, and most calamitous to the conquered. They were beaten at all points and altogether; all that they suffered was great; they were destroyed, as the saying is, with a total destruction, their fleet, their army, everything was destroyed, and few out of many returned home. Such were the events in Sicily."

"LXII. IL y a des notions communes, dont tous les hommes conviennent également. Les disputes, les séditions, les guerres, d'où viennent-elles ? De l'application de ces notions communes à chaque fait particulier. La justice et la sainteté sont préférables à toutes choses, personne n'en doute. Mais une telle chose est-elle juste, est-elle sainte ? Voilà sur quoi on s'égorge. Chassons cette ignorance et apprenons à appliquer ces notions à chaque fait particulier ; il n'y aura plus de disputes, plus de guerres, Achille et Agamemnon seront d'accord." (Epictet, Entretiens, Livre Premier)

While we agree on theoretical notions, he says, we disagree on how to apply these theories to practice. We agree that justice is best every time, yet is this particular action just is a more perplexing statement, so that what we need to learn is to apply these theoretical notions to each particular fact. Then, there would be no more disputes and wars, Achilles and Agamemnon will not disagree anymore.

The question is of course, isn't it hopeless to think one could learn how to apply theory to all the infinite possibilities that practice presents us with? There is ultimately always a point where extrapolation becomes necessary, where past experience will have to do, where past results will have to be taken as almost a guarantee of future ones. Perhaps really this is where the bigger disconnect is: not in our capacity to apply theory to practice but in the fact that practice is always slippery, always changing, always flowing and theory can only try to keep up with it. The further question would be: is our awareness of past results always a helping hand in our approach to present or future actions? And the answer is of course not. Of course sometimes our history is what hinders us from taking the plunge. When it is only an individual issue, the solution depends on minute factors that I can't explore here. But when it is a group issue, some members of the group will take the plunge faster than others, by virtue of their individual histories being different though they may share one with the group they belong to and also because of those minute factors I ignored above and will continue to do so here. The conflict that ensues is the one between the old and the new orders, between conservative and innovative spirit. You would think that given that the latter is the result of the realization that the old theories no longer apply to the new practice, the victory of the innovationists is pretty much assured. Yet to one watching the dispute from very close ground it seems anything but an easy and pre-decided one. Then there is the issue of those innovations that are actually not better than the tradition they are trying to replace. How to justify the birth of something like the communist innovation? Based on the perception that the old way of doing business no longer serves as well as its new counterpart would. Is this a case where theory simply outran practice?

"The Athenian generals seeing a fresh army come to the aid of the enemy, and that their own circumstances, far from improving, were becoming daily worse, and above all distressed by the sickness of the soldiers, now began to repent of not having removed before; and Nicias no longer offering the same opposition, except by urging that there should be no open voting, they gave orders as secretly as possible for all to be prepared to sail out from the camp at a given signal. All was at last ready, and they were on the point of sailing away, when an eclipse of the moon, which was then at the full, took place. Most of the Athenians, deeply impressed by this occurrence, now urged the generals to wait; and Nicias, who was somewhat over-addicted to divination and practices of that kind, refused from that moment even to take the question of departure into consideration, until they had waited the thrice nine days prescribed by the soothsayers." (Thucydides, The Peloponesian War, Chp. XXIII)

This is relatively self-explanatory even for one who might not know the context in which this incident takes place: the Athenian army, a very large one too, launched a half-baked attempt to conquer Syracuse, during a period of truce in the war against Sparta. The campaign went from bad to worse. All along, Nicias has been refusing to leave for fear of the wrath of the easily swayed Athenian people at home. (At least this is how Thucydides, no friend of democracy, puts it.) Then this. Then they are decisively attacked and the Athenian army is utterly destroyed. The treasury of Athens has been emptied, its most capable generals dead, its ships destroyed and its large army generally annihilated. This is in many ways the beginning of the end for Athens. And it all hangs on a lunar eclipse.

Well sort of: in a conflict this long, there are many turning points, many little things that, had they turned out different, the war would have had a different conclusion. But this is, definitely one of those little things that might have made a difference. A sad one too, considering the image we generally have of the Athenians as rational and inquisitive, rather than superstitious.

'So rechtfertigen die Götter das Menschenleben, indem sie es selbst leben - die allein genügende Theodicee! Das Dasein unter dem hellen Sonnenscheine solcher Götter wird als das an sich Erstrebenswerthe empfunden, und der eigentliche Schmerz der homerischen Menschen bezieht sich auf das Abscheiden aus ihm, vor allem auf das baldige Abscheiden: so dass man jetzt von ihnen, mit Umkehrung der silenischen Weisheit, sagen könnte, "das Allerschlimmste sei für sie, bald zu sterben, das Zweitschlimmste, überhaupt einmal zu sterben"' (Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragoedie)

"This is how the [Greek] gods justify human life by living it themselves - the only pertinent theodicy! Existence under the shining light of such gods is seen as worth striving for, and the real pain of the Homeric heroes comes from having to part with it, and especially so soon; so that one could say, turning around the wisdom of Silenus, that 'the worst pain is to die soon, the second worst to die at all."

This is an interesting 'pro-life' approach. Sort of related with the Christian notion that human life is precious because humans are the image of God. Yet the difference is enormous: in the Christian doctrine the external similarity is granted, and the internal one is sought after. In the Greek world, the inner (just as the outer) similarity between man and god is already presumed to be accomplished. (I take the 'living' of one's life to be the expression of one's inner, while one's look, fashioned after that of God is of course the outer similarity.) As Nietzsche among many others noted, in his search for the inner imitatio Christi, the Christian in fact turns away from life. To the Christian human life is merely the vehicle through which man gets to be more like God, or at least so it is hoped. That in reality we all end our lives a lot less innocent than we had started it doesn't seem to bother the proponents of this doctrine. Nor should it, necessarily: innocence is not a godlike state.

Informed decision to do the good rather than the bad is. (Morality which, moreover, may appear run amok to an uninformed eye.) Yet in making this proposition Christianity takes mankind on the edge of a precipice, and unfortunately most of us fall off. Christianity is a sort of tight-rope walking exercise, engaged in by a consummate drunkard. Imitatio Christi fails, and so does our aspiration to become more like our God.

Be that as it may, the fact remains that the Greeks world outlook allowed them to view themselves as closer to their gods. Which is, just as Nietzsche says, better for living in a problematic world.

"Your typical ultra-abstractionist fairly shudders at concreteness: other things equal, he positively prefers the pale and spectral. If the two universes were offered, he would always choose the skinny outline rather than the rich thicket of reality. It is so much purer, clearer, nobler." (W.J. Pragmatism, Lecture II)

"οἱ μὲν γὰρ οὐ̂ν τέττιγες ἕνα μη̂ν' ἢ δύο

ἐπὶ τω̂ν κραδω̂ν ᾄδουσ', ̓Αθηναι̂οι δ' ἀεὶ

ἐπὶ τω̂ν δικω̂ν ᾄδουσι πάντα τὸν βίον."

For while locusts only buzz one month or two
On the branches, the Athenians
Buzz on legalities their entire life.

Transl. by Arrowsmith thusly:
"the locust, who one month or two, drones and shrills
among the little thickets, while the men of Athens,
perched upon the thorny thickets of the law, sit
shrilling out their three score years and ten." (Aristophanes, The Birds)

I particularly like the 'perched upon the thorny thickets of the law' verse, though of course there is little like it in the original.

"You will probably be surprised to learn, then, that Messrs. Schiller's and Dewey's theories have suffered a hailstorm of contempt and ridicule. All rationalism has risen against them. In influential quarters Mr. Schiller, in particular, has been treated like an impudent schoolboy who deserves a spanking. I should not mention this, but for the fact that it throws so much sidelight upon that rationalistic temper to which I have opposed the temper of pragmatism." (The Project Gutenberg EBook of Pragmatism, by William James, Lecture II)

And here's another illustration, twenty some centuries later, of how in the conflict between conservatism and new ideas the former uses violence (verbal or otherwise) to defend its positions against the invaders.

The Clouds is generally discussed from the point of view of the Platonist who deplores the satiric, unfair and even untrue image that Aristophanes gives of Socrates and his philosophy. There has always been a lot of debate around the notion that some of the accusations that were to doom Socrates in 399 found their first source in this comedy. But what I find more interesting is the fact that a play that purports to criticize the new, sophistic training in the name of the old, moral education ends in violence. Never mind that the violence was probably meant to be slapstick. The slapstick, I believe, is the part that has to do with the fact that this is a comedy. The violence, on the other hand, the notion of it being the end line of all theoretical arguments is a serious matter and bespeaks of many troubles to come for the Athenian, (and the rest of the human) civilization. Sure it would be too much to say that this is what Aristophanes means to show, that is, that we finally resort to violence to solve our irreconcilable differences. The play rather endorses that solution, but the idea is there, independent of whether Aristophanes wanted it or not: the human comedy often ends in tragedy because we allow the war of words, a war we invented precisely in order to keep violence at bay, to become just as real as the occurrences of the natural environment. The irony is then that what was meant to be a firewall against violence ends up providing yet more (and a lot more, at that) sources for violence. The early humans had, like most other animals, a few reasons to get into conflict: over food and water first of all, that is over territory; over sexual partners. And generally, just out of boredom and desire to inflict pain on others or, perversely, on oneself. In inventing words they supposedly established a way to cooperate, first in hunting, but also in other activities that brought them together. In inventing words, humans created a second reality, that was meant to be less harsh than the real one. In this reality one could say rather than do hurtful things; yet, it proved soon enough that saying was not enough, on one hand; and on the other, that saying could in some instances do even more harm than doing hurtful things. Of all the dictators of the last century, none could have directly done so much harm to so many people, yet they were all able to order it done. And done it was.

Also, in inventing words, humans had now not just territory and sexual partners to fight over; they had gods and ideas they could fight over, and kill each other in the name of. Sure, many would say that these were merely altered images of the same old fights over territory; and to a certain extent it is true. Yet how many times in history have peoples neither of which was a real threat to the immediate existence of the other come into conflict on matters of faith or ideology?

"XVII. NOUS sommes composés de deux natures bien différentes : d'un corps qui nous est commun avec les bêtes, et d'un esprit qui nous est commun avec les dieux. Les uns penchent vers cette première parenté, s'il est permis de parler ainsi, parenté malheureuse et mortelle. Et les autres penchent vers la dernière, vers cette parenté heureuse et divine."

Ok, there is nothing really new about the idea that man is of two natures, animal and divine; and there was nothing new about it back when Epictet uttered it. However, what can't help catch your eye is the paranthetical "[some incline to this first relationship,] if we are allowed to call it so". The idea that we are related to animals even just in our bodies probably verged on blasphemous: it was ok to say that metaphorically we have an animal streak in us, as our appetites, needs and fears made this notion too hard to ignore or to cover up. It was an altogether different matter for someone to view this relationship with the rest of the animal kingdom in the terms of a family relationship, a 'familiarity' in the etymological sense of the word. What's even more interesting, the same paranthesis doesn't show up when the sentence continues by referring to our other, divine, side; it was then, and for many it still is today, verging on the blasphemous to say we are related with animals, but it is acceptable to say we are related to God. That despite the fact that we see every day how similar we are to animals yet we can only hope that God is different in just about anything from us. Oh well, this ain't going anywhere.

"LXXX. LA première et la plus nécessaire partie de la philosophie est celle qui traite de la pratique des préceptes ; par exemple : il ne faut point mentir. La seconde, est celle qui en fait les démonstrations : pourquoi il ne faut point mentir. Et la troisième, celle qui fait la preuve de ces démonstrations, en expliquant en quoi consiste une démonstration, et ce qui en fait la vérité et la certitude ; elle définit ces différents termes : démonstration, conséquence, opposition, vérité, fausseté. Cette troisième partie est nécessaire pour la seconde, et la seconde pour la première ; mais la première est la plus nécessaire de toutes, et celle où il faut s'arrêter et se fixer. D'ordinaire, nous renversons cet ordre ; nous nous arrêtons entièrement à la troisième ; tout notre travail, toute notre étude, est pour la troisième, pour la preuve, et nous négligeons absolument la première, qui est l'usage et la pratique. Il arrive par là que nous mentons ; mais en revanche nous sommes toujours prêts à bien prouver qu'il ne faut pas mentir."

Despite some terminological confusion (the result perhaps, of the translator's treason) this is still an interesting comment. Which could turn into a paradox very easily: if we are always ready to lie but also to prove why it's not good to lie, who's to say our proofs are not just one of our lies? And that we truly believe it's good to lie. And that, of course, only goes to stress the enormity of what it means to lie, to state that things are other then we know or think them to be, the tearing apart of the web of meaning and insertion of a subversive alternate that de-clarifies, complicates the world.

"Wenn daher bei Uneingeweihten das Gespräch auf einen philosophischen Lehrsatz kommt, so schweige meistens; denn es ist große Gefahr vorhanden, du möchtest etwas von dir geben, was du noch nicht verdaut hast. Spricht dann jemand zu dir: Du verstehst nichts und du lässest dich das nicht anfechten, so wisse, daß du auf guten Wegen bist. Und wie die Schafe das Gras nicht wieder ausspeien, um den Hirten zu zeigen, wie sie geweidet haben, sondern das Futter verdauen und Milch erzeugen, so zeige du den Uneingeweihten nicht deine Prinzipien, sondern die aus ihnen hervorgehenden Handlungen, sofern du jene wirklich verdaut hast."

This is almost the equivalent of do not throw pearls to the pigs; but where Matthew is mostly concerned that knowledge (pearls) disseminated indiscriminately will get corrupted by unprepared mouths, minds and ears, Epictetus worries about the fate of he who would disseminate such knowledge. By spilling the beans when not appropriate, he would act just like a goat who, in order to show her shepherd that it has grazed would throw up. He would, in other words, act foolishly, even against nature; rather, Epictetus suggests, do as the goat does and prove you've digested the food by growing and giving milk. The distinction is ultimately between the concern for Truth (natural in a text that claims to be the expression of Truth regarding God) and the concern for having a well-rounded individual, one who know what he knows and more importantly, knows what he doesn't know.

But then... what of the internet? What of books? What of all other forms of disseminating knowledge (or a pretense thereof) to an anonymous public, of whose readiness to accept the message you can never be sure? I'll be baackk...

"LXVI. LES femmes, pendant qu'elles sont jeunes, sont appelées maîtresses par leurs maris. Ces femmes donc, voyant par là que leurs maris ne les considèrent que par le plaisir qu'elles lui donnent, ne songent plus qu'à se parer pour plaire, et mettent toute leur confiance et toutes leurs espérances dans leurs ornements. Rien n'est donc plus utile et plus nécessaire que de s'appliquer à leur faire entendre qu'on ne les honorera et qu'on ne les respectera qu'autant qu'elles auront de sagesse, de pudeur et de modestie.

LXVII. UN signe certain d'un esprit lourd, c'est de s'occuper longtemps du soin du corps, comme de s'exercer longtemps, de boire longtemps, de manger longtemps, et de donner beaucoup de temps aux autres nécessités corporelles. Toutes ces choses ne doivent pas être le principal, mais l'accessoire de notre vie, et il ne les faut faire que comme en passant : toute notre application et toute notre attention doivent être pour notre esprit."

The paragraphs above faithfully illustrate the place of Epictetus at the end of the Antiquity (fragment 66) and anticipating the Middle Ages, in fragment 67. The former, with its idea that women are to be appreciated for the same qualities men are; this may sound far-fetched, but for anyone having read the paragraphs immediately above it is obvious that men too are enjoined to behave sagely, with decency (avoid obscene discussion etc) and modesty. And while feminists may take issue with his notion that women come to be concerned with their looks only as a result of men's focus on looks, that women are, in other words, molded by men, one ought to remember that Plato's idea of equality of men and women was an exception even among the enlightened Greeks. The latter paragraph, obviously, anticipating the medieval distaste for the corporeal, that would in due time push to pathological the idea of a superior reality, which is to be preferred to all things belonging to the Earthly realm, paving the way for disease and pestilence and a thousand years of intellectual gloom.

"XXIII. SOUVIENS-TOI que tu dois te conduire dans la vie comme dans un festin. Un plat est-il venu jusqu'à toi ? étendant ta main avec décence, prends-en modestement. Le retire-t-on ? ne le retiens point. N'est-il point encore venu ? n'étends pas au loin ton désir, mais attends que le plat arrive enfin de ton côté. Uses-en ainsi avec des enfants, avec une femme, avec les charges et les dignités, avec les richesses, et tu seras digne d'être admis à la table même des dieux. Et si tu ne prends pas ce qu'on t'offre, mais le rejettes et le méprises, alors tu ne seras pas seulement le convive des dieux, mais leur égal, et tu régneras avec eux. C'est en agissant ainsi que Diogène, Héraclite et quelques autres ont mérité d'être appelés des hommes divins, comme ils l'étaient en effet." (Pensées et entretiens. Trad. Dacier. http://abu.cnam.fr/)

This I will forever remember whenever, in a plane, on an intercontinental flight, I see the fight attendants begin to serve dinner. Otherwise, I remember seeing something similar in the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, which is not that strange, given that both authors belonged to the same philosophical school and were not that far from each other in time (Epictetus died in 135, when the future Aurelius was 14) however, it is ironic, given they were coming from the very opposite ends of the Roman society. Also, very important, Epictetus's injunction is not the Buddhist 'abandon all desires, find Nirvana'; but rather: do not wish that whose acquiring doesn't depend on you. There is in other words, a certain pragmatism in Epictetus's advice: it derives from the awareness that certain things are possible while others aren't and not, though of course the same argument could be made for Buddhism; the difference being that Buddhism sees a lot more things as being impossible to reach, being therefore more pessimistic on the human condition. Or maybe it's merely overkill: Buddhists say abandon everything, just to be on the safe side...:)

"But the most successful soldier will always be the man who most happily detects a blunder like this, and who carefully consulting his own means makes his attack not so much by open and regular approaches, as by seizing the opportunity of the moment; and these stratagems, which do the greatest service to our friends by most completely deceiving our enemies, have the most brilliant name in war. Therefore, while their careless confidence continues, and they are still thinking, as in my judgment they are now doing, more of retreat than of maintaining their position, while their spirit is slack and not high-strung with expectation, I with the men under my command will, if possible, take them by surprise and fall with a run upon their centre; and do you, Clearidas, afterwards, when you see me already upon them, and, as is likely, dealing terror among them, take with you the Amphipolitans, and the rest of the allies, and suddenly open the gates and dash at them, and hasten to engage as quickly as you can. That is our best chance of establishing a panic among them, as a fresh assailant has always more terrors for an enemy than the one he is immediately engaged with. Show yourself a brave man, as a Spartan should; and do you, allies, follow him like men, and remember that zeal, honour, and obedience mark the good soldier, and that this day will make you either free men and allies of Lacedaemon, or slaves of Athens; even if you escape without personal loss of liberty or life, your bondage will be on harsher terms than before, and you will also hinder the liberation of the rest of the Hellenes. No cowardice then on your part, seeing the greatness of the issues at stake, and I will show that what I preach to others I can practise myself." (Thucydides, The Peloponesian War [5.9.4-5.9.10], trans. by Richard Crawley)

This is a fragment from a speech by Brasidas just before one of the many engagements during the Peloponesian war. Of course it is here because of its similitude, in point of attitude and direction to those quoted earlier from Shakespeare and Herodotus. But it is also because of two other things: first, the mentioning of opportunity: this is a Greek obsession, one with which I myself have become somewhat obsessed; the Greek word here is the same that Plato uses in the first book of his Republic (

) to describe that which is one's own, which, in the first stage of the dialogue is part of the definition of justice ('to give everyone what is due or what belongs to them', which Socrates famously counters with the question: should one having obtained someone's weapons while the giver was in full mental health return them when the giver would have lost his mind?); the word means at the origin 'to bring with' (sym is the preposition meaning with, fero is the verb meaning to bring). From this, the meaning evolved into 'that which is one's own' (naturally, that which one brings with is one's own) and further on, like most words meaning 'that which is one's own' it was abstracted (here the niceties of English come out to play too, where to abstract means not only what I meant but also to steal, to make one's own...) into 'that which is proper' or 'essential'. Other meanings, like here, were 'that which is advantageous' (no one brings with (Germans, it strikes me, have this compound too: 'mitbringen') things that are to his disadvantage, at least not intentionally). The second thing I quote this here for is because it illustrates another typically Greek penchant, the one for generalizations: it is always a particularity of the Greek way of thinking, speaking and writing that a practical example is viewed in the wider context, in terms of which it is justified and interpreted; thus, Hesiod, starts in The Days and Works from a very mundane fight with his brother but soon enough finds himself talking about mankind's greed, then about other attributes of man, then about the other things that characterize the life of humans; from trying to teach his brother a lesson in kindness and wisdom, he ends up teaching one to all who care to listen, telling them what is the proper way and season for sailing, for the various agricultural labors and so on. Here too, Brasidas underscores his argument that the Athenians would be in terror at the surprise of the enemy's attack by stating the general principle that "a fresh assailant has always more terrors for an enemy than the one he is immediately engaged with." And in so doing he truly sounds like Aristotle or Plato sitting down and pondering, not as a general at a pep-rally right before the fight. I know that this is merely Thucydides writing down the speech, which is in itself problematic among other thing because the historian could not have witnessed personally the speech given by a general in the enemy's army, yet...

The battle however is not merely one amongst the many others, as I mistakenly suggested above. In it both the Spartan and the Athenian generals would lose their life. Moreover, since Cleon (the Athenian general) was the leader of the Athenian hawks, and since Brasidas himself had scored quite a few victories recently against the Athenians, the death of the two during this battle paves the way for the peace party in both cities to take over and set up a tenuous truce. It all happens in the tenth year of the conflict, which, come think of it, sort of parallels the Iliad story with both Trojans and Greeks losing two of their ablest generals (Hector and Patroclus) during the fateful tenth year.

"11. Sprich nie von einer Sache: Ich habe sie verloren, sondern: Ich habe sie zurückgegeben. Dein Söhnlein ist gestorben, es ist zurückgegeben. Dein Gut ist dir entrissen worden, auch dies ist zurückgegeben. Wohl ist der ein Bösewicht, der es dir entreißt; was liegt dir aber daran, durch wen es der Geber zurückfordern will? Solange er es dir zum Besitz überlassen hat, besitze es als ein fremdes Gut, wie ein vorüberreisender Wanderer seine Herberge. " (Epiktet, Handbüchlein der Moral, Trans.: C. Hilty)

(The numbering system of this text differs in the French and German editions. This is why the fragment quoted yesterday from the French had number 13 while today's from the German is number 11.)

Say not of a thing: I have lost it; rather: I have returned it. If your baby dies, he is merely given back. Your wealth is snatched away? It too is merely given back. But perhaps he is a rascal who took it away from you; what is then to you, through whom the Giver chooses to demand back? As long as he has left it in your posession, use it as borrowed goods, as one who merely passes through his house of rest.

"XIII. SI, dans un voyage sur mer, ton vaisseau entre dans un port, et que l'on t'envoie faire de l'eau, tu peux, chemin faisant, ramasser un coquillage ou cueillir un champignon, mais tu dois avoir toujours ta pensée à ton vaisseau, et tourner souvent la tête, de peur que le pilote ne t'appelle, et, s'il t'appelle, il faut jeter tout et courir, de peur que, si tu fais attendre, on ne te jette dans le vaisseau pieds et poings liés comme une bête. Il en est de même dans le voyage de cette vie : si, au lieu d'un coquillage ou d'un champignon, on te donne une femme ou un enfant, tu peux les prendre ; mais, si le pilote t'appelle, il faut courir au vaisseau et tout quitter, sans regarder derrière toi. Et, si tu es vieux, ne t'éloigne pas trop du navire, de peur que le pilote venant à t'appeler tu ne sois pas en état de le suivre. " (Pensées et entretiens. Trad. Dacier. http://abu.cnam.fr/)

This fragment seemed to me strangely related to the idea of nausea, mentioned a little earlier. Just as nausea is the word expressing the feeling one has when one embarks on a sea voyage and, the ship leaving, one sees the land recede in the distance, just so there ought to be a word for the fear expressed here, that one might be left behind in an unfamiliar territory by the departing ship. (This truly is, along with falling from the tenth floor, the stuff nightmares are made of.)

In a paradoxical reversal, it is now, for the traveler, the ship that represents the familiar territory and land that is merely an episode. Episode, from the Greek epeisodios, is something that "comes in besides", deriving ultimately from hodios, word that means road, in other words an episode is something else that the cat dragged in... Perhaps the very ball of yarn Clotho just finished spinning, for, after all, isn't this the point Epictetus himself makes? That our life is merely an episode? Of course the familiarity of the ship is merely a matter of degree, the ship is only our refuge in so far as it is the only way we can hope to ever get back to the true homeliness of home. Thus, the fear expressed in the anxiety of being left behind is, ultimately, still a fear about not making it back home, a nausea of the second degree, perhaps, or maybe a nausea squared, given that to the pain caused by unfamiliarity of the land we might be left behind in is now added the pain caused by being left alone amongst strangers; and to the episodic unfamiliarity of the oceans, the enduring one of a foreign country.

It has been part of the American mythology for the longest time that this country is the melting pot of the world. Just like the British pride on their fair-play, the French on their rationalism, the Russians on their sentimentalism, and Romanians on their tolerance. Needless to say, there is some truth to these notions, they are not complete fabrications. Yet there is something strange or artificial about them, something that makes them sound like a historical construct, something like the separation of the billions of individual humans that ever lived in a 'before' and 'after' Christ era; or like the division of living organisms according to whether they do or don't have a spinal column or according to whether they perpetuate their species by laying eggs or they feed their young on milk. It is the fact that all these notions provide an easy way to classify entities that are so different, it is the fact that they give us the illusion in our ability to know the world, that makes them not only resilient but also, to a large extent, true. It is the fact that they work, in other words, that makes us to keep using them. How they work though, is a totally different issue, one that Crash attempts to demistify in at least one case, that of the melting pot. To do that the first thing one has to do is renounce the 'scientific self-distancing' from the object of study, which "Crash" does admirably. The movie in fact starts with a zooming in motion that suggests descending from a point where the lights of Los Angeles are mere flickers in the distance to the hustle and bustle of everyday traffic. The descent starts slowly but doesn't take long to complete: almost unnoticeably, the lights of Los Angeles metamorphosize in the first snow flakes sticking to a wet pavement. That's it. The descent is over. You are now in the middle of the melting pot, you are now part of it. We hope you'll enjoy your ride, or at least find it enlightening.

And the first impression you get is that the melting pot is gone awry. Everything is going wrong, everyone is getting one everyone else's nerves. The white man fears the black man. The black man alternately despises and justifies those fears. The Persian is taken for a sucicide-plane flying Arab, and he in turn mistakes a Hispanic for your regular locksmith who, when called to fix your lock craftily recommends that you replace the whole door only for his own (or his buddy's, the door-seller) benefit, while a nice suburbanite mistakes the same hispanic for a gang-member. Then there is the black man who sees everywhere signs of the white oppression (for instance claiming that buses have windows so that the white man may make fun of the minorities riding them; or that hip-hop music is a huge conspiracy of the FBI meant to popularize bumbling-idiotic black singers in order to discredit the real intellectual black figures. And who, of course, never steals from blacks.)

Yet, as the movie progresses, through story after interlocking story, all small episodes taking place within the space of about a day, you begin to get a sense that your first impression is not totally right, if not totally wrong either. You begin to understand that the melting pot is not broken, rather that that's just the way it works. And it works that way because, while people are not inherently evil, racist and narrow-minded, they are not angels either. Everyone in this movie is capable of a good deed, just as everyone is capable of a bad deed, and they all come up unexpectedly, which is what makes this movie so engrossing: you never know (with a few exceptions) where a character is going. But if people are not inherently evil, you wonder, why are they treating each other this way? To paraphrase a Joyce, it seems life is to blame: life in a city (and a world) that is always on the rush is what seems to make them ignorant or negligent or even too in a hurry to notice each other's qualities. Life prompts them to continually appeal to classifications like those mentioned in the beginning, but focusing on the bad rather than the good of each group. These categories, such as the violent, angry black, the fanatic Middle-Easterner, the Hispanic gang-member or even the dishonest handyman and of course the racist white work because they keep on being validated by life. Yet sometimes, many times, they go horribly wrong, and this is what this movie is mostly focused on, though not exclusively.

Not having lived in a real melting pot such as Los Angeles, it is a little hard for me to gain a sense of how true to life is all this preoccupation with race in everyone. In the America that I know, people are of course fully aware of race-differences, but also expressing their 'awareness' in a covert way, whisperingly and only in groups of like-minded individuals. Rarely (if ever) have I seen a discussion between individuals of two different races or ethnic groups focusing on placing their differences in a bad light. Sometimes, from an exaggerated fear of saying the wrong thing, people try to actually sandpaper any such differences. Compared to this, the in-your-face attitude to race of the characters in the movie seems a bit unrealistic. Yet, for all I know, and for all one can read every so often in in the papers or see during prime-time news hours, things like those in the movie do happen, people like those do exist, and situations like those do make innocent victims every once in a while. In the end however, with a tinge of American optimism, things seem to return to normal, as the wealthy suburbanite finds out who her true friend is, and people, as in a Socratic dialogue, start to become more confused and less certain about their whole outlook on 'otherness'. There is also a little irony in the way this movie ends: as the camera zooms out, yet another car-crash took place, and other furious drivers storm out of the car ready to hurl racist or narrow-minded insults at the non-native English speaker. This time it is a black woman badmouthing a foreigner. To one who would first arrive onto the stage, this would be the sign of a world in which everyone hates everyone different from themselves. Yet to the one who just followed the destinies and stories of the characters in this movie it is all too evident that, no matter how wrong things might seem, in fact, they are going on just as usual.

"Mit welchem Erstaunen musste der apollinische Grieche auf ihn blicken! Mit einem Erstaunen, das um so grösser war, als sich ihm das Grausen beimischte, dass ihm jenes Alles doch eigentlich so fremd nicht sei, ja dass sein apollinisches Bewusstsein nur wie ein Schleier diese dionysische Welt vor ihm verdecke." (F. Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragoedie)

"With what astonishment must have looked at him the Apollonian Greek. With an astonishment that was so much greater as it was mixed with the fear that all that was really not foreign to him, indeed that his Apollonian consciousness was only like a veil covering this Dionysian world."

I am saving this here not because I find it really enlightening as to the situation of the Apollonian Greek, about whom I really couldn't care less; but because I like it as a reminder that many times we look at the values of others and find to our astonishment that no matter how strange they might seem at first sight, they truly are the same, in the end, because, as Aristotle, and others have said, while words in all languages are different they all reflect the same realities, since feelings are universal and do not vary with the borderlines.

'Tout d'un coup les noms des derniers auteurs dont il a consulté les ouvrages me reviennent à la mémoire : Lambert, Langlois, Larbalétrier, Lastex, Lavergne. C'est une illumination ; j'ai compris la méthode de l'Autodidacte : il s'instruit dans l'ordre alphabétique. Je le contemple avec une espèce d'admiration. Quelle volonté ne lui faut-il pas, pour réaliser lentement, obstinément un plan de si vaste envergure ? Un jour, il y a sept ans (il m'a dit qu'il étudiait depuis sept ans) il est entré en grande pompe dans cette salle. (…) Puis il est allé prendre le premier livre du premier rayon d'extrême droite ; il l'a ouvert à la première page, avec un sentiment de respect et d'effroi joint à une décision inébranlable. (…) Et le jour approche où il se dira, en fermant le dernier volume du dernier rayon d'extrême gauche : “Et maintenant?”' (J.P. Sartre, La nausée)

Nausea, the word, derives from the Greek word for ship. Nausea, the feeling one has while on a ship, might derive from the permanent rocking motion of the ship, but, equally, from seeing the land slowly recede into the distance, along with all its familiar contours, faces, and memories, along with the safety of the solid ground beneath one's feet. Needless to say, to experience nausea one must experience departure, estrangement, and the rocking motion that may come with it, the rocking motion that churns you from the inside out, over and over until it breaks you into pieces and reassembles you, such a different you that you yourself would sometimes fail to recognize yourself, were you to meet yourself in the street, and yet also the same you, in so far as you carry within you everything from the old country, all the things they threw into you in the years or perhaps the decades you lived there. It is in a way difficult to give new meanings to the idea of Nausea that Sartre so masterfully employs to display one of the essential attributes of the human condition, that of estrangement in (from) the world. Yet this estrangement, so abstract by Sartre's time, had as origin a very concrete sort of situation, the sadness of the ostracized fallen hero, the fear of the unknown countries inhabited by hostile barbarians, the longing of the colonists for their mother country. Unless, of course, the name of the former was Corcyra and of the latter Corinth.

Of course I realize that my musings have little to do with the specific fragment I quoted above, yet.. why must it be so? Why can we not think that the Autodidact's method is nothing else than a futile attempt at appropriating the world, at making oneself more at home within it, by nourishing the illusion that, having read all there is to read, one knows all there is to know, which of course wouldn't be true, even if it were a feasible enterprise, and I have no doubts it is not, Sartre's hint to the contrary notwithstanding.

"They have all the same manner of sacrifice established for all their religious rites equally, and it is thus performed:--the victim stands with its fore-feet tied, and the sacrificing priest stands behind the victim, and by pulling the end of the cord he throws the beast down; and as the victim falls, he calls upon the god to whom he is sacrificing, and then at once throws a noose round its neck, and putting a small stick into it he turns it round and so strangles the animal, without either lighting a fire or making any first offering from the victim or pouring any libation over it." (Herodotus, IV.60, transl. G.C. Macaulay)

Here is a strange scene: man, fearful of present or future pain, causing inexpressible pain to a real animal, in the hope of alleviating the pain of an imagined god.

Remember Ruach? Pneuma? Maybe this will help... Now, I know etymology is a tricky discipline, and many a wise man made a fool of themselves inventing false etymologies. I also know that I have no real knowledge of German etymologies, and (after a cursory search on the internet) that I have no really good resource to verify whether the Aramaic ruach (breath) is in any way related to the Germanic Rauch. The one source I was able to find, (see below) states that Rauch is 'apparently not found outside Gmc.' Finally, I also know that this is by no means a treatise of some kind, just a collection of things I happen to find enticing for one reason or another. With all these precautionary remarks, let me just say that I find the similarity between the two, and their notional sphere ... thought-provoking. However, I will honestly say that all these cautionary remarks had a chilling effect even on my own desire to speculate. So for now I will just leave it at that, and try to find more about this, before I put any more effort into thinking out loud things that I may have to cross out as foolish one day, sooner rather than later.

reek (n.) O.E. rec (Anglian), riec (W.Saxon), "smoke from burning material," probably from O.N. reykr (cf. Reykjavik, lit. "smoky bay"), from P.Gmc. *raukiz (cf. O.Fris. rek, M.Du. rooc, O.H.G. rouh, Ger. Rauch "smoke, steam"), apparently not found outside Gmc. Sense of "stench" is attested 1659, via the notion of "that which rises." The verb is from O.E. recan (Anglian), reocan (W.Saxon), from P.Gmc. *reukanan (cf. Ger. rauchen "to smoke," riechen "to smell"). Originally "to emit smoke;" meaning "to emit a bad smell" is recorded from 1710.

Story of Cambyses (Book 3): son of Cyrus, king of Persia. Apparently mad or terribly paranoid. Dreams that someone comes telling him his brother, Smerdis, is sitting on his throne and his head is reaching the heavens. Wakes up startled, has Smerdis killed. Later, while on campaign, some other dude called Smerdis is set by his brother to impersonate the murdered brother of Cambyses. Cambyses finds out, wounds himself idiotically, in his own sword climbing on horse to go home and fight him. Wound gets infected. He's dying and he knows it. So he confesses the deed in true Shakespearian fashion

to his soliders, hoping to have them fight the usurper. Dies. They refuse to believe him, thinking he was only trying to wreak some stupid vengeance on his brother from beyond the grave. Bottom line: they accept the usurper Smerdis (in fact his brother, the puppetmaster) as king.

"Daß die Kinder nicht wissen, warum sie wollen, darin sind alle hochgelehrten Schul--und Hofmeister einig; daß aber auch Erwachsene gleich Kindern auf diesem Erdboden herumtaumeln und wie jene nicht wissen, woher sie kommen und wohin sie gehen, ebensowenig nach wahren Zwecken handeln, ebenso durch Biskuit und Kuchen und Birkenreiser regiert werden: das will niemand gern glauben, und mich dünkt, man kann es mit Händen greifen." (W. Goethe, Die Leiden des Jungen Werther)

Children don't know why they want what they want, wise men agree. Yet to W. it's obvious that, even though no one believes it, the same is true about adults, that they too run around not knowing where they come from, where they are going, heeding as much a true purpose as some cookies on the table or the fear of the stick.

(Note: the fragment above is not a literal translation, just a close approximation of the German text. All translations will be enclosed in quote marks.)

This, of course for the image similarity with Hesse's pages on the Kindermensch.

Es ist ein einförmiges Ding um das Menschengeschlecht. Die meisten verarbeiten den größten Teil der Zeit, um zu leben, und das bißchen, das ihnen von Freiheit übrig bleibt, ängstigt sie so, daß sie alle Mittel aufsuchen, um es los zu werden." (W. Goethe, Die Leiden des Jungen Werther)

"It's the same thing with all men: they spend the majority of their time surviving, and the little freedom that is left to them terrifies them so much that they look for any means to lose it."

This caught my eye among other things for the silly reason that in the fictional universe of Goethe's text it pretends to have been written on almost the same day that I am writing this.

the inexpressible beauty of dandelions, hundreds or thousands of them, on the side of the dusty road to work, obliviously facing a sun that makes their yellow shapes translucent and true.

Pretext: Siddhartha blieb stehen, er beugte sich übers Wasser, um noch besser zu hören, und im still ziehenden Wasser sah er sein Gesicht gespiegelt, und in diesem gespiegelten Gesicht war etwas, das ihn erinnerte, etwas Vergessenes, und da er sich besann, fand er es: dies Gesicht glich einem andern, das er einst gekannt und geliebt und auch gefürchtet hatte. Es glich dem Gesicht seines Vaters, des Brahmanen. Und er erinnerte sich, wie er vor Zeiten, ein Jüngling, seinen Vater gezwungen hatte, ihn zu den Büßern gehen zu lassen, wie er Abschied von ihm genommen hatte, wie er gegangen und nie mehr wiedergekommen war. Hatte nicht auch sein Vater um ihn dasselbe Leid gelitten, wie er es nun um seinen Sohn litt? War nicht sein Vater längst gestorben, allein, ohne seinen Sohn wiedergesehen zu haben? Mußte er selbst nicht dies selbe Schicksal erwarten? War es nicht eine Komödie, eine seltsame und dumme Sache, diese Wiederholung, dieses Laufen in einem verhängnisvollen Kreise? (Herman Hesse, Siddhartha)

Text and context: Siddhartha having lost his son to the world (i.e. his son, not wanting to spend his life with two old men in the woods, ran away back to civilization) leaves one day intent on finding him and seeing him again. He stops at the river, peers down and sees his aged face staring back. Only his face reminds him of the face of another, of something he had forgotten: of his father, whom he also had ran away from, whom he also had left without remorse and not to ever return, who had also, he now understands, suffered the pain that his son was causing him now, eventually dying 'alone, without to have seen his son again'.

Somewhere in his Republic Plato wonderfully says: "... just as he who knows the letters of the alphabet will also be able to recognize their mirrored image, the same art teaching both sorts of knowledge..."

"Lange saß er und blickte auf ihr entschlafnes Gesicht. Lange betrachtete er ihren Mund, ihren alten, müden Mund mit den schmal gewordenen Lippen, und erinnerte sich, daß er einst, im Frühling seiner Jahre, diesen Mund einer frisch aufgebrochenen Feige verglichen hatte. Lange saß er, las in dem bleichen Gesicht, in den müden Falten, füllte sich mit dem Anblick, sah sein eigenes Gesicht ebenso liegen, ebenso weiß, ebenso erloschen, und sah zugleich sein Gesicht und das ihre jung, mit den roten Lippen, mit dem brennenden Auge, und das Gefühl der Gegenwart und Gleichzeitigkeit durchdrang ihn völlig, das Gefühl der Ewigkeit. Tief empfand er, tiefer als jemals, in dieser Stunde die Unzerstörbarkeit jedes Lebens, die Ewigkeit jedes Augenblicks." (Herman Hesse, Siddhartha)

Someone said that Cervantes is the only writer who reads better in translation than in original (in reference to the countless mannerisms and cliches that apparently plague his original texts.) Quite the opposite is true about Hesse: I've once tried to read a translation of his Demian. Frightful. So would be any attempted translation that I could offer for the passage above. So I prefer to keep my peace. Suffice it to say that I find this one of the best passages in the whole book.

Then again, there is some justification in Heidegger's anguish over the fate of Greek language. Only, it seems, the Greeks started it all:

'The word [the early Aramaic-speaking Christians] employed [in talking about the Holy Spirit] was ruach, a feminine noun that means 'breath' or 'spirit'. Nearly all Hebrew prayers include the word baruach. When Greek became the language of the New Testament, gospel writers translated ruach into pneuma, which is the Greek word for "air" or "spirit".'

'Then Jerome translated the Greek Bible into the Latin Vulgate version. He translated the word pneuma as spiritus, which means "spirit" and is a masculine noun in Latin. The Holy Spirit has been male for the last 1700 years. There was another, more appropriate word for "spirit" in Latin: anima, the Latin word for "soul", a feminine noun. Jerome could have chosen this word to describe the third entity. The trinity would have consisted of a Father, a Mother, and a Son instead of three masculine figures. One can only speculate on how differently the Church might have evolved had Jerome used the feminine anima instead of the masculine spiritus.' (94-95) (Leonard Shlain, Sex, Time and Power: How Women's Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution, Penguin Group USA, 2003, New York NY)

The following are just some thoughts that have very little in the way of a theological basis. In other words, in saying what I am about to say I run the risk of stating the obvious or, on the contrary, of saying absurdities. I pray to be forgiven, particularly as I write this on the Orthodox Easter Sunday. So, there it goes...

I find fascinating the notion that "Holy Spirit" has its ultimate root in a word that meant simply Breath. Now, in English, Breath is orphaned of its "political" dimension in that it (like all other English nouns) has no grammatical gender. In Romanian however, just like, it seems, in Aramaic (and Hebrew?) the word for Breath is feminine. So that what we would have for the Holy Spirit would something like "Sfinta Respiratie", or, with a less clinic, more poetic term, "Sfinta Rasuflare". For those not speaking Romanian, the French equivalent will have to do: La Sainte Respiration. Or the German: "Die Heilige Respiration" or "Die Heilige Atmung" or "Die Göttliche Respiration" or finally "Die Göttliche Atmung". Don't know how the Spanish is, but I would guess it's similar. Anyway, what fascinates me about this is that la sainte respiration is in fact the way the divine power manifests on earth, in other words the power of God is so immense it works through that most basic of acts of living organisms, breathing. There is in most cases no effort in breathing, and no thought given to it. For most of our lives it just happens without us worrying about it. (As I write this, I struggle with the allergy season of Georgia, USA.) Now, as I said earlier, my knowledge of the exact role la sainte respiration has in the Bible is limited. I do know that Mary is told that la sainte (or divine) respiration descended upon her and that as a result of this encounter she will give birth to the Son of God. In other words, this divine respiration has engendering power, it is the breath of life, and what is more remarkable about this earth than the fact that it has life? Sure, the authors of New Testament had no idea (or no thought to spare) about the (a)biological situation of the other planets, so that in placing this in the context of their text I am guilty of anachronism, if nothing worse. Still, by the time, 2000 years ago, when those texts were written, the human species had long reached the evolutionary point at which it finds itself today. An essential part of this evolutionary point being the wonder at Nature and the ever-present life in all its manifold forms, as illustrated in the countless cosmogonic and anthropogenic myths, in the naturalistic researches of the Greeks and in many other scientific endeavors of ancient peoples, whose only faintest echoes survived to us. So while people back then may not have had the notion of just how unique (at least in our solar system, and according to our current knowledge) life is, they nevertheless had a lot of other clues by which to judge (or to invest) life with all its preciousness. (This is a neutral statement. I do not mean to express a judgment as to whether their judgments on the value of life were correct or not. Simply not my point here.) And by choosing to ascribe to this divine breath the awesome power of creating life the writers of the New Testament were making a statement about the power of their God: he gives birth to his son by that most banal of gestures, by mere breath. It is hard to imagine a more matter-of-fact manner of creation than by mere breathing. This all seems to me to have been lost, and not necessarily through Jerome's fault, as Shlain says, since spiritus in Latin still means "breath" in addition to "spirit". The loss happened when the Bible was translated in vernacular, and for instance, in English, I feel no connection between spirit and breath. In fact, the Concise Oxford Dictionary only lists as its sixth definition (and an archaic one, at that) something that vaguely resembles any connection between spirit and breath: Spirit = (archaic) a highly refined substance or fluid thought to govern vital phenomena. German too uses a term that has no relation to Breath, Geist, which, like its other English counterpart (Ghost) is more related to the notion of phantom, shadow, apparition, Father-of-Hamlet sort of thing, or, at best, demon, that is, "at best" if one were to use the word in the sense (and with the spelling) of the Greek term, daemon (daimon), meaning an intermediary being between humans and gods, sort of like an angel, but not quite, because angels derive from angelus, which is messenger, messengers of God, then, while, if my memory helps me, daimons were more doers than talkers. Or, like in Socrates's case, non-doers, dissuaders rather than persuaders. So here I am, wrapped again in the cocoon of my own thoughts. Don't know where I started from, and certainly don't know where I ended up.

A fit conclusion to the above: "He proves by algebra that Hamlet's grandson is Shakespeare's grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father." (James Joyce, Ulysses)

"Let it be assumed by us that pleasure is some sort of movement of the soul, a sudden and perceptible settling into its proper condition, while pain is the opposite." ('upokeistho de hemin einai ten hedone kinesin tina tes psyches kai katastasin athroan kai aistheten eis ten uparhousan physin.")

Echoes: aistheten is that which is perceptible by the senses, which in due time gave us aesthetics...in uparhousan I get a glimpse, even though it might be illusory, (although I doubt it) of 'arhein', to rule, and 'arhe', beginning, source of our archetype. Uparhousan physin (or, to use the proper declination, uparhousa physis) would then be something like our original state, our (Heidegger pardon me!) natural state, which, considering that the subject is pleasure, makes this a statement similar to that in the Book of Genesis, describing our birth into the Garden of Eden. Or to the androgynous state described in Plato's Symposium prior to the separation decreed and enacted by gods, separation so dramatic and irredeemable that the two newly created beings cannot achieve a true re-union even through sexual intercourse which, as seen in De Amore, at the beginning of this page, fills the partners with wildly differing emotions, thoughts and aims. A feminist might say, of course they were seeing sex from a different perspective, man and woman: they did have a different perspective, a different position during the act, a position that, except for those brief intermissions afforded by Petronius, Boccaccio or Fellini intermissions, stayed unchanged for millennia. Or so we are told. Or, to return to that notion of an original state, we might recall Rousseau's merry-go-lucky vision of Man being born free and living happy in his Natural World, only to be enchained later on by custom and customs. Which in turn brings up the other Greek distinction between physis, and nomos, between physical law and customary law. Or that begrudging remark of Heidegger's that translating 'physis' with 'nature' is a primordial (archetypal) instance of traduttore traditore, for, quoth Heidegger, "...with this Latin translation, the original content of the Greek word phusis is already thrust aside, the authentic philosophical naming force of the Greek word is destroyed." Moreover, "This is true not only of the Latin translation of this word but of all other translations of Greek philosophical language into Roman. This translation of Greek into Roman was not an arbitrary and innocuous process but was the first stage in the isolation and alienation of the original essence of Greek philosophy." (Introduction to Metaphysics) What Heidegger describes here then is a straitjacketting of the language of the wisdom-loving Greeks into that of the war-mongering Romans, or, to return to Aristotle's definition, a movement of the soul of the Greek philosophy away from its natural (or 'out of itself emerging', as Heidegger would have it) state. Pain. The opposite of pleasure.

"Nein, keine Lehre konnte ein wahrhaft Suchender annehmen, einer, der wahrhaft finden wollte. Der aber, der gefunden hat, der konnte jede, jede Lehre gutheißen, jeden Weg, jedes Ziel, ihn trennte nichts mehr von all den tausend anderen..." (Herman Hesse, Siddhartha)

"No, a true Searcher, one who would really want to find truth, could accept no Teaching. As for the one who has found one, any, any Teaching would be just as good, any Way, any Aim, nothing would separate him from the other thousands..."

First off, I wish I could find a better English word than Searcher. Strangely enough, the Romanian equivalent ('cautator') sounds better to my ears than this English. Second, the first sentence of this surely expresses a relatively commonsensical, even tautological notion: if you are truly looking for something you can't just accept others' findings, because that means not looking for something but rather wishing something, something to which you cannot get because of your lack of knowledge. Accepting the findings of others is in this case just a tool, just a way, just a shortcut, to getting that something accomplished, even if that something is nothing more than knowledge itself. For if your desire of knowledge is in any way instrumental or utilitarian, or anything else other than mere, pure, empty desire of knowledge, joy of knowledge, (but is this joy of knowing really pure?) then you accept the truths of others. And as I was saying, is this joy really pure? Isn't this joy the result of serotonin or some other hormone doing its nasty little work in our brain, and isn't all our struggle for the attainment of that sort of revelation we call knowledge, which fills our brains with the warm, pleasant feeling of eureka, isn't this hedonism of knowing just as motivated as, say, our desire for fame or for money, even though the motivation is subliminal, hormonal? I made this sound more convoluted than it ought to be, and believe you me, it is (or it was, when I first started writing) clearer in my mind than on screen here. There you have it then: the writing that instead of clarifying things confuses them, muddies the waters. What is the reason behind this sort of writing? And by the way, I should just mention, because I ran into it recently, and because it has something to say about the above, that Aristotle defines pleasure (hedone) as "a movement of the soul, a sudden and perceptible settling down into its natural state" (Rhetorica). So there.

Let me then go to the second sentence, which charmed me the most, with its notion that all truths are equal, all teachings are the same and our acceptance of them is not the result of some rationally justifiable process but is based on other predispositions. I said charmed, not convinced, and for a good reason: there are truths that are more equal than others: the heliocentric versus the geocentric universe, for instance. There are of course, many other fields (or circumstances, even within the field of science) where Siddhartha's revelation holds water. On the radio: Bach's Violin Partita 3, the fragment used in Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" as background for the "history of life on earth" cartoon. (www.mostlyclassical.com, or something.)

"Chez les Grecs, tout ce que le peuple avait à faire, il le faisait par lui-même: il était sans cesse assemblé sur la place. Il habitait un climat doux; il n'était point avide; des esclaves faisaient ses travaux; sa grande affaire était sa liberté. N'ayant plus les mêmes avantages, comment conserver les mêmes droits? Vos climats plus durs vous donnent plus de besoins (a): six mois de l'année la place publique n'est pas tenable; vos langues sourdes ne peuvent se faire entendre en plein air; vous donnez plus à votre gain qu'à votre liberté, et vous craignez bien moins l'esclavage que la misère.

Quoi! la liberté ne se maintient qu'à l'appui de la servitude? Peut-être. Les deux excès se touchent. Tout ce qui n'est point dans la nature a ses inconvénients, et la société civile plus que tout le reste. Il y a telles positions malheureuses où l'on ne peut conserver sa liberté qu'aux dépens de celle d'autrui, et où le citoyen ne peut être parfaitement libre que l'esclave ne soit extrêmement esclave. Telle était la position de Sparte. Pour vous, peuples modernes, vous n'avez point d'esclaves, mais vous l'êtes; vous payez leur liberté de la vôtre. Vous avez beau vanter cette préférence, j'y trouve plus de lâcheté que d'humanité." (Chapitre 3.15)

Rousseau doesn't like the idea of representative government. In fact, he dislikes it so much that he even says, a little earlier on the same page, of the English who prided themselves of being a free people that they are only free in the brief moments when elections take place, and that, as soon as their representatives are elected and sworn in, the people is in fact become their slave. An interesting notion, to say the least. I will return to it some day, some place.

De Amore, a 12th century writing on love that borrows freely from Ovid, written for Marie de Champagne, brings together a knight and a lady asked to judge on the following situation: A lady who was loved by two suitors, “divided the solaces of love” into two parts, and let them choose either the upper or the lower half of her body. Which of the two suitors had selected the better half? The knight speaks first and he states that the suitor rewarded with the upper part of the woman's body had received the best pleasures for that part is not the beastly part, not the part in which also beasts enjoy during sex. Furthermore, the higher part offers the better pleasures for “whereas the delight of the lower part quickly palls upon those who practice it, and it makes them repent of what they have done”, the delights of the higher part can be pursued ad infinitum. The lady replied that “whatever lovers do has as its only object the obtaining of the solaces of the lower part, for there is fulfilled the whole effect of love, at which all lovers chiefly aim, and without which they think they have nothing more than certain preludes of love.” (quoted in "Life in a Medieval Castle " by Joseph and Frances Gies , Harper & Row Publishers, NY, 1973, p.93)

Here it is: the story of western civilization: on one hand the Cartesian spirit, the logical evaluation of some situations in terms of others, considered similar, on the other hand the down-to-earth, realist perspective of everyday life. ~~The noble minded impulse of Man, even though, ironically, employed in the pursuit of lowly goals, such as eternal physical pleasure,~~ Man's eternal rhetoric of noble-mindedness, hilariously employed unto the accomplishment of that lowliest of aims, eternal physical pleasure, and the Woman's frank understanding and depiction of erotism. Adam, the reluctant apple-eater and Eve, the enticer. Eternal obsession with distinguishing oneself from the beastly, even in the middle of the baser acts of the human animal, and the embracing of sex with all its ambiguities and double-entendres. The so-called Platonic love (or a close image thereof) and the sexual revolution. The generalist view of the before and after sex, the panorama of what sex means to mankind, on one hand, and the focused, strictly erotic perspective on the other. The classic versus the romantic, the obsession with eternity versus the obsession with dramatic punctuality of the orgasm. The belief that extensive pleasure is more desirable versus the belief that in sex as in life, “seize the moment” is the recipe for true happiness. This particular aspect is very interesting as it represents the exact opposite of what that age believed to be the orgasmic equation: in middle ages, following an idea taken from Aristotle, the menstruum, or woman's seed was said to gradually accumulate in the womb, increasing sexual desire, which was periodically relieved through menstruation, seen as the equivalent of a man's ejaculation. Therefore though a man's pleasure might be more intensive, women's was more extensive. ( "Life in a Medieval Castle " by Joseph and Frances Gies , Harper & Row Publishers, NY, 1973, p.92) It speaks volumes of the medieval mentality that rather than asking the women what exactly they felt during the month and during the menstruation, men went back to the writings of Aristotle in order to come up with an explanation of how things “down under” worked.

"Damals, so erinnerte er sich, hatte er sich vor Kamala dreier Dinge gerühmt, hatte drei edle und unüberwindliche Künste gekonnt: Fasten--Warten--Denken. Dies war sein Besitz gewesen, seine Macht und Kraft, sein fester Stab, in den fleißigen, mühseligen Jahren seiner Jugend hatte er diese drei Künste gelernt, nichts anderes. Und nun hatten sie ihn verlassen, keine von ihnen war mehr sein, nicht Fasten,nicht Warten, nicht Denken. Um das Elendeste hatte er sie hingegeben, um das Vergänglichste, um Sinnenlust, um Wohlleben, um Reichtum! Seltsam war es ihm in der Tat ergangen. Und jetzt, so schien es,jetzt war er wirklich ein Kindermensch geworden. Siddhartha dachte über seine Lage nach. Schwer fiel ihm das Denken, er hatte im Grunde keine Lust dazu, doch zwang er sich.

Nun, dachte er, da alle diese vergänglichsten Dinge mir wieder entglitten sind, nun stehe ich wieder unter der Sonne, wie ich einst als kleines Kind gestanden bin, nichts ist mein, nichts kann ich, nichts vermag ich, nichts habe ich gelernt. Wie ist dies wunderlich! Jetzt, wo ich nicht mehr jung bin, wo meine Haare schon halb grau sind, wo die Kräfte nachlassen, jetzt fange ich wieder von vorn und beim Kinde an! Wieder mußte er lächeln. Ja, seltsam war sein Geschick! Es ging abwärts mit ihm, und nun stand er wieder leer und nackt und dumm in der Welt. Aber Kummer darüber konnte er nicht empfinden, nein, er fühlte sogar großen Anreiz zum Lachen, zum Lachen über sich, zum Lachen über diese seltsame, törichte Welt." (Herman Hesse, Siddhartha)

1. the distinction between being a "Kindermensch" and a mere "Kind".
2. the reaction of laughing at it all, rather than crying about it;
3. where is Siddhartha: in the forest, meditating on his past life; ('nel mezzo del camin di nostra vita')

"Ist es nicht so, als sei ich langsam und auf großen Umwegen aus einem Mann ein Kind geworden, aus einem Denker ein Kindermensch? (...) Ich habe durch so viel Dummheit, durch so viel Laster, durch so viel Irrtum, durch so viel Ekel und Enttäuschung und Jammer hindurchgehen müssen, bloß um wieder ein Kind zu werden und neu anfangen zu können."
(Herman Hesse, Siddhartha)

Here the suggestion is that the two are connected; that S. becomes a "Kindermensch" so that he may start again as a "Kind". Though obviously he is a Kindermensch as he strives to acquire the earthly goods, and as he acquires and loses them, but as he acquires and loses them he loses his earlier possessions, that made him a "Mann", and the mere game of acquiring and losing possessions, a children's game, is all he is left with up until this moment when he acknowledges it and presumably starts anew.

"Woher denn, fragte er sein Herz, woher hast du diese Fröhlichkeit? Kommt sie wohl aus diesem langen, guten Schlafe her, der mir so sehr wohlgetan hat? Oder von dem Worte Om, das ich aussprach? Oder davon, daß ich entronnen bin, daß meine Flucht vollzogen ist, daß ich endlich wieder frei bin und wie ein Kind unter dem Himmel stehe?"

again the notion of being free as a child appears, so that the former notion, of a true distinction between being a "childman" and being a "child" is reaffirmed, the former being a deplorable state, the latter an enviable one, or a second chance, at the very least.

The above, of course, for the different perspective it offers on the same problem: the birth of 'credulity' or, (to keep away from any negative inference) of 'belief': ignoring the natural causes is one source of it, quite different, if not even opposite to the one Aristotle hinted at and that I blabbered about earlier: seeing causes where there are none. There is then, here like in most cases, a middle way to follow: a middle path between ignoring those knowable patterns whereby nature moves and imposing those patterns on the other, the chaotic, side of nature, a middle way between ignorance and arrogance. Well, in fact even that doesn't seem complete: when one ignores the natural cause one doesn't also neglect one's lack of knowledge. In fact, what one does is invent a new cause, where one already exists that is not known yet. To sum up, we tend to invent causes both where other causes exist, and where no causes exist, and this invention of causes is what gives birth to belief, or as Hobbes calls it, 'credulity'. Perhaps I should have called this page hairsplittings.

"Ignorance of natural causes disposeth a man to credulity, so as to believe many times impossibilities: for such know nothing to the contrary, but that they may be true, being unable to detect the impossibility. And credulity, because men love to be hearkened unto in company, disposeth them to lying: so that ignorance itself, without malice, is able to make a man both to believe lies and tell them, and sometimes also to invent them." (Thomas Hobbes, The Leviathan, Chapter XI, Of the difference in manners)

And yet, I can't help returning to the paragraph before, to the one from Aristotle for now, for I feel I haven't said all that I had been meaning to say. So, here it goes: Mistaking the cause for a coincidence is the cynic’s error. It is also the dilettante’s error. Mistaking the coincidence for a cause is the believer’s error. The difference between the two is the following: while the former will in the long run

correct itself, the latter is likely to take refuge in all sorts of alternate pseudo-reasoning; thus, if a and b happen once in sequence, a cynic or a dilettante would safely assume that a and b are mere coincidences; if a and b happened in sequence two or more times (as they must, if they are in a relationship of causality), then both the cynic and the dilettante will eventually be forced to recognize the evidence: a and b are no mere coincidences. They would have both learned the truth: the ascension from the error to the correction is epistemological: its result is an accumulation of knowledge. On the other hand, when the a and b happen at the same time merely coincidentally, but the believer assumes that they are in a relationship of causality, one (or even repeated) breakage of the supposed causal link will not necessarily result in the same epistemological trip. On the contrary, in assuming two coincidences to be cause and effect, the believer imposes an artificial order on the universe: the believer prescribes rules according to which the universe ought to manifest itself. In imposing this order, he has already made what he thinks is the epistemological trip, the accumulation of knowledge, and as such he is reluctant to, as it were, give it up. While the cynic starts assuming that what he sees is exactly what he gets, and asks no further question, but is later on forced to reconsider his cynicism, the believer proceeds from the notion that he has already acquired some knowledge, and future events that seem to contradict this knowledge have a more difficult path to his intellect. The believer is the Platonic hero prior to his meeting with Socrates; the cynic just left that meeting and though he may feel uncomfortable in his new position of knowing that he doesn’t know, the minute the opportunity for learning presents itself (as in the succession of the two events, a and b) he grasps it. The believer, confident in his already acquired knowledge, hesitates in tabulating any experiments that might contradict it.

(Since everything has to start somewhere, sometime, somehow, here's this beginning, though it is in no way a real beginning, but rather a pseudo-beginning, a fool's beginning just like today used to be a fool's New Year's.)

"So that in the first place, I put for a general inclination of all mankind a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death. And the cause of this is not always that a man hopes for a more intensive delight than he has already attained to, or that he cannot be content with a moderate power, but because he cannot assure the power and means to live well, which he hath present, without the acquisition of more. And from hence it is that kings, whose power is greatest, turn their endeavours to the assuring it at home by laws, or abroad by wars: and when that is done, there succeedeth a new desire; in some, of fame from new conquest; in others, of ease and sensual pleasure; in others, of admiration, or being flattered for excellence in some art or other ability of the mind." (Thomas Hobbes, The Leviathan, Chapter XI, Of the difference in manners)

Interestingly, for Hobbes it is not the desire for ever more that influences humans' actions. It is rather the desire to make permanent the gains, once gained, that drives this urge for ever more gains. It is in other words the wish to cross the threshold of kairos, to escape the impermanence of all things, life included, that drives us to want ever more. The desire for ever more is just the symptom of the disease, rather than the disease itself. Aristotle distinguishes somewhere amongst the various ways in which two simultaneous events are related to each other. Thus, he says, some simultaneous events are in a relationship of causality; others are mere symptoms of each other; and others are only coincidences.