Philosophical notes…
The Truth about Lying
“It’s all about rationalisation. If we can rationalize to a higher degree, we will be able to cheat more and think of ourselves as good people. And if we can rationalize less we would be more honest... We went to UCLA in Los Angeles and we asked about five hundred students to try and recall the Ten Commandments. But after trying to recall the Ten Commandments, when we gave them the same opportunity to be dishonest nobody was dishonest. In fact, when we take self declared atheists and we ask them to swear on the bible and give them the chance to cheat they don’t cheat. So this suggests that there is something about reminders that the moment we think about morality, even if it’s not our own moral code, all of a sudden we are kind of supervising ourselves to a higher degree.”
Who Killed the Liberal Arts?
“The death of liberal arts education would constitute a serious subtraction. Without it, we shall no longer have a segment of the population that has a proper standard with which to judge true intellectual achievement. Without it, no one can have a genuine notion of what constitutes an educated man or woman, or why one work of art is superior to another, or what in life is serious and what is trivial. The loss of liberal arts education can only result in replacing authoritative judgment with rivaling expert opinions, the vaunting of the second- and third-rate in politics and art, the supremacy of the faddish and the fashionable in all of life. Without that glimpse of the best that liberal arts education conveys, a nation might wake up living in the worst, and never notice.”
How to do things with books
'And how is the value of books changing in an increasingly digital culture in which, depending on how you look at it, print is becoming either less or more valuable? Price suggests that we need to better understand the print “before” against which we position the digital “after”: too often, she argues, “we use idealized printed texts as a stick with which to beat real digital ones” in ways that “flatten the range of uses to which the book was put before digital media.” But as this book shows, the meanings of the book in Victorian Britain were just as diverse as the multiple uses to which books were put. By complicating the two-way distinction of text and book, Price above all suggests that the contemporary binary of print vs. digital is a false dichotomy, one which pushes us towards asking the wrong questions and creating all-too-simple answers. As Price ventures, the most interesting question to ask may be not “what the Victorians felt about the book but why they felt so much.” The same might be said of our feelings towards books – both print and digital – today. Books matter in every sense of the word, and better understanding “how to do things with books” can both enrich our study of the Victorian period and enliven our cultural debates today.'
- "Books Before and After" by Charlotte Mathieson, http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/?p=18726
Sloterdijk's Bubbles
"Sloterdijk’s contention is that, as sociologist Bruno Latour paraphrases it, “to define humans is to define the envelopes, the life support systems, the Umwelt that makes it possible for them to breathe.” That may seem a trivial point to make: who doesn’t think context is all? But, as Sloterdijk is aware, thinking outside of the liberal-individualist paradigm at an ontological level is not without its dangers. Sloterdijk conceives of the Spheres trilogy as companion and continuation of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, and a corrective to what he sees as its faults. Heidegger’s wrong turn is precisely his insistence on essential loneliness, and his abandonment of “existential spaciousness.” Heidegger’s mistake, according to Sloterdijk, is to try to answer the question of ‘who’ before fully exploring the question of ‘where’. Sloterdijk contends that, by neglecting the spatial dimension of ‘being in the world’ in favor of questions of authenticity, Heidegger gave himself a blind spot that not only left his own philosophically project unbalanced, but himself vulnerable to the political blindness of radical nationalism. Bubbles attempts to remedy that neglect: to think through the implications of existence as ‘being-with’ — that is, as part of a containing sphere." - Joshua Mostafa on Bubbles," Los Angeles Review of Books, http://bit.ly/NV4CjJ
Apocalypse Not
"Religious zealots hardly have a monopoly on apocalyptic thinking. Consider some of the environmental cataclysms that so many experts promised were inevitable... Predictions of global famine and the end of oil in the 1970s proved just as wrong as end-of-the-world forecasts from millennialist priests. Yet there is no sign that experts are becoming more cautious about apocalyptic promises. If anything, the rhetoric has ramped up in recent years. Echoing the Mayan calendar folk, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved its Doomsday Clock one minute closer to midnight at the start of 2012, commenting: “The global community may be near a point of no return in efforts to prevent catastrophe from changes in Earth’s atmosphere.”
- "Apocalypse Not: Here’s Why You Shouldn’t Worry About End Times," Wired Magazine, http://bit.ly/OrElL0
For further reading on the theology of tipping points see also, Stefan Skrimshire's work Future Ethics: Climate Change and Apocalyptic Imagination.
Many Windows on Private Lives
“Gail Albert Halaban began looking into other people’s windows six years ago, soon after moving to New York. She was living across the street from a 24-hour flower shop, waking up at all hours with a newborn baby, and the shop was the most reliable show in town. Then, when the store changed owners and hours, she said, she needed something else to watch... The photographs here come from her continuing project/obsession, ‘Out My Window,’ taken from the apartments of people who like to look into their neighbors’ lives. Fifty images from the series will be published in book form by powerHouse on Sept. 18.”
- "They Know They Are Being Watched?" - http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/?p=118320
The Footnote
Just saw a brilliant film which links the academic rivalry of two Talmudic scholars to questions about contemporary Israeli national identity. The Footnote was a Best Foreign Film, Academy Award Nominee and winner of Best Screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival this year. It portrays a father who has been passed over for the Israel Prize, which had been awarded to his son. Through an erroneous twist of fate the son decides to give up his prize, but fails to conceal his sacrifice from the philological prowess of his father. At the heart of the rivalry between them are a series of inside hermeneutic jokes, biting depictions of academic culture, and subtle reminders about the political romanticism which underwrites the quest to reconstruct the Talmud (and other sacred scripture). It's a clever and touching film, but a particular must see for scholars of ancient near eastern literature and Israeli nationalism alike. One of the most poignant quotes from the film comes from a scene where the son, Prof. Uriel Schkolnik begs the chair of the prize committee to let his father receive the award:
Yehuda Grossman: Uriel, there is no greater betrayal of your father and his principles than what you are asking of me. In spite of all my criticism of him your father never validated a mistake because it was convenient. You know that.
Uriel Shkolnik: Yes, but he won't.
Yehuda: We will.
Uriel: So what? So what?
Yehuda: It turns the whole system into a circus.
Uriel: No. It means that there are things more important than the truth.
Yehuda: Like what? Family? Like your father, I do know something about cutting corners... about abandoning the truth.
Uriel: Enough! Enough with this truth! So much aggression and violence you hide under the word 'truth'? I don't believe in this romanticism. You don't seek the truth. You seek honours just like other mortals. Such a terrible thing you're doing in the name of truth. It's just a prize. A prize, that's all. It's not a betrayal of anything.It's just a small nice thing you can do for a colleague, if only you'd be a little flexible. Just a tiny bit. That's all I ask of you. That's all.
The Footnote (He'arat Shulayim), 2011, Dir. Joseph Cedar (Interestingly, the Hebrew root, shul of the title He'arat Shulayim, can refer both to the seams on the robes of a priest, as well as to the flabby nether regions of the body; a further cut, it seems to me, at the 'power' of scholarship, HALOT, pg. 1442).
Messiaen by the ACO
This past Thursday, my wife and I attended the Australian Chamber Orchestra's performance of Olivier Messiaen's (1908-1992) Quatour pour le fin du Temps (Quartet for the End of Time) at Newcastle's Civic Hall theatre. It was written during the winter of 1941 near Görlitz, Silesia in the easternmost part of Germany while Messiaen was a prisoner of war there. As the performance program notes, "Messiaen found himself having to work with the instruments and musicians available to him in camp: violinist Jean le Boulaire, Henri Akoka, clarinetist, and Etienne Pasquier, a cellist." A guard knew of Messiaen's genius and provided materials and space for him to compose.
"In the confines of a prisoner of war camp in the depths of the winter of 1941, Messiaen might well have believed that the end of time - and indeed his own end - were imminent. He signals his grander intentions by heading the score with a lengthy quotation from the Book of Revelation of St John the Divine: 'And I saw another mighty angel descend from heaven clothed with a could: and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was as it were the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire... and he said... there should be time no longer' (Rev 10.1-7, KJV)"
So often I find that my life is haunted by limits and a lack of time, space, and resources. This Quartet for the End of Time, reminded me that the heart of creative genius is to make something out of nothing. Malnourished musicians, damaged instruments and imminent death were the context for Messiaen to create one of the most acclaimed (and derided) quartets ever written.
I have to admit, I often find modernist composers to be something akin to a man caught in a sensory deprivation tank. Near insanity, he bites his own tongue just to feel something and taste the salt from his own blood. The dissonance, discordant in-temporality, disharmonies, and counterintuitive melodies were trying. It was as if Messiaen forced his audience, and indeed his captors who were as obligated to guard him, to feel what he felt. Despair and utter hopelessness dominate in most of the eight movements. Indeed, a few souls walked out of the hall last Thursday night, and those that stayed shifted uncomfortably in their seats towards the end of the sixth and seventh movements. The pain of the clarinet and piano jarring against the violin and cello was near unbearable at times. It seemed to me, however, that this pain was the profound contrast to a modern world of soul numbing complacency. Messiaen seemed intent on raising to the surface, feelings we usually bury deep within us.
However, Messiaen's attempt to disorient his audience's temporality in this Quartet for the End of Time, was not without its contrasts in some of the most hauntingly beautiful moments. I can only agree that when this "Quartet was premiered in Barracks 27 of Stalag VIII on the frozen night of 15 January 1941 with meters of snow piled outside... [that] the 400 or so inmates and guards shivered as they listened, enraptured, to the end of time in Messiaen's vision of an eternity of hope and love." The entire quartet seemed to hang upon a cross between the fifth and final eighth movement. The fifth, Paean to the Eternity of Jesus, was a duet between the cello and piano. It was echoed by the eighth, Paean to the Immortality of Jesus, where the violinist stood for her own duet. Both movements held the possibility of harmony ever in front of them, never quite resolving themselves, nonetheless refusing any other hope but that such full harmony would emerge.
What does eternity feel like? Is it a permanently sustained harmony? Or is it, as Messiaen suggests, the ability to include the dissonance and disjunctions in time together with what faith teaches is already a unity. I suppose I heard a Hegelian note here, a sublation which takes up all things into a higher relational whole. Or, maybe, given Messian's overtly theological themes, St. Paul is more appropriate: "He has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth." (NRSV, Ephesians 1.9-10).
Although winter nights in Newcastle are not nearly so cold, many a novocastrian spine nonetheless felt a shiver this past Thursday night.
On Wikipedia at University
"Well certainly when people copy and paste from Wikipedia that is a very stupid thing to do because your professors also read Wikipedia and they'll recognise it immediately. In term s of using Wikipedia as a source or not that's something I'm not too worried about. Certainly at the university level I think it would be silly to use Britannica as a source. Use it for background reading. Use it to get yourself oriented. Use it to point yourself in the right direction. But at the university level it's time to grow up and start to do some real research on your own." Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia Chairman Emeritus and Founder, PBS NewsHour Interview, 10 July 2012 - http://to.pbs.org/ShxqW8
Gideon's Kindle
"The Hotel Indigo in Newcastle, England, is replacing the once-ubiquitious Gideon's Bible with Kindles -- in every one of its 148 rooms -- starting July 16. Travelers looking forward to finding the Bible in the hotel's dresser drawer need not worry, however: The Bible is pre-loaded onto the e-readers from Amazon." - "Rocky Raccoon checked into his room, only to find a Kindle?" http://lat.ms/N8at6h