Polytropy

Here are edited emails of mine from the first half of 2025. For an explanation and summaries, see “Homicide.”

1. Friday, January 10
2. Sunday, January 12
3. Monday, January 13
4. Tuesday, January 14
5. Saturday, January 18
6. Monday, January 20
7. Monday, January 20
8. Wednesday, January 22
9. Thursday, January 23
10. Tuesday, January 28
11. Saturday, February 1
12. Saturday, February 1
13. Thursday, February 6
14. Friday, February 7
15. Sunday, February 9
16. Friday, February 14
17. Friday, February 14
18. Wednesday, February 19
19. Friday, February 21
20. Tuesday, March 18
21. Friday, March 21
22. Saturday, March 22
23. Wednesday, March 26
24. Sunday, March 30
25. Tuesday, April 1
26. Tuesday, April 1
27. Tuesday, April 1
28. Wednesday, April 2
29. Thursday, April 3
30. Tuesday, May 6
31. Thursday, May 15
32. Monday, May 19
33. Tuesday, May 27
34. Tuesday, May 27

Friday, January 10

Sayeth the Psalmist (in verses of Psalm 19 I used in “Subjective and Objective,” January 8, to suggest that our minds inhabit our bodies only in the way that thoughts inhabit words):

9 The fear of the LORD is clean, enduring for ever: the judgments of the LORD are true and righteous altogether.
10 More to be desired are they than gold, yea, than much fine gold: sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb.

Such teachings may help explain why the Scientific Revolution happened in Christendom, as science is based on distinguishing the true from the false. (See “What It Takes,” May 26, 2018.)

Good literature too depends on making some such distinction, it seems to me.

I have managed to recover a remark, remembered dimly from high school, by Palmer & Colton in A History of the Modern World (fifth edition, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978):

In the closing decades of the nineteenth century … Almost overnight [Russia] presented Europe with great works of literature and music that Europeans could understand. The Russian novel became known throughout the Western world. All could read the novels of Tolstoy (1828–1910) without a feeling of strangeness …

(I used this in “Learning Mathematics, May 14, 2013.)

By somebody who claimed native fluency in Turkish and Russian, it was asserted recently that both Russia and Turkey represented failed attempts to become European. I wondered why the Russian Empire had produced great literature, and the Ottoman Empire hadn’t. I was given a biological answer: neither Russians nor Turks were racially European, but at least Russia was subject to genetic infiltration by Germans.

Fortunately, I suppose, the person writing that is not a professional historian (he is a neuroscientist).

Here are the sources, if you want to check whether my reading is fair – and I’ll be glad to find out if it’s not:

• “Turkey as Mini-Russia” (December 30, 2024)
• “The Turkish Pseudomorphosis: Atatürk as Turkey’s Peter the Great” (January 5, 2025)

For a properly historical explanation of differences between Russia and Turkey, I might expect to look at their confessions. The Russians adopted Christianity; the Turks, Islam, which (as far as I can tell) is less interested in truth than obedience.

People can make what they want of the religion they are raised in. Vegetarian Muslims point to the Quran itself to explain that animal sacrifice is not for God’s sake, but for humans’. Here in Turkey, there is an organization of anticapitalist Muslims, at odds with the government. A perversion (I would call it) of Christianity allowed a lot of Americans to vote as they did in the 2024 US Presidential election.

According to the Appreciation of Northrop Frye at the head of The Double Vision: Language and Meaning in Religion (Toronto, 1991),

Frye reminded his students that when the Bible is historically accurate, it is only accidentally so …

As far as I know, a certain portion of the Hebrew and Greek Bibles is intended to be historically accurate. Most of us, including Frye, may be more interested in another kind of accuracy. So is the person referred to by C. F. von Weizsäcker in The Relevance of Science (1964), Chapter 2, “Cosmogonical Myths”:

The Babylonian Epic of Creation was written by men who lived as many years before Christ as we live after Christ; it will become relevant for our interpretation of the Old Testament, for there can be no doubt that the author of Genesis 1 knew it and despised it.

To my mind,

• Genesis 1 is a great story for having God check his work as he goes along;
• Iliad 1 is great for another kind of checking: by Achilles, of his impulse to slay the man who has grievously insulted him.

The medieval Icelanders of Njal’s Saga have trouble with the latter kind of checking. An example takes place in Mainland, Orkney, where a story is being told, and told wrongly:

To tell now about Kari and David and Kolbein … They walked up to the earl’s residence and came to the hall at drinking time. It happened that Gunnar [Lambason] was telling his story just then, and Kari and his companions listened to him from outside. It was Christmas Day.

King Sigtrygg asked, “How did Skarphedin bear up during the burning?”

“Very well, to begin with,” said Gunnar, “but by the end he was weeping.”

He slanted his whole account and lied about many details. Kari could not stand this; he rushed in with his sword drawn and spoke this verse:

Men bold of battle
boast of the burning of Njal,
but have you heard
how we harried them?
Those givers of gold
had a good return:
ravens feasted
on their raw flesh.

Then he rushed along the hall and struck Gunnar Lambason on the neck; the head came off so fast that it flew onto the table in front of the king and the earls. The tables and the clothing of the earls were all covered in blood.

Earl Sigurd recognized the man who had done the killing and spoke: “Seize Kari and kill him.”

I quote again now from the Appreciation of Northrop Frye at the head of The Double Vision:

… he refused to see literary theories as competing theories but viewed them simply as ‘different programs’ for looking at the same reality.

Are Marxism and capitalism then more than “literary theories”? Frye himself judges between them:

In capitalism there is both a democratic and an oligarchic tendency, and the moral superiority of capitalism over communism depends entirely on the ascendency of the democratic element.

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While the “water restoration declaration” in California is just another story from the US President-elect, the fires in LA are not, and neither is the Russian shelling of Zaporizhzhia on Wednesday.

Sunday, January 12

Of Why Homer Matters (2014), by Adam Nicolson, I kept a review (December 28, 2014) in the New York Times by Bryan Doerries:

The Homeric epics are long, contradictory, repetitive, composite works, riddled with anachronisms, archaic vocabulary, metric filler and exceedingly graphic brutality. Over the millenniums, Nicolson asserts, they have been cleaned, scrubbed and sanitized … Part of Nicolson’s objective is to follow the poems back to the vengeful, frighteningly violent time and culture from which they came, and to restore some of their rawness.

In my last email, I shared a vignette from a “vengeful, frighteningly violent time and culture”: medieval Iceland. Perhaps I insinuated that the Iliad reflected a higher level of civilization than Njal’s Saga did, since Achilles was able to restrain his murderous rage, at least in the beginning. One may well object:

• After the death of Patroclus, Achilles lets himself go.
• The Icelanders take responsibility for their killings by paying blood money.

Meanwhile, Bryan Doerries reports the view of Adam Micolson that Homer

may have culled, arranged and interpolated these foundational myths from within a living, oral tradition … “Homer reeks of long use.” Try thinking of Homer as a “plural noun,” he suggests, made up of “the frozen and preserved words of an entire culture.”

Can an entire culture write a novel? Such a sprawling work as War and Peace would seem to depend on having a single author for its richness, and the same may go for the Iliad.

When Agamemnon cannot sleep for worry – worry not just that the Trojans may attack in the night, but that his comrades are not worried enough – can the detail that has reached us here have come down through oral tellings and retellings?

For terribly do I fear for the Danaans; my strength is not
steady, I am distraught, my heart seems to leap through
my breast, my shining limbs shake beneath me.
But if you wish to act, since sleep has not reached you,
come, let us go down to the watches, so that we can see
whether, worn out with exhaustion and lack of sleep,
they are drowsing and have forgotten wholly their watch duty;
enemy men are camped nearby; nor do we know
whether even in the night they might be minded to do battle.

Those are lines 93–101 from Book X in Caroline Alexander’s translation; the General is talking with Nestor.

In her Introduction, Alexander writes that, at the department of classics at the University of Malawi, her colleagues and students,

who had grown up with genuine, living oral traditions and knew the genre intimately, were emphatic that the Iliad did not “feel” like an oral poem. To their sensibilities, despite the obvious evidence of an oral legacy, Homer was a literary poet. He did not honor oral conventions. In particular, his characters are “round,” which is to say fully formed. The Iliad’s dramatic speeches serve as much to reveal a speaker’s character as to further epic action, for example, while traditional oral poetry, being intensely communal, is not similarly invested in individual characterization. Homer is celebrated by literary people in literary cultures, my associates maintained, because his compositions meet literary expectations.

With the Catherine Project in the summer of 2023, I read West African epics, but this was possible only because anthropologists had transcribed the performances of griots. I guess there are interesting details here too:

Mukiti reached Tubondo; Shemwindo accommodated him in a guesthouse. When they were already in twilight, after having eaten dinner and (food), Mukiti said to Shemwindo: “You, my maternal uncle, I have arrived here where you are because of (this one) your sister Iyangura.” Shemwindo, having understood, gave Mukiti a black goat as a token of hospitality and, moreover, said to Mukiti that he would answer him tomorrow. Mukiti said: “Yes, my dear father, I am satisfied.” When the night had become daylight, in the morning, Mukiti made himself like the anus of a snail in his dressing up; he was clothed with raphia bunches on the arms and on the legs, and with a belt (made) of bongo antelope, and he also carried an isia-crest on the head.

That’s from The Mwindo Epic from the Banyanga, edited and translated by Daniel Biebuyck and Kahombo C. Mateene, pages 44–5. I saved screenshots from the Internet Archive, but could not do the same now: the book is one of the many that cannot be checked out anymore, because of the publishers’ successful lawsuit, Hachette v. Internet Archive.

I suggested also:

For a properly historical explanation of differences between Russia and Turkey, I might expect to look at their confessions. The Russians adopted Christianity; the Turks, Islam, which is less interested in truth than obedience.

True, people can make what they want of the religion they are raised in …

People can adapt a religion to their purpose; but for this, it would seem, they must have a purpose, along with the will to fulfil it. Most people won’t put up a fight, and that can be a problem:

There is a very real possibility, increasing by the day, that one or many more of Trump’s political opponents, perhaps starting with Liz Cheney, end up in jail in 2025 … What we see all across the globe is that when you start to put a couple of the regime’s political opponents in jail, there are literally just thousands of people who say, You know what, forget it. It’s just not worth it. I think this is important, to oppose Donald Trump, but I got a family at home. I just don’t want to put my name in the mix. And all of a sudden, the bodies that are available for the political opposition are cut in half.

Those are words of Senator Chris Murphy, from an interview of December 18, 2024, transcribed in The New Republic.

Claire Berlinki quoted from the Murphy interview in “Thinking Week” (December 21, 2024) – thinking, that is, of what more there is to say:

Writers who put out columns every day are at grave risk of becoming stale. It’s the Tom Friedman phenomenon … Liberal democracy had a good run for a quarter of a millennium. But we no longer seem capable of producing the kind of leaders – or citizens – that liberal democracy needs to produce the kind of obviously superior results it did in the 20th century. When the majority of the American public, for example, is excited about putting the nation’s most prominent anti-vaxxer in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services, I think it’s fair to say that there’s no obvious path back.

Meanwhile, regarding explanations of why people do things, be it vote for the candidate who tells stories they want to hear, or write epics or novels – I have figured what mathematical ability I had was genetic, but there’s a good argument against this:

A substantial portion of the variation in complex human behavioral traits is not accounted for by the effects of genes or families.

Thus Eric Turkheimer, described as a geneticist and quoted by David Bessis in “Beyond nature and nurture” (January 9, 2025).

The “third factor” beyond nature and nurture is

the nonshared environment – the unique context in which a person develops … When I look at my own trajectory and the unique events that shaped my mathematical destiny, the most salient features are better captured by another phrase: idiosyncratic cognitive development.

Bessis talks about mathematician Bill Thurston, whose “severe congenital squint” kept him from joining the two two-dimensional images from his eyes into one 3-d image. At least, he couldn’t join the images “naturally”; he had to practice. Once he could understand three dimensions, apparently he went on to practice with four and five.

According to Bessis,

we never found any genius genes, nor any recipe for “nurturing” people like Gauss: deterministic fairytales can’t account for black swan events.

Are there genes for paying attention? It would seem to me then that perhaps Gauss or Thurston was born with the ability to stay focussed. The latter said,

Mathematics is a process of staring hard enough with enough perseverance at the fog of muddle and confusion to eventually break through to improved clarity. I’m happy when I can admit, at least to myself, that my thinking is muddled, and I try to overcome the embarrassment that I might reveal ignorance or confusion.

Unfortunately such perseverance is something mobile phones are designed to destroy. I don’t know what my students think of how I still use only a 14-year-old Nokia with a tiny keyboard. I would rather not get it out, but for this I would need to go get a new battery for my wristwatch.

Monday, January 13

In the first, called “The Whirligig of Time, 1925–90,” of the three unnumbered sections of the first, called “The Double Vision of Language,” of the four chapters of The Double Vision, Northrop Frye distinguishes primary and secondary concerns. At first, they seem to be animal and ideological, respectively:

Human beings are concerned beings, and it seems to me that there are two kinds of concern: primary and secondary. Primary concerns are such things as food, sex, property, and freedom of movement: concerns that we share with animals on a physical level. Secondary concerns include our political, religious, and other ideological loyalties.

Although it may be of primary importance, primary school would seem to be called primary, only because it comes first in time in the student’s life.

Nonetheless, what Frye calls primary concerns are of primary importance:

All through history ideological concerns have taken precedence over primary ones … with a pollution that threatens the supply of air to breathe and water to drink, it is obvious that we cannot afford the supremacy of ideological concerns any more. The need to eat, love, own property, and move about freely must come first …

I think this kind of argument gets perverted today, when (as many are persuaded to believe) what really matters is the cost of gasoline, and we must not be hijacked by the ideology of climate change.

Presently, Frye suggests that the concerns he calls primary are not only physical after all:

The United States offered … full satisfaction of primary concerns on a purely physical level. An evolution toward freedom, however, is conceivable if freedom is a primary concern …

I may not understand that second, hypothetical sentence. Although revolution is mentioned a number of times in the book, it seems evolution will come up only once more, when Frye mentions “the great evolution of what we now call literature out of mythology” in Chapter 3.

Meanwhile, Frye’s “evolution toward freedom” must allude to previous paragraphs:

now the original Hegelian conception is being revived, and the revolutions of our day are sometimes seen as manifestations of an impulse to freedom …

Freedom alone, however, is far too abstract a goal … I think there is a real truth in the notion of an impulse to freedom, but it needs to be placed in a broader and more practical context.

One may evolve towards a goal, to which one has an impulse. However, this makes it difficult to understand the theory of evolution, which (as far as I understand it) denies that nature has impulses or goals.

Freedom may be a primary concern, but it also has a concern, an immediate one:

The immediate concern of freedom is still a physical one: it is a matter of being able to move about without being challenged by policemen demanding passports and permits and identity cards, and of not being excluded from occupations and public places on the ground of sex or skin colour …

This sounds like freedom to go places and do things.

We seem to be groping for a way to talk about a primary concern that is not ideological (for then it would be secondary), but not physical either. Thus Frye suggests a distinction of stages of concern; this is a secondary distinction, after the primary one between primary and secondary concerns:

The United States, Japan, and Western Europe have been much more successful in achieving stage one of primary concern … But the legacy of the Cold War is still with us … in

• the McCarthyism that imitated the Stalinist show trials,
• the McCarran act that imitated Soviet exclusion policies, and
• the interventions in Latin America that imitate the Stalinist attitude to the Warsaw Pact countries.

Something at the very least, is still missing.

That was the end of the first section.

The ensuing section is called “Primitive and Mature Societies.” Perhaps no society is simply primitive or mature, but “primitive” and “mature” are like −∞ and ∞, denoting endpoints of the real number line that are never actually reached.

I would note a couple of Frye’s remarks about our society. First:

What I am expounding may be called a bourgeois liberal view … it may begin to look more central with

• the repudiation of marxism in Marxist countries,
• the growing uneasiness with the anti-intellectualism in American life, and
• the steadily decreasing dividends of terrorism in Third World countries.

Concerning liberalism, I pause to note an interesting remark in “Our Mirror Worlds w/ Naomi Klein,” episode 182 (dated January 10, 2025) of the podcast The Fire These Times. Klein suggests that when people go crazy, politically, they do so from being liberals rather than leftists:

I grew up in an actual left family. I’m a third-generation red-diaper baby, so I didn’t get kicked out of my family. I didn’t lose as much as she lost; I didn’t have the illusions she had.

“She” here is Naomi Wolf, the doppelgänger of Klein, who continues:

But I know other people like that, and they are liberals. They are not leftists. This is what bothers me about horseshoe theory! If you look at her or RFK Jr. or Glenn Greenwald – these are hardcore liberals who really believed in the myth of America, and are very patriotic and all that.

Myself, I am patriotic in the sense of believing in the self-evident truth that all of us are created equal. Maybe, as in the Noble Lie, we are fashioned severally of gold, silver, iron, or bronze; nonetheless, the metals do not breed true. You never know whether the person in front of you might not be golden-souled.

Actually, Socrates suggests you can assay children and track them accordingly; but then he also says, as part of what people are to believe (Republic III, 415c, Bloom translation),

there is an oracle that the city will be destroyed when an iron or bronze man is its guardian.

As for Naomi Klein, she mentions the horseshoe theory in a different way in her book Doppelganger. Here the ones who go off the deep end are not liberals, but “body people”:

a who’s who of woo – alternative health, women’s wellness, and spirit-infused diet and fitness. All were now hopelessly entangled with the surging far right and had become card-carrying citizens of the Mirror World.

They are “the Disinformation Dozen … collectively responsible for originating roughly 65 percent of the junk claims circulating about Covid and vaccines,” according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate. Klein continues:

Many have claimed that we are simply seeing the horseshoe theory in action: the idea that the right and the left each bend at their farthest reaches until they almost touch. But that is to confuse the far left … with the far-out … Moreover, the members of these subcultures who made the Disinformation Dozen list had all figured out how to monetize the far-out …

The sentence curtailed by me reads in full,

But that is to confuse the far left – which is where the socialists and revolutionaries reside – with the far-out, which is where the wellness and New Age spiritualists hang out.

I return to Frye, who says,

depriving religion of all secular or temporal power is one of the most genuinely emancipating movements of our time.

Yes, but the depriving cannot be achieved by external authority, as Frye goes on to suggest:

I was in Kiev during the celebration of the thousandth anniversary of the introduction of Christianity to Ukraine, and it was clear that seventy years of anti-religious propaganda had been as total and ignominious a failure there as anything in the economic or political sphere.

May the Russian invasion be such a failure. Unfortunately it seems its perpetrator has given the US President-elect the idea of looking the other way and establishing his own terrestrial empire by seizing other countries.

After distinguishing concerns into primary and secondary, and cultures into primitive and mature, Frye moves on to distinguish bodies into psychic and pneumatic. Actually it is Paul who distinguishes the σῶμα ψυχικόν from the σῶμα πνευματικόν, in 1 Corinthians 15:44; here’s more of that chapter for some context:

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Greek	English (King James)
39 οὐ πᾶσα σὰρξ ἡ αὐτὴ σάρξ, ἀλλὰ ἄλλη μὲν ἀνθρώπων, ἄλλη δὲ σὰρξ κτηνῶν, ἄλλη δὲ σὰρξ πτηνῶν, ἄλλη δὲ ἰχθύων.	All flesh is not the same flesh: but there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds.
40 καὶ σώματα ἐπουράνια, καὶ σώματα ἐπίγεια: ἀλλὰ ἑτέρα μὲν ἡ τῶν ἐπουρανίων δόξα, ἑτέρα δὲ ἡ τῶν ἐπιγείων.	There are also celestial bodies, and bodies terrestrial: but the glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial is another.
41 ἄλλη δόξα ἡλίου, καὶ ἄλλη δόξα σελήνης, καὶ ἄλλη δόξα ἀστέρων: ἀστὴρ γὰρ ἀστέρος διαφέρει ἐν δόξῃ.	There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars: for one star differeth from another star in glory.
42 οὕτως καὶ ἡ ἀνάστασις τῶν νεκρῶν. σπείρεται ἐν φθορᾷ, ἐγείρεται ἐν ἀφθαρσίᾳ:	So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption:
43 σπείρεται ἐν ἀτιμίᾳ, ἐγείρεται ἐν δόξῃ: σπείρεται ἐν ἀσθενείᾳ, ἐγείρεται ἐν δυνάμει:	It is sown in dishonour; it is raised in glory: it is sown in weakness; it is raised in power:
44 σπείρεται σῶμα ψυχικόν, ἐγείρεται σῶμα πνευματικόν. εἰ ἔστιν σῶμα ψυχικόν, ἔστιν καὶ πνευματικόν.	It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body.

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According to later Christians such as Newton (though it seems he was anti-trinitarian and perhaps Arian), there is no real distinction between the celestial and terrestrial bodies, but they are all governed by God through the same mathematical laws.

Frye says, regarding Paul’s letter,

The genuine human being thus born is the soma pneumatikon, the spiritual body (I Corinthians 15:44). This phrase means that spiritual man is a body: the natural man or soma psychikon merely has one. The resurrection of the spiritual body is the completion of the kind of life the New Testament is talking about, and to the extent that any society contains spiritual people, to that extent it is a mature rather than a primitive society.

Is the New Testament really saying what Socrates did (Apology 38a, translation by Christopher Rowe, Socrates’ Defence, Penguin Little Black Classics)?

ὁ δὲ ἀνεξέταστος βίος οὐ βιωτὸς ἀνθρώπῳ.

For a human being a life without examination is actually not worth living.

I would only remark on Frye’s distinction: the natural person has a body; the spiritual person is one. For the natural person, the body is something that needs to be kept under control:

the natural man sets up a hierarchy within himself and uses his waking consciousness to direct and control his operations.

Just so, I suppose, does the intellect need to direct the passions and the appetites, as in Socrates’s account in the Republic. But then there is another possibility:

I investigate (σκοπῶ) not these things, but myself, to know whether I am a monster more complicated and more furious than Typhon or a gentler and simpler creature, to whom a divine and quiet lot is given by nature.

That’s Socrates in the Phaedrus (230a, translation by Fowler in the Loeb edition).

Tuesday, January 14

This is to supplement a couple of things I said yesterday, in response to passages from Frye, on evolution and liberalism respectively, namely:

The United States offered … full satisfaction of primary concerns on a purely physical level. An evolution toward freedom, however, is conceivable if freedom is a primary concern …

Then,

What I am expounding may be called a bourgeois liberal view … it may begin to look more central …

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… depriving religion of all secular or temporal power is one of the most genuinely emancipating movements of our time.

I’ll keep reading; one can make too much of isolated passages of a writer. Apparently people do this with Darwin:

The vastness of the truth and the one-sidedness of formulae always haunted him … Since he cannot qualify every sentence, selective quotation often makes him seem enslaved to one or other of these attitudes.

That’s Mary Midgley, in the first chapter of Evolution As a Religion (1985, revised 2002). The “attitudes” that Midgley refers to are

the two emotional responses which belong most naturally to evolutionary speculation – on the one hand, optimistic, joyful wonder at the profusion of nature, and on the other, pessimistic, sombre alarm at its wasteful cruelty …

If Frye has either of these attitudes when talking about an “evolution toward freedom,” I suppose it is optimism; but there is a pessimistic side too:

Freedom alone, however, is far too abstract a goal … History tells us that, ever since Adam’s six hours in paradise, man has never known what to do with freedom except throw it away.

As for liberalism, I brought in a kind of criticism by Naomi Klein. Here she is, again in “Our Mirror Worlds w/ Naomi Klein,” distinguishing herself from Naomi Wolf:

This was the part of [Doppelganger] where I talk about the thing that bothers me most about being confused with her: that she’s a liberal and I’m a leftist. Yes, she had a critique of patriarchy in her first book The Beauty Myth, but it was always a “Lean In” critique: These beauty standards are unfair to women because they’re keeping us from advancing in the corporate workplace or in politics, because we have all this extra beauty labor. That’s fine, it’s just not my politics. It was always annoying to me.

I recall one of the rallies in DC in January, 1991, against the first invasion of Iraq under a President Bush. One of the speakers was Molly Yard, then president of the National Organization for Women. She objected that women in the military didn’t get the higher-paying combat jobs. As she realized quickly, this was not a good line to take at an anti-war rally.

What has this got to do with Frye? I don’t suppose he is just trying to get his own piece of the action. The problem is, some people always will try.

Frye says,

Something of the genuine secular benefits of democracy have rubbed off on the religious groups, to the immense benefit of humanity, and depriving religion of all secular or temporal power is one of the most genuinely emancipating movements of our time. It seems to be a general rule that the more ‘orthodox’ or ‘fundamentalist’ a religious attitude is, the more strongly it resents this separation and the more consistently it lobbies for legislation giving its formulas secular authority. Today, in Israel and in much of the Moslem and Hindu world, as well as in Northern Ireland and South Africa, we can clearly see that these religious attitudes are the worst possible basis for a secular society.

“Worst possible basis”? I dunno, there may be worse, such certain kinds of nationalism, particularly Nazism. Given the government of Turkey today, I’m not actually sure that Atatürk’s abolition of the Caliphate was on the whole a good thing. Hereditary rule over a religion might be better than elected rule, at least when that rule is combined with rule over a country, as it is now in Turkey.

Presumably “these religious attitudes” that Frye mentions at the end of the quote are the orthodox or fundamentalist ones mentioned earlier. Perhaps the point is not that they are religious attitudes, but that they are authoritarian; for, Frye continues:

This principle applies equally to the dogmatic atheism and the anti-religious campaigns that Lenin assumed to be essential to the Marxist revolution …

Nonetheless, we may all need to be subject to external authority sometimes. There’s a simple example in Book I of the Republic: the person who asks for his weapons back at a time when he is not in his right mind.

Interesting essay in the Guardian: “I am a rational liberal, yet a question about the sanctity of life floored me” (January 12, 2025), by Sonia Sodha, looking at three issues:

• assisted dying;
• surrogate motherhood;
• genetic screening of fetuses.

Says Sodha,

Liberalism has much to offer, but there are risks in embracing it as an overarching political philosophy without a degree of humility about its shortcomings: its hollow silence over how to navigate knotty ethical issues where society needs some kind of shared understanding. This queasiness about morality means liberals sometimes look the other way when others smuggle in controversial ethical assumptions under the guise of choice and autonomy.

When “a strong proponent of assisted dying” tells her, “You are obviously a person who believes very strongly in the sanctity of human life,” Sodha replies,

Gosh, maybe I … do? Which doesn’t mean I think assisted dying is innately immoral if truly someone’s free will, but a belief that we can never be certain of this renders it wrong because the consequences are so terrible.

That’s a difficult sentence, which perhaps should not have slipped past a copy editor, but I think the point is this.

• In theory, one should be able to choose freely when to die.
• In practice, the rest of us cannot know the choice is free.
• When in doubt, respect the rule: “Thou shalt not kill.”

The reference to Hebrew scripture is mine; according to Wikipedia, Sodha “describes herself as a ‘half-Hindu, half-Sikh Indian’.” Perhaps she did not need to be taught the Ten Commandments to have qualms about people’s killing themselves or getting doctors to do it for them.

However, it seems there are doctors and others who lack these qualms, in Frye’s native land in particular:

The Canadian Association of MAID [“Medical Assistance in Dying”] Assessors and Providers, the leading organization of Canadian euthanasia providers, has sat on credible evidence by its own members that people are being driven to euthanasia by credit card debt, poor housing, and difficulties getting medical care. These are people who do have some sort of medical condition but in many cases are using these conditions to check a box in the approval process, when the relief they are mainly seeking is from other forms of suffering. And the system is doing much more to help them down the path toward death than to protect them as the public was promised.

Source: Alexander Raikin, “No Other Options,” The New Atlantis, Number 71, Winter 2023, pp. 3–24; TheNewAtlantis.com, December 16, 2022.

Saturday, January 18

I take the Gospels, or at least the synoptic ones, as history. Mark, Matthew, and Luke are trying to be like Herodotus, recording what they have heard (or perhaps read in the hypothetical “Q”). That doesn’t mean they do a good job or are even trying to be impartial.

I could be wrong. The Gospels may be a fraud like the Donation of Constantine, written with conscious intent to deceive. Or they could be works of the imagination, like Paradise Lost.

Frye makes a distinction between Weltgeschichte and Heilsgeschichte, but I can’t say I understand it. This is in the third section, called “The Crisis in Language,” of the first chapter of The Double Vision. According to Frye there,

Jesus is not presented as a historical figure, but as a figure who drops into history from another dimension of reality, and thereby shows what the limitations of the historical perspective are.

Maybe this describes the Gospel According to John. I can’t say I’ve spent a great deal of time studying the differences between this and the other three gospels.

Frye says earlier in the section (page 15),

In the early Christian centuries it was widely assumed that the basis of Christian faith was the descriptive accuracy of the historical events recorded in the New Testament and the infallibility of the logical arguments that interconnected them. This pseudo-literalism was presented as certain without the evidence of sense experience, and belief became a self-hypnotizing process designed to eke out the insufficiency of evidence.

Does this mean Paul has hypnotized himself when writes the Corinthians as follows, in chapter 15 of the first epistle of that name?

3 For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures;
4 And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures:
5 And that he was seen of Cephas, then of the twelve:
6 After that, he was seen of above five hundred brethren at once; of whom the greater part remain unto this present, but some are fallen asleep.
7 After that, he was seen of James; then of all the apostles.
8 And last of all he was seen of me also, as of one born out of due time.
9 For I am the least of the apostles, that am not meet to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.

Or is it only readers of this who have hypnotized themselves, when they conclude that Paul really did see Jesus, in the flesh, on the road to Damascus, just as Grant saw Lee at Appomattox Court House?

Perhaps I should ask first whether 1 Corinthians represents an actual letter or letters sent by Paul from Ephesus to Achaia. I assume it does, the way The Zimmerman Telegram is based on an actual document, but Frankenstein is not. Barbara Tuchman begins her Author’s Note by saying,

Nothing in this book has been invented.

I don’t think this is BS, or even the same kind of assertion that Somerset Maugham makes near the beginning of The Razor’s Edge:

I have invented nothing. To save embarrassment to people still living I have given to the persons who play a part in this story names of my own contriving, and I have in other ways taken pains to make sure that no one should recognize them.

Tuchman is not trying to save anybody embarrassment. Maugham starts his book by saying,

I have never begun a novel with more misgiving. If I call it a novel it is only because I don’t know what else to call it.

That’s a bit unconventional, but we know he is not writing history the way Tuchman is (even if somebody calling himself the Wanderling used to write to me saying his teacher had been the model for Maugham’s Larry Darrell).

Mary Shelley makes clear what she is doing in her Preface:

The event on which this fiction is founded has been supposed, by Dr. Darwin, and some of the physiological writers of Germany, as not of impossible occurrence. I shall not be supposed as according the remotest degree of serious faith to such an imagination; yet, in assuming it as the basis of a work of fancy, I have not considered myself as merely weaving a series of supernatural terrors …

I have thus endeavoured to preserve the truth of the elementary principles of human nature, while I have not scrupled to innovate upon their combinations. The Iliad, the tragic poetry of Greece, – Shakespeare, in the Tempest and Midsummer Night’s Dream, – and most especially Milton, in Paradise Lost, conform to this rule …

I don’t know, the composer of the story of Adam and Eve may have “endeavoured to preserve the truth of the elementary principles of human nature” with a fictional tale; but at some point, I suppose, the scriptures are intended as history.

Frye says at the end of the paragraph whose beginning I quoted above,

It is seldom, however, that anyone is convinced by an argument unless there are psychological sympathies within that open the gates to it. So when words failed, as they usually did, recourse was had to anathematizing those who held divergent views, and from there it was an easy step to the psychosis of heresy-hunting, of regarding all deviation from approved doctrine as a malignant disease that had to be ruthlessly stamped out.

Is Paul being psychotic when he writes in 1 Corinthians 6 as follows?

9 Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind,
10 Nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God.
11 And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God.
12 All things are lawful unto me (Πάντα μοι ἔξεστιν), but all things are not expedient (ἀλλ’ οὐ πάντα συμφέρει): all things are lawful for me (πάντα μοι ἔξεστιν), but I will not be brought under the power of any (ἀλλ’ οὐκ ἐγὼ ἐξουσιασθήσομαι ὑπό τινος).

It seems to me that Paul is indeed trying to “stamp out deviation from approved doctrine.” Just because Jesus has made all things lawful doesn’t mean you get to sleep with your stepmother.

I suppose Paul is dealing with the doctrinal issue that Frye himself alludes to, before what I started out with:

Literalism of this kind in the area of the spiritual instantly becomes what Paul calls the letter that kills. It sets up an imitation of descriptive language, a pseudo-objectivity related to something that isn’t there.

I take the reference to be to 2 Corinthians 3:

4 And such trust have we through Christ to God-ward:
5 Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think any thing as of ourselves; but our sufficiency is of God;
6 Who also hath made us able ministers of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life (τὸ γὰρ γράμμα ἀποκτείνει, τὸ δὲ πνεῦμα ζῳοποιεῖ).

That’s the KJV, but in place of “letter” in verse 6, the RSV has “written code” – not exactly Frye’s interpretation, I think, unless for example the Ten Commandments were not intended to be taken literally. In a note on 2 Cor 3:6 in The Bible: Authorized King James Version, Oxford World Classics edition, Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett would seem to disagree with Frye:

While it can be misunderstood as differentiating between literal and spiritual (or metaphorical) meanings, it is really a stark contrast between Jewish and Christian codes (the Law versus the Spirit).

Is this a matter for scholarly dispute such as Frye might have engaged in as an academic?

Monday, January 20

According to the Roman Catholic faith, as expounded by Ludwig Ott in Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma, Mary remained a virgin, even while giving birth to her son. One might otherwise think this doctrine was like the heresy of Docetism, whereby Christ only seemed to have a human body.

Perhaps there is a new faith in the United States, whereby, regardless of her own powers of reason, even a nominee for attorney general must believe that the loser of the 2020 US Presidential election actually won.

In Miracles: A Preliminary Study (1947), C. S. Lewis says (and see also “The Miraculous” on this),

If the laws of Nature are necessary truths, no miracle can break them: but then no miracle needs to break them … if God comes to work miracles, He comes ‘like a thief in the night’. Miracle is, from the point of view of the scientist, a form of doctoring, tampering, (if you like) cheating …

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If God creates a miraculous spermatozoon in the body of a virgin, it does not proceed to break any laws.

Again, I don’t know how one distinguishes such a belief from Docetism.

I also don’t know what Lewis would have known or could have known about DNA, but presumably his “miraculous spermatozoon” carried DNA, and the genes would have suggested a source from somewhere on earth, if not the local population. This would seem to be required by the full humanity of Jesus.

In any case, I was interested in the following from The Catholic Encyclopedia, “Virgin Birth of Christ”:

Modern theology adhering to the principle of historical development, and denying the possibility of any miraculous intervention in the course of history, cannot consistently admit the historical actuality of the virgin birth. According to modern views, Jesus was really the son of Joseph and Mary and was endowed by an admiring posterity with the halo of Divinity; the story of his virgin birth was in keeping with the myths concerning the extraordinary births of the heroes of other nations [16]; the original text of the Gospels knew nothing of the virgin birth [17].

[16] Gunkel, “Zum religionsgesch. Verst. des N.T.”, p, 65, Göttingen, 1903

[17] Usener, “Geburt und Kindheit Christi” in “Zeitschrift für die neutest. Wissenschaft”, IV, 1903, 8

Source: Maas, A. (1912). Virgin Birth of Christ. In The Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. Retrieved April 26, 2010, from New Advent.

As I understand the article, the story of Mary’s virginity goes back to herself:

All we can say therefore, concerning St. Luke’s source for his history of the infancy of Jesus is reduced to the scanty information that it must have been a Greek translation of an Aramaic document based, in the last instance, on the testimony of Our Blessed Lady.

OBL must be believed, like the incoming US President, DJT.

Monday, January 20

Ideally we take every piece of writing as one of a kind, in a class by itself, sui generis. In practice, just to be able to read a text, we have to make assumptions: first of all, that it is a text, which we can read, because it is in some language that we understand.

Loosely speaking, perception is not neutral. Aristotle would seem to say this, when speaking of capacities of the soul at the head of chapter 3 of Book II of De Anima (414^b1–6) – text from The Little Sailing, with the 2018 translation of David Bolotin:

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This suggests to me that we cannot perceive something without somehow desiring it. In that case, in a passage about nerves (looked at in “Subjective and Objective”), William James is not really addressing perception as such:

The fibres are mere transmitters; the terminal organs are so many imperfect telephones into which the material world speaks, and each of which takes up but a portion of what it says; the brain-cells at the fibres’ central end are as many others at which the mind listens to the far-off call.

Meanwhile, if we are reading something, we probably figure – or so I have assumed – that it belongs to one of two broad genres, which might be described respectively as poetry and history, or alternatively as fiction and fact. Thus the Iliad and Frankenstein are poetry or fiction; Herodotus and The Zimmerman Telegram, history or fact.

A text can belong to a genre accidentally, perhaps in the way that Frye describes in The Great Code, pages 42–3:

The Icelandic Greenland and Eirik sagas are literary productions … But because they allude to Norse explorations and settlements on the coast of America, the extent to which they may be incidentally historical is naturally of great interest to many people …

Also, pages 46–7:

History as such has continually to be rewritten … Gibbon’s work “dates” … Gibbon’s work survives by its “style,” which means that it insensibly moves over from the historical category into the poetic, and becomes a classic of English literature, or at any rate of English cultural history.

A writer can also try to fake a genre. On January 18, I mentioned the Donation of Constantine, whereby Popes of Rome tried to assert their authority over all of Christendom. The document was made to look like a decree by the Emperor, but was not really that.

Apparently Frye will suggest a new possibility for the Gospels: that they are not imaginative works or history, but neither are they frauds. I’ll say no more about this now, except that the Aristotle that I quoted seems relevant.

With works like the Donation of Constantine, we are not dealing with the kind of writing I first talked about. I would say poetry or history is “theoretical,” in the sense that the writer is trying to work out something to be “seen” with the mind’s eye, through the work itself. An Imperial decree or a Pauline Epistle is practical – intended to get something done beyond itself.

For now at least, I read the Gospels as works of history or fact. That doesn’t mean they are written as history is written today, any more than Euclid’s Elements are written as mathematics is today. Still, our way of writing mathematics is a development of Euclid’s, and we use this fact to try to recover Euclid’s thought.

Likewise, I try to understand the Gospels on the basis of what is expressed for example in the Athanasian Creed:

Furthermore it is necessary to everlasting salvation: that he also believe rightly the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ.

For the right Faith is that we believe and confess: that our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is God and Man;

God, of the Substance of the Father, begotten before the worlds: and Man, of the Substance of his Mother, born in the world;

Perfect God, and Perfect Man: of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting;

Equal to the Father, as touching his Godhead: and inferior to the Father, as touching his Manhood.

I figure such doctrines are based on the existence of somebody. All the more so are the letters of Paul. The Gospels then are an attempt at a history of the life of that person.

The stories in the Gospel could be as factual as the fraud in the 2020 US Presidential election to which Pam Bondi alluded last week (under oath, I believe).

I don’t know what my age was when some older children of the neighborhood said a spaceship had landed around the corner. We all ran to see it. I was thrilled by the thought of seeing its blinking lights. I didn’t see them. “The ship must have left,” the other kids said.

I retained some kind of belief in flying saucers. I read books about UFOs. I once claimed to have seen one: at first I had thought it was an airplane, but then it made a sudden turn, the way an airplane would not.

Even if I had carefully noted the date, time, and place, I would not bother trying to look up flight logs now. Understanding my childhood belief needs another kind of investigation. I suppose this is what Frye is saying of Christianity in The Great Code, here on page 42:

There is early secular evidence for the rise of Christianity, but there is practically no real evidence for the life of Jesus outside the New Testament, all the evidence for a major historical figure being hermetically sealed within it. But it seems clear also that the writers of the New Testament preferred it that way.

I don’t think my UFO was a flying saucer from Mars, but my evidence for this is not my memory. The New Testament alone is not evidence that there is no other evidence for its main character. One might use that “early secular evidence for the rise of Christianity” to investigate whether the cult was based on such fantasies as have led to today’s ceremony in Washington. It depends on one’s interests.

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I’m not sure how any kind of “reading” of the Biblical miracles explains how Paul found himself trying to keep members of the Corinthian and other churches in line. The Disciples followed Jesus, without being able to understand even the Parable of the Sower – at least, that’s what the Gospel says, and I think it’s probably an adequate reflection of most people’s capacity for literary analysis. (See “Thinking & Feeling.”)

Wednesday, January 22

When I quoted recently from Aristotle’s De Anima, I took the Greek text from a website called The Little Sailing. That’s Μικρός Απόπλους in Greek, and I guess now I can see this, since becoming aware of the Anaplous of the Bosphorus. This is the work by one Dionysius of Byzantium, who writes of the geography of where I live, near the end of the strait of his title where the Black Sea comes into view. (See “Cavafy in Istanbul” and “Bohemianism.”)

In modern Greek, at least, πλους is voyage; απόπλους, departure. There’s no ανάπλους in the Pocket Oxford Greek Dictionary (modern Greek, that is), but I guess that would be sailing up.

At the head of the main page of the Μικρός Απόπλους site is an image of a relief carving of a woman’s head, looking down, hair in a bun, seen from the right.

Looking at the page first with the lynx browser, I saw the ALT text for the image:

Στήλη του Giustiniani (λεπτομέρεια)

This could mean, “Column of Justinian (detail).” The Greek Wikipedia calls the column Στήλη του Ιουστινιανού. That column

• collapsed in the Kıyamet-i Sugra, the “Minor Judgment Day,” namely the 1509 earthquake, here in Istanbul;
• is Columna Iustiniani in Latin, not Giustiniani.

Why then did the creator of Μικρός Απόπλους use “Guistiniani,” in Latin letters? Well, Giovanni Giustiniani was a Genoese man who led 700 men in the defense of Constantinople in 1453. Wounded, he fled the city, which was then lost. Malicious tongues said the flight caused the loss.

I think of what malicious tongues say now about Democrats, or Kamala Harris in particular.

As Fred Schneider of the B-52s asked in 1980, “Who’s to blame when parties get out of hand?” House parties were meant, but the question applies to political parties too.

Reagan was elected that year. I remember a story from the Washington Post about a woman who flew in for the inauguration, perhaps from Texas, and felt the need to bring both of her fur coats along.

Now I keep imagining Republicans might come to their senses, but I guess there’s no reason to expect it.

Back in 1453, Giustiniani died three days after the Fall of Constantinople. This was also the Conquest of Istanbul. The Genoese defender was buried on the island of Chios, now about an hour’s ferry ride from Turkey. Apparently the tomb has been lost, “possibly from the 1881 earthquake.”

I have the idea that I have been prepared for disasters, insofar as I am prepared, by the Chronicles of Narnia. At the end, the country you have come to love is invaded. A resistance forms, but is not enough. It is even hobbled by people who ought to support it.

Such things happen. Philip Pullman can’t stand it though:

One of the most vile moments in the whole of children’s literature, to my mind, occurs at the end of The Last Battle, when Aslan reveals to the children that “The term is over: the holidays have begun” because “There was a real railway accident. Your father and mother and all of you are – as you used to call it in the Shadowlands – dead.” To solve a narrative problem by killing one of your characters is something many authors have done at one time or another. To slaughter the lot of them, and then claim they’re better off, is not honest storytelling: it’s propaganda in the service of a life-hating ideology.

I quoted that in “Narnia.” Now one can get the Pullman essay from the web archive.

The railway accident was what sent the children to Narnia to see its end, and their parents to the world beyond that. One of the children is left alive though: Susan. It’s not clear to me that Pullman has this in mind when talking of a bad solution to a narrative problem.

Thursday, January 23

On January 18, I quoted the note by Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett on 2 Cor 3:6 in The Bible: Authorized King James Version:

While it can be misunderstood as differentiating between literal and spiritual (or metaphorical) meanings, it is really a stark contrast between Jewish and Christian codes (the Law versus the Spirit).

This makes some sense to me, since I doubt Paul meant to say, “You know how God told us, ‘Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal,’ and so on? He didn’t mean all of that stuff literally!”

Nonetheless, Frye may have been onto something in the second section of chapter 1:

The genuine human being thus born is the soma pneumatikon, the spiritual body (I Corinthians 15:44). This phrase means that spiritual man is a body: the natural man or soma psychikon merely has one.

I looked at that on January 13, when it reminded me of the Republic: in the natural man, desires and passions would not automatically obey reason; in the spiritual man, the three parts would harmonize as one or perhaps even be one (as three persons can be one God).

Perhaps one could also use a term of psychology introduced in 1954: in the natural man, the “locus of control” is external; spiritual, internal.

Jesus taught the prayer, “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” If we succumb to temptation anyway, perhaps Paul would say it was our own fault. He closes 1 Corinthians in chapter 16 by anathematizing unbelievers:

21 The salutation of me Paul with mine own hand.
22 If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be Anathema Maran-atha.
(εἴ τις οὐ φιλεῖ τὸν κύριον, ἤτω ἀνάθεμα. μαρανα θα.)
23 The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you.
24 My love be with you all in Christ Jesus. Amen.

That’s the KJV, which I imagine preserves the collocution “Anathema Maranatha” for its sound as well as its ambiguity. The RSV has for 22,

If any one has no love for the Lord, let him be accursed. Our Lord, come!*

* Greek Maranatha.

The New Oxford Annotated Bible (1973) glosses this:

Our Lord, come! is the preferable rendering of the word Maranatha (transliterated from two Aramaic words); an equally legitimate rendering, but less probable in this context, is “Our Lord has come.”

The latter interpretation makes more sense to me, if Paul’s point is that, since our Lord has indeed come, anybody who doesn’t love Him must be out of his mind.

Frye himself talks about anathema in the passage from §3 that I quoted on January 18:

So when words failed, as they usually did, recourse was had to anathematizing those who held divergent views, and from there it was an easy step to the psychosis of heresy-hunting, of regarding all deviation from approved doctrine as a malignant disease that had to be ruthlessly stamped out.

Doesn’t religion matter? I guess it mattered to Paul and the Church Fathers. It mattered to the participants in the Ecumenical Councils, from Nicaea on, trying to find consensus on the most important things.

I think mathematics matters; at least, if you are going to do mathematics, you ought to get it right. And yet getting it right must be an entirely free act. Mathematics is done, we might say, not by mouthing the words of Euclid, or Thābit ibn Qurra, or Descartes, or Sophie Germain, but by sharing his or her spirit.

Mathematical truth is not determined by majority vote. Neither is it by consensus, I would say, though others may disagree. Practically, if the truth of a theorem is generally accepted, then we just use it freely; still, in principle, it could be wrong, and one person alone could know this.

Perhaps, by some lights, mine is an intolerant position. After talking about the “psychosis of heresy-hunting,” Frye has a new paragraph:

I am, of course, isolating only one element in Christianity, but cruelty, terror, intolerance, and hatred within any religion always mean that God has been replaced by the devil, and such things are always accompanied by a false kind of literalism. At present some other religions, notably Islam, are even less reassuring than our own. As Marxist and American imperialisms decline, the Moslem world is emerging as the chief threat to world peace, and the spark-plug of its intransigence, so to speak, is its fundamentalism or false literalism of belief. The same principle of daemonic perversion applies here: when Khomeini gave the order to have Salman Rushdie murdered, he was turning the whole of the Koran into Satanic verses. In our own culture, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale depicts a future New England in which a reactionary religious movement has brought back the hysteria, bigotry, and sexual sadism of seventeenth-century Puritanism. Such a development may seem unlikely just now, but the potential is all there.

I think tolerance is an important concept, requiring some balancing, and a certain “Statement from the anti-terf protest” is unbalanced. The statement is introduced thus (December 15, 2022):

Yesterday there was a screening of a transphobic movie planned on Edinburgh University campus. A group of protesters managed to block this screening from taking place and wrote to us asking us to publish their statement on the movie …

As far as I understand, the blocking was by physical intimidation. The protesters’ statement begins:

When we tolerate intolerant views and they take hold in society, people become intolerant of each other. We have to be intolerant of intolerance in order to have a tolerant society … Shutting down this event is not an attack on academic freedom, it is an assertion of our right to feel safe on campus and not have our fundamental right to exist as ourselves attacked in University facilities …

There was a good article by Daniel Callcut, “Toleration is an impressive virtue that’s worth reviving” (6 July 2022), reviewing the work of Bernard Williams:

Toleration, for Williams, is a central ingredient in thinking through ‘what coexistence under conditions of fundamental disagreement requires’ (to use a helpful phrase from the philosopher Teresa Bejan).

To tolerate, as Williams stresses, is to be conflicted. Toleration involves putting up with something that you would rather not be the case …

You can see then why toleration is quite a delicate state. If you are to count as tolerant about X, you must:

1. keep hold of the belief that X is wrong, which naturally issues in
2. your desire to prevent X but you must, nonetheless,
3. suppress your desire to prevent X and, instead, let things be.

(I made use of this in “Courage.”) I’ve nothing in particular to add, beyond noting that, in Frye’s list of “cruelty, terror, intolerance, and hatred,” I don’t think intolerance is quite like the others.

Tuesday, January 28

Paul would seem to have had an ideology, with which he tried to coerce and control the various churches that
he visited and wrote letters to. Was that ideology a “myth to live by”? Frye talks about such myths in the third and last section of the first chapter of The Double Vision:

I am not trying to deny or belittle the validity of a credal, even a dogmatic approach to Christianity: I am saying that the literal basis of faith in Christianity is a mythical and metaphorical basis, not one founded on historical facts or logical propositions. Once we accept an imaginative literalism, everything else falls into place: without that, creeds and dogmas quickly turn malignant. The literary language of the New Testament is not intended, like literature itself, simply to suspend judgement, but to convey a vision of spiritual life that continues to transform and expand our own. That is,

• its myths become, as purely literary myths cannot, myths to live by;
• its metaphors become, as purely literary metaphors cannot, metaphors to live in.

What does this say about, for example, the Lord’s Prayer? I brought this up on January 23:

Jesus taught the prayer, “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” If we succumb to temptation anyway, perhaps Paul would say it was our own fault.

What is mythological or metaphorical about the Prayer?

Was Jesus only metaphorically the son of God, while literally being the son of Joseph, biologically as well as legally?

I think the Council of Nicaea was supposed to settle the question of how to understand the relation of Jesus to God.

Saturday, February 1

This is about the “Religion” chapter of Collingwood’s Speculum Mentis. The book as a whole is about

• art,
• religion,
• science,
• history, and
• philosophy.

These were all possible career choices for somebody (born in 1889) who was

equally well fitted to specialize in Greek and Latin, or in modern history and languages (I spoke and read French and German almost as easily as English), or in the natural sciences; and nothing would have afforded my mind its proper nourishment except to study equally all three; but my father’s teaching had given me a good deal more Greek and Latin than most boys of my age possessed; and since I had to specialize in something I specialized in these and became a ‘classical’ scholar.

That is how Collingwood describes himself in An Autobiography (1939; page 6) when he was on his way to a year at a prep school, followed by five years at Rugby School.

While at Rugby, Robin Collingwood was baptized in the Anglican Church, taking the second name George. This was July 4, 1905; he was confirmed a year later. When he submitted for publication his first book, Religion and Philosophy (1916),

the reader, a clergyman, wondered why its author didn’t go into orders

– thus Fred Inglis in History Man: The Life of R. G. Collingwood (2009; pages 89–90). Inglis says Collingwood’s mother Edith was “daughter of a non-observant, partially Jewish family” (page 8), but from what I understand, the only evidence for this is her maiden name, Isaac.

Robin’s father, William Gershom, was “lapsed from the Brethren.” When he sent his son to school,

he was too poor to pay for it himself, and my school bills (and later my Oxford bills) were paid by the generosity of a rich friend. Thus, at thirteen, I was put into a preparatory school with the aim of competing for a scholarship …

(An Autobiography, page 5).

R. G. Collingwood’s parents were both artists, and John Ruskin was a neighbor; his father was also an archeologist. Collingwood himself considered becoming a professional violinist. Writing to his wife from Java in February, 1939, he regretted not having been a writer; apparently a reason why he had gone work at Oxford, where he was ultimately Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy, was to have a steady income, unlike his father.

In addition to his several books of philosophy, Collingwood wrote the first four of the five “books” that compose Roman Britain and the English Settlements (second edition, 1937); this is a volume of the series called The Oxford History of England.

That is my evidence for the claim about Collingwood’s possible career choices.

The “Religion” chapter of Speculum Mentis has seven sections:

On page 154 begins the next chapter, “Science.” I describe the sections of “Religion” as follows.

§ 1. The Transition from Art to Religion.

There is a warning or disclaimer:

the reader is earnestly implored to resist the vice of collecting ‘definitions’ … The writer’s definition of religion (as of art and so forth) is coextensive with this entire book, and will nowhere be found in smaller compass. Nor will it be found in its completeness there; for no book is wholly self-explanatory, but solicits the co-operation of a reasonably thoughtful and instructed reader.

This is attached to a definition of religion “from beneath” as the assertion of what art only imagines.

The disclaimer is by somebody familiar with being misunderstood. As he reports in An Autobiography (page 56), a reviewer of Speculum Mentis who was

one of the ‘realists’ (not an Oxford man) … dismissed it in a few lines as ‘the usual idealistic nonsense’.

On the contrary, “it was neither ‘usual’ nor ‘idealistic’,” although Collingwood agrees it might be described as nonsense:

The position laid down in it was incompletely thought out and unskilfully expressed; and for most readers concealed, rather than illustrated, by a dense incrustation of miscellaneous detail.

I continue to find Speculum Mentis worth reading and rereading. I had been looking forward to a new edition, presumably supplemented with additional material; such editions have been made for Collingwood’s later works. Unfortunately I learned the other day from one of the editors that the new edition of Speculum Mentis, while “planned,” is “not imminent, I’m afraid.”

Maybe the disclaimer above is special pleading. I recall seeing Ibram Kendi fairly accused of such pleading on Twitter, after he had told somebody to read his books. As an activist, Kendi ought to be able to make his case simply for what he wants to see happen. In Speculum Mentis, Collingwood is just reviewing his own life choices and disillusionment with his colleagues at Oxford.

As for Kendi, I once quoted him somewhere, back on December 22, 2016:

Intellectuals are open-minded. Intellectuals have a tremendous capacity to change their mind on matters, to self-reflect, to self-critique.

More than seven years later (March 26, 2024), I said Kendi

would seem to be authoritarian in outlook, if not totalitarian; or perhaps just naive.

§ 2. The Growth of Religion.

The child passes from an artistic phase to a religious phase when it starts to ask whether stories are true. The simplest thing to do then is to assert stories as true.

Perhaps I had such an experience, though I could never embrace formal religion. I say this, because when I read the Chronicles of Narnia of C. S. Lewis, I announced that I wanted to go to Narnia.

Relevant also may be something I recall from one of Beverly Cleary’s books, presumably Henry and the Paper Route. A “genius” moves into the neighborhood, and Henry hopes to use his knowledge to do fun things like rig up an intercom system between their houses. “Why not just use the telephone,” says Murph, who is more interested in reality than in playing games.

The pursuit of truth leads ultimately to philosophy, but that’s hard, and again, the simplest step beyond art is just to assert that what it makes is real.

Art itself has two phases:

• childish, unreflective;
• grown-up, deliberate.

Likewise with religion:

• primitive, polytheistic;
• mature, monotheistic.

What makes the difference is recognizing that to affirm one thing is to deny something else. Not to do this is to retreat into “religious aestheticism.” Religion makes a world and a society, and

contradiction, even in its extreme forms of persecution and war, is a function of sociability.

§ 3. Religion and its Object.

The object or ideal of

• art is the beautiful;
• religion is the holy, “the beautiful asserted as real.”

The god of a religion is described by a creed. To leave the deity as a “mere abstract unity” is also religious aestheticism, which Islam would seem to be prone to; further evidence for this is the antipathy of Islam for figurative art (Collingwood refers to “the Mohammedan negation of art”).

Idolatry is worshipping one’s own works of art as such. Religious art is bound to serve the needs of worshippers; one cannot expect it to be good as art.

§ 4. Symbol and Meaning in Religion

Science goes directly to the thought meant by a symbol. Religion does not distinguish. It may say bread symbolizes the body of Christ; however, it does not say what that body means.

That the base angles are equal, when proved for one isosceles triangle, is true for all; but God has ordained only specific things as holy.

Saints do find God everywhere. Nonetheless,

a philosopher would not be regarded as a Christian for subscribing to a statement which he declared to be a mere paraphrase of the Apostles’ Creed in philosophical terms. Indeed, the moment he began talking about the Absolute Spirit, all pious people would unhesitatingly write him down an atheist.

Religion does not understand that it speaks in metaphors and that the historical accuracy of the Bible, say, is irrelevant.

Religion does not argue. Its agnosticism could take the form of an admirable humility or a contemptible complacency.

Geometry does not argue about whether the postulates of Euclid are true. However, religion is based not on postulates, but faith. This makes it unstable, intermittent, and beset by dualisms, particularly between man and God.

§ 5. Convention

Religious morality is not principled, but conventional. Call it collective caprice, but at least it is better than individual caprice.

§ 6. The Task of Religion

Though a religion mature into “a universal Church worshipping a universal God,” it is still not done; for, “there will be no religion in heaven,” as one can infer from Revelation 21:22, concerning New Jerusalem:

And I saw no temple therein: for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it.

Religion must resolve the antithesis of subject and object, or man and God, which results from original sin (though this is not an historical claim). One cannot see anything better than the Christian solution of Incarnation and Atonement.

§ 7. The Transition from Religion to the life of Thought

The sheep of religion “always mistakes what it says for what it means.” Thus it is easy prey for the wolf of atheism or rationalism. By distinguishing symbol from meaning, theology serves as sheep-dog. It is still a danger to religion, being not itself religious, but scientific.

Saturday, February 1

I don’t know how much more historical knowledge there is now of the Councils than there was in 1924, the year of publication of the 7th edition of The History of the Christian Church: From the Earliest Times to A.D. 461 by F. J. Foakes-Jackson; still, now I’ve read the chapter on Nicaea – and to do this conveniently, formatted it in html.

In a quotation made earlier, Frye mentions

• the McCarthyism that imitated the Stalinist show trials,
• the McCarran act that imitated Soviet exclusion policies, and
• the interventions in Latin America that imitate the Stalinist attitude to the Warsaw Pact countries.

A couple of paragraphs earlier, he says,

The Cold War gave us a Soviet Union upholding an allegedly materialist ideology, at the price of

• chronic food shortages,
• sexual prudery,
• abolition of all property except the barest essentials of clothing and shelter, and
• a rigidly repressed freedom of movement.

One might suggest that the Soviet Union paralleled the early Church. This seems too easy, like the rationalist attacks on religion described by Collingwood in Speculum Mentis:

Religion … always mistakes what it says for what it means. And rationalism … runs about after it pointing out that what it says is untrue … rationalism only errs through accepting the account given by religion of itself … If the rationalist had any intelligence he would see that his attacks on religion are too easy to be sound …

Foakes-Jackson tries to convince the modern reader of the importance of getting theology straight:

But the Fathers of the fourth century were not engaged in a mere dispute about words. The principles of Arianism were a serious menace to the well-being of Christianity … If God is a mere abstraction – the Platonic ὄν – a Being separated by an impassable gulf from the world, how can He be described as loving man, or how can man’s love be directed to Him? If Christ is a created being, essentially different from God, His manifestation only reveals new gradations of being between the human and the divine, nor can it fulfil the purpose of bringing men nearer to God.

Perhaps this is of no interest to the religious person of centuries later, particularly the Protestant in a liberal democracy, if Collingwood is accurate here:

One aspect of the great paradox of religion is the fact that religion claims truth but refuses to argue. Rational truth … is essentially that which can justify itself under criticism and in discussion. But religion always withdraws itself from the sphere of discussion …

At the end of his first chapter, Frye recalls a lecturer who

was interrupted by a student who said impatiently, ‘But I want to know the truth about the Trinity.’ One may sympathize with the student, but trying to satisfy him is futile. What ‘the’ truth is, is not available to human beings in spiritual matters: the goal of our spiritual life is God, who is a spiritual Other, not a spiritual object, much less a conceptual object.

This sounds like what Collingwood calls religious aestheticism:

It is the explicitly rational character of religion that necessitates religious controversy and persecution, for these are only corollaries of its cosmological and social nature. To deprecate them and ask religion to refrain from them is to demand that it shall cease to be religion; and the demand is generally made by those shallow minds which hate the profundity and seriousness of the higher religions and wish to play at believing all the creeds in existence. This religious aestheticism, or degradation of religion to the level of play, for which a creed is a mere pretty picture to be taken up and put down at will, is only one of the enemies which religion to-day encounters, and a despicable enemy at that.

Collingwood also says things like,

for religion itself the symbol is always an end, never a mere means to the expression of an abstract concept

and

The assumption is that God is a concept, an object of thought, the ultimate reality of philosophical analysis. Now is this identification of God with the absolute legitimate? All theology assumes that it is; but it cannot be. God is the holy one, the worshipped, the object of faith.

One might think Collingwood was pejorative when saying,

one would have supposed no frame of mind to be more familiar than that in which one repeats an act or phrase in the conviction that one has expressed one’s meaning literally when, in point of fact, one has only uttered a metaphor. This is the normal way in which primitive and unsophisticated thought expresses itself.

It seems to me a metaphor is first of all a literary figure, often convertible to a simile by addition of the word “like,” and normally employed consciously, as when, in summarizing Collingwood on religion above, I brought in his metaphor of theology as sheep-dog.

In Greek grammar, tmesis is the separation of a prefix from the rest of a verb. According to Smyth and Wikipedia, the term is improperly used for Homeric Greek, where the adverbs had never been treated as prefixes in the first place.

Likewise it seems improper to speak of metaphor as a “normal” mode of speech.

In any case though, sure, “literal,” scientific speech is not the only kind of speech.

Meanwhile, near the head of Chapter 2, Frye seems quite right to say, for example, citing Blake,

the conscious subject is not really perceiving until it recognizes itself as part of what it perceives.

Thursday, February 6

I was going to suggest that history is not a process of drawing analogies, as between the Byzantine Empire and the Soviet Union, or for that matter between the Weimar Republic and the Biden Presidency.

History is about the individual, of whom Wendell Berry writes in Life Is a Miracle:

It is a curious paradox of science that its empirical knowledge of the material world gives rise to abstractions such as statistical averages which have no materiality and exist only as ideas. There is, empirically speaking, no average and no type …

The uniqueness of an individual creature is inherent, not in its physical or behavioral anomalies, but in its life …

… the Bible says that between all creatures and God there is an absolute intimacy … Edgar was being perfectly scriptural when he said to his father, “Thy life’s a miracle,” [Lear 4, 6] and so was William Blake when he said that “Everything that lives is holy” …

People who blame the Bible for the modern destruction of nature have failed to see its delight in the variety and individuality of creatures and its insistence upon their holiness …

And yet medicine does involve analogy and classification by empirical methods, and Hitler and Trump seem to be correctly classified as pathological narcissists.

Humanity is infinite in its variety, but all malignant narcissists are alike.

Thus Claire Berlinski, “Cosmopolitan Globalist,” in a new letter, “Impeach Him” (February 6, 2025):

Freud’s theories were speculative and introspective; they were not empirical in the modern, scientific sense. But his concept of narcissism has been validated and elaborated by means of rigorous psychological studies …

It is neither abstract nor unscientific … to say that someone who receives a high score on the Pathological Narcissism Inventory is far more likely than someone who doesn’t to exhibit a particular, predictable behavioral repertoire. He is far more likely to be a criminal. You do not want to marry him. You may have no use for Freud’s theory about why this is so, but if you know that it is so, you will be much less surprised by the actions of a pathologically narcissistic leader …

The psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Otto Kernberg later described the narcissistic personality structure in detail. The pathological narcissist, he reported, is invariably grandiose. His life is an endless fantasy of unlimited specialness, superiority, power, and success …

Kernberg drew some of these concepts from the work of Melanie Klein, who believed that the life of a pathological narcissist was dominated by obsessive envy …

Simply by summarizing these ideas, I’ve drawn a portrait of Donald Trump that anyone would recognize. But these seminal works on narcissism were written before he was born, or when he was still a child. His personality type has long been well known to psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, psychologists, criminologists, and historians … Donald Trump is a textbook case, literally: Around the world, when psychiatrists lecture on this pathology, they point to Trump as the most obvious example they’ve ever seen.

As with the phrase folie à millions, we owe the term malignant narcissist to Erich Fromm. It is his term for charismatic leaders whose narcissistic psychopathology devours their enemies, their societies, and ultimately, themselves …

Freud and Fromm were German Jews. Kernberg and Klein were Austrian Jews. Hitler was Patient Zero, the platonic form of the malignant narcissist … Only Hitler has been Hitler, but every malignant narcissist has been dangerous … Humanity is infinite in its variety, but all malignant narcissists are alike …

I was reading Wendell Berry because John Warner wrote in his own recent letter, “More Than Words Release Week Day 2” (February 5, 2025),

Wendell Berry’s Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition is a great example of a book that’s constructed to argue against the ideas of another, in this case, the concept of “consilience,” Edward O. Wilson’s notion that, essentially, all the questions of life and living could (and should) ultimately yield to understanding through the application of science.

Friday, February 7

Northrop Frye (1912–91) writes in The Double Vision (1991),

For the last fifty years I have been studying literature, where the organizing principles are

• myth, that is, story or narrative, and
• metaphor, that is, figured language.

Here we are in a completely liberal world, the world of the free movement of the spirit.

• If we read a story there is no pressure to believe in it or act upon it;
• if we encounter metaphors in poetry, we need not worry about their factual absurdity.

That’s on page 16 (bullets mine), in “The Crisis of Language,” which is the last of the three sections of Chapter One, called “The Double Vision of Language.”

I had been wondering why Frye needed to use the word “myth,” when it seems “story” would do.

I should have paid more attention to how Frye uses “metaphor” to mean all “figured” or figurative language.

In Smyth’s Greek Grammar, metaphor is not one of the many “grammatical and rhetorical figures,” from anacolūthon to zeugma; the list passes directly from litotes to metonymy. Nonetheless, Aristotle defines metaphor in Poetics XXI.4 (translation by Fyfe, all from Project Perseus):

μεταφορὰ δέ ἐστιν ὀνόματος ἀλλοτρίου ἐπιφορὰ ἢ

• ἀπὸ τοῦ γένους ἐπὶ εἶδος ἢ
• ἀπὸ τοῦ εἴδους ἐπὶ τὸ γένος ἢ
• ἀπὸ τοῦ εἴδους ἐπὶ εἶδος ἢ
• κατὰ τὸ ἀνάλογον.

Metaphor is the application of a strange term either transferred

• from the genus and applied to the species or
• from the species and applied to the genus, or
• from one species to another or else
• by analogy.

Perhaps Frye is metaphorically transferring “metaphor” from species (metaphor) to genus (figures of speech). Aristotle’s example of such transference is,

ἦ δὴ μυρί᾽ Ὀδυσσεὺς ἐσθλὰ ἔοργεν·

Indeed ten thousand noble things Odysseus did.

So perhaps when Frye speaks of metaphor, he does not mean to bring in, say, the doctrine of I. A. Richards, whereby a metaphor combines a tenor (such as numerosity) and a vehicle (such as a myriad).

Or perhaps he does.

It may be that “metaphor” is meant to label certain registers of speech, such as the one employed here by Jane Austen:

Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.

Frye did say, in the passage above,

if we encounter metaphors in poetry, we need not worry about their factual absurdity.

Well, etymologically speaking, fiction would seem to be poetry: each one is a making. There wasn’t really somebody called Emma Woodhouse. Austen is not lying to us though; her register shows that she is telling a story.

Perhaps one wants to say that Jane Austen Emma Woodhouse is the vehicle whose tenor is anybody who grows up indulgently, without being pushed to face the facts and do her best.

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A Turkish translation of Collingwood’s first book, Religion and Philosophy, was published with my introduction, whose English version begins,

Published in 1916, during World War I, Religion and Philosophy is the first book of R. G. Collingwood (1889–1943), but contains some of his finest writing and most inspired vision.

The vision is of a unified world …

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Speculum Mentis also divides the world, or “experience,” into art, religion, science, history, and philosophy. I tried to suggest recently that Collingwood could find a home in any one of those five modes of experience. Each one of them has its register, in the sense above, and Collingwood could speak in any one of them.

On January 14, I referred to two registers or “attitudes” that Darwin could take, described by Mary Midgley as

the two emotional responses which belong most naturally to evolutionary speculation – on the one hand, optimistic, joyful wonder at the profusion of nature, and on the other, pessimistic, sombre alarm at its wasteful cruelty …

I see now an interesting relevant remark by Frye in The Double Vision Ch. 2, § 3 (page 26):

In interviews I am almost invariably asked at some point whether I feel optimistic or pessimistic about some contemporary situation. The answer is that these imbecile words are euphemisms for manic-depressive highs and lows, and that anyone who struggles for sanity avoids both.

Frye does seem to talk a lot about mental illness (as in “the psychosis of heresy-hunting,” page 15). Well, I did too, yesterday, concerning the narcissism of the Potus. I could have brought in his dementia as well, taken advantage of by Sheinbaum and Trudeau most recently, as Claire Berlinski noted:

Mexico regularly deploys and rotates its military forces on anti-crime and counter-drug missions. In 2021, Mexico sent 10,000 troops to the border, at President Biden’s request, to stem migration. No threat of a trade war was required. It is simply a fact – easily verified – that we got nothing out of Trump’s threats. They did cost us dearly, however, in Canada’s good will, the world’s respect, and the widespread belief that the United States upholds the treaties it signs …

What [Trump] says, at any given moment, no matter how ludicrous – even if he said the opposite just days before – is reality to him at that moment, just like the dementia patients living in an eternal 1956 … He is no more capable of leading the country than those dementia patients in California who spend their days shuffling sadly past a the portrait of Ike, impatiently waiting for their long-dead wives to return from their shopping excursions.

Perhaps somebody would suggest that those patients are like the believers waiting for the Second Coming.

The question now is whether there is some kind of ontological difference between the Devil and God: the former being a “type,” say; the latter, real.

Sunday, February 9

OK, so perhaps the current Potus is better described as a solipsist than a narcissist.

The investigative psychiatrist Robert J Lifton once explained to me that Trump is a solipsist, as distinct from the narcissist that he’s often accused of being.

That’s Harper’s publisher John R. MacArthur writing yesterday in the Guardian. He continues:

A narcissist, while deeply self-infatuated, nevertheless seeks the approval of others and will occasionally attempt seduction to get what he wants … For Trump the solipsist, the only point of reference is himself, so he makes no attempt even at faking interest in other people, since he can’t really see them from his self-centered position … He delights in being attacked because it keeps him at center stage.

I see Lifton himself wrote about this in Dissent almost seven years ago (but I haven’t read far into the article). It’s not that 47 isn’t a narcissist:

An important way to understand Trump and Trumpism is as an assault on reality. At issue is the attempt to control, to own, immediate truth along with any part of history that feeds such truth. Since this behavior stems from Trump’s own mind, it is generally attributed to his narcissism (and he has plenty of that). But I would suggest that the more appropriate term is solipsistic reality. Narcissism suggests self-love and even, in quaint early psychoanalytic language, libido directed at the self. Solipsism has more to do with a cognitive process of interpreting the world exclusively through the experience and needs of the self.

Meanwhile, 47’s Rasputin is not just a white nationalist, but a white globalist. It’s a reason to try to kill USAID: this agency helps black and brown people survive and reproduce. I gathered some sources from two days ago. Here’s Malcolm Nance, “In The Trump ‘White’ House: No Spies Matter”:

In a stunning display of what I called WEI, White equity, and inclusion, Trump used his incompetent, unqualified, drunken frat bro Pete Hesgeth to issue orders that would essentially turn the United States Department of Defense into a white supremacist organization.

In one of the letters in the New York Times under the title, “An Uproar as Trump and Musk Wreak Havoc,” Charles Llewellyn of Beaufort, N.C., writes,

I was a commissioned Foreign Service officer with U.S.A.I.D. from 1986 to 2010, working on health programs in six countries … I was not a member of “a criminal organization,” as claimed by Elon Musk.

Mr. Musk has a personal vendetta against U.S.A.I.D. He rightly claims that U.S.A.I.D. helped overthrow the apartheid government of his native South Africa. Now, he is extracting his revenge, enabled by President Trump. Unfortunately, they are destroying an incredibly important institution of America’s foreign policy.

Finally, Elad Nehorai, “Elon Musk Isn’t a White Nationalist. He’s a White Globalist”:

If you know even a little about Elon Musk, you’ll know he is obsessed with birthrates … Among the many head-spinning changes we’ve seen him take with his work, the most shocking and horrific is his attempt to completely shut down USAID … Children, in particular, are some of the most protected by USAID … So why would Elon Musk want to kill hundreds of thousands if not millions of children?

If you know anything about Musk, the answer is quite simple: he is only concerned with white children and white birth rates … Rather than only trying to increase birth rates of white people and jail brown/black people/immigrants, he is also trying to reduce the populations of brown and black countries … If we were to evolve our definitions and discussions, Musk would not be termed a white nationalist. He would be a white globalist.

Meanwhile, had a first meeting to talk about Middlemarch this morning, 4–6. Sixteen people:

• Eight Twelve women, four men;
• One American, living in Turkey;
• two Chinese, living respectively in Japan and Australia;
• one American, living in China;
• one Indian, living in India (I think);
• the remaining eleven, seemingly Americans in America, three in Texas.

I thought of saying I was from DC, “where the coup is taking place,” but I didn’t. How many people would even know what I was talking about? How many others had actually voted for the regime?

We had a pleasant conversation about the first six chapters of George Eliot’s novel.

Friday, February 14

In my summary of the “Religion” chapter of Collingwood’s Speculum Mentis, I said of “The Growth of Religion,” which is § 2,

The pursuit of truth leads ultimately to philosophy, but that’s hard, and again, the simplest step beyond art is just to assert that what it makes is real.

As far as I understand, Frye condemns the early Christians for trying to get the language right about what they believed. Does he criticize the Jews for refusing to put a sculpture of the Emperor in the Temple? According to him in chapter 2,

Paul tells us that we are God’s temples: if so, we should be able to see the folly of what was proposed by the Emperor Caligula for the Jerusalem temple, of putting a statue of ourselves in its holy place.

I chanced on that by searching for the word “holy.” I wonder what the significance is for Frye of the ending of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “For every thing that lives is Holy.”

If the Great War was going to restore belief in a forgotten devil, it ought to be the right devil: so I think Collingwood argued in “The Devil” (1916):

Orthodox Christianity believes in a Devil who is, as it were, the bad child in God’s family; the “Devil” in whom people of to-day are coming to disbelieve owes much if not all of his character to the Manichaean fiction of an evil power over against God and struggling with Him for the dominion over man’s soul.

If one wants to check, here are links to pdf versions of “The Devil” in two forms:

• from an image of the original book, 34 pages, nearly size A6, file size 1.4M;
• my annotated version, 116 pages, size B6, file size 724K.

Still, Collingwood says,

The Devil is an immanent spirit of evil in the heart of man, as God is an immanent spirit of goodness.

He adds a qualification though:

… God is transcendent also, a real mind with a life of His own, while the Devil is purely immanent, that is, considered as a person, non-existent.

Nor is it even entirely true to say that the Devil is immanent … There is not one immanent Devil, but countless immanent devils, born in a moment and each in a moment dying …

That’s “metaphorical” language, I suppose. Collingwood has another warning:

There may be devils in places and in things which we generally regard as inanimate; but those which we know exist in the human mind. Of these the Devil of orthodoxy is a type or myth … as soon as the mythical nature of the belief is forgotten, as soon as the Devil is taken not as a type of all evil wills but as their actual supreme ruler, then the step has been taken from truth to superstition, from Christianity to Manichaeism.

Friday, February 14

Another seminar I’m in is with my wife alone, reading a canto a day of Dante. Today is Canto XI of Purgatorio Inferno. Every day then, we descend deeper into hell.

That’s how I feel when reading the news from the US. But then

One of the basic purposes of our culture is to interpret suffering, to make it meaningful and therefore bearable. Myth, art and religion all do this job.

There’s also an interesting idea, if it’s not a grasping at straws, that I have seen only in a little video: “extinction burst,” like what happens when you press a key, and the expected response doesn’t happen; you press repeatedly, the way the MAGA slogan gets pressed, but it’s not going to work.

Wednesday, February 19

Frye says,

With the dawn of consciousness humanity feels separated from nature and looks at it as something objective to itself.

I think this distinguishes us from computers. The idea is corroborated in “Why Kant Wouldn’t Fear ChatGPT-4” (Time, August 29, 2023), by William Egginton, who observes,

A being whose cognition consisted entirely of a set of instructions could, by definition, make no distinction between the instructions and an experience of the world outside those instructions. For such a being, its knowledge would always equate to its world, with no difference between the two. And yet, Kant saw, such a model of knowledge emphatically contradicts everything we know about our experience.

I talked about this in “Subjective and Objective.”

Frye too would seem to be saying that, as conscious beings, we do distinguish between the world and our knowledge of it.

Shannon Vallor too seems relevant here, though “The Thoughts the Civilized Keep” (Noêma, February 2, 2021) is four years old now, and one might always claim the programs are better now:

When GPT-3

• is unable to preserve the order of causes and effects in telling a story about a broken window, when it
• produces laughable contradictions within its own professions of sincere and studied belief in an essay on consciousness, when it
• is unable to distinguish between reliable scholarship and racist fantasies

– GPT-3 is not exposing a limit in its labor of understanding. It is exposing its inability to take part in that labor altogether.

Some people do think we are crude computers – “meat machines,” as Marvin Minsky put it (as I noted in “Resurrection”). A machine might work forever. Parts might wear out, but they could always be replaced.

One might pursue immortality that way, preferring it to immortality of fame, such as Achilles won.

In Canto XV of the Inferno, Dante encounters a mentor of his who sought immortality through his writing, and perhaps that was his sin – that, or ignoring the immortality that Christ had already made available to everybody.

From “Where Are the Churches in Canada’s Euthanasia Experiment?” (Plough, February 27, 2023), by Ben Crosby, an Anglican priest horrified that his own church is neutral on MAID:

The United Church, Canada’s largest Protestant denomination, produced a 2017 statement that “we are not opposed in principle to the legislation allowing assistance in dying” and that MAID “may be chosen as a faithful option in certain circumstances” …

… Perhaps the most vivid image of the mainline churches’ capitulation is a MAID death being carried out in the sanctuary of a United Church in Manitoba, complete with the minister telling journalists that there was a “sense of ‘rightness’” in this woman’s killing.

Crosby quotes prayers that the United Church makes available for the use of those who want to be euthanized:

I hope [my family] will be proud of my decision and will understand that MAID is consistent with the love and compassion of Jesus. I have such peace in knowing this is my choice.

… Daily my dignity is being eroded … I give thanks that I have still the ability to choose …

Dignity and freedom to choose are desirable, but are not what the Church is there for, at least according to Crosby. Perhaps MAID is performed out of sympathy, but

it is an ethic of sympathy divorced from its original context within a Christian theological and anthropological framework, within a moral universe in which independent self-fashioning is not the highest good. And without this framework, as we have seen in Canada, this ethic of sympathy can go terribly awry. As Flannery O’Connor puts it, “when tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror.”

That “source of tenderness” is “the person of Christ.”

The source of the O’Connor quote itself is “Introduction to A Memoir of Mary Ann,” which is included in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, selected & edited by Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, 1969.

First I found that the essay was quoted also in “The Failure of Christless Tenderness,” by John Piper, who apparently came up with the name of Christian hedonism for his conviction. He quotes O’Connor as writing,

One of the tendencies of our age is to use the suffering of children to discredit the goodness of God, and once you have discredited his goodness, you are done with him.

O’Connor was writing about

Mary Ann … a girl with a grotesque, cancerous tumor on her face. She died from it at the age of twelve. By all accounts, she was a radiantly cheerful girl, whose short life was worth living.

Friday, February 21

Frye (page 30):

But literature, even in its most mythological phases, communicates, and the dreamer cannot, without special training, understand his own dreams. Jung went a step further in identifying a collective unconscious … by definition still unconscious. The arts, said Plato, are dreams for awakened minds: only a collective consciousness can perform their communicating tasks.

Does Plato really say such a thing? Good question, especially given the ambiguity of the word “arts.” In the sense of having similar diction, the closest that I can find in the Republic is in the account of dialectic in Book VII (533b–c, Bloom translation):

all the other arts are directed to human opinions and desires, or to generation and composition, or to the care of what is grown or put together. And as for the rest, those that we said do lay hold of something of what is – geometry and the arts following on it – we observe that they do dream about what is; but they haven’t the capacity to see it in full awakeness so long as they use hypotheses and, leaving them untouched, are unable to give an account of them.

I first thought of the “evening prayer,” Republic IX (571d–2b):

But, on the other hand, I can suppose a man who has a healthy and moderate relationship to himself and who goes to sleep only after he does the following:

• first, he awakens his calculating part and feasts it on fair arguments and considerations, coming to an understanding with himself;
• second, he feeds the desiring part in such a way that it is neither in want nor surfeited – in order that it will rest and not disturb the best part by its joy or its pain, but rather leave that best part alone pure and by itself, to consider and to long for the perception of something that it doesn’t know, either something that has been, or is, or is going to be; and,
• third, he soothes the spirited part in the same way and does not fall asleep with his spirit aroused because there are some he got angry at.

When a man has silenced these two latter forms and set the third – the one in which prudent thinking comes to be – in motion, and only then takes his rest, you know that in such a state he most lays hold of the truth and at this time the sights that are hostile to law show up least in his dreams.

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I liked what Frye said here (still page 30):

Luther did not say at Worms, ‘Here I stand, because my conscience and private judgement tell me to.’ He said, ‘Here I stand, until I can be convinced otherwise by arguments drawn from the Word of God.’

Luther does sound like the fellow who sat at a table on a university campus, seven years ago, making himself an example of what he seemed to be questioning. His sign said,

Male privilege is a myth / Change my mind

To insist on being shown the error of one’s ways is a sign of privilege. Most of my students are young women, and I wish they would insist more on this privilege.

One ought to exercise the privilege in good faith, not like a friend of mine in adolescence: he enjoyed

• getting people to explain something,
• telling them, “I don’t understand,” then
• watching them repeat the explanation.

There are also times when it is expedient, at least, to trust the judgment of others. In any case, one ought to pay some attention to it. Collingwood seems right in Religion and Philosophy:

a philosopher has no right to construct the nature of morality out of his inner consciousness, and end in the pious hope that the reality may correspond with his “ideal construction.” His business as a philosopher is to discover what actually are the ideals which govern conduct, and not to speak until he has something to tell us about them.

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Frye also says the following (still on page 30):

For many creative people consciousness would only be a self-consciousness that would block and frustrate them. Let us turn to the critical faculty. The Book of Genesis tells us that God made the world in six days and rested on the seventh, devoting six days to work and one day to the contemplation of what he had done. It adds that as this forms part of God’s activity, it is a model for man to imitate.

Maybe God spends the seventh day contemplating, but “all” Genesis 2 tells us is,

1 Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.
2 And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.
3 And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made.

Maybe it depends on what one means by contemplating, but Genesis 1 tells us that God contemplates, or criticizes, or reflects, throughout his six days of work. That’s how he can come several times to the judgment, “It is good.”

I suppose God feels, while resting on the seventh day,

that agreeable afterglow of excitement when thought lapses from examination of a specific object into a suffusive sense of its connections with all the rest of our existence.

That’s George Eliot in Middlemarch, chapter 16, which I’ve just read for a Catherine Project seminar. For completeness, here’s Eliot’s description of the fire preceding the afterglow; it is not a making of anything but one person’s new knowledge:

Many men have been praised as vividly imaginative on the strength of their profuseness in indifferent drawing or cheap narration: – reports of very poor talk going on in distant orbs; or portraits of Lucifer coming down on his bad errands as a large ugly man with bat’s wings and spurts of phosphorescence; or exaggerations of wantonness that seem to reflect life in a diseased dream. But these kinds of inspiration Lydgate regarded as rather vulgar and vinous compared with the imagination that reveals subtle actions inaccessible by any sort of lens, but tracked in that outer darkness through long pathways of necessary sequence by the inward light which is the last refinement of Energy, capable of bathing even the ethereal atoms in its ideally illuminated space. He for his part had tossed away all cheap inventions where ignorance finds itself able and at ease: he was enamoured of that arduous invention which is the very eye of research, provisionally framing its object and correcting it to more and more exactness of relation; he wanted to pierce the obscurity of those minute processes which prepare human misery and joy, those invisible thoroughfares which are the first lurking-places of anguish, mania, and crime, that delicate poise and transition which determine the growth of happy or unhappy consciousness.

As he threw down his book, stretched his legs towards the embers in the grate, and clasped his hands at the back of his head, in that agreeable afterglow of excitement when thought lapses from examination of a specific object into a suffusive sense of its connections with all the rest of our existence – seems, as it were, to throw itself on its back after vigorous swimming and float with the repose of unexhausted strength – Lydgate felt a triumphant delight in his studies, and something like pity for those less lucky men who were not of his profession.

Eliot goes on at such length, I think I understand why I could not get through Middlemarch when I first started it in the nineties. Perhaps I can also understand why Virginia Woolf (at age 37) would describe it as “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.”

Tuesday, March 18

Is anything to be taken literally?

Friday, March 21

The ordinary sense of words is not the intended sense, even or especially in mathematics. Plato has Socrates point this out to Glaucon in Republic VII (526–7, Bloom translation):

“Then if geometry compels one to look at being (οὐσία), it is suitable; if at becoming (γένεσις), it is not suitable.”

“That is what we affirm.”

“Well, then,” I said, “none of those who have even a little experience with geometry will dispute it with us: this kind of knowledge is exactly the opposite of what is said about it in the arguments of those who take it up.”

“How?” he said.

“In that they surely speak in a way that is as ridiculous as it is necessary. They speak as though they were men of action and were making all the arguments for the sake of action, uttering sounds like ‘squaring,’ ‘applying,’ ‘adding,’ and everything of the sort, whereas the whole study is surely pursued for the sake of knowing.”

“That’s entirely certain,” he said.

“Mustn’t we also come to an agreement about the following point?”

“What?”

“That it is for the sake of knowing what is always, and not at all for what is at any time coming into being and passing away.”

“That may well be agreed,” he said. “For geometrical knowing is of what is always.”

In geometry,

• γραμμή is not the stroke of a pen;
• line is not a flaxen (that is, linen) thread;
• κῶνος or cone is not the fruit of a coniferous tree.

We are supposed to see through those things to some pattern or structure.

Saturday, March 22

A friend says free will is an illusion. I say there can be no illusion without reality. You cannot think something is something else, unless you have real experience of that other thing.

Likewise, if the Bible is not to be taken literally, there should be something that is. What is that?

A metaphor would seem to be an illusion. Euclid talks about scratches on a wax tablet; Apollonius talks about pinecones. We are supposed to figure out that these geometers are really talking about something else. They are not even geometers in the literal sense of “earth-measurers” or surveyors.

The account that I have just given makes sense, only if we have a way to talk about scratches and pinecones and surveying and mean scratches and pinecones and surveying.

If mathematics is to be taken literally, this is only because there is an established way to read mathematics: a way that forgets the original meanings of the words that it uses.

Once a genre such as mathematics is established, it can be used metaphorically, or illusorily, as in cartoons like this one (chosen at random).

Such cartoons show blackboards filled with nonsense that looks from a distance like mathematics, but is not to be taken literally as mathematics.

What is the Bible not to be taken literally as? (I am aware of both “history” and “fiction” as possible answers.)

---

Questions about, say, transsubstantiation or Docetism may be thought to miss the point, like questions such as,

• How did Jack Nicholson get into that old photograph at the end of The Shining?
• Is Travis Bickle dead at the end of Taxi Driver?

Those are from “Satanic Panics and the Death of Mythos” (Current Affairs, February, 2021), by Aisling McCrea, who says,

by getting bogged down in the literal objects, characters, and rules that populate the world – the “lore,” the “canon” – the fan loses sight of why the author chose to populate the world that way in the first place.

Meanwhile, I like McCrea’s essay for highlighting the practice of treating movies as a puzzle.

In high school, with a Japanese brush, I made a drawing consisting of a single stroke. Somebody asked me, “What is that?” She had missed the point. Maybe one can see a bird, or a flower, or a testicle, but any such interpretation is only accidental.

I notice that Aisling McCrea uses the word “literal” or “literally” nineteen times in her essay. I am inclined to agree with certain researchers mentioned in Wikipedia:

Beginning with the work of Michael Reddy in his 1979 work “The Conduit Metaphor”, many linguists now deny that there is a valid way to distinguish between a “literal” and “figurative” mode of language.

Wednesday, March 26

Apparently I wrote too tersely:

A friend says free will is an illusion. I say there can be no illusion without reality. You cannot think something is something else, unless you have real experience of that other thing.

Likewise, if the Bible is not to be taken literally, there should be something that is. What is that?

I thought there was an analogy. To call something an illusion is like saying something is not to be taken literally.

A mirage in the desert may look like water, but should not be read as water.

For such a warning to make sense, there should be things that both look like water and are water.

Likewise, if the Bible is not to be taken literally, I think this means the scriptures look like something else, which really is as it seems. That something else could be what Frye describes in The Great Code as

everything we are accustomed to think of as historical evidence.

I would still observe as I did a couple of months ago (Thursday, January 23),

I doubt Paul meant to say, “You know how God told us, ‘Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal,’ and so on? He didn’t mean all of that stuff literally!”

It can be argued that the Biblical prohibition is not against killing as such, but murder. Animals may be killed for meat, criminals may be put to death. What is prohibited is unlawful killing.

This doesn’t make the commandment vacuous. The point is that some killing is unlawful, and we need to figure out which.

Meanwhile, since I have never actually wandered the desert in search of water, I look at another kind of mirage: the “café wall illusion,” created by courses of bricks.

The bricks of each course alternate in color, and each new course is slightly offset from the one below.

• In reality, the courses are parallel.
• They seem not to be.
• This is an illusion, because:
  • We have better tests for parallelism than the naked eye.
  • The courses of bricks pass these tests.
  • The eye usually serves as a decent test, though it fails here.

Another example. If we are given to drinking, we are probably going to learn that the courage it gives is illusory: a false bravado. I think such learning is possible only if, in sober times, we can trust our judgment on whether to jump in a river, or knock down a hornet’s nest, or discuss war plans on an insecure channel when we are top officials of the US government.

Being drunk may impair one’s freedom of will, but one cannot know this without having experience of a freedom less impaired.

Recently I was trying to accomplish something, and it wasn’t happening. This was a clue that I was dreaming. So I woke myself up. It soon transpired that I was still dreaming, because I woke up again.

I think I’m awake now, but I guess I could be wrong, since I was wrong before. I had been reading from Dante, Purgatorio XI 25–30 (Mandelbaum translation, Everyman’s Library):

  Beseeching, thus, good penitence for us
and for themselves, those shades moved on beneath
their weights, like those we sometimes bear in dreams –
  each in his own degree of suffering
but all, exhausted, circling the first terrace,
purging themselves of this world’s scoriae.

There is still some kind of relative awakeness, of being more or less awake.

Meanwhile, to say that the Bible is not to be read literally sounds like a warning: don’t read as you normally would. I was asking then what was normal.

I think the answer depends on whether one is like Rivka Galchen, in a theater review (“New Drama,” Harper’s, March 2016, pages 80–1; see “Thinking & Feeling”), on the subject of

one of the stranger moments in the New Testament, when Jesus explains the parable of the sower to his disciples. This is the one about a farmer sowing seeds – some get eaten by birds, some land in rocky soil, but some find fertile ground and produce a good crop. When the disciples ask the meaning of the story, an irritated Jesus explains that the seeds are the Word of God, the varieties of soil are the varieties of people who hear the Word, etc. The story means just what it sounds like it means.

It seems as if Galchen’s normal, “literal” reading is the one that others may call metaphorical.

When somebody is a Good Samaritan, the illusion, if one were subject to it, would be the belief that the helper was a member of the ethno-religious group claiming descent from Israelites not subject to the Assyrian Captivity.

Sunday, March 30

I said,

I thought there was an analogy. To call something an illusion is like saying something is not to be taken literally.

Thus “That’s a lake” is to “No, it’s a mirage” as “That’s a work of fact” is to “No, it’s entirely a work of fiction.”

But there’s no point belaboring it.

Mathematics has drawn me away from reading Frye.

I put on shows for my students. I get up on a stage, I say things, I write and draw things on the whiteboards behind me. I may wield a carpenter’s square from the hardware store, symbolizing the postulate of Euclid that all right angles are equal to one another. I am not actually showing off a right angle, any more than the right index finger of Plato in Raphael’s School of Athens is pointing to the ideas.

Meanwhile, I wrote (Wednesday, February 19) about how Frye’s church supported killing people in name of dignity.

I don’t know, maybe Frye leaves people to solve their own problems. That may be what people must do anyway; however, it is not (as far as I know) the message of Christianity, especially Protestant Christianity, whereby all goods that we have are by the grace of God.

Here are my selections from a recent first-person account of Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada. That person is Stefanie Green, in “‘We’re going to talk about death today – your death’: a doctor on what it’s like to end a life rather than extend one” (The Guardian, March 15, 2025):

Harvey is straightforward with me. He knows he is dying, that it will not be long, but he wants to control the how and the when …

“My goal is to make this as comfortable and as dignified as possible. But there is a real possibility his breathing will stop before his heart does …”

Then Harvey dies exactly as he wished: being held by his children and gazing into the eyes of his wife as he begins to feel sleepy …

To my utter astonishment, there is also an immediate outpouring of gratitude for what I have just done, and for this, I’ll admit, I was unprepared.

I was becoming known … for my work in assisted dying, and the number of referrals to my office continued to climb. The latest concerned a patient called Edna …

Edna had been raised in a religious home and still had family who were deeply faithful …

Edna’s nephew Andrew and his wife were standing at the foot of her bed, pleading with her to reconsider.

“They have poisoned your mind!” Andrew thundered. “The church will never condone this. Your soul will never rest.” His anger was mounting. “We will never condone this!”

… I assured him his arguments were important but only in relation to his own healthcare and no one else’s …

I had to remind myself

• it was Edna’s disease that was killing her and
• my role was only to facilitate her free will …

I took comfort in the fact that, in the end, Edna died with dignity, holding the hand of a person who loved her, confident in her decision and empowered by a rights-based legal system.

I added the two bullets. Regarding the doctor’s remarks there:

• Edna’s disease would probably kill her if the doctor didn’t do it first. However, a miracle is always possible – not because God can break the laws of nature, but because our understanding of those laws is imperfect.
• Killing somebody may be doing them a service. I am not sure. It may give freedom to their desire. However, I don’t think it is “facilitating their free will.” (See below.)

I record some interesting passages from my other reading. Here’s an appearance of the Bible at the end of Chapter 40 of Middlemarch:

“What reason could the miserable creature have for hating a man whom he had nothing to do with?” said Mrs. Garth.

“Pooh! where’s the use of asking for such fellows’ reasons? The soul of man,” said Caleb, with the deep tone and grave shake of the head which always came when he used this phrase – “The soul of man, when it gets fairly rotten, will bear you all sorts of poisonous toad-stools, and no eye can see whence came the seed thereof.”

It was one of Caleb’s quaintnesses, that in his difficulty of finding speech for his thought, he caught, as it were, snatches of diction which he associated with various points of view or states of mind; and whenever he had a feeling of awe, he was haunted by a sense of Biblical phraseology, though he could hardly have given a strict quotation.

From Purgatorio X 121–6 (Mandelbaum translation):

  O Christians, arrogant, exhausted, wretched,
whose intellects are sick and cannot see,
who place your confidence in backward steps,
  do you not know that we are worms and born
to form the angelic butterfly that soars,
without defenses, to confront His judgment?

Tuesday, April 1

I quoted Dr Stefanie Green of Canada on fulfilling a patient’s requests for euthanasia:

I had to remind myself it was Edna’s disease that was killing her and my role was only to facilitate her free will …

I took comfort in the fact that, in the end, Edna died with dignity, holding the hand of a person who loved her, confident in her decision and empowered by a rights-based legal system.

I questioned the doctor’s notion that she was “facilitating free will.”

I think she was increasing freedom, perhaps only of the crudest sort. This is the freedom of children, alluded to by the Latin word for them, līberī.

If only through their own immaturity, children are liberated from certain worldly cares.

Still, their parents are also called līberī, at least if they are of a certain class.

The two meanings of liberi are used in the motto of St John’s College, Facio Liberos ex Liberis Libris Libraque – “I make freemen of children by books and a balance,” in the translation used by Eva Brann in “The Seal With Seven Books” (originally a “dean’s lecture” in Annapolis, apparently in 2021/2).

Adults, or “freemen,” have the freedom to bind themselves with others through legal contracts. They have the freedom to express their will through a document called a will.

I note by the way that wills are something of a theme in Middlemarch.

One can will the wrong thing, even by one’s own standards. Socrates points this out in Book I of the Republic, with the example of the man who asks for his weapons when he is not in his right mind.

It would be useful if everybody read the Republic, so that they could be asked, whenever it was relevant, what they thought of the return of the weapons.

Philosopher Kathleen Stock describes somebody who would hand over the weapons without question; unfortunately she doesn’t bring in Plato:

Possibly the most hardcore Freedom Lover there ever was, was anti-psychiatry psychiatrist Dr Thomas Szasz … He thought that if you decide to kill yourself, you have a right to noninterference from everyone else, even in the case of severe mental illness. Any reason to end your life is a good one as long as it is yours, and any attempt to stop you is an infringement on personal autonomy.

A conviction such as described would itself be crazy – or childish, it seems to me, like the people influencing and controlling at least the executive and legislative branches of the US government right now.

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Again by the way, I note comparisons being made by Claire Berlinski, Cosmopolitan Globalist, with the France that was overrun by the Nazis. She makes use of Marc Bloch, L’Étrange Défaite or The Strange Defeat.

Why are Americans – of all people! – tripping over each other in their race to submit to the whims of a man who is obviously out of his mind? …

… In the sciences, good theories are elegant. In history, it is the opposite … To understand a moral collapse of this kind, we need to consider la longue durée …

What drove the French army to disaster, Bloch concludes, was the accumulation of many mistakes. What characterized them all, however, was the inability of the French leadership to think in terms of a new war. “In other words,” he writes, “the German triumph was, essentially, a triumph of the intellect …”

… Bloch looks to the military’s culture and structure. At every level of the hierarchy, he writes, it prized blind obedience and punished initiative …

… Troops were alienated from their commanders, he writes, because the commanders enjoyed near-total impunity, no matter their shortcomings and failures, whereas subordinates were severely punished for minor infractions.

Here, too, I shuddered. Upon learning that our senior officials discussed war plans on Signal, everyone subordinate to them in our national security apparatus had the same reaction: If any of us did that, we would be going to jail.

… when leaders enjoy impunity but subordinates don’t, subordinates cease to respect their leaders …

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In my second semester of college, I overheard some young women who were in their first semester. They were discussing whether to drink that night:

“Let’s not! You know how it makes us feel bad the next day.”

“Yes, but we live for the moment!”

It is a standard conundrum, described by Aristotle in De Anima III.10 (433^b7–10; translation by David Bolotin, with his [bracketed] insertions and my bullets):

• For the intellect bids [one] to resist [desire] on account of the future,
• while desire [bids one to resist intellect] on account of the now;

for what is pleasant now appears both simply pleasant and simply good, on account of [one’s] not seeing [i.e., not looking into] the future.

• ὁ μὲν γὰρ νοῦς διὰ τὸ μέλλον ἀνθέλκειν κελεύει,
• ἡ δ’ ἐπιθυμία διὰ τὸ ἤδη·

φαίνεται γὰρ τὸ ἤδη ἡδὺ καὶ ἁπλῶς ἡδὺ καὶ ἀγαθὸν ἁπλῶς, διὰ τὸ μὴ ὁρᾶν τὸ μέλλον.

I have found the De Anima difficult reading, but perhaps it cannot be any other way and still be of value as anything other than a source of platitudes.

I am often aware of the influence of Collingwood on my thought. Now I wonder how much he was influenced by De Anima, which he lectured on, early in his career. Apparently T. S. Eliot was in attendance.

I have been pleased that images of the pages of Collingwood’s notebook on De Anima have been shared with me. However, I don’t know how insightful the notes are.

Meanwhile, on the subject of freedom, I note a recent essay that came to my attention: Antoine Davis, “I Went to Prison for Murder. God’s Word Brought Freedom.”

I asked the young man in the cell for the Bible that he had offered and I had rejected … never realizing that my pain had become my prison, first figuratively and then literally.

… Beneath the title, The Message, were broken handcuffs torn from a man’s wrists, symbolizing the freedom I desperately wanted …

I felt exposed before God’s Word …

This time, a sense of peace flooded my heart like water bursting through a broken pipe. I knew I was accepted …

All I can say is that surely there is a kind of freedom that can be enjoyed, even in prison or when beset by a debilitating medical condition.

Tuesday, April 1

Speaking of la longue durée – Dan Rather notes in his latest newsletter,

Our nation was founded on the principles of dissent and criticism. In the early 1760s, Britain imposed several direct and indirect taxes on the American colonies …

Founding father John Adams hoped historians would view the many acts of noncooperation by colonists as the real “revolution,” not the War of Independence that followed them. “The Revolution was in the Minds of the People, and this was effected, from 1760 to 1775, in the course of fifteen Years before a drop of blood was drawn at Lexington,” Adams famously wrote to Thomas Jefferson.

Adams may have written “famously,” but I didn’t know it. The letter in question is at the National Archives, who knows for how long, dated 24 August 1815:

As to the history of the Revolution, my Ideas may be peculiar, perhaps Singular. What do We mean by the Revolution? The War? That was no part of the Revolution. It was only an Effect and Consequence of it. The Revolution was in the Minds of the People, and this was effected, from 1760 to 1775, in the course of fifteen Years before a drop of blood was drawn at Lexington. The Records of thirteen Legislatures, the Pamphlets, Newspapers in all the Colonies ought be consulted, during that Period, to ascertain the Steps by which the public opinion was enlightened and informed concerning the Authority of Parliament over the Colonies. The Congress of 1774, resembled in Some respects, tho’ I hope not in many, the Counsell of Nice in Ecclesiastical History. It assembled the Priests from the East and the West the North and the South, who compared Notes, engaged in discussions and debates and formed Results, by one Vote and by two Votes, which went out to the World as unanimous.

The “Counsell of Nice” is apparently the Council of Nicaea, 325, taken up earlier.

Tuesday, April 1

A recapitulation.

The St John’s College motto begins in English, “I make free men out of children”; however, “free men” and “children” are translations of the same plural Latin noun (in different cases).

Both children and adults are free, but in different ways.

I believe the Canadian doctor was confusing those ways.

Adults have free will, children have license.

It is raising a child to adulthood that would seem to be an instance of “facilitating somebody’s free will.”

I think free will is not an event, but a cause of certain events.

I am doubtful that any suicide can be chosen entirely freely.

I am willing to allow that possibly the person Edna’s suicide was sufficiently free that it ought to be (as it was) legally permitted.

Right now though, the arguments that I am aware of are stronger against euthanasia than for it.

Wednesday, April 2

According to a review of a book about assisted suicide,

Humans might be the only mammals with advance knowledge of their own ends, yet unlike even pets we lack the right to merciful deaths.

I think there’s a problem with this rhetoric.

Pets have no particular right to be put down; we humans have the right to put them down or let nature take its course. We haven’t got such a right with respect to other humans though, because they have rights.

“People who do wish to end their lives and shorten their period of great suffering and loss – those people are out of luck in the United States of America,” Bloom writes.

People in the US are out of luck in various ways under the current regime, whose collective attitude towards health is eugenicist. It’s survival of the fittest now.

Part of what makes this book moving is Bloom’s toughness. She’s a mama bear, in the right ways. She doesn’t go overboard in explaining her moral reasoning. She doesn’t have to. Her title is her explanation.

Bloom’s title is “IN LOVE: A Memoir of Love and Loss.” I could be wrong, but it doesn’t seem practical to me to make love an excuse for homicide; careful moral reasoning is still needed.

She implicitly understood when her husband said, “I’d rather die on my feet than live on my knees.”

It might make sense for a Ukrainian to say this, in response to Russian aggression; or a Canadian or Greenlander, in response to American aggression.

However, there are problems with treating disease as if it were a human aggressor.

Being sick or otherwise needing help does not make you less human or less worthy of respect.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights begins by asserting our inherent dignity:

Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world …

Apparently dignity here is intended not to be a specifically Christian concept. This is pointed out by Sigrid Müller (who “teaches Theological Ethics at the Catholic Theological Faculty of the University of Vienna”) in a paper I found: “Concepts and Dimensions of Human Dignity in the Christian Tradition” (Interdisciplinary Journal for Religion and Transformation in Contemporary Society 6.1 [2020]: 22–55).

The article does not address euthanasia, but makes some interesting comments about Thomas Aquinas, who

mirrors the moral obligation to live up to one’s inherent human dignity in a negative way when he argues that human beings can lose their dignity if they do not act according to their reason and freedom. Thus, the loss of dignity means the failure of not living up to it.

So we can lose our dignity, but only by our own actions. Müller quotes Thomas himself:

Hence, although it be evil in itself to kill a man so long as he preserve his dignity, yet it may be good to kill a man who has sinned, even as it is to kill a beast. For a bad man is worse than a beast, and is more harmful, as the Philosopher states.

Would Thomas say it was good to kill a man suffering the indignities of a disease?

Perhaps it doesn’t matter. Thomas is not the final authority. Already, in Müller’s judgment, Aquinas shows

some shortcomings with regard to the legal consequences of a universal understanding of morality and freedom. These limitations include the idea that the death penalty is justifiable with respect to the common good of society, or the belief that slavery can be deduced from natural law …

Here are a few more interesting passages, with a key point at the end.

… Reformation theology lead to a division between the public sphere, in which reasoning and acting righteously were important, and the personal and private relationship to God, where dignity was interpreted as God’s free gift …

These developments can explain why human dignity is not present in classical human rights declarations of the 18th century, nor is it present in many important treatises based on natural law. Only Samuel Pufendorf refers to the term … Human dignity therefore is not intrinsic to human beings in the sense of being given by nature, but needs to be “reached” by dominating and overcoming fallible nature.

It is important to know that when only the second perspective (individual and personal approaches to human dignity) was taken into consideration, the danger occurred that some persons were excluded from having dignity … Without acknowledging first, the universal dimension of equality, the particular dimension of human dignity has no foundation. In this regard, the imago Dei paradigm, which relates to universality, intrinsic worth, and which, already in its origin, explicitly does not regard particular faith questions, cannot be replaced …

I’m not sure the requisite universality is not supplied by, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal …”

In any case, the point seems to be not that people deserve dignity but that we already have it (and then certain things follow).

Thursday, April 3

I refer to assisted suicide as homicide, because, as Wikipedia says,

Homicide is an act in which a person causes the death of another person. A homicide requires only a volitional act, or an omission, that causes the death of another … Homicides can be divided into many overlapping legal categories, such as murder, manslaughter, justifiable homicide, assassination, killing in war … euthanasia, and capital punishment …

We are concerned with the kind of homicide called euthanasia. I brought it up January 14, quoting a “half-Hindu, half-Sikh Indian” (Sonia Sodha) who had qualms that I shared.

There are good arguments against euthanasia, as there are against capital punishment. There are also arguments on the other side, and as I’ve tried to say, I don’t dismiss them all.

I am also not in a position to decide whether any particular person should be legally permitted to ask to be put to death.

It may be that my grandmother hastened my grandfather’s death (at home, of lung cancer) by giving him too much morphine. I have no particular issue with that. After the body was taken away, my grandmother complained that she couldn’t find the morphine bottle, because she had wanted to try some herself.

I criticized an analogy with pets. A British writer uses it too:

we love our dogs in this country, but why, at the very end of our lives, do we treat pets so much better than we treat people?

One is allowed to put down one’s dog when one wants to. Does Esther Rantzen really think one should be able to do the same to one’s husband?

Rantzen mentions a parliamentary debate. One speaker

… suggested that doctors were once able, discreetly and mercifully, to put a suffering patient’s life to an end without risking being prosecuted or struck off. But since the murders committed by Harold Shipman in the mid-90s, medical regulations have tightened and made that impossible.

Is there something wrong with such regulations then? Apparently Shipman was convicted of killing 15 of his patients, and he is thought to have killed almost 300.

Meanwhile, Rantzen laments:

I will probably not be given the chance to die in my favourite place, my New Forest cottage.

She plans to die in Zürich. Sounds like a first-world problem. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be solved, but the solution ought not to create worse problems.

On February 19, referring to an Episcopal priest, I observed:

Dignity and freedom to choose are desirable, but are not what the Church is there for, at least according to Crosby.

One can infer that I find Crosby’s argument interesting.

Crosby begins his essay:

“Church should not oppose MAID law, primate says.” So reads a recent headline of the Anglican Journal, the newspaper of the Anglican Church of Canada. In the piece, Archbishop Linda Nicholls calls for the church she leads to avoid publicly opposing the expansion of euthanasia, or medical assistance in dying (MAID), in Canada.

I suppose a “church functionary” would just go along with the archbishop. Not Crosby, who continues:

“The mood in Canada” is not “to consider what churches have to say about this,” she says, warning against “imposing Christian values.”

It’s not “imposing values” for somebody not in government to state an opinion.

Far better for the church to “focus on providing pastoral care to people who are considering medical assistance in dying,” the article paraphrases her as saying, “ensuring they have the support they need to make decisions based on the value of their life.”

“Pastoral care” might involve giving advice, even reminding somebody of the teaching that we are made in the image and after the likeness of God.

People can go wrong in assessing the value of their own lives. One may even disagree with this, while recognizing that we make different assessments at different times. Death cuts off the possibility of any future assessment. Thus Crosby seems right to question the archbishop:

Archbishop Nicholls … is arguing that on an issue of profound moral gravity, the church lacks the capacity and will to say anything to the public as a whole, or indeed even to offer definitive guidance to its own members.

As Crosby points out elsewhere:

supposedly neutral, nondogmatic pastoral care … isn’t actually value-neutral at all, but ends up reflecting a whole set of judgments about what is most important about human life – choice, autonomy, independence. And these judgments simply are not compatible with Christian teaching.

From what I read of Frye, he cared about environmental destruction in his province:

In the nineteenth-century work that transformed Ontario from a forested environment into an agricultural one, there were many largely unexamined assumptions: the immense destruction of trees and slaughter of forest animals were necessary to ‘clear’ the land, and nothing else needed to be said about it … For us too, no one who drives through the Ontario countryside can miss the reality of beauty in the woods and crop lands and running streams, or the reality of ugliness in the outskirts of towns and cities.

I should think the potential ugliness of the end of a human life would be of concern too.

Tuesday, May 6

I happened to read the Poetics recently. It constituted the last four weeks of a 22-week Catherine Project seminar on Aristotle. We started with a few selections from the Physics, then continued with all of De Anima. I brought up this work on the soul, or on soul,

• on January 20, to back up the suggestion, “perception is not neutral … we cannot perceive something without somehow desiring it”;
• on April 1, to give an instance of recognition of the conflict between taking pleasure now and planning for the future.

I don’t know that I joined the Aristotle group to fulfil any other purpose besides pleasure. I had already spent a year reading the Nicomachean Ethics with some of the same people. I wanted to see what had been done with De Anima by my old tutor David Bolotin in his 2018 translation. Joe Sachs had a great essay on the Poetics called “Tragic Pleasure” in the St John’s Review in 1995, but I did not reread it for the recent seminar; I preferred to see whether Aristotle’s own words would lead us in the same direction. I cannot say that they did.

Maybe the group ought to have read specific tragedies in conjunction, because people often wanted to talk about their own favorites anyway. Since (as I mentioned first on February 9) I was reading Middlemarch in another Catherine Project seminar, I thought of how Dorothea was a tragic hero, precisely for not being able to accomplish what George Eliot describes as “some long-recognizable deed.”

Thursday, May 15

I have a memory of one writer’s saying that Aristotle had been beneficial for him. I think the writer was David Gerrold, in The Trouble with Tribbles: The Birth, Sale and Final Production of One Episode. I cannot confirm this now, because I didn’t keep my copy of the book, and there isn’t one on the Internet Archive.

In The Principles of Art, Collingwood parenthesizes rather dismissively on the

small part of [the Poetics] which is something more than a set of hints to amateur playwrights.

For the record, here is the context, where it is said of Aristotle,

He nevertheless deliberately took upon himself the task which Socrates had left, in Republic 607 D, to ‘her champions, men who are not poets but lovers of poetry – the task of speaking on her behalf in prose and arguing that she is not only pleasant but wholesome for a city and for the life of man’. ‘She’ here, as the context shows, is not poetry but ‘poetry for pleasure’s sake, that is, representation’ (607 c). Aristotle is claiming the place of such a champion, and the Poetics (or rather, that small part of it which is something more than a set of hints to amateur playwrights) is offered as the prose speech Socrates asked for.

Myself, I think the Poetics provides an opportunity to meditate on art, but what one comes up with might not be what Aristotle intended.

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Is the purpose of life to catch a certain feeling? There seems to be a professor at Yale who thinks so. So I gather from the report of Jennifer Frey in “Taking Humanity Seriously,” which we talked about four years ago (I seem to have brought it up, Jan 4, 2021, 9:41 AM):

I introduced a familiar philosophical thought experiment aimed at generating the intuition that a good human life must have a self-transcendent dimension, that it must make contact with an objective reality outside ourselves that we can really and truly affirm is good.

That makes sense to me. Nonetheless, Frey describes a machine where

one seems to experience all the things one wishes for: love, security, professional success, and pleasures of various kinds and degrees. Of course, none of it would be real, but it would seem real …

I think such ideas go back to the Republic, where Plato has Glaucon and Adeimantus suggest that one wants to seem just without being just.

I would say the current American regime is trying to do that. It is not ultimately possible. Nonetheless, says Frey,

… Yale’s renowned expert on “the good life,” the one to whom throngs of well-heeled students go for lessons on how to be happier, enthusiastically pronounced that she would, without hesitation, lie motionless and alone inside of this machine for the rest of her days.

Perhaps the professor in question is Laurie Santos.

One may reason as follows. All there really is in life is feeling. Therefore, if it feels good, do it.

I don’t think that’s right. Thus for example I don’t think somebody like Novak Djokovic wants the feeling of being the world’s greatest male tennis player; he wants to be that player.

Still, some may say there’s no difference. Niall Ferguson wrote in a book review,

Others go further. “What I really want to know,” writes Josiah Ober, at the death of Alexander the Great, “is what it felt like to be at the centre of the world, at a moment when human history had reached one of its great turning points.”

I would say the only way to know what it feels like to conquer the world is to do it. Also, to do it takes more than wanting the feeling.

Monday, May 19

About the 1976 hit by Boston, “More Than a Feeling,” somebody wrote on Wikipedia,

Scholz wrote the lyrics based on the idea of losing someone close, and on the way in which music can connect a person to memories of the past.

Northrop Frye’s title, The Double Vision, connects me to a memory of music of the past: the 1978 Foreigner song “Double Vision.”

Never do more than I, I really need
My mind is racing, but my body’s in the lead
Tonight’s the night, I’m gonna push it to the limit
I live all of my years in a single minute

Fill my eyes with that double vision
No disguise for that double vision
Ooh, when it gets through to me, it’s always new to me
My double vision always seems to get the best of me 
The best of me, yeah-hah, yeah

In the last section, “Time and Education,” of the third chapter, “The Double Vision of Time,” of his book, Frye says,

When the Preacher said that there was nothing new under the sun, he was speaking of knowledge, which exists only in the past, and where nothing is unique. The passing of experience into knowledge is closely related to the tragic vision of life.

I am not sure I even know how to guess at what this means. Frye continues:

It is part of a reality in which at every instant the still possible turns into the fixed and unalterable past. We feel partly released from this tragic vision when we are acquiring skills, getting an education, or advancing in a religious life: there we are exploiting our memory of the past to give direction along the present.

There’s that idea of feeling again. By learning, “We feel partly released.” Is it not the case that we are released?

There aren’t a lot of ways I wish my life had been different. I do wonder whether I could have learned to make music, rather than just absorb it.

Again in the seventies, or perhaps early eighties, I heard an interview (perhaps by Rusty Hassan on WAMU) with a musician who had not made his daughters learn to play an instrument. He had not liked how his own parents had made him do it. His girls were complaining though, “If you had made us learn, we would be able to play now.” I could never decide who was right.

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My grand theme might be that of Socrates in the Republic: the distinctions between appetite, passion, and thought.

1. Appetite alone has you like a barnacle, waiting for something you want to come your way.

2. I called it passion, but it is also translated as spirit or even anger: something that will get you to your feet in pursuit of what you want.

3. You still have to think about whether it really is what you want.

Frye would seem to give an example of an appetite: the one seeking satisfaction in

Oriental techniques of meditation, Indian yoga, Chinese Tao, Japanese Zen.

I like what he says:

The genuine teachers of these techniques stressed the arduous practice that was essential to them, and pointed out the futility of trying to avoid the work involved by taking lysergic acid and the like.

By the report of Jennifer Frey that I mentioned last time, a lot of Yale students are being taught that one can “avoid the work,” at least in principle.

From what I hear now, lots of students are trying to avoid work by means of AI, but maybe then their teachers are at fault for giving the impression that learning is something that might be had without work.

Three months ago, I quoted Chapter XVI of Middlemarch on Dr Lydgate’s experience of

that agreeable afterglow of excitement when thought lapses from examination of a specific object into a suffusive sense of its connections with all the rest of our existence.

The third paragraph of Chapter XV covers a page and a half. George Eliot sure can be verbose, though she is not alone! She concludes as follows.

The page he opened on was under the head of Anatomy, and the first passage that drew his eyes was on the valves of the heart. He was not much acquainted with valves of any sort, but he knew that valvae were folding-doors, and through this crevice came a sudden light startling him with his first vivid notion of finely adjusted mechanism in the human frame. A liberal education had of course left him free to read the indecent passages in the school classics, but beyond a general sense of secrecy and obscenity in connection with his internal structure, had left his imagination quite unbiassed, so that for anything he knew his brains lay in small bags at his temples, and he had no more thought of representing to himself how his blood circulated than how paper served instead of gold. But the moment of vocation had come, and before he got down from his chair, the world was made new to him by a presentiment of endless processes filling the vast spaces planked out of his sight by that wordy ignorance which he had supposed to be knowledge. From that hour Lydgate felt the growth of an intellectual passion.

Lydgate developed a passion.

Perhaps I developed a similar passion in high school, when I read “π is Irrational” (Chapter 16 of Calculus, 2d edition, 1980, by Michael Spivak). I had a kind of vision. I recalled it, a couple of years later, when we read The Confessions in Santa Fe.

Since my own vision had not involved God, Augustine’s vision was different. At least, that’s what somebody else in seminar said. That’s fine. I didn’t get any particular insight into the question when I read The Confessions in a Catherine Project seminar in the fall of 2022.

Back in 1987, having graduated from the college, not sure what to do next, I was reading Pascal. On December 13, I wrote a classmate who had gone to live at a Zen center in California (see “Interconnectedness”):

In my cursory readings of that book called Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, I have wondered whether the goal of the Zen Buddhist may not be called “knowing everything.” Well, it would have to be a strange kind of knowing. I wonder this because while working last spring on my senior essay, I came to think that if one understood the law of contradiction, there would be nothing left to understand. The law, then, might be called a symbol for the interrelatedness that Pascal mentions. If one understands that a thing cannot both be and not be, one understands things and how being relates them. Anyway, the law is a basis for logic, and so with logic one will not understand it, but the koans flout logic, as in

Wakuan complained when he saw a picture of bearded Bodhidharma, “Why hasn’t that fellow a beard?”

The student of Zen is said to meditate on such a story until he can give an account of it. Methinks such an account is a kind of account of the law of contradiction, – but then, I could not understand the account until I could give it myself.

It is well to remember that in a story in that book of Zen writings, a physician wanting to learn about Zen is told “Zen is not a difficult task. If you are a physician, treat your patients with kindness. That is Zen.”

I did not receive a direct response to that letter. I did hear indirectly, if I may say so, that I had understood Zen better than 90% of the people at the Zen center. I figured my classmate had found herself surrounded by people who didn’t do their chores; or perhaps they nitpicked about how other people did their chores.

“If you are a physician, treat your patients with kindness. That is Zen.” In Middlemarch then, Dr Lydgate would seem to have Zen. That seems to be a message of the book. His scientific passion never led to great discoveries, but at least he was able to give his wife the kind of life she wanted. This was thanks to Dorothea Ladislaw, née Brooke, whose own youthful passion was not like that of Teresa of Avila, leading to the founding of a new contemplative order of nuns; nonetheless,

the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

Tuesday, May 27

As the President of the United States of America wrote recently,

HAPPY MEMORIAL DAY TO ALL, INCLUDING THE SCUM THAT SPENT THE LAST FOUR YEARS TRYING TO DESTROY OUR COUNTRY THROUGH WARPED RADICAL LEFT MINDS

To remember properly: is it a happy thing?

Angels have no memory. That is what Dante has Beatrice observe in Paradiso XXIX (76–81). At least, angels might as well have no memory, since they are always in sight of what should be remembered:

  These beings, since they first were gladdened by
the face of God, from which no thing is hidden,
have never turned their vision from that face,
  so that their sight is never intercepted
by a new object, and they have no need
to recollect an interrupted concept.

I have cut and pasted the verses (in Mandelbaum’s translation) from the Digital Dante at Columbia University.

Columbia is one of the universities being brought to heel by the regime.

As for the regime’s vandalism in general, a recent lesson from Heather Cox Richardson of Boston College puts it in perspective:

the anti-intellectual impulse behind Trump’s attacks on higher education has a long history in the United States.

That history reaches at least as far back as the 1740s, when European-American settlers in the western districts of the colonies complained that men in the eastern districts, who monopolized wealth and political power, were ignoring the needs of westerners. This opposition often took the form of a religious revolt as westerners turned against the carefully reasoned sermons of the deeply educated and politically powerful ministers in the East and followed preachers who claimed their lack of formal education enabled them to speak directly from God’s inspiration.

Perhaps somebody else has a different take on the history here. I can only ask of the “westerners” in question: if God gave us the world for our use, didn’t that include our brains?

Everybody should read Richardson, it seems to me. Of course another historian may have a different emphasis, as I see was pointed in The Nation, in the January before the last US Presidential election. The following is from “Heather Cox Richardson and the Battle Over US History,” by another historian of America, Kim Phillips-Fein, then of New York University, now Columbia:

Historians have been divided, roughly, into two camps … by arguing that egalitarianism is the authentic creed of the country, she does align herself with one side more than the other. But she also wants … to keep the ideals of American democracy and egalitarianism but to change the heroes. In her telling, the very people who have been most excluded throughout American history are the ones who have most forcefully advanced its central ideas and principles …

In certain ways, Richardson’s account resembles that of Howard Zinn … But … she has little to say about the leading figures in Zinn’s account, namely the radical activists …

Richardson also seems to elide some of the divisions among those seeking to keep the United States true to its founding principles …

When we look at politics today, those opposing Trumpism are also divided about their ultimate political goals … As de Crèvecoeur wrote: “Here are no aristocratical families … we are the most perfect society now existing in the world.” But even when Crèvecoeur wrote this, his egalitarian vision was not the only or even the prevailing one, and today its radicalism stands out far more than Richardson’s account suggests.

As for memory as such, the topic I started with, I think it means we are less like computers then angels are.

Computers can store our memories. However, according to Socrates in the Phaedrus (275a), such storage helps us only to forget. We have no need to recollect what we can always look up.

According to Socrates’s story, after the Egyptian god Theuth invented letters (along with games and mathematics), the god-king Thamus pointed out,

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So Theuth has invented a pharmakon of hypomnêsis, not of mnêmê itself. The drug provides a seeming, not a being.

When he has Socrates say that, we are allowed to think that Plato is playing around.

Apparently the title of Aristotle’s Topics refers to a memory trick: for ease of recall, associate a bit of rhetoric with a location: a topos. Instead of relying on memory, one can write down one’s bits in a book: a commonplace book.

That’s according to the slides of a talk, “Some things a logician would like to know about human reasoning,” by Wilfrid Hodges – who once told me that he could remember hearing the voice of Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) as it came shouting over the telephone into the ear of a professor at Oxford.

On May 19, I quoted something Northrop Frye said about memory that didn’t make a lot of sense to me. He was talking about Ecclesiastes:

When the Preacher said that there was nothing new under the sun, he was speaking of knowledge, which exists only in the past, and where nothing is unique. The passing of experience into knowledge is closely related to the tragic vision of life. It is part of a reality in which at every instant the still possible turns into the fixed and unalterable past. We feel partly released from this tragic vision when we are acquiring skills, getting an education, or advancing in a religious life: there we are exploiting our memory of the past to give direction along the present.

It seems to me that learning and knowledge automatically give us more than a feeling. For example, knowledge is correct or not; a feeling isn’t.

Tuesday, May 27

I was bothered by a sentence:

We feel partly released from this tragic vision when we are acquiring skills, getting an education, or advancing in a religious life …

I thought learning was more than a feeling.

This would seem to be corroborated by a study I encountered, “Measuring actual learning versus feeling of learning in response to being actively engaged in the classroom.”

Apparently students of physics at Harvard feel as if they learn better from a traditional lecture, but they do learn more under a regime of “active learning.”

It seems to me St John’s practice would fall under the rubric of “active learning.” The study in question describes it thus:

In the experimental group, the instructor actively engaged the students using the principles of deliberate practice: students were instructed to solve the sample problems by working together in small groups while the instructor roamed the room asking questions and offering assistance. After the students had attempted each problem, the instructor provided a full solution that was identical to the solution given to the control group. Students were actively engaged throughout the class period, making the experimental group fully student-centered.

Obviously students will learn better this way than by being lectured to. However, it is not obvious to the students themselves:

when students experienced confusion and increased cognitive effort associated with active learning, they perceived this disfluency as a signal of poor learning, while in fact the opposite is true.

Therefore the authors conclude,

We recommend that instructors intervene early on by explicitly presenting the value of increased cognitive efforts associated with active learning. Instructors should also give an examination (or other assessment) as early as possible so students can gauge their actual learning. These strategies can help students get on board with active learning as quickly as possible.

I might ask: can you thus lecture to students about what is of value, and expect it to take hold?

Also, perhaps performance on traditional examinations is not actually the best measure of what one has learned in college.

I helped create my department’s SJC-style Euclid course in 2011, here in Istanbul. I continue to lead a section about every other year. Last fall’s experience makes me wonder whether there is any point continuing, since I wasn’t able to get anything out of the students. They may have presented their propositions well enough, but they never wanted to talk about anybody else’s.

On the other hand, I have also been teaching my axiomatic set-theory course about every other year, and this spring’s students, though few, were as interested as ever. I could cover some material that I had never got to before. One student attended every class, just for her own pleasure; she was not officially registered. Other students asked to be assigned exercises that they could do at the board. (True, they didn’t always show up next time to make their presentation.)

Sample question: In the ordinals, prove or disprove

It’s false, since for example, ω being the first infinite ordinal,

Back in 1997, when I was a postdoc at the University of Illinois, there was an orientation for new faculty in the mathematics department, and a professor reviewed his list of favorite complaints from students about their courses.

One was, “The lectures were so bad, I had to learn everything for myself.”

The professor reported giving that student his hearty congratulations.