Christoph von Dohnanyi

I just listened to von Dohnanyi's Cleveland recording of Bruckner's 5th symphony.

He is one of a group of conductors--others include Herbert Blomstedt, Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, Michael Gielen, and the now-deceased Gunter Wand--who give me a lot of inspiration. Pushing 90 years old, they are at the height of their knowledge, wisdom, musical passion, and communicative power. They give me hope that I still have time to accomplish something in the years left to me.

The Population Problem

From Alternet: Too Many Humans

Overpopulation is one of the biggest problems we face, perhaps the main source of many of our other environmental and economic difficulties. Wikipedia tells me that the highest estimates of Earth's carrying capacity is 16 billion humans (a number we are likely to reach and surpass by the end of the century). I suspect the number is closer to 1 billion, or less.

Empowering poor people, especially poor women, with knowledge and resources, seems like an answer (which won't solve but will at least mitigate the problem) which everyone besides religious extremists can get behind.

The Really Big One

A few weeks ago, links to this New Yorker article were popping up around the Internet. Understandably, people in the Pacific Northwest were getting particularly excited about it.

Inspired by this attention, last night the University of Oregon held a "public forum" about this. In the two hours that I was there, several scientists and an emergency response coordinator talked about what's likely to happen, what would be the cause, how measurements are being and should be taken for early warning, and what one should be prepared to do. I had to go catch my bus before they got to the question-and-answer session.

(Despite what the New Yorker article says, Eugene is far enough inland that it will avoid any tsunamis, and none but the flimsiest of buildings is likely to totally collapse. However, basic infrastructure--roads, bridges, electricity, water, sewer, food and energy distribution--are likely to take from several months to a year or more to re-establish. That's for a magnitude 9 earthquake, which is about 15% likely in the next fifty years.)

Thoughts:

1)  that we didn't really know about seismic volatility of the Pacific Northwest until just recently. There's so much yet that we don't really know, even about things of direct importance to us.

2) that the Native inhabitants had memories of earthquakes and tsunamis in their oral history, to which of course we paid no attention.

3) if the United States is to have a humane, progressive, ecologically responsible future, much of the conceptual and technological innovation is likely to come from this area. But only if Seattle and Portland (and Eugene!) continue to exist in something like our present form.

4) a thought that's harder to formulate. So much of human civilization is built with reckless disregard for the local or global environment it depends on being situated in. If we cared about what's good and worth preserving of humanity and its history and culture, we'd reduce our population to sustainable numbers, stop destroying the planet as a whole with our effluvia, located ourselves in the relatively less precarious places, leave some space to the uncounted other species that also call earth home, and work like hell to establish some outposts on other worlds as a backup. But we're doing almost nothing on any of those tasks, and won't.

5) Don't count on the government to be there to do anything but make things worse. Remember Katrina.

Right-brain philosophy

This video (The Divided Brain) talks about the modern update to the popular but no-longer-sustainable understanding of the differences between the left and right hemispheres.

Assuming the perspective of the video, I take my favorite philosophers to be engaged in the task of bringing right-hemisphere balance to the philosophical conversation. (Particularly, William James, Henri Bergson, and Alfred North Whitehead.) (I suspect that Heidegger was up to something similar, but I understand his work far less well.)

And I think that twentieth-century philosophy can be seen as a story of left-hemisphere counter-insurgency. Positivistic analytic philosophy in the Anglophone sphere. Either structuralism, cynicism, or yet another return to neo-Kantianism in the Continental sphere.

Our post-work future

People talk about a post-work and post-scarcity future. It all sounds rather breathless, science fiction, techno-utopian. The things is, we are already there--or at least at a point in our development in the first world, where what we need and genuinely want could be produced by something like 15-20 hours a week of labor.

But:
1) Advertising has been designed to pump up what are (for lack of a better term at the moment) "inauthentic" wants. (Marx lives!)
2) We don't have infrastructure to distribute the wealth we have so that regular people can subsist in such a society. (Universal basic income!)
3) Our culture hasn't developed so that people know how to meaningfully use their liberated time. Education is needed. It's not that the resources and opportunities aren't there (give or take, depending on the area of interest), it's just that we haven't evolved into thinking in those terms.

Anyway, this article in The Atlantic is an interesting look at the issues.

A World without Work

Resurrection

As noted in the previous post from a couple of months back, I have been working over the summer on a paper to submit for a conference. I'm nearing the end of that, so I thought I'd take the time for a couple of notes here about other things that have happened recently.

On July 12, Sandra and I went to the Oregon Bach Festival's performance of Mahler's 2nd symphony, titled "Resurrection". (My favorite piece of music, one that's meant a tremendous amount to me in a variety of contexts over the years. All of Mahler's symphonies mean a lot to me as I take the time to inhabit the worlds they create, but it's the 2nd that I always come back to.)

I didn't know how much to expect from this performance. Especially in the era of "historically informed performance", Bach and Mahler occupy rather different corners of the classical music universe. And Matthew Halls, the conductor, is someone I've never heard of before (though Sandra happened to run into him at Resurrection

And it was....perfect. I had no occasion to stop and question the conducting or performance, because I was hearing the music of Mahler from beginning to end, delivered with the utmost passion and devotion to the music. This is far more rare than it ought to be.

I believe it is the only concert I've attended that brought tears of emotion. I haven't listened to the 2nd symphony since, so as to not lose what I have of the memory of this performance. (Don't worry, I will.) But for those of you who didn't have this experience, I'll give you another good performance for your enjoyment.

The theme of resurrection is, of course, very Christian. Unlike Lutheran Bach and Catholic Bruckner, Mahler's religious/spiritual biography is complicated. Like Beethoven's, perhaps, but even more so. Mahler began, and arguably remained at heart, a Czech Jew. However, in order become conductor of the Vienna State Opera in the senescence of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he had to convert to Catholicism, and did, seemingly without qualm. Looking at his music reveals a syncretist spirituality that was at its core Pantheistic. You get Jewish folk tunes throughout, settings of Catholic hymns and legends of at least one saint, Cinese nature poetry, and texts from Goethe and Nietzsche. And that's where I'm at: a naturalistic pantheist who takes inspiration from a variety of sources. I don't believe in resurrection after death, but do believe that the idea of resurrection can mean something in the course of one's life. And that music can be a part of it.

Moushka Helping with the Project

My Summer Project

I've started working on a paper to submit to SAAP (the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy), which is going to have their annual conference in Portland (just down the road, sort of) in March. The paper is due September 1.

SAAP Call for Papers

So I am--if with some hesitancy--dipping my toe back in the world of academia, if as an "independent scholar"--that phrase freighted with so much baggage. My prediction, though, is that independent scholarship will soon be more the norm than the exception. So, really, I'm ahead of the times.

Turkeys

I've let the blog languish somewhat. I thought I'd share some "wildlife" I encounter in my daily perambulations.

Crazy for Wagner

Georg Solti conducting, a little crazier than usual.

A Sliver of Consciousness

On Friday I attended the George Lakoff lecture at the University of Oregon.

The basic theme--cognitive schemata, frames, and metaphor theory applied to the current landscape of American politics--is the one he's devoted himself to largely supplanting his work in linguistics for the last decade. Given that, I got more from the talk than I expected.

One claim he made is not so surprising yet still provocative: that 98% of our behavior is unconscious.

If this be true (and, give or take quibbles about the exact percent, the boundary between consciousness and unconsciousness, etc., it is likely to be) then what is the use? Why try to figure out the meaning of life, or the meaning of anything, if even a good answer applies to only two percent of our behavior?

The key is the role of consciousness in the formation and modification of habit. Though most of our behavior, the relatively or completely unconscious part, is habitual--William James noted the important role of consciousness in modifying our habits.

As such, that 2% comes with an important modifier effect. It can, successively over the course of time, shape a much larger amount of unconscious habit. That is the scope of our freedom, and our responsibility.

Have we given up on space?

Spaced Out - Aeon Magazine

I was more a child of the 80s than the author's 70s; but on the other hand, I was raised more on older science fiction novels than contemporary science fiction movies.

It does seem like we've largely given up the explorer's impulse--one that still seemed part of the geekier side of the culture into the 80s, or even into the 90s with the popularity of Star Trek: The Next Generation. But there's no talk now about going boldly. It almost seems...with the second space shuttle disaster, we turned out the lights and shut the door on that era.

Have we no more tolerance, let alone appetite, for risk? Then we have entered the senescence of our species.

Science, Speculative Philosophy, and the Expansion of Experience

In a previous post I noted Alfred North Whitehead's definition of speculative philosophy. In this post I ask the question: given that speculative philosophy is a creative endeavor, what is its relationship to science?

I've posed this question to somebody in a much better position to offer an insightful answer. But until he gets the chance to respond, I'll share a thought of my own.

Whitehead himself spent most of his career as a mathematical physicist, with philosophy as a side interest that he didn't write much about until fairly late in life. Pierce, responsible for his own works of speculation (though not set forth nearly so systematically as Whitehead) studied chemistry, worked in geodesy, and thought of himself primarily as a mathematician and logician. Both knew and respected science, and had a keen sense of when they were venturing beyond it.

Reprising Whitehead's quote from the previous post:

Speculative Philosophy is the endeavor to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted. (p. 3)

Science has greatly expanded the number and scope of the elements of our experience that Whitehead refers to. Observationally, we can look much farther into space with our telescopes. To smaller levels with our microscopes. To different ranges of the spectrum of light with our various detectors.

Also added to our experience are the understanding of relationships that scientists have worked out from the range of things they have seen. These days, we "see" apples falling under the influence of gravity, whereas in the past they were seen to be returning to the earth because they were also composed of earth.

While we acknowledge how incredibly expanded our experience is because of what science gives us, we shouldn't forget the narrowing it also involves. If an observation or experiment cannot be replicated, science cannot work with it. Usually this will simply mean that the observer or experimenter was mistaken, and we should accept this as the default assumption that will be correct in most cases.  But it is at least theoretically possible that it was a truly one-of-a-kind experience, never to be repeated.

Whitehead and Peirce were wise enough to recognize the possibility of such experiences. (William James went further, rushing to embrace them.)

If speculative philosophy is to answer to our experience: in the modern era, science provides most of this experience. It's possible that our current understanding of that expanded experience will undergo minor or even major revision--the history of science displays page after page of examples. So it's OK for speculative philosophy to go not just beyond but also against current science. But it must recognize that it does so on borrowed coin. The number of claims that it makes in the face of science, and the length of time it maintains those contrary claims, constitute a debt upon which interest compounds rapidly.

Does a Particle have a Personality?

(I once heard of somebody who named their two cats Article and Particle. But I digress...)

Among the many things I'm currently in the middle of reading is Lisa Randall's Warped Passages. It's a good way for a layman to learn a bit about many recent developments in theoretical physics. Even if some of her stories are a bit hokey and her name-dropping a bit grating.

I was led to the following thought:

Generally a mathematical abstraction is just that, an abstraction of certain aspects of objects (or situations or experiences or whatever). They gather together what entities have in common, explicitly leaving aside what makes them individuals, unique. Uniquenesses do not mathematical relations make.

When statisticians count "households" in a demographic, there's no concern for who is arguing with whom under any particular roof. We count nine planets (wait...eight...damn you Neil DeGrasse Tyson...) without in counting distinguishing that Saturn has rings and Mercury does not.

But particles are represented differently, as nothing beyond pure abstraction. There is nothing that makes them individuals. A photon is a photon is a photon. Same with electrons, etc. Any can be replaced with another of its own kind, and this replacement makes not the slightest bit of difference.

But...can this be right? Does a particle's individual history not matter at all, not serve to distinguish it from others of its kind? Does photon #17483 have no individual quirks and eccentricities that serve to distinguish it from photon #334981?

For nothing at scales above simple molecules is this true. Unicellular organisms are (barely) distinguishable individuals. Galaxies and galactic clusters are unique. Potentially, so are universes, with separate sets of physical laws (or at least separate constants and parameters of those laws) and different, quite complex histories.

Is there a scale of sizes of things such that, when we get small enough, we suddenly (or is it gradually) transition from the incorrigibly unique to the thoroughly interchangeable?

An Atheist Search for God

From Salon.

From this article, I'm quite interested to read the rest of Nancy Ellen Abrams' book.

What she describes is much along the lines of the sort of spirituality I look for, and try at times to articulate. I hesitate to bring in the words "religion" and "God" for the result. I find those terms so tied to, and evocative of, anthropocentric monotheism and its history that I despair of re-purposing them for something so different, so much more honest and better. (Whereas some people find the word "spirituality" irredeemably cheapened by kitsch, New Age uses.)

Others (besides Abrams) disagree with me.  Alfred North Whitehead held on to it, for instance, while dismissing the Abrahamic religions (and others) as "the last refuge of human savagery".  He speaks in Religion in the Making about the religion and the gods we've had so far as being humanity's savage prehistory of the real religion to come. (I'd have to read back through the work to find the exact quote.)  Sadly, those who appropriate Whitehead have not learned from him and have used him as "inspiration" for a lot of Protestant treacle.

There is a lot of very substantial beauty that comes as an somewhat incidental by-product of traditional religion. Sacred music and church architecture, for two examples. But the aesthetic appeal of the beliefs, and the texts in which they are expressed, are surpassed by innumerable orders of magnitude by the beauties of the natural world, on this earth and in the wider cosmos. Do not worship and obey. Instead, wonder and learn.

Nietzsche's Individualism

When a traveler who had seen many lands and national and several continents was asked what characteristic he discovered to be common to all of humanity, he replied: "They have a tendency toward laziness." To many it will seem that his reply would have been more accurate and valid if he had said: "They are all fearful. They hide behind customs and opinions." At bottom, every human being knows perfectly well that he lives in the world just once, as a unicum, and that no coincidence, regardless how strange, will ever for a second time concoct out of this amazingly variegated diversity the unity that he is. He knows this, but he conceals it like a bad conscience. Why? Out of fear of his neighbor who demands convention and who cloaks himself with it. But what is it that forces the individual to fear his neighbor, to think and act like a part of a herd instead of taking pleasure in being himself? Modesty, perhaps, in a few rare instances. In most instances it is convenience, indolence--in short, that tendency toward laziness of which the traveler spoke. He is right: human beings are lazier than they are fearful, and what they fear most are those hardships that unconditional honesty and nakedness would foist upon them. Artists alone despise this lethargic promenading draped in borrowed manners and appropriated opinions, and they expose the hidden secret, everyone's bad conscience, the principle that every human being is a one-of-a-kind miracle. They dare to show us how every human being, down to each movement of his muscles, is himself and himself alone; moreover, they show us that in the strict consistency of his uniqueness he is beautiful and worthy of contemplation, as novel and incredible as every work of nature, and anything but boring. When the great thinker disdains human beings, it is their laziness he disdains, for it is laziness that makes them appear to be mass-produced commodities, to be indifferent, unworthy of human interchange and instruction. The human being who does not want to be a part of the masses need only to cease to go easy on himself; let him follow his conscience, which cries out to him: "Be yourself! You are none of those things that you now do, think, and desire."

(from "Schopenhauer as Educator" in Unfashionable Observations, p. 171-172)

Or in contemporary slang: do you.

What is (Speculative) Philosophy?

Some time back, I was happy to discover in Gilles Delouse and Félix Guattari's What is Philosophy? others who shared my sense of what philosophy is. In their terms, it is the "creation of concepts". I pushed this further: I think that what a philosopher does is the creation of world-views; creation of individual, specific concepts can occur within the specific sciences, when scientists are doing philosophical/foundational work in their disciplines. But the point is, Delouse and Guattari share we me the thought that philosophy is primarily artistic, rather than analytical or argumentative.

But there are downsides. Most of this work's prose is incomprehensible--even if you read it in English as I did. They are far more interested, it seems, in dadaist language play than in saying what they have to say.

Enter Alfred North Whitehead. I started reading his work and learning about his thought in 2008, just after I have my revelation regarding the core of my own philosophic thought. I realized that much of what Whitehead thought was very close to my own philosophy that was beginning to take clearer shape.

However, the most central and important of his works, Process and Reality, comes with a daunting reputation. I've seen it described as one of the most obscure texts in the Western philosophical tradition. So I was cautious to jump in, feeling that I needed to line up a set of secondary works to help me get through.

This week, I decided it was time to jump in, and see what I could make of it. And so far (just a few pages in, admittedly), it's going just fine.

In the first few pages, Whitehead defines "speculative philosophy"--the task he is setting himself. I find this a more satisfying, helpful guide to what the task of philosophy is.

Speculative Philosophy is the endeavor to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted. (p. 3)

He continues in this section and the next few to elaborate the meanings of each of the components of this definition.  It bears a striking resemblance to the account of scientific inquiry given by Peirce. For Whitehead imagination (what Peirce called abduction or reproduction) is essential to both philosophy and science--there is no mere deduction from observation. Rather, one starts from some arena of experience. One formulates general principles that seem capable of accounting for what is fundamental to those experiences, and amenable to application to further experience. Then, if the principles fall sufficiently short in accounting for further experience, we go back to the drawing board.

Whitehead says that we will never get to a final set of principles, but that we will approach one asymptotically. Peirce thought that a community of inquirers would converge on the truth, over the long run.  I do wonder if either of these formulations leave enough room for the creativity at the end that they have brought in at the beginning. Could different philosophers end up having created different sets of principles differently expressed, equally adequate to experience? My thought is, yes. But my sense is that Whitehead and Peirce think that scientists and philosophers will converge on single answers.

Despite this possible criticism, I strongly appreciate how Whitehead maintains Deleuze and Guattari's appreciation for creation, for the artistic element in philosophy, while also insisting that this creation must answer to both logical and empirical constraints that the French writers completely ignore.

The Creative Life of Nature

The story of Ernst Haeckel, a fascinating figure in the world of late-19th century biology.

This bio tells of his love for art, how that pulled him away from science, and how eventually he learned to integrate the two. It reminds me, in a way, of the story of William James. James' first professional education was as a painter; he apprenticed with William Morris Hunt, before deciding to pursue science (in medical training and research).

What is the relationship between science and art? "Pure" science studies the beauty that nature creates. Science could be call "art appreciation" writ large, were it not that in our culture "art appreciation" sounds like a trivial pursuit.

Human art is our attempt to make our own intentional contribution to nature's beauty, to participate in nature's creative life. As such, all our paintings and drawings, all our novels and stories, all our music, etc., are the smallest fraction of a fraction of the creative work of nature. This is an important perspective to take when judging the relationship between science and art. It is understandable that we disproportionately value our intentional creations, but in doing so we risk missing a lot. Particularly when the worlds of art and science are set in opposition, rather than seen as facets of the same project in the way that Haeckel came to see them.

Basic Income Guarantee

Basic Income Guarantee - Priceonomics

Another positive after skeptical consideration take on the universal basic income.

The Future is Hot

Scorched Earth - Aeon Magazine

Continuing with today's parade of happy thoughts.

As dark as the prognosis in this article is, I think it may perhaps not be gloomy enough.

We're facing an era of increased resource wars. We already have them--it's the story of the Middle East and of the Middle Asian -stans  since at least 1980s. Just wait until the battle isn't just over energy to fuel modern civilization, but a desperate scramble for the fresh water needed for life itself.

Toss in an intensification of the already-present apocalyptic religion (not necessarily referring to one in particular--there's a bewildering buffet of old- and new-fangled options). With access to nuclear weapons. (Much of the old Soviet arsenal is in Kazakhstan, and too much of it is unaccounted for--just one example.)

Or how about the nanotechnology we may develop and deploy to address the problems? There's the "gray goo" scenario: out of malevolence, or just for the LOLZ, that technology gets hacked to destroy the matter it comes into contact with.

I would say it's more likely than not that most of life on earth, including most of humanity, won't survive the next hundred years. If we are "lucky" in a very relative sense, then humanity will carry on in either of two precarious scenarios: 1) a small contingent (closer to a million, perhaps, than the 500 million the author speculates) in enclosed communities on the cooler edge of a very hot and dying planet, or 2) a few groups taking the "Hail Mary" chance of setting out in spaceships, not knowing where they will go, or if they'll find the resources to carry on for more than a few months, but finding this chance the best of their desperate options.

I've asked myself, what is the role of philosophy, with such a prospective future? What is its point?

There are three possible answers:

1. To help preserve the work of those thinkers worth preserving. Be the librarians, promoters, and teachers, so that what they have done has a chance of being remembered and carried forward.
2. More generally, send messages, wisdom, to whoever might make it through the dark age to come. To give them whatever tools might avail them to re-build civilization, one that duly chastened by the near-destruction of everything earthly, may actually have gained enough wisdom to cooperate on building something to last.
3. To learn about and philosophize upon the vastness, the infinitude of beauty beyond the earth, that which will survive long past whatever happens on this one planet. To attest that life carries on, be it organic life on other worlds, or the inorganic "life" of those worlds themselves, or their stars, or galaxies, or of the universe itself. Maybe along the way we'll learn about nearby parallel universes, perhaps one in which we learned to love the beauty of our world rather than relentlessly defoul, devour, and destroy it.

One that I've come to believe is not an answer: seeking the conceptual tools to argue for the prevention of what is to happen (for instance, by doing environmental philosophy). For one thing, we already know what's wrong. And we already understand the human frailties, vanities, and cupidities that brought us to this place. More important, though, as James Lovelock argues and an increasing number are coming to understand: we are already past the point of no return. It's too late to break now, we're going to hit the wall.

The Fermi Paradox

The Fermi Paradox. On the search for extraterrestrial life, and why we haven't found it.

There's a lot here, a lot to ponder and chew on. So go read the article and give it some time.  I'll need to re-read it, for sure.

A couple of largely pessimistic reactions that I have:

•  The "we're fucked" option is highly likely, if not so iron-clad as the article and accompanying diagram present. Because of the following fairly straightforward logic: it's easier to be clever than wise.  Our technology will develop faster than our personal-ethical or social-political structures. Through a combination of inadvertence and malevolence, we will have the capacity to destroy ourselves before we have the restraint not to. And this will be true in principle for any sufficiently technological civilization.
• Once civilizations become interplanetary, on their way to becoming intergalactic, they will encounter, and fight with, other such. It's hard to imagine life forms that have succeeded in the competition of evolution that are not aggressively competitive for resources. It's hard to even imagine them evolving beyond instinctual xenophobia, though I think that's at least possible. In any case, the resulting conflicts may not leave many such civilizations living at the end of them. Maybe more than one in the galaxy--but maybe not many more. 

Unconditional Basic Income

There are, to my mind, two big changes to the economy needed in order to make most people's lives better as well as put a significant dent in our environmental crises. The first is to eliminate or drastically curtail the power and role of corporations. The second is to institute a universal basic income.

Regarding the latter: there are a number of natural objections that leap to mind. Most notably two: it would be so expensive that it would not be feasible, and it would leave everybody with no incentive to work.

Along with other advocates of a universal basic income, I think these intuitively plausible objections are incorrect, and that we will see empirical proof of that as more studies (or actual implementations, if they come) are put into effect. The video below discusses what the speaker believes to be the first good, reliable study of a universal basic income and how the results counteract these intuitive "myths".

Garrick Ohlsson and Rachmaninov

Last night Sandra and I went to the Eugene Symphony. The main work on the program was Rachmaninov's 3rd piano concerto (my favorite of the piano concerto repertoire) performed by Garrick Ohlsson, one of my favorite pianists.

My benchmark favorite performance has been Martha Argerich, with Riccardo Chailly conducting, readily available both on YouTube and CD.

The recording from which I "learned" the work is a bit obscure, but still a favorite of mine.

Somehow a British pianist and a bunch of Scottish musicians do a wonderful job with this epitome of Slavic pathos.

Unfortunately Eugene doesn't have a particularly compelling conductor in Danail Rachev. The orchestra itself is very good, as a couple of guest conductors have demonstrated. But Rachev seeks to play everything as loud as possible, jinning up the crescendos and snoozing through most everything else. This was particularly disastrous in Sibelius' 7th symphony, which was played before the intermission. Any sense of the work's structural integrity was chopped to bits. In the Rachmaninov, Ohlsson took a (relative to the work's baseline temperament) a more introspective approach to Argerich's above. Which led him to often being overpowered by the over-loud orchestra.

Below is a snippet from a performance where he and the conductor seemed to be more on the same page.

We also noted that he was a very gracious and friendly person. His visage beamed genuine gratitude for the enthusiastic reception from the audience.  The following clip will give a sense of his persona.

Exploring

The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space -- each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision -- Randall Munroe

There is a left-wing critique of space exploration: it's too expensive, too resource-intensive, and too diverting of attention when there are (often grave) human needs to be attended to right here.

This ignores the question: what are we living for? As individuals. As a species. As nations, if we insist in continuing to divide ourselves in that manner. One of the answers we have consistently found, at least since the days that humans left their African homeland and spread out across the earth, is to explore new places, learn about them, and settle them.

The last point--the settling--points to a dark side to this tendency. We have a tendency to destroy what's already there. We should maintain our awareness of this tendency and let it temper what we do when we explore. But explore we must. It is an essential component of who we are, one of the reasons and rewards for carrying on with our lives.

On the Uses and Disadvantages of Geology for Life

I attended this lecture yesterday at the University of Oregon. Coincidentally enough, I have just started reading Nietzsche's second Untimely Meditation or Unfashionable Observation from which David Wood got his title: "On the Utility and Liability of History" in the Stanford translation, but also known in English as "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life".

First, I want to say: Wood is steeped in contemporary Continental, particularly French, philosophy, and yet (despite that!) is a perfectly clear and comprehensible speaker. For that reason alone, I'm going to take a look at his books.

The gist of his talk was the promotion of "geological" thinking as a response to current environmental crises. While Wood looked analytically at such geological thinking--for instance, categorizing it into monumental, antiquarian, and critical variants as Nietzsche does for history--it does seem that Wood is more "pro" geology whereas Nietzsche was more "con" history. Wood did touch on the potentially oppressive and debilitating weight of geological consciousness, impeding action on environmental issues and much else. I believe that Wood felt himself to be offering a bit of an answer to such debilitation, but I also feel that I did not come away with one.

I don't know that "geology" was the most felicitous word to talk about a consciousness beyond the anthropometric. Also, a question I might have raised were there more time at the end: how to justify a focus on value at the level of the planetary? In opposition notably to that which is smaller: one's self, the nation, etc.  But also in opposition to that which is much larger: the cosmic. In view of the vastness of the universe, the fate of planet earth and its life seem to fade into true insignificance. This is a core question for Wood to address. Perhaps by making the case that there is (aesthetic?) value at each of these levels? He did mention the work of Delanda; it sounds like Delanda devalues the geologic from a cosmic perspective.

Overall, this lecture of just over an hour appeared to be a taste of a project in an early stage. I like Wood's style, his topics, and how he uses the thinkers he draws upon.

The Many Worlds Interpretation Naysayers

Regarding both the quantum and the David Lewis variants:

Aeon - Is the Many Worlds hypothesis just a fantasy?

I tend--just intuitively, but does anybody have more than wispy intuitions to go on here?--to shy away from the idea of universes (an infinitude of them?) spiraling out of every (possible?) measurement. (Though the idea provides for some interesting philosophical ponderings.) At the same time, I do think there are many, perhaps an infinitude, of other universes, some of them nearly (at least physically, if not in the details of their history) close by, in the sense suggested by (mem)brane theory.

Plant minds?

I am drawn to panpsychism, the idea that some form of mind pervades everything in the universe. Inanimate matter as well as everything we consider living. (There is the related idea from Whitehead: panexperientialism.) Drawn to it, though not convinced by it.

Staying focused on the living: if plants are considered to have minds or experience, this complicates the already complicated conversation around the ethical status of the non-human. Folks like Tom Regan have done as good a job as can be done extending Kantian deontology to animals. Pushed further, it breaks down. Infinite, absolute individual rights get us nowhere in a world where life has to consume life, and compete with life, in order to survive and propagate.

I've always felt there is a wisdom in trees. But I've been willing to consider that a mystical, imaginative fancy.  Maybe there's more to it?

Górecki

Alex Ross, my favorite music critic, writes about the completion of Polish composer Henryk Górecki's 4th symphony.

Despite the faddish fame that the 3rd symphony, "A Symphony of Sorrowful Songs", gained among a crowd looking for the next cool "spiritual" thing at a time when "Chant" also topped the charts, it is real music. When performed with true understanding, it is heartbreakingly beautiful real music. See below.

Portrait of the artist

Also see:  Post by Erie Art Museum. (Facebook)

I met Ian Brill when we were working evening shifts together at the Starbucks on the University of Pittsburgh campus. Back in, what, 2002? We've remained friends since then, as I've moved about the country and he has remained based in Pittsburgh and New York City. He has developed into quite the Renaissance man: footbag fanatic (if you call it hacky sack, he'll give you a lecture), devotee of physics and robotics, recipient of an MFA, computer programmer, musician, and as you see above, an installation artist.

I just wanted to congratulate Ian on his success. Most of all, his success in living live fully and following his muse wherever it leads.

Nietzsche on the scholars

The essence of the scholarly person...is marked by a genuine paradox: he behaves like the proudest idler upon whom fortune ever smiled, as if existence were not something hopeless and questionable, but rather a firm possession guaranteed to last forever. He sees nothing wrong in wasting one's life with questions whose answers could be important to someone already certain of eternal life. Everywhere around this heir to a few meagre hours there yawn the most terrifying abysses; at every step he should be reminded to ask: Why and to what purpose? Whither am I going? Whence do I come? But his soul is set aglow at the thought of counting the filaments of a flower or of cracking open the stones along the path, and he sinks the full weight of his attention, joy, energy, and desire into this labor.

Having myself foresworn academia--and what has been harder, foreswearing being an independent scholar doing the sort of research that academics do (though these days, mostly in what passes as their free time)--to pursue my studies where they lead and to do my own creative work, I enjoy Nietzsche's bold words. Though in calm moments I have to admit that scholarship too is of great value--or can be. It can exhibit the scientific spirit of discovery. It can be creative. And it can be helpfully pedagogic. Of course, often it's not--it is churned out to fit the demands of "publish or perish"--and almost always is crafted within the very narrow confines of what's currently considered acceptable academic opinion. (Which often requires willfully misunderstanding texts from other eras and contexts.)

Apropos of "publish or perish", Nietzsche's next words are prescient:

Now, this living paradox, this scholarly person, has recently begun in Germany to work at such a frantic pace that one must imagine scholarship as a factory in which for every delay of mere minutes the scholarly laborer is punished. Nowadays he labors as hard as the fourth estate, the slaves; he labors, his studies are no longer a calling but an affliction, he looks neither to left nor to right and passes through all the matters of life, even through those that are questionable in nature, with that half-attention or with that odious need for rest and recreation characteristic of the exhausted laborer.

(Unfashionable Observations, p. 46, Stanford edition of The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, v. 2)

P. S. (Feb. 19):

Found the following a little further on in my reading (in "The Utility and Liability of History for Life"):

To those who tirelessly mouth the modern cries to battle and to sacrifice, "Division of labor!" "In rank and file!," we have to say clearly and bluntly: if you want to further scholarship as quickly as possible, just as the hen that you artificially force to lay eggs as quickly as possible also perishes. Granted, scholarship has been furthered at an astonishingly quick pace in the last decades, but just look at the scholars, the exhausted hens. They are truly not "harmonious" natures: they can only cackle more than ever because they are laying eggs more frequently. To be sure, the eggs have kept getting smaller (although the books have only gotten bigger).

Nietzsche on the tasks of writing

I'm reading Nietzsche's Unfashionable Observations, or what has been previously translated as the Untimely Meditations. The first of these is an extended, withering attack on one David Friedrich Strauss, who as far as I know has been completely forgotten outside of those who know about him through Nietzsche. I'm finding this essay to have a lot of contemporary relevance, because much of what Nietzsche attacked in German academia and culture in the 1870s holds true of American academia and (the tiny world of) intellectual culture today.

At this time Nietzsche was breaking free of the world of academic philological scholarship (quite possibly an unmooring and setting adrift as well). He sought to create original works worth studying, being inspired by the models of classical authors, rather than doing scholarship on the tiniest details of those classical authors as a comfortable (bourgeois!) profession (something academia no longer promises to be, but that's a story for other posts).

I liked the following quote:

Anyone who has reached his fortieth year should have the right to write an autobiography, for even the most insignificant person can have experienced and seen up close something that the thinker may find worthwhile and noteworthy. But to make a confession about one's beliefs must be considered incomparably more exacting, because it presupposes that the confessor ascribes value not only to what he has experienced, explored, or seen during his lifetime, but even to what he has believed.

As someone who has reached and even surpassed his fortieth year...

The knife in his quote is double-edged. But I will take the optimistic side of it: One who has reached "a certain age" (I don't know that there's anything sacred about forty, but, hey, it works) has experiences that are worth writing about. And even beliefs, if written about in a way incomparably more exacting.

The Inextinguishable Symphony

Carl Nielsen's 4th Symphony, The Inextinguishable

At the top of the score to his fourth symphony, Carl Nielsen wrote what has come to be his most famous quote: "Music is life, and like it, inextinguishable." As Nielsen's symphony was devoted to the spirit of what is inextinguishable, what he called "the elemental will to live", so is this blog.

I will share items from my explorations in philosophy, my love of music, and my interactions with the world of nature that speak to this elemental will.

PS. Nielsen was Danish, and uudslukkelige is "inextinguishable" in Danish. (Where is the Internet going to be in another ten years, given that all the simple and straightforward website names, email addresses, usernames, etc., are already taken?)