Imagination, War, Peace, and Planetary Dabbling

This may have to be a weekly thing. (I see that this shall be a perpetual battle.)

In the morning, I finished rereading Barkman's chapter on Myth and had some decisive moments of insight and understanding. The main thing I need to taxonomize here is the various ways to understand the different facets of the faculty of imagination. The idea is gradually coming into more focus than it ever has, but I still find the conceptual edges needlessly blurred, not with the concepts themselves, but with the way Lewis uses them to explain his own imaginative experience and balancing this with Barkman's sometimes jarring corrections of the incorrect way Lewis had sometimes used these concepts. For example, there's an overlap between Coleridge's Primary Imagination and Aristotle's Deliberative Imagination. Even now, I cannot quite describe the rest. I forget whether Coleridge's Secondary Imagination overlaps with fancy and whether fancy is Aristotelian or Romantic. This could be cleared up in a moment but I don't have Barkman's dissertation on hand. 

Re-read the precipitation of what the causes of the Peloponnesian War were in Thucydides. After watching a YouTube video from Sadler on what it means to be 'well read', I learned some encouraging advice on 'pacing' in my reading. It's not how much you read that should be the measure; the pacing is what matters most. I find it vexing that I had forgotten this, since I already learned this from Lewis Carroll's Symbolic Logic, and even from Craig's metaphor of the tortoise. I record it here for no other reason than that it happened. I could be a Sterne and meander more, but I desist. But to conclude, I can't quite make up my mind yet on whether Athens violated the 30 years Peace Treaty in allying itself with the Corcyraeans against the Corinthians (allies of Sparta). Corcyra was neutral with Athens and Corcyra was asking for Athens to be their ally to preempt an aggressing Corinth. So, unless I'm missing some fine print in the treatise, I can't see how Athens isn't expediently exploiting a loophole that the treaty isn't explicit about. The only thing that complicates matters is that Corcyra insulted Corinth's honor and Corcyra belonged to Corinth so Corinth had every right to reclaim a recalcitrant Corcyra. And it only makes sense that a wayward Corcyra would see Corinth's aggression only in terms of oppression since their aggression was contrary to Corcyraean aspirations, like a child seeing a parent's anger as oppression because of similar reasons. Nevertheless, it all seems to hinge on whether the Corcyraeans were right as to whether war between Sparta (the ally of Corinth) and Athens is inevitable. If it was, then it is more expedient for Athens to side with Corcyra. But this foreign policy is further complicated by the fact that this expediency is only a consideration in the first place because Athens had already worried and irritated Sparta because of the former's expansionistic policies! So, yes, war was inevitable, but only because Athens was already the expansionistic aggressor, prompting Sparta to take the necessary measures to protect itself against Athenian expansion. Siding with Corinth would have been counterproductive and ultimately self-defeating. Corinth would have eventually betrayed Athens, already an ally of Sparta, which didn't take kindly to Athenian expansion, which then would have led to Corcyra adopting the geopolitical strategy it did. 

Was faithful with my War and Peace readings (about halfway through now). Serial publications are definitely what best explain tomes. The only way to consume them is to take small bites daily unless you're sick in bed or have the skills to trek entire countries in a day's walk. I'm finding the readings a bit tedious. Nothing revelatory or glorious or numinous or jaw-dropping, just a constant reminder that the quality of the descriptions comes from the pen of Tolstoy and a constant expectation that the love affairs betwixt the characters will either end in tragedy or some 'complex good' (in the Lewisian sense). I'm finding that Levin (Anna Karenina) is much the same as Pierre and that Vronsky and Prince Andrei are very similar. This humanizes Tolstoy a bit and, to me, constrains the excessive praise heaped upon his imagination. I begin to see how these love affairs will ultimately come to. Natasha will end up with Pierre after initially choosing Andrei (just as Kitty eventually ended up with Levin after initially choosing Vronsky), and Nikolai will probably end up with Maria, though I'm not sure what Tolstoy will do with Sonya to make that happen. 

The other characters are charming in their own way and the resultant effect of the whole upon my imagination is pleasing, it is a species of that pleasure that delights in seeing how unique personalities are interconnected in a causal web that is too big and complex to be taken in as a whole. So, you're moving around the dynamic mass almost like a spirit, which enlivens it and lends to it a donegality that is nearly palpable.  It's hard to put into words but I think modern folks will begin to see what I mean. It has affinities with the way the camera works in a cinematic experience. It can move and relocate across time and space while the events themselves can take on a crisp visualization that gives off its own sensuousness conjured and enjoyed only while the imagination is in motion so that while Tolstoy is transporting you from some domestic quarrel to a battlefield, I sense myself moving in the sky from the quaint roof of some Russian home, through the wet and misty clouds, over the tops of some forest, hearing the rustling of the leaves as the wind carries me to my narrative destination, racing through a screen of gun powder from a recently exploded cannonball, the faint murmur of war cries and suffering and bloodshed swelling into the loud horror and confusion and bustle of the battle itself, and then Tolstoy pulling me in to focus on one character's thoughts and actions within the entire imaginative context of that departure, flight, and arrival. That is perhaps the distinct impression that Tolstoy's genius has on my imagination. The more often the geographic departures, the more distinct and vivid the imaginative effect. 

After some domestic duties, I think I dipped into Perelandra for no reason. As a species of world-making, Perelandra is positively delightful and gorgeous and peaceful and warm and luscious and pleasurable. It is a world where all the pleasures are finetuned to all the details of our expectations, known or unknown. It is like a celestial vacation to a tropical island that is everything you wanted it to be and yet there are pleasures there beyond the number that satisfies beyond what you were expecting, or what you could have expected. I find myself returning to it again and again, more for the planetary descriptions than for the plot, and then if it's for the plot, it's oftentimes for the sake of the descriptions. 

December 26, 2022 - Reading, reading, reading, formulating, simmering, but writing?

I'm going to start keeping a random diary if for no other reason than just to chronicle my thoughts for chronicling's sake. The stuff below I wrote over the course of a week. Maybe, if I'm lucky, I can be more terse and to the point, which is what the diaries I've read are wont to do. I also have the hunch that it is good exercise. I know I'm not supposed to write with the aim of polishing a style, but I can't help but think that if I continue to write, to give form to what would otherwise be nebulous, formless, ghostly, evanescent and foggy is a pleasure unto itself, but I think it's reasonable to expect that doing this daily would contribute toward developing a style, wouldn't it? My problem is that I do too much reading and not enough writing. I feel Schopenhauer's disgust, hot on the back of my neck! Read, boy! Anyways, I'll see where this goes, and I will say that future diary entries will tend to be much shorter, as they should be. 

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I think I've polished off Linford's anti-Lorentzianism and I'm about ready to post my response. Ultimately, responses like these are professionally useless, as I can't take into account all the citations Linford has, which may or may not make mince meat out of any of my points. I think I may come out on top in the spots that matter, though, because I was able to make use of some sources that I'm very confident Linford hasn't taken notice of. I don't say this to engage in polemical one-upsmanship, but just to emphasize the virtue of adding something to the conversation, whether there be a rejoinder or not. My response should be done by next week. I still have to understand York Time to my satisfaction. I can't quite reach that point yet. The mathematics is still a bit opaque to me, and I can't see, yet, how this appeal to York Time isn't either a mathematical trick that awaits a clever unmasking or a philosophical gaffe that isn't taking into account distinctions that have already been tediously made. Sometimes it sounds like the infinite number of intervals involved are unequal, in which case, it's irrelevant; but, at other times, it looks like another, tired application of empirical indistinguishability by mere manipulation of a Hamiltonian. To dive into details would be an impertinence, in this context. 

I continue to wade through Boswell's Life of Johnson. I can't tell whether my sense of being underwhelmed is due to my own dullness and stupidity or whether I find Johnson himself (who I'm supposed to find endearing and lovable, even if only from a distance) a bore, or whether I'm dull and stupid because I find Johnson a bore! Boswell seems to want to paint Johnson as someone who salts all conversation with witticisms, comedic anecdotes, and off-the-cuff literary insights, that astonish because of both their insightfulness and because of the fact that it seems like Johnson is yawning and uninterested while making them, almost like a bored medical diagnostician making titanic breakthroughs on impenetrable cases but giving the impression of going through the motions involved in something as banal as reading the morning newspaper over a cup of coffee. The debates seem staged and when Boswell stacks descriptions of Johnson's rare genius on top of each other, when I actually get to the anecdote that is supposed to illustrate that genius, I get something that is a bit humdrum. I seriously doubt my reaction is like Tolstoy's reaction to Shakespeare, so I fear I'm the dullard. Time will tell if I'll change upon repeated readings or by the time I finish the book. 

I was excited to dive into Plutarch's Lives, inspired by some whimsical sources! I remember being intrigued by Pierre casually grabbing it off of Prince Andrew's shelves in War and Peace (or was it Caesar's Commentaries?). I can't remember if the memory is veridical, but the image of Pierre doing that in the context of casual conversation with Prince Andrew was charming to me for some reason. Then, when thumbing through Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, it is mentioned that the Lives was among his favorite books to read for pleasure. Just the thought of reading this classic for pleasure was enough to thrill, especially during this time of image-rich shallowness and illiterate taste. The first Life was that of Romulus and Remus; I need to read it again, as Plutarch stacks detail upon detail, and I begin to despise my intellectual upbringing for only bestowing upon me a mind of mediocre metal. It might also be Dryden's 17th century style mediating the English for me, but I'm fond of the style when it waxes philosophical; the moment it shifts to pure narrative, and the diction veers into the poetic, my mind looses its way in how the author describes, charmed by the vividness of a metaphor for too long to be taken away, in a timely way, by the flow of thought as a whole, and landing in a place I'm not sure I'm supposed to be in, judging by my memory of where I thought I should be when I began the rumination. The same thing afflicts me as I carefully wade through Thucydides The History of the Peloponnesian War.  I find myself getting lost in the details. Secondary sources are doing a little to help, but they mostly confound my solitary interpretations and make my unassisted readings seem like unreliable drafts, rather than unalloyed pleasures. 

Working my through C.S. Lewis's All My Road Before Me; I'm struck about how similar his style is to my own, though I tend to agree with Michael Ward (I think it was him) who said that the diaries are predominated by excessive tedium: prosaic accounts of the people met that day, occasional sneering accounts of dull conversations, a somewhat repetitive-sounding series of descriptions of nature during his very frequent jaunts through the countryside. What always rouses my attention is the colorful accounts of his philosophical conversations and his ubiquitous revelations about his reactions to his insatiable reading habits. I find myself always looking up the books he says he's reading, and being that they're always obscure, I'm constantly being pleasantly surprised by how charming they are. Unfortunately, I find myself filled with envy by how much time seems available to Lewis for such voluminous reading. I hesitate to say this because there are some diary entries that make it sound like his life is dominated by the constant intrusion of various domestic duties. Sometimes Lewis's assessments of books are sweeping in their generality and sometimes dismissive to the point of being almost unbelievable. He says he found nothing new in Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, just 'what the ordinary egoist has always believed and acted on'(!) Because of my respect for Lewis's intellect, I sincerely hope that lurking underneath this sweeping denunciation is a more careful critique, and I expect there might be. I'm not so stupid as as to expect this in the context of terse tidbits in a diary. I mention it because it provokes my incredulity to a degree that I find mildly irritating. 

I have to confront the monster that is Space, Time, and Deity (Samuel Alexander) for my overall thesis to be worth anything. It is dreadful to think about the fact that a paper wholly dependent on secondary sources is almost worthless the person attempting an original contribution to a subject. I almost feel the hot breath of Schopenhauer in my ear accosting me for my insincerity and tearing to ribbons my ostentatious sentences for being dolled up to make it look like I'm an authority when I'm not. But then I'm stuck, once again, in the possibility of being entangled in Glaucon's dilemma. What partially consoles me is the fact that it applies to pretty much everyone in pretty much everything they say about pretty much everything: do we prefer being original and honest, but seeming ostentatious and insincere; or, being ostentatious and insincere, but seeming original and honest? To be frank, capturing German-inspired idealism, British idealism, seems to be a dragon I can't completely slay without seeming to, unfortunately. I genuinely wonder how philosophers find the time to either master an issue or deceive themselves into feeling that they have. The eyes that range over any manuscript are inevitably going to confront the eyes of a specialist; and no one has time to be a specialist on all the topics ranged over by a manuscript. There is an unconquerable paradox hemorrhaging here. Are all efforts of publication instances of unavoidable hubris, insurmountable ambition, or wanton exercises of self-deception? Does the overall theme of publication require a tectonic shift in the spirit in which they should be interacted with? Perhaps the success of a publication lies more in the spirit in which they are read, rather than the sufficiency of the topic we expect an author to deliver. I put Alexander in the same bucket as Bradley and all the other British idealists of the time (perhaps even a Whitehead), whose prose are gusts of sawdust in my eyes. I can't, in good faith, use Alexander's contemplation/enjoyment distinction only because I read that Lewis appreciated it in Surprised by Joy. I have to read Alexander and decide for myself and appreciate the wider context within which that distinction has a meaning. There is no other way. I will say that I have my work of Coleridgean synthesis cut out for me. Staring at me from the abyss is this lurking suspicion that Heidegger has done away with this festering subject/object distinction, but I'm not sure how else to understand Alexander's enjoyment/contemplation distinction without the subject/object distinction, so I'm not sure what the resulting synthesis will look like when kairos bids me to synthesize. I hope the synthesis will involve me keeping the subject/object distinction in a sense that could be salvaged by Heidegger's phenomenology. But we'll see. 

It's strange that, as I read Space, Time, and Deity, Alexander begins the book by detailing the relationship between philosophy and empirical science, making philosophy distinct, not by the method it uses, but by the domain it investigates. This exact dichotomy between method and subject matter I had chosen to use, independently, but I made the interrelationship a little more nuanced than Alexander (this, in a draft I had concocted on scientism that never saw the light of day). 

Read an SEP entry on Fichte: this is a philosopher I have neglected to acquaint myself with in my life. I had always placed him as merely one of a trio of German Idealists to make sense of a historical accounting for a philosophical movement and, once again, I am humbled by my embarrassing lack of knowledge of the history of philosophy and philosophers. I'm entering the 'dark wood' of my 'life's journey'; the 'right way' may not be 'lost' in the sense of not knowing the way, but of seeing that the way involves a trek much more arduous and difficult than I had imagined. I see Fichte is in the category of 'cantankerous genius', who may fall victim to being fascinating, not for his 'system', but for the psychological genius that produced it, his legacy might involve a perpetual warding off of the 'personal heresy'. 

Yesterday I forgot to mention that I am once again struggling with my absolute detestation of A.N. Wilson's dreadful biography of C.S. Lewis, an obnoxious exercise of disingenuous bullshit, an obvious attempt to smear someone because he serves as the symbolic conduit for the system Wilson has come to despise in a period of his life he conceitedly discerns to be an epoch of his own silly enlightenment when, in reality, it is a headlong plunge into the darkness of his own tragic self-deception. There is lots of material for the psychoanalyst here and the level of obliviousness on Wilson's part would be staggeringly tragic if it weren't so insufferably irritating. Wilson comes across as the know-it-all, 'I've-figured-it-all-out', latte-sipping, self-appointed iconoclast of what he sees as all our pet theories of the ways he thinks Lewis has been idolized by the alleged evangelical conceptualization of him, going way too far (inappropriately so) in trying to describe a Lewis that is vindictive, immature, cartoonishly conniving, lecherous, emotionally stunted, petty, and unscholarly. What is so annoying about this hatchet job is how Wilson's screed, while masked by engaging prose, is itself vindictive, immature, and cartoonishly conniving, maybe not lecherous, but definitely emotionally stunted, petty, and unscholarly. I discern the seeds of hope in my unsanctified indignation that a future biographer of Wilson does the same to him so he can see (posthumously) the same damage he did to Lewis done to himself. 

My dreams are either becoming odder lately or I've become more aware of how odd they have always been. The temptation to begin a dream log is stronger than ever. I am going back and forth on the reasons for it. My vanity repels me and I give up the idea because I know that fuel can only burn for so long and the project will be doomed to premature death (vanity because all that motivates me in that context is the outlandish fantasy of it being discovered posthumously by a group of brilliant dream analysts, who publish their findings and research, making me famous, a prospect I won't be able to enjoy even if the impossible were to happen - vanity is amplified again by the ridiculous idea that I only consider the fantasy outlandish so that if I were discovered posthumously, the brilliant dream analysts could see that my dream chronicles weren't driven by fantastic conceit, but arose out of a psychological mixture of grounded realism and introspective caution and self-censure, thus improving the likelihood of my warm and awed posthumous, reception). Alas! After all of that needless wind, I've lost my desire to record the dream. 

Recently read a somewhat congenial review of Craig's God and Abstract Objects, the criticisms, though, came off as sneering at times, and the more sneering they were, the more I became thunderstruck at how inept they were.

Just found out from Michard Ward that what C.S. Lewis meant by Maleldil is 'Lord of the Sign', another proof that semiotics seems indispensable to understanding Desire as a sign and how the Argument from Desire for God's existence might more accurately be called a Semiotic Argument from Desire for God's existence. I'm still confident that if I conceptualize semiotics phenomenologically, in some neo-Heideggerian way, I can distinguish my approach from Evan's project of conceptualizing Natural Theology in terms of Natural Signs, though I may still want to reference his approach for pruning purposes. 

I can apply the above to something else Ward helpfully points out and which I've seen in other places, that all of the visible is a sign of the invisible, which gets into transposition, reality being sarcremental, and all that jazz. Desire is going to be aroused by Something in the visible world, and it'll be aroused by virtue of the fact that that Something is mediated by signs, and those signs will be interpreted in a way that arouses Desire, where the act of interpretation can't be understood without talking about the nature, role, and powers of the imagination. So, all of these conceps, which were once disparate and opaque to me, are now coming together into a satisfying, synthetic unity. It seems like all the different, perennial binaries (will vs. representation, numinous vs. non-numinous, sensible vs. supersensible, numinal vs. phenomenal, Dionysian vs. Apollonian, Religious vs. Aesthetic/Ethical, looking at vs. looking along, Enjoyment vs. Contemplation, et al.) are merely nuanced conceptual markers for hooking onto different properties of Desire's semotic structure. And if Peirce is to be perferred to de Saussure (and we can more fully unpack Peirce when we read Walker Percy's meditations on the Semotic), then Desire's semiotic structure, as a whole, signifies God. What further enriches this imaginative investigation is that God Himself, when conceived conceptually, is mediated by signs and so is constituted by its own semiotic structure. Thus, there are two semiotic structures, one constituting Desire and one constituting God (I'll put 'Desire' and 'God' in italics when they are functioning as semiotic structures, and not as Things that such structures are signifying), and both of these structures have, as their signifieds, either aspects of God (when that structure constitutes Desire) or the extra-conceptual reality of the Triune God as revealed in the Bible (when that structure constitutes God). 

I notice something disingenuous about the ubiquitous advice to forget about originality and to write what you want to write as clearly as possible, whereupon it is then promised that originality will come unbidden once forgotten. This idea I've found in Russell, Chesterton, Lewis, Orwell, and even Einstein. It's disingenuous to a certain degree because they don't all completely forget about originality in all respects at all! I forget the passage in Bruce Edwards's collection on Lewis, but one of the contributors has a whole chapter on how Lewis consciously imbued his prose with rhetorical force, and did this tactfully, to engineer a particular effect on his audience. How does complete self-forgetfulness achieve that? 

I wonder if you can use Heidegger's critique of technology to explain C.S. Lewis's technological ineptness? 

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I'm stopping here for fear of the reader suffering death by hodgepodge.