Some Diary Intimations

I'm watching a movie called Prisoners now. It's intense. The mood is uncomfortable. Jake Gyllenhaal's character Detective Loki is excellent. He blinks with regularity but is aggressive, almost as if it had been caused by some past, unspecified trauma. I'm still not finished with it. I guess I'll nibble on it for the rest of the week. I saw Chris Stuckman as one of the top reviewers! It's amazing how far he has come in his career. 

Now I'm watching Nightcrawler. It took me a while to adjust to Gyllenhaal outside of Donnie Darko. That was 2001. I think I'm finally coming around. Seeing Bill Paxton was a pleasant surprise. I often wonder what it would have been like to enjoy these movies if I hadn't first seen Paxton in Twister, True Lies, Terminator, or Aliens. I wonder the same thing about music. 

I have a theory about all modes of art. Art is unavoidably phenomenological. All I mean by this is that a piece of art is never only a piece of art. It is never only the stuff that the art production is made up of or constitutes. I think this means that there is a conceptual distinction between the art itself and a critic's appreciation of it. What I'm trying to say is that . . . 

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My main point is that C.S. Lewis was too much in love to investigate some theme for too long in one particular way. When he had to, it was in an academic setting and involved making novel contributions to his career field. But when it comes to his phenomenological experience, it looks as though Lewis would prefer to seize the light of the glowworm of inspiration, and have it illuminate an aspect of such an experience as long as the light would last. Thus, in Surprised by Joy, every event Lewis chronicles has a constant reference to Joy, from the concentration camp at Wynyard to the horrors of trench warfare. All these episodes are the half-illumined, revolving planets in elliptical orbit around the sun of Joy. But a sustained meditation on a phenomenological aspect of Joy you won't find anything beyond the precious string of multiple paragraphs expositing one aspect. What one desires are book-long or chapter-long meditations. Surprised by Joy is a book-long meditation in a sense. Perhaps Lewis would argue that it said best what needed to be said. But I can't see why we can't have that and phenomenological meditation. 

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Finished Kierkegaard's A's The Immediate Erotic Stages in Either/Or: Volume I. Captivating. I have yet to read a Lewis scholar tie A's analysis of desire in with C.S. Lewis's idea of desire and Joy. This is the lacuna that needs filling. There is so much that even Lewis didn't consider. For he thought reading Kierkegaard was like a jaunt through a room full of sawdust, one of the most perplexing things I've ever read. Was it another literary misdirection, a literary instance of lying to the hunters about which way their quarry had scurried? I find a number of places in Kierkegaard that I also find in Lewis, so many places that one wonders if their serendipitous compresence to the literary sleuth is more than just a face in the clouds.  

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Finished what feels like a whirlwind of Kierkegaard. The First Love was a doozy. I tried very hard to abide by Chesterton's dictum that there are no boring subjects, only bored readers, but I failed. I also think I read it too fast to catch the existential pearls. It was a 'review' of a convoluted play about a conceited woman courting a pair of wily suitors who inveigle everyone about their own identities. That was a bad summation. A theme is supposed to be mistaken identity. I definitely saw some places where Walker Percy drew some inspiration in his Lost in the Cosmos: the idea that one's reflection in a mirror at an unfamiliar angle makes your own delayed recognition a paradox. I'm reading about the idea of rotation now in The Rotation of Crops, another idea I think I remember seeing in Percy's A Message in the Bottle; whereas Percy was talking about something related to an idea in Kierkegaard's Repetition (something to do with the distinction between visiting far-flung corners of forgotten lands or revisiting any place associated with one's past memory of a connection that place had to something wistful or nostalgic in your life: the former is when you take leave of the beaten path; the latter encapsulated by Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey), Kierkegaard's primary motif is boredom. I think only The Seducer's Diary remains. It's long, but I may finish volume 1 of Either/Or by tomorrow morning if everything goes without a hitch. I expect that volume 2 will be a slog. There is a change in tone and style and I expect to find Kant's rigidity too much if I don't take him in doses. 

Began Lewis's Oxford History of English Lit. again. I don't think I'll swallow the entire repast again, but I find myself drawn to the preface The New Learning and the New Ignorance over and over again, like one who sees some kind of enchanting piece of furniture in a store window. A pensée that stands out is that our speculation that we were the center of the universe had nothing to do with importance. The center was the rim of being. The nobility of a heavenly sphere increased in proportion to how far it was from the Earth. Also, there is the irony in anti-theistic screeds, coupled with an excusable ignorance of the history of science, about how magic is more allied with religion than it is to science. Any objective look at the historical facts would explode this immediately. I also find intriguing Lewis's hypothesis that there was no Renaissance. 

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The Seducer's Diary has finally commenced. It is easy to be cynical and label the seducer a stalker, a jarringly distasteful word if there ever was one. That would betray your own cynicism (is cynicism the last refuge of the unrequited lover?). Nothing about the situation mandates that mode. Honesty demands a retraction. How many times have I, if I thought about it, schemed to attract a maiden? What affrontery there would be if I disclosed the inner machinations of those schemes! To those who sit in judgment, what a rich array of targets their sinful arrows could take flight torward if they were so privy. And it isn't hard to imagine that there may be such an audience so privy. One has to snuff it out of consciousness to inure oneself sufficiently, like the one who puts a shroud over a picture of Christ, propped up on one's vanity, to occlude his gaze as you thereafter do the deed. 

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Stalled on my Diary reading. I did some punctuated reading. I remember Boswell mentioning that Johnson did this frequently. Perhaps that's why he didn't understand Berkeley. I read the introduction to one of Craig's dissertations on Christ's resurrection. Once again, a thorough and rigorous monograph, deserving of attention, even if one has issues with it. It never ceases to amaze me why people don't notice that their knee-jerk disqualification of entire issues rarely has much to do with reasons or arguments. It has way more to do with one's imaginative appraisal of sign systems and their relationship with the way such systems are appropriated in the context of myth, an overall story of the way such systems render meaningful one's dynamic maturation after synthesizing such a story to one's life-world. I need to know more about the relationship between empirical reality and the way scientific methods more or less successfully interrogate Nature to reveal her secrets for the sake of Her technological bondage. There's lots to be said here. And one can't but hear Heidegger's admonishments about the way technology enframes Being. What I also think is worth saying is that perhaps something like Climicus's idea of endless approximations is ineradicable when it comes to reasons/arguments for any thesis that isn't strictly empirical (though I'm not entirely sure how the empirical relates to the entire hermeneutical enterprise). Perhaps the thoroughgoing rationalist is a delusion. Perhaps the illusion of naked rationalism is pragmatically indispensable for certain psychological dispositions to dispose themselves to adopt particular kinds or particular combinations of ideological frameworks. Perhaps this is all true and particular reasons are plausible and particular arguments are sound. It's hard to see how we really know about such reasons and arguments before we've already found the propositions to be true or the conclusions of the arguments to be true. It's almost as if there's always this retrospective posture dialectic always has to adopt........... [interuppted]

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I just read another confirmation of a phenomenon I've noticed. It takes the form of contemplating what I'd expect if Christianity were true. Actually, that's not exactly right but I'll leave it in because it propels me to the relevant point. So many ideas in the history of philosophy involve the conceptual isolation of one aspect of Christianity and setting it up as a Sovereign organizing principle. Book 1, chapter 7 of Rousseau's The Social Contract admonishes the state to force those who disobey the General Will 'to be free'. C.S. Lewis writes elsewhere regarding an aspect of conversion that God's compulsion is our liberation. This seems to suggest that Rousseau is attributing to The State what rightfully belongs to God and, more importantly, in a spiritually salvific context, not the context of The State's relation to its denizens in the context of Civil Society. I realize Lewis makes a similar point in an ethical context, but the principle can probably be applied to some aspect of every philosophical system. The phenomenon is palpable in early Heidegger. 

Isiah Berlin's "freedom from"/freedom to" distinction is useful. Do compatibilists hyper-fixate on the former and proclaim their view from the scaffolding of some unfinished skyscraper? 

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I have 'finished' The Seducer's Diary. I regretfully didn't enjoy the whole, but there were numerous parts that were enchanting and bewitching. It is astonishing to me how much Kierkegaard concerned himself with desire and longing. Mention was made of autumn. I find that any description involving the wind and the swaying of trees has an immediate effect on me. If that is mixed with autumn, I'm nearly undone. One day I shall unpack why. Unbidden memories beckon my consciousness with the deafening power of the Sirens. The notion of there involving memories of memories carries first-order concerns to the second power. (Has there been a cross-culture study of desire?) 

Either/Or (Vol. 1) appears thick, but I was only a little over halfway through once I finished it. The remaining chunk is many excerpts extracted from his prodigious journals. Some of the excerpts I can't see why they were included. Perhaps it's because of their contemporaneity with his literary labor? 

I plan to begin Gadamer's Truth and Method as one of the indispensabilities of my task at wielding longing. I can't divorce interpretation from the descriptions that ultimately prevail after archeologically mining that peculiar phenomenology that ossifies almost immediately after longing has devastated it. The effect is wreckage, but it might only be an intrinsic wreckage of disorientation and myopia. This book contributes to the lacuna I've noticed Lewis studies: a total lack of awareness or care about anything called continental when it comes to explicating desire. 

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I think one of my greatest fears is seeing someone snigger at something I've said which I've labored over with great care and painstaking resolve. I caress the process of dialectical and conceptual metamorphosis as my thoughts burst forth from their chrysalis. New visions granted by flying are shared. Then, the snigger. An unlucky dart of dissolution undoes my psychological security. The sniggering solvent dissolves the solute of my dispositional resolve. 

I have begun The Esthetic Validity of Marriage in Either/Or Vol:2. I'm also about halfway through Orwell's 1984, a perfectly dreary, dank, odorous atmosphere, a heavyhanded, oppressive, unyielding use of the panopticon. It is monotonous tonally but has some strokes of genius worthy of Hitchcockian suspense and thrill. There are some hackneyed descriptions. Orwell's repeated references to the smell of rotting or stale cabbage were offputting but perhaps that was the point. The thing I found distasteful on a moral level was what seemed to be Orwell's approval of the moral appropriateness of organismic instincts in the face of a feigned, manufactured, contrived, and (most importantly) sterile and virtuous purity (one thinks of Ash's comment in Alien (1979) about the alien that he admires its purity). To boil down an individual revolution against totalitarianism to avenged acts of fornication not only comes off as woefully reductionistic but underwhelming to the extreme. It keeps the book from being great literarily and boxes it in to be simply a prophetic book whose idiom found its way into our cultural lexicon . . . for now. We'll see how it resolves everything by the end. 

I continue to battle the limitations of my own bedeviled intellect by wondering why I'm obligated to call Wittgenstein's contributions to philosophy genius. The impulse has been felt before in other domains. I have a viscerally negative reaction to The Godfather and The Beatles. Vanity cordially invites me to take my seat with Tolstoy's revulsion for King Lear or even Marlon Brando's distaste for Burt Reynolds! But with regard to Wittgenstein, I waffle between two poles of general appraisal. I either see him as a gifted philosopher who did work that, on the whole, was worthy of consideration, respect, and even adulation. But the effusions poured on him by his worshippers are astonishing to me. Aren't they more enamored and bewitched by his interesting personality and isn't that the drug that induces in his readers an aura of hallucinatory unapproachability, like ascending the stairs of some ziggurat. His hagiographers are legion. The same kind of reaction happens to fans of celebrities that finally see the celebrity 'in the flesh': faintings, swoonings, spasmotic, euphoric gyrations, hysterical fits of ecstatic sobbing, screeching, and worshipful prostrations. (and, of course, after the ecstasy has subsided, they revert back to scoffing at the religious attitude as it's directed to God) 

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I used to wonder what an encounter between Kierkegaard and Nietzsche would look like and now I don't. I know exactly how it would go. Nietzsche would admire Kierkegaard's psychological acuteness and subtlety but would find the latter's Christianity an obnoxious and stifling inhibition to the full potential of his genius, just as he had complained about regarding Pascal.  The last semblance of curiosity might be where Kierkegaard anticipates Nietzschean themes and what Nietzsche would make of them: e.g. the demonic self vs. the superman, the teleological suspension of the ethical vs. going beyond good and evil, etc.      

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Shall complete The Aesthetic Validity of Marriage by tomorrow. Finished The Sickness Unto Death. I'm undecided about whether to commence The Aenead or The Odyssey next, to work backward from Virgil's aesthetic reconstruction, or to work forward from Homer's aesthetic construction. 

As I read Kierkegaard, I discern a particular style of writing and I wonder about the aesthetic effect on the reader and how that might vary depending on whether the reader is a philosophical poet or a poetic philosopher? I might call myself a poetic philosopher because my first love was philosophy. That love's ripples expanded to include poetry and a poeticizing of philosophy. I can discern things this particular way in Kierkegaard because of the rippling that constitutes my poeticizing consciousness. For instance, in discussing the social and psychological elements of marriage, Kierkegaard will throw in a Cartesian neologism. For the philosophical poet whose consciousness hasn't yet rippled, I wonder how the neologism would aesthetically affect it? As for my own consciousness, I immediately dislike it. I find that it leads me from the poetic into the philosophical when I'm already in to poetic mood. 

Another thing that Kierkegaard and Nietzsche would never reconcile about is their view of Socrates, of course. I wonder if Nietzsche ever had an opinion of Socrates under the aspect of the ironical that wasn't at the same time a judgment as to the latter's aesthetic decay or corruption? Kierkegaard obviously admired the ironic aspect of Socrates, wrote an entire dissertation on it, wrote it in Danish and not Latin probably because he wanted to be ironical about the language it was written in, and probably wrote ironically throughout the entirety of his literary career. If Nietzsche discerned this, I can't help but think he'd find the career and psychology that spawned it rotten and corrupted by Christian decay. There would probably be some inverse proportion between the intensity of Nietzsche's opprobrium and the poetic brilliance of the Kierkegaardian descriptions since the latter would bespeak the poeticizing potential of genius unfettered by backward, Christian, sentimental, ethical moralizing. 

The dialectical advantage goes to Kierkegaard, however. Any Nietzschean critique will be as the blade to the head of a hydra. Kierkegaard is literarily legion. For Kierkegaard, the ironical enfolds the dialectic into an unpredictable phantasmagoria of subjectivity, but that phantasmagoria also interfaces with the prism of Kierkegaard's pseudonymous authorship, and so the irony splits off into a spectrum of kaleidoscopic syntheses, and so raises the entire sign-structure to the second power. Nietzsche is alone with his Zarathrustra. He can leech off the romantic by mythologically appealing to the solitary hero up against all odds and yet surviving. It may survive in the imagination, but not in reality; in ideality, but not actuality. But since the actual is also the ideal, its initial survival would be only a seeming one. Its extinction would be discovered in consciousness diachronically for such a disoriented self not yet synthesized into spirit. 

I shudder to think that Bloom's anxiety of influence may have some inkling of plausibility now that I've been thinking over it for a decade or so. One shouldn't prize truth over just one's friends (among Aristotle's advice to Nicomachus), but one's enemies as well. I shouldn't believe something because my friends believe it. I also shouldn't disbelieve something because my enemy believes it. I was surprised that Bloom treated Lewis's analysis of a part of The Faerie Queene with due respect and my antipathy subsided a bit. He became more than just a prolix, meandering, priggish defender of the Western Canon, at that point. I will have to read Bloom's book to be sure, but I wonder if the anxiety is Kierkegaardian?  

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There has to be a word for the feeling one gets when one reads a text in a book after one reads that text electronically on a computer or an iPhone. It doesn't feel quite yet read until read in the book. 

There's more to a book than its content. You have to get at that content in the way that the author organized that content. The way in which the content is arranged is itself the most important part of that content. Those who reduce this arrangement to mere form haven't yet awoken. But to those who understand this, unless you first try to forget that you have to wake up, you'll forever be entangled in new sublations of slumber. Reading a book called How To Wake Up in a dream will further envelop you in a more complex layer of slumber. It is one of life's ironies that it isn't up to us when we wake, or even that we wake. How much more true this is in the realm of the Spirit! The prince's kiss comes from without. Who is it that disposes the Self to wake when kissed? If we have to dispose ourselves, the kiss doesn't cause the waking. The kiss becomes the occasion without which such a disposition would be useless. Without the kiss, one wouldn't awake. But the kiss doesn't cause one to wake. The disposition is the cause. And I cultivate the disposition. The cultivation is done while asleep. Who would have thought that there is such a thing as slothful slumber? There is a sloth that is so slothful that one can even be a slothful sleeper. 

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The slog through Stages on Life's Way continues. Will I finish it before the end of 2023? Prospects are looking bleak. The chapter 'Guilty/Not-Guilty' is a gigantic, gorgeous, passionate, prolix banality. When reading it I feel as though I'm in quicksand. Every new attempt to gain a footing is a new, unfamiliar dialectical orientation. An anecdote morphs into a confession, which morphs into a soliloquy, which morphs into a diatribe, which morphs into psychological exploration, which morphs into a conceptual exploration, which morphs into a parable. The breaks in the paragraphs sometimes seem arbitrary. Its complete amorphousness is given somewhat of a structure because of its form as a diary. The amorphousness can be traced to the intrinsic amorphousness of subjective consciousness. Kierkegaard writes like he's trying to exorcise a demon. That contributes to my desire to continue to resist the gusts of his idiosyncratic sentences. What happens when genuine passion composes a symphony that my sensibilities find opaque? I wait and tarry. I dispose myself to wait and tarry. I have faith. One of Kierkegaard's goals, therefore, is accomplished. His oeuvre attunes his readers by virtue of the form of his literary output; and the content can then be forgiven if its initially perceived as banal. Perhaps I don't have eyes to see past its banality yet. 

Incomplete Thoughts on Style

I am presently thinking of style. Over-consciousness of one's style stifles style. Did I prepare the grammar of that statement? I didn't. It flowed. Does that mean it's not susceptible to future revisions? No. Future revisions can take into account polishing style. Why concern oneself with style? One aspect might be vanity. You read your favorite authors and you have a desire to emulate the style that charmed you. You were charmed and you want others to feel a similar charm when they read you. Vanity can extend after the grave. You read accounts of people being charmed by your writing after you're dead. A more noble motivation might be concerns over clarity. Another might be concerns over widening the scope of your appeal. A robotic style might only attract a tiny contingent of academics. A winsome style widens your appeal. Of course, the variable of appeal is related to the subject being discussed. Taylor Swift's biography will have wider appeal than John Calvin's. 

I do find it very interesting that you can discern whether a style is authentic and that when it is, the style is unique. Even in cases of influence, the influenced style is still different enough. Bertrand Russell admitted to being influenced by John Stuart Mill's style. If you read them both, you can notice who is Russell and who is Mill. Is style akin to personality? Personalities can be influenced. Influenced personalities are still sufficiently different from the personality that did the influencing. This epistemic element seems relatively uncontroversial. What might be more controversial whether we ought to adopt a style from an outside source, or even whether it's inevitable or necessary. If style is like a cultivated skill and that skill is aimed toward some end, then, if you care about the end, you ought adopt the style you judge to be suitable. Of course, nothing intrinsic has been established. Is there anything intrinsic about writers needing to adopt a style from an outside source? I'm not sure, but I'm also not not sure. Anomalous singularities aren't, in principle, impossible. But I can't conceive how such singularities wouldn't or couldn't be influenced by the books they read. Do they learn language in a vacuum? Imagine a man reared by wolves somewhere in the hinterlands. Grant Chomsky's idea of universal grammar. The savage manages to link grunts, growls, whimpers, shrieks, and howls with some rudimentary markings etched on stone with another rock. Do the wolf's sounds affect the grammar of the savage's etchings? I can't see how they wouldn't. If the savage had literary or poetic impulses, how couldn't it be that the wolf's sounds shaped the style of the poem or the literary work? How much more would such influences be present in the case of our fellow humans? So, it seems to be the case that style is inevitable because it's necessary. It can't be that someone writes a poem with a style that wasn't first adopted or cultivated by another. One wonders how Samuel Johnson's style of speaking influenced Boswell's writing, or whether the elenchus of Socrates influenced the style of Plato? 

Decades ago now, I remember trying to be a literary critic and discern similarity and distinctness in style when my bibliophilia was burgeoning. I think my judgment wasn't good, but ignorant. It had more form than content. Or, it had too little content for the form to be sufficiently robust. I made the judgment that Augustine, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Chesterton, and C.S. Lewis all had similar styles. This is both demonstrably false and ludicrously reductionistic. But I see now what my incipient literary impulse was sensing. Augustine, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Chesterton, and C.S. Lewis all had a unique style, are were Christians, were all autobiographical, satirical, polemical, dialectical, apologetical, philosophical, theological, witty, prone to figures of speech, and humor. Moreover, these were the authors I read first, the local solar system from which I'd later launch to other galaxies. 

It is all-important to accompany your style with content. Style is festooned form and contributes to the content of the content. If The Aeneid were written in lyric form rather than epic, its content would thereby be altered. A documentary of the D-day landings would have different content from Saving Private Ryan, though the media is the same. But regarding the content that's distinct from that contributed by the form, this is the part where writers relentlessly inform us that you have to have something to say, and to make say that and not something else the reader might get. Someone has set its like leading a herd of a sheep to a stall. If there are any distractions along the way, the sheep are sure to take to their leave. 

It is also a constant temptation to want to string together long, meandering, ponderous sentences because of the way older writers wrote. There is a mystique about it. You discern that nothing violates the grammar, that perhaps the sentence's length is necessary to concretize the unfathomable depths of the thought attempting to be expressed. The language encircles the amorphousness of the thought and by virtue of such encircling, the sentence eventually gives birth to the idea in the mind of its reader. There is a romanticism about this. It evokes images of trekking great distances in hostile environments with the desire to attain some precious jewel at the end of a journey. I make it a point to only write long sentences if I see that it is absolutely necessary at the moment I'm writing it. Otherwise, the piquancy of a short sentence is as pleasurable and as final as a gunshot. They shoot out with the reliability and simplicity of a brick. All that's left is to organize them into some coherent whole. The various wholes are paragraphs, the sections, homes; the chapters, neighborhoods; the sections, towns; the book, a city.