The Sound of Rain on Metal

Plato Love

2009-11-16T01:01:03Z

One of the biggest ironies in the history of philosophy is that Plato is regarded as the archetypal rationalist from whom the tradition acquires its dogmatic enthusiasm for the intellect's ability to know the Real.

Yep, Yep

2009-10-05T03:49:27Z

The Oresteia is by far the coolest thing I've read in a long while.

Initial Thoughts on the Timaeus (still reading)

2009-09-13T01:05:39Z

In the Timaeus, Plato has the eponymous character narrate a kind of creation myth which explains the construction of the universe by an intelligent agent. Interestingly, the account that Timaeus gives actually arises in the context of a discussion about the social structures and activities of the ideal state. In the dialogue’s opening scene, Socrates quickly lists the characteristics that he and his three friends (Critias, Hermogenes, and Timaeus) had agreed upon during the course of the previous day’s discussion—all of these characteristics being reminiscent of those mentioned in Books III through V of the Republic—and then challenges his friends to turn this ideal account into a description of this state’s international policies, should it ever become a reality. Critias responds by telling a story that his great-grandfather reportedly heard from the great Athenian lawmaker Solon. While traveling in Egypt, Solon was told that primeval Athens, a city lost to Greek history but known by the Egyptians, was the noblest state on earth and led Europe in its efforts to repel an invasion by the empire of Atlantis. From there, the trio decides to give an exhaustive account of forgotten Athens, an account which begins with Timaeus, an astronomer-philosopher, describing the creation of the universe and the resulting implications for human nature. Timaeus’ cosmological story depicts the universe and all it contains as a harmonious and rationally ordered system that is properly regarded as good. In fact, Timaeus attributes both a soul and godhood to the universe (34B).

The central point of relevance regarding the beginning of the Timaeus is that it starts with issues of ethics and politics and then undergoes a secondary shift to a detailed cosmological-physical description, provided only so that Critias, Hermocrates, and Timaeus can respond to Socrates as fully as possible. Therefore, although the Timaeus is chiefly about the manner in which a divine craftsman called the Demiurge fashioned the universe, its primary significance is ethical rather than metaphysical or scientific. Considering the Timaeus to be the first of a projected trilogy of dialogues that was never completed by Plato (Timaeus, Critias, Hermocrates), the early 20th century classical scholar Frances M. Cornford writes that “[t]he whole cosmology of the Timaeus is only a preface to the legendary picture of the ideal state in action [as featured in the Critias] and to whatever were to have been the contents of the Hermocrates." Furthermore, the Timaeus is an extension or extrapolation of “the structural analogy between the state and the individual soul” which Plato laid out in the Republic and so “the chief purpose of the cosmological introduction is to link the morality externalised in the ideal society to the whole organisation of the world." This means that the Timaeus is a continuation of the Socratic-Platonic tradition’s focus on the “examined life” and questions of the good, rather than solely a competitive response to the proto-scientific, object-oriented metaphysics of the pre-Socratics. Plato’s interest is not so much in how the Demiurge uses the Forms in order to give shape and intelligibility to the universe as it is in what this means for human conduct and ethical/political relations.

None of this is to say that the Timaeus has no relationship to ancient Greek cosmology. In his commentary, Cornford explains how Plato, operating through the character of Timaeus, rejects the various cosmologies advanced by earlier schools of Greek philosophy, especially the Pythagoreans and the Atomists. Whereas the Pythagoreans saw the universe as developing in a kind of vegetative process in which it drew nourishment from a kind of primitive, unshaped matter surrounding it, the Atomists believed that the universe had arisen from the pure blind luck of lifeless particles colliding. Considered from the perspective of early Greek philosophical cosmology, Plato’s contribution was to offer the first account of a universe created according to intelligent purpose, with the result that the universe was regarded as capable of being understood, lived in, and shaped according to human reason. Platonic philosophy posited a basic congruity between the objects of human thought and the nature of ultimate reality, a congruity which was also ethical insofar as human reason was capable of structuring human behavior according to the divine order. This stood in stark contrast with earlier tendencies within both philosophy and Greek culture at large, which saw the Olympian gods as jealously hoarding their knowledge and powers. Instead of fickle deities and the harsh world in which the Trojan War was fought and the Persians repelled, Plato gives a description of a kind of craftsman deity who is good and “[d]esiring then, that all things should be good and, so far as might be, nothing imperfect […] took over all that is visible […] and brought it from disorder into order” (30A). The creator is motivated by his own goodness and implants this goodness into the fabric of the created order. However, he is not omnipotent and so his work is constrained by the limits of his materials, namely matter and whatever else is provided to him by Necessity.

But despite this cosmological significance, the main impetus behind the Timaeus is how it serves to connect the order inherent within the universe with human goodness, a linkage in which the good takes precedence and is more immediate. Indeed, as Timaeus explains, the universe is ordered because it is good and an account of the details of that organization can only be probable, whereas its essential goodness is taken to be known (29A-29C).

Edith Hamilton and the Greek Conception of Human Nature

2009-09-03T15:31:30Z

There's a deep tension between Edith Hamilton’s comments on Greek mythology in the beginning of her Mythology and the three creation myths she describes later on. Hamilton starts by depicting the Greeks as an ascendant and humanistic culture that conceived of the gods in their own image. The Greek gods are mentioned as standing in direct contrast to the animalistic deities worshipped throughout the rest of the ancient world, deities who represented primal and alien forces external to man. Zeus and the other Olympians represent the triumph of reason over savagery and the irrational. Their beauty and human shape serve to connect man to the world around him, neatly fitting him into a rational order that he is able to understand and, to some extent, shape. Hamilton believes that the monsters and beasts found in Greek myth exist only to be conquered and contained rather than to dominate and terrify.

But while Greek mythology and culture may ultimately emphasize the primacy of reason over the unintelligible and savage, I think the creation myths stand as clear instances of a darker, anti-humanist aspect of Greek thought. The first creation myth involves the gods tasking Prometheus and his brother with creating mankind. When the brother, Epimetheus, foolishly gives the “best gifts” to the animals—gifts that help them in terms of either predation or protection—Prometheus decides to grant the gift of heaven’s fire to mankind in order to make them superior to the beasts. Here, humanity receives fire in opposition to the gifts received by the animals and this spark of reason and vitality secures their own dominance over external forces. I think this largely accords with Hamilton’s earlier comments, but it’s interesting that fire is granted to man by a divine benefactor. This might suggest that the Greeks see themselves as generally favored and blessed by the gods, except for two other facts: 1) Prometheus is punished by Zeus for his efforts on behalf of mankind, and 2) the other creation myths treat human beings very differently.

In the second account, men are created through a series of experiments conducted by the gods and these experiments get progressively inferior until the current race of human beings emerges as the fifth generation. This race is said to “live in evil times,” to “never have rest from toil and sorrow,” and to be intrinsically evil by nature. The passage of generations constitutes a continual degradation of the character of humanity until they are so full of wrongdoing and the lust for power that Zeus destroys them. In the third and final story, Zeus actually does destroy a previous race of human beings by killing them all in a great flood, but Prometheus rescues two of his own family members who go on to create another group of humans out of stones. This last group, being made of stone, is a “hard, enduring race” tasked with rebuilding the world out of the aftermath of the flood. The myth involving the gods’ experiments is distinctly anti-humanist and portrays the gods as intentionally producing mankind’s gradual decay, whereas the myth of the Stone People emphasizes the caprice of the gods (specifically Zeus) and fatalistically emphasizes the difficulty of humanity’s restorative role in a world of suffering and hardship. Something similar to this second myth can also be found in the story of Pandora’s Box, where—ignoring the implications the myth has for the status of women—a horde of evils are unleashed upon the world but Hope remains.

I don’t think that any of these myths completely undermine the idea that the Greeks valued reason and saw themselves as champions of it, whereas other cultures were not. Greek mythology has the Greeks receiving fire instead of the “animals,” as well as facing the threat of a hostile world with hope and endurance. But the belief that the Greeks saw themselves as in tune with a kind of rational, cosmic harmony certainly does take a blow. The roles and resources of humanity, specifically Greek humanity, continually appear to be in direct opposition to the broader affairs and events of the world. Whatever virtue the Greeks possessed is possessed in spite of the nature of reality and in spite of the gods, but neither is it inherent within the Greeks themselves. Zeus stands opposed to the good of humanity in all of these myths and fire comes from an external source, a Titan who bestows this gift upon a wicked race of mortals. I think this reveals an underlying attitude that goodness is mysterious, causally unaccounted for, and scarce. Man is inherently evil and can only struggle against this evil inside himself and the larger evils of the world with weapons and tools that inexplicably appear in his hands.

Hume's Rejection of Metaphysics in Light of ... Human Nature?

2009-04-16T00:57:54Z

Section 1 of Hume's Enquiry recently struck me as having an odd relationship to all of the other things he's so famous for within philosophy. We get his preparatory remarks about his epistemological project, the flourishes about two types of philosophy (topped off with the comment about anatomy's relationship to art), and then--WABAM--we get a theory of human nature. Humans are reasonable, social, and active, and the good life is one where all of these elements intermix in even proportions. While Hume's basically telling his readers how a careful consideration of epistemology will show that human reason is not capable of making justified metaphysical claims, he insinuates that this constitutes a genuine service on the part of epistemology only because of what it means for human ethical life. In bringing a close to metaphysics, epistemology eliminates a force alleged to be generally hostile--the abstruse philosophy whose superstitions bring about such negative consequences for our more sociable and practical affairs, "overwhelm[ing]" the mind "with religious fears and prejudices." Hume’s assault on metaphysics is motivated by a desire to eliminate error and superstition, but this is because metaphysics means the elevation of philosophy at the expense of genuine human good.

Apparently he just wasn't in much of an is-ought gap mood. It looks to me like we're starting with a fact about ourselves (whether metaphysical or something else) and then moving to nothing less than a condemnation of metaphysics and a plan for its burial--all in the spirit of British modesty, of course.

Cormac McCarthy and No Country for Old Men

2008-12-30T22:44:15Z

"I always knew you had to be willing to die to even do this job, but I don't want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don't understand. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He'd have to say: okay, I'll be part of this world."

I was originally planning on writing up my thoughts on Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, but I could probably benefit from reading the book again beforehand. I got in most of the first reading while I was sick; I came down with a cold on Christmas night. This made the book read even more like an odd fever dream than if I hadn't punctuated the chapters with coughing fits and naps. So in lieu of talking about my vague impressions of the novel, I'll write something about the movie version of No Country for Old Men and Oprah's interview with McCarthy (which I've recently rewatched and seen, respectively). Since I think both Blood Meridian and the movie have quite a few thematic elements in common--and I suspect these might be major themes of McCarthy's work in general--this will help when I eventually revisit Blood Meridian.

The Oprah interview can easily be found on YouTube and I think it's worth watching. As far as I know, it's the only public interview McCarthy's allowed. Oprah's questions and comments are generally embarrassing (e.g. her awkward lines about him being a "different kind of writer" when he casually dismisses the value of a wide readership and material remuneration) and lightweight (she asks him if he ever has "aha!" moments), but she deserves credit for landing the interview in the first place and I got the impression that McCarthy didn't mind. If anything, it was probably his kind of interview: simple and affable. And McCarthy does his thing anyway. All of his responses are stated plainly and matter-of-fact, but it's easy to read a lot of them back into his work. Across a wide range of subjects (religion, McCarthy's experience with poverty, etc.), he says things that gel with my general sense that BM and NCfOM stress the necessity and essential ambiguity of hope. When Oprah asks whether or not he's sorted out the whole "God thing," McCarthy's laconic answer is that he doesn't believe a person has to have the question of God's existence worked out in order to pray. When describing being evicted from the $40 a month hotel he was living in, he mentions his own luck in that something, some "unforeseen thing", would come about to benefit him just when things were truly desperate. Probably most obviously, he talks about how lucky our society is and that if his writing had a single message, it is that a person should appreciate life even when it's "pretty damn bad." I think that all the violence and depravity that appear in his stories is towards the end of pointing out a vital uncertainty that serves as the basis of our being and living. In both works, he floods the narrative with an overwhelming amount of suffering and alienation and then, after presenting a single closing image which may be entirely naive, asks us whether or not life is worth it anyway. It's not just a matter of having hope in the face of uncertainty, but the very possibility of hope itself being uncertain.

Because this uncertainty is so vital, McCarthy portrays it as a fundamental metaphysical and existential force that is oddly law-like. There's a kind of Heraclitean dialectical relationship between fatalism and uncertainty on one hand and agency and uncertainty on the other. This plays itself out, for example, in Chigurh's pursuit of Moss (Chigurh = fatalism; Moss = agency) and Chigurh's coin tosses. I think this is alluded to in the interview when McCarthy briefly talks about how the laws of probability are unshakable, but that ultimately there is no reason why one person should be in one group rather than another. Faced with the blind laws of probability, human beings as moral agents are left to dwell on the slight margin of chance that offers both anxiety and freedom, nihilism and self-creation.

I think saying that most of No Country for Old Men is relatively straightforward in terms of plot can be accepted with little to no argument and, initially, the sheer silliness of that plot was a turn-off to me that prevented the movie from being great. I still think there are a couple of ways in which the movie trips up (the ending isn't one of them), but overall it's impressive. The bulk of the interpretative work falls on the end of the movie of course, but there's also a fair amount at the very beginning. When the sheriff, narrating, mentions his encounter with a boy who'd been planning to kill someone for as long as he lived and felt certain he was destined for Hell, this is the initial presentation of the two heads of nihilism: the boy's grim certainty and the sheriff's own shock and lack of direction. The sheriff balks at uncertainty ("a man would have to put his soul at hazard") and is consequently left impotent from the standpoint of agency, and this inefficacy is at the heart of the movie as a whole. At the risk of overreaching, I'm additionally going to say that Moss stumbling across the money, when he wounds the antelope and tracks it across the prairie only to spot a limping black dog from the botched drug deal, is something like an unconscious bargain with primal violence. I don't think it's just an irrelevant coincidence within the plot that Moss is hunting when he comes across the scene. Moss' violence is an uncertain one, in contrast to Chigurh's.

Chigurh is methodical and dispassionate in his killing. He uses a device used to kill cattle and determines his victims based on "principle." Chigurh represents a ruthless determinism of basic cause and effect, where there is only a single "tool" for every "job." From Chigurh's perspective, pursuing Moss will lead to a clear and final result: Moss' death. From Moss' perspective, the conflict is uncertain and strange. The tragic aspect of Moss' death is that it is largely a victory for fatalism (although, significantly, Chigurh was not his killer). For Chigurh, the coin toss is the only admissible chance within his world, a pseudo-chance, but the "best [he] can do." Chigurh wants to believe that his own actions are just as perfunctory and unthinking as the coin being carried along in his pocket, but receives a shock at the ending of the movie, visibly uncomfortable over Moss' wife insisting that he does not have to kill her, that he in fact has a choice. Of course, Chigurh kills her (this isn't ambiguous) and seemingly thereby affirms the truth of his own worldview, until a random car accident injures him.

The sheriff is the most ambiguous of the three. First, he is notably unable to save Moss and this moral failure is most emphasized in his chat with his buddy after leaving the morgue. The two cops bemoan how the world is leaving them behind and collapsing into chaos and the dialogue ends with the other cop (i.e. not Tommy Lee Jones) asking how to defend against someone who walks into the same crime scene twice, a question which would seem to have a pretty easy answer. The explanation of the two dreams at the very finale of the movie isn't all that difficult: For the first, Jones' character feels like a rudderless disappointment to his father. The second is an image of hope and brightness in the dark, which is recognized as possibly being a complete illusion with the final line of the movie: "Then I woke up." What's more difficult is his visit with Ellis (his uncle?) who points out that inexplicable violence has always been a part of the profession and of the world in general (or at least since 1909). This shows the sheriff's decision to retire for what it is, a moral cowardice in the face of uncertainty. What's more difficult is the other contortions in Ellis' little talk: he affirms that the sheriff can't stop what's coming and that to think differently would be vanity and mentions never asking to be a deputy. This could be just as simple as telling Jones to buck up and accept the overwhelming odds without resigning, but I can't help but think it's more complicated. Namely, these statements apparently reinforce the sheriff's impression of his lack of agency, which is not a plus.

There are other things about the movie worth talking about in more depth, like the humorous aspects (Chigurh's standoff with the convenience store owner & the significance of being a 'Nam vet come to mind) and the shots of the wide, barren Texas landscape--harsh and serving to dwarf the people that nonetheless belong to it and are at home in it. But I'm out for now.

mercuryxrises @ 2007-10-25T17:34:00

2007-10-25T21:38:32Z

"...for that called body is a portion of the soul discerned by the five senses." - William Blake