SELECTED NOTES ON WHAT I’VE BEEN READING RECENTLY

Descartes is the start.

Descartes and his rationalism gave us Cartesian doubt, founded analytic philosophy and some would say modern science too. Descartes says before you can know anything you must doubt everything, every preconception, every prejudice left over from childhood. He extirpates every trace of falsity from his mind, entertaining that the data of his senses comes from a hideous demon, then realises that he is still thinking, still doubting, and therefore knows he exists. Hence we get “cogito ergo sum,” one of the most famous formulations in philosophy. Descartes also claims to have proven God’s existence by the fact that he can conceive of a perfection greater than himself so God must’ve put it there. It is kind of in line with the Ontological Argument as opposed to the Teleological or Cosmological Argument for God, which simply put is that if we have a word for God He exists. Descartes also says no effect can be more perfect than its cause and traces therefore his own existence back to God. I like the scene with the candle, where the candle beside the fire melts and is unrecognisable as a candle because it no longer takes the candle’s form – and what he means by it may well be to extinguish all trace of recognition from the myriad mind in the process of becoming your true self and finding your true stance before life. Spinoza often takes his cue from Descartes and says Descartes “proved nothing but his own brilliance.” He certainly was a brilliant mind and a gifted writer even if we don’t agree with his reasoning process and think his proof of God involves casuistry.

Philosophy might’ve died.

Is it true that philosophy might’ve died? I don’t know, but heard it on the airwaves in that song we call the new music. It is true that most lives are unaffected by things like Wittgenstein. As John Gray writes in The New Leviathans, the universe too remains indifferent to human philosophy. The human mind is a spec of dust in the cosmic order, he says. Life is essentially meaningless, in other words.

But with philosophy we try and give it meaning. The quest for meaning is not such a bad one to be on. The quest for meaning implies that we can redeem a situation with the salvation of our arts and sciences too. It gives us hope, something to strive for, without which the entire enterprise of research would collapse in on itself.

I suppose if meaning broke down completely there would be no sense in reading. It has occurred to me that any word can be spelled in any way, any guitar solo played in any way, and that all the subject boundaries have disappeared, leaving only one subject: life. Then I suppose one would become a philosopher. I also believe that it is subjective as to whether or not philosophy has died. It’s like when young poets design their “canon” – what is canonical is a personal matter, up to them.

It’s the same in philosophy: there is a canon, and then there is what is personally canonical to the philosopher in question too. If you think The Simpsons is the American Shakespeare you can. If you think the movie Waking Life one of the finest philosophical essays ever written you can think that too. If you think the philosophy groups on Facebook are proof enough that philosophy has not died, you can think that as well. It’s personal. But you should probably, not definitely, face up to the fact that there is a tradition, and that engaging with the past is how one can most radically re-calibrate the co-ordinates of the possible in the present and future. If you don’t know what already exists, you don’t know what to add to it.

There is no such thing as mind cancer.

I may have said this earlier already but Hobbes and Descartes sat on opposite ends of the spectrum w/r/t the mind. For Hobbes the mind was part of the body, for Descartes the mind was separate from the material world. You could argue, there being no mind cancer proves Descartes right in that debate; but you could also say there is no mind cancer because there is nothing for the term “mind” to name except the dance of the synapses, electrical impulses in the brain.

Furthermore, it could also be instructive to add that when I read of Descartes clenching the idea of perfection in his mind and using it as ontological proof of God; and when I turn inward my eye – I glimpse a perfect inner judge whose concerns are grammatical.

I have a friend who says “beware perfection” much like Lacan says to “beware the image.” Still I wish to know more of the perfect, inner judge whose concerns are grammatical – for he seemed to be the mirror-image of what I was reading, like the piece was a two-way mirror.

If for some reason you attempt the maths of the new colour, you shouldn’t give it away for free.

But you can say that while reading Saul A. Kripke trying to persuade a sceptic that when he says “plus” he doesn’t mean “quus” you kept thinking how interesting it would be to add to the debate that back at 7 years old you wrote the line:

“I have a scar+ that is red and black,”

using a + sign for an ‘f’. You did that after taking care of Einstein’s E in a particular way and so that the E and the F were a seamless continuity. The so-called maths also extends further, beyond the F; but as I say one shouldn’t just give it away for free. This way we also pay respect to Descartes who spoke against academics giving mathematical demonstrations as being untrustworthy. But I might go back on this later.

You should read Lucretius before you start.

They said I should read Lucretius before I begin and I began without having done so but now I have read it. I think it remarkable how advanced the discussion of the atom was, in a world before Christ, considering they didn’t even know if the sun was remade every morning. Indeed, Lucretius – On The Nature of the Universe – would make a great compare and contrast with a modern Italian physicist called Carlo Rovelli who wrote Reality Is Not What It Seems. Lucretius inherited and versified the content of his book but it’s still remarkable as an achievement and that includes the way he keeps bringing the discussion back to the goal of Epicurean philosophy, in tranquillity of mind and good behaviour. He never loses touch with the ultimate goal of Epicureanism. As for the atom, once the idea of it is conceived of, he goes overboard and attributes everything to the work of atoms. He even says sight is an effect of a thin stream of atoms emitted by an object. As I say to compare and contrast with Rovelli would show how much things have changed and how much they’ve remained the same.

The paradigm of psychoanalysis has given way to that of neuro-science.

Mental illness is seen as chemical imbalances in the brain which are therefore treatable with medication, which some deem crude. Still the brain is 99% blood and 1% statistics. Scientists still know very little about the brain. The point is that philosophy too has moved in this “physicalist” direction, moved from “the mental image” to the central nervous system. Even ineffable qualia can be considered effects of the CNS rather than the mind. Things are all moving in that general, physiological direction in science, psychology and philosophy at once. I read about this in A. J. Ayer’s Philosophy of the 20th Century which is probably itself way behind the ever-changing times by now but still indicative of the general direction of things. And I am reminded of a debate I had with my ex who said “intelligence is a social construct” as opposed to hardwired/ physiological. The truth is not that; the truth is that intelligence is a balance between the socially constructed and the hardwired/ physiological. In neuro-aesthetics where they say “if it fires it wires,” contact with other artists only hones and enhances one’s skills but at the same time, twins separated at birth can grow up to have identical handwriting, indicating a hardwired aspect to intelligence. So it is a bit of both. And meanwhile in philosophy everything is loaded more on the central nervous system and the physiology than before.

There is a lot to be said for common sense.

I’ve been reading A. J. Ayer; and if I could start my philosophy again I’d restart by highlighting the 3 beliefs of the “common sense” philosophy of G. E. Moore.

1. there are in the universe enormous numbers of material objects

2. men and perhaps some other animals have minds that perform acts of consciousness

3. we really do know there are objects and minds.

Now I look about the room grounded in basic tenets of belief that I share. If “colour” was my next port of call, I’d take my point of departure either from a Neil Curry poem on the shelves that says “colour is merely a spectacular event;” or look up a scientific definition of colour on Google. That is, I stare at objects as if trying to expand what is known yet know that philosophy must turn inwards. Increasingly (it says), mental states are co-aligned with actions in the brain. Struggling to expand at leisure on Moore’s general beliefs, I stare at some tiny insects moving on the white ceiling; then the lightbulb dims and flashes back on for a split second while I stare. There are such things as hallucinations but this I don’t think is one. Still, trusting my own perceptions does not necessarily correlate to intelligence much like recognising there are no Absolutes kind of does. I am left with the room again, thinking “isness is the centre of everything; the quiddity and suchness of existence, but not exactly only enough.” In time I hope to build on Moore’s 3 beliefs.

If you pick up a book of philosophy you should stay with it until you finish it.

A. J. Ayer presents an historical trajectory of philosophers as a continuum of philosophical discourse. At some point in his historicisation he encounters himself in the timeline. What is clear is that the saturation-point of his erudition is light years beyond what I have read in philosophy. I could probably list the philosophy books I’ve read recently on one A4 page, as if the desire to keep shaping my own philosophy book is dictatorial. Then again I excuse myself by saying Wittgenstein himself was no scholar. Ayer accounts for the history of Western philosophy as has happened since Russell wrote History of Western Philosophy, or rather as an adjunctivity to where that history ends. It’s difficult reading but I got through it in the end. As we reach the contemporary point, or rather contemporary as it was in 1982 at the time of publication, Ayer takes us through pragmatism, the analytical school, physicalism, existentialism, neo-Marxism, structuralism, essentialism and gets to the end and says he’s still an old-fashioned empiricist.

Nobody can force you to be Anon.

The wind calls for my anonymity; but historically when a work is Anon, they try and work out who really wrote it so Anon would seem backward to me. More to the point, and having read On Liberty by John Stuart Mill, I would say a progressive country goes stagnant, stale, sterile, staid and stationary, full of dead values and dead customs, when there is a decrease in Individuality, and that someone like myself should therefore not be pressured into anonymity. Not only that but it’s against the law to coerce someone or force someone into being Anon against their wishes. One has something called the Right to Attribution which you can ask your friendly A. I. co-pilot all about. I don’t wish to be Anon but to resonate as an individual which I do not consider to be a political position in the slightest. If you can’t even write poetry because someone is sounding out saying you have to be Anon every time you start that’s not a good situation. Especially with a CV like mine I feel my Individuality should be preserved for the sake of the greater good.

Nietzsche is not my philosopher.

For one he’s big into war, not kindness, forgiveness, compassion or mercy. He also seems to think the herd-crowd should endure great suffering for the sake of one great man. Through Nietzsche we also get the idea that morality is all inherent in the idea of God and if there is no God morality is all a make-believe. The latter I find untrue because I know atheists devoted to trying to be a good human in all ways, like tending to their souls more than their bodies, or living moderately within their means. Nietzsche is nevertheless an interesting writer to read – a very eccentric writer and an horizontal thinker who says the secret of his happiness is “a yes, a no, a straight line, a goal;” who also says “knowledge kills action.” Despite him not being my philosopher, I like what he says in Beyond Good And Evil about the new philosophers of tomorrow being big into experiment. He says new philosophers are what he hopes for in the world and that, yes, they will be essentially experimenters. He gets excited about their arisal… and I feel like I could have been one of them… even if it was just the tape with a pause where cut and resealed in the flimsy reel and its inherent mandate to somehow “do away with the pause” it would have been an experiment enough…

Knives are better the blunter they are if they are weapons.

Nietzsche is rather disparaging about England in Beyond Good And Evil. He says we are nowhere near being a philosophical race. He says in other words he does not like Locke and Hume, nor that he likes Darwin (who was not a philosopher but whom he describes as mediocre) or Bacon or John Stuart Mill or Hobbes either (he doesn’t mention Berkeley). In England we happen to think this not being a philosophical race has all changed now ever since a few updates: one is my own piece on the falsification of the Nirvana barcode; another is the James P D Tucker sheet where pictures seemingly depicting my own song lyric grew; and we also think that my brother’s notion that <BEE> might soon ensue from @ in the international language alphabet is written into the very dawn chorus itself. We believe that since my brother and I, England has become the philosophical centre of Europe. Nietzsche says “the European ignobleness, the plebeianism of modern ideas” is an English invention; but now we have my brother and I. We are half-Finnish but English is our only language, and we have lived in England all our lives. We are both writers who often stay awake into the Night and who share a co-imagination as I call it or a sympathy as James calls it. James as I say was the one who gave us <BEE> and I was the one who brought the Nirvana barcode in. When I discovered the sheet where pictures grew it was only the latest development in a long chain of remarkable events for me, and I falsified the Nirvana barcode then. Our football team may not be as successful as Germany but I would back English philosophy over Nietzsche. I would say that in England although we have no Beethoven, Anon is one of the best composers, not to mention our having provided The Beatles; and our scientific tradition is the best in the world. Shakespeare is reckoned to be a genius the world all over too, through whom we get that love is the answer. But all this is the sharpening of a knife and knives are better the blunter they are if they are weapons.

Wittgenstein is a maddening writer but a genius no doubt.

Relational undoing. I’ve just finished Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. There are some interesting mirror neuron-y things in the second part; in fact I love it when it seems the structure of the book is the subtext of the examples he’s discussing with intelligent selection. One thing I remembered was a game I used to play back in childhood: I would lie in bed and somehow (I forget how) with my eyes closed or else under the cover lose orientation, lose the room, forget which end of the bed my head was at, where the wall was, and how I would lie dead still and appreciate the utter lostness, the freedom from direction madly and gladly too. There was something contained in Wittgenstein’s approach to an accelerated discourse combining music, geometry, psychology, maths, linguistics, and more, in the second part of his book that suddenly reminded me of the exquisite pleasure of having escaped reality in such a fashion as a kid. I say “escaped reality” but maybe that was to find it for walking on the sun as Einstein tells us there are no ups, downs, lefts or rights. This experience of having become free from knowing which way round I was lying, where the room was, where the wall was, and just lying there in incognito position I don’t quite attain anymore and I can’t remember the details of it that greatly as to how it was arrived at – sometimes by chance, sometimes on purpose. It’s an experience of amnesia or even ecstasia that I mean. It wasn’t a contravention of gravity but of spatial awareness; a way of escaping the obvious that would seem normally inescapable and go unnoticed too. Such an experience I would say even re-instils a belief in paradise, magic and fantasy in the young child, but that may be unqualified. To attain it again would seem too difficult. It was a relational undoing. A scrambling of the co-ordinates of reality.

Spinoza tries to lead you through a moral maze.

With Spinoza when he refers you back to previous hypotheses, propositions, corollaries and the like you are supposed to flick back the pages and reread them mid-flow. It’s to do with trigonometry. But flicking back to one previous proposition you find he refers you mid-flow to another, and checking that out you are soon waylaid again by yet another and can reach an impasse or even moral maze where you can’t proceed with the book. For the most part I read without turning the pages back but that was not how it was intended, so I was wrong. It’s an ingenious piece of writing that reminds one of much more hyper-textual online experiments. Imagine an online page you have to read which is full of hyperlinks, and you have to press on them and read them to proceed; but you press on one and find once more you are faced with further hyperlinks you must read to proceed, and press them and find further hyperlinks. On the internet this can go on forever and I am not sure of the extent to which it can in Spinoza’s Ethics but I am already impressed by the form and wondering if I can possibly carry on. Could there come a moment of ecstasia – an incognito moment – a moment of peripiteia or even upturning – where to read on you would have to be redirected endlessly and could therefore not proceed? If there was I might already have gone past it, in the crude way of not turning back when he signals to. I really have been missing out on at least half the beauty of Ethics. It has taken me to beyond 100 pages before I have started to flick the pages back as directed to previous propositions and the like. Doing that, one thinks of forgiveness, mercy and compassion – that we are allowed to be fallible and that is the point. More recently I came at the book from all sorts of convoluted angles, rereading propositions several times, and found it to be recursive rather than linear. I think the idea is that it’s the moments the text breaks down that teach you to reason for yourself. Also of note, in talking about the emotions he manages to get the reader to locate within himself a moment of rarefied and heightened emotion that could be called passion. He just somehow points to it in your experiential kingdom, like a rare coincidence and you find it an elevated feeling and therein fall in love with the text.