Finished Mann ...

... finally finished Buddenbrooks. Dreadful. Long and dreadful. Okay, there were some beautiful passages here and there, if it had been the first Mann book i had ever read i would probably hold out hope that another book of his might be great. The problem is, i read his short works first (including, of course, Death in Venice) and then The Magic Mountain. Loved them. ... and i can see his writing in the 3 or 4 books of his i have read since, but only in sections, in paragraphs, and the reading, as a whole, has been an ordeal. (Looking at my shelf ... the others would be: The Holy Sinner, Transposed Heads, Felix Krull, Doctor Faustus and Buddenbrooks. Faustus was the best of these, and maybe The Holy Sinner was also average.)
If anyone has Mann suggestions that might get me back to that first high, please let me know.

Meanwhile i have made that labor up to myself with a new Mauriac novel ... Woman of the Pharisees. At his best, Mauriac is not as good as Mann (at his best). But i enjoy the average Mauriac novel far more. "Therese" is one of my all time favorites. The Viper's Triangle is the only one that has let me down. From a critical standpoint ... Mauriac talks to much, which is a shame because he does not have to. His characters take care of their own characterizations, and the themes and motifs are pretty straight forward. Still he feels the need to tell you what the characters are too ... and if this is a pet peeve of yours you will probably dislike Mauriac. But the habit meerly makes me wrinkle my forehead and then i move on.

My pet peeves ... bad psychology (eg. D.H. Lawrence - Lady Chatterley's Lover), proving points via literature (eg. C.S. Lewis - Screwtape), the author writing about the intellectual standpoints with whom they do not agree in such a way as to suggest that the intellectuals who hold those viewpoints really do not believe what they say (eg. DeLilo - White Noise) and stopping the story to explain the intellectual points just made (Steinbeck - The Grapes of Wrath, all Ayn Rand, Tolstoi - War and Peace). And OF COURSE ... text that does not have anything to do with the novel, play or short-fiction (Melville, Shakespeare, Mann - Buddenbrooks, many many others).
Okay ... i have a lot of pet peeves. I admit that. But i will also input that even Melville at his worst is better that contemporary "plastic" writing.

William James ...

I often explain the views of W.V.O. Quine in a neo-positivist perspective, but there is also a strong sense in which Quine lies in the lineage of Pragmatism. Here is a quote from William James which has very much a Quinian ring to it.

This quote was published (or, rather, actually, presented in lecture) about the time Quine was born.

... "Solomon knew the names of all the spirits, and having their names, he held them subject to his will. So the universe has always appeared to the natural mind as a kind of enigma, of which the key must be sought in the shape of some illuminating or power-bringing word or name. That word names the universe itself. 'God,' 'Matter,' 'Reason,' 'the Absolute,' 'Energy,' are so many solving names. You can rest when you have them. You are at the end of your metaphysical quest.
But if you follow the pragmatic method, you cannot look on any such word as closing your quest. You must bring out of each word its practical cash-value, set it at work within the stream of your experience. It appears less a solution, then, than as a program for more work, and more particularly as an indication of the ways in which realities may be changed.
Theories thus become instruments, not answers to enigmas, in which we can rest." [James' use of the commas in that last sentence, not mine. I would have said "Theories thus become instruments. They are not answers, in which we can rest, to enigmas." Really, i would have.]

I think of this passage as an excellent explanation of the attack on the human propensity to think that because they have named something, object or theory, that they have answered any question at all. Newton's Universal Gravity is a(n) (approximate) mathematical functionally equivalent statement to what is going on in our physical world. It is not an answer to a question. It is a parallel statement that elucidates and helps make predictions. It is a tool.

Young Hegelians

I have been sifting about through the group of thinkers called the Young Hegelians. A very interesting period of time. Marx, David Strauss, Feuerbach, Bauer and even Stirner and maybe Kierkegaard if you want to stretch the definition a bit ... and more less famous thinkers that made interesting notes here and there. The Right Hegelians were also about.
The paradigm was open and it was a free time to be a thinker, to really be able to change the way philosophy is done.
I happen to think almost everything done by these post Hegelians, as well as by Hegel and Ficthe themselves, was bad for philosophy and thought in general ... but the way in which the thought opened up at that time and the sides went to battle, i really like to read within those time periods.
Also, while we think of the thoughts as, in some sense, free ... the thinkers themselves really gave something up. Bauer lost his teaching job in 1942. Most of the rest were requested to not even submit their thesis ... they had no chance of approval. Stirner gave up his teaching job (at a girl's elementary school) before publishing his book, just to save his superiors the effort of having to fire him after the book release.
These are people who gave something up for their thoughts, and knew they were so doing.

Developmental foundations of cultural practices

An interesting study by Katherine Nelson from the 70s showed that pre-linguistic infants, when asked to take a chip from a pile of blue chips with only one yellow chip ... Japanese infants take one of the many blue chips, American infants take the one yellow chip.
Trained not to stand out? ... or trained to stand out?

God and his predicates

My email discussions this week have all been in email, and since they are just about God and the predicates thereof, I have not bothered to post them on-line. Though i have considered it.

The person to whom i am talking has an interesting perspective, but getting him to fully explicate is like pulling teeth. If anything interesting comes out, or at least something that might be useful to others, i'll be sure to post it.

Quietude

It has been a quiet week in my mind.

I was enjoying a German beer (Schneider & Sons - weisse) at Huberhouse the other day (basement of the Crescent Moon) and reading Thomas Mann's "Buddensbrook". SOmeone asked me who were my favorite authors.

This used to be an easy question, but i realized suddenly that i no longer had an answer. Kafka, Dostoevski, Mauriac, Flaubert, Grimmelshausen ... the old names would just not leave my tounge, they no longer sound correct. No new names have replaced them.

It is best that i write as little as possible when such thoughts are afoot in my mind. I might start giving voice to nihilism.

Nietzsche's predecessor

Max Stirner ... the ur-Nietzsche

emotions and the brain

Natalie commented ...
"If emotions are pre-symbolic, to know an emotion (which necessitates the symbolic) is to impose a symbol (and I would argue, a Gestalt) over a heterogeneous field of affect. One does not really know the emotion in its non-symbolic state, but inevitably interprets (transforms it) it through the symbolic."

Fair enough, especially when we get to the point of thinking about emotions during the liguistic phase of infancy. By the time the child has started to speak about how they feel they are defintely interpreting an array of physiological phenomena.

The brain has distinctive physiological affects for the 4 main emotions ... fear, anger, sadness and joy. The chemicals released and the electrical connections between brain parts is different for each of these. (This finding is more LeDoux work. ) Most of the time, however, one never feels just one of these at a time, but a mixing or 2 or more affects at the same time. The nuances and, eventually, the words we use to describe these nuances contain a considerable degree of intepretation.

[Aside - There are those who believe there are more than 4 base emotions ... disgust is another that gets thrown on the list., and there are 2-3 others. The key point is that, whatever the number you like, they are physiologically distinctive to ourselves and to observers with the right brain tools.]

Going back even further ... the newborn is feeling the rush of these emotions, and their blends, from the get-go. But the internal feeling of these feelings has a natre akin to external stimuli ... the better trained "listener" can here more. Just as Karajan would hear a different symphony than me, and a violinist will here a deffierent symphony than both of us, and different from the trombone player ... the raw data of these internal stimuli are different in consciousness from one newborn to the next ... and the newborn that seeks to learn more about these internal stimuli will soon learn to see nuances.

This learning is also interpretation ... but there is something in the term "interpretation" that makes me think of a static set of stimuli ... like interpreting the words on a page from German to English. The interpretation problem here is ... even if you know every definition (primary, secondaries, and slang) of every word, still the task of combining the right definitions in the right order is a finite computational task, but near impossible .. and then you add to it that some words likely mean more than one thing at a time. Etc etc.

The interpretation of raw stimuli, internal or external, is problematic in a different way. First is the question of knowing "what is out there to be seen or heard, etc" versus what a body actually sees or hears ... and then a second layer of how the brain filters and combines what actually makes it that far, and thirdly, what finally we become conscious of.

Karajan has trained his ear to hear more of what is out there than we others, and his brain filters and combines things differently and reports different stimuli to consciousness. The violinist and trombone player may have the same ear training to pick up roughly the same sounds, but then filter and combines them very differently based on their experiences in their sections of the orchestra, as well as persoanl whims, and finally consciousness hears different things.

Internal stimuli have similar differentiations. An infant that can self-calm, or that is calmed by a caregiver, can relax and take in the emotional stimuli very differently than the one who's baby brain is being overbeared by such stimuli. I tend to use the term filtering and nuancing in this regard, meant more mechanically, than interpretation as it seems far less intentional than i take interpretation, as above described, to be. It more like filtering with a learning mechanism (nuancing).

The emotion to which we eventually apply words is going to be based on that segment which has made it through the filters and conmbinations and into consciousness.

[Aside 2 - It is my belief that words can only point to (pick out) things of which we are conscious, or things directly deducible from the things of which we are conscious. Conversely, i find such phrases as "what is really out there" to be mostly vague and meaningless pointers, at best. But these are language and reference issues better set aside for now.]


That is all for now, must collect more thoughts ...