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Incompatible premises

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Your house or mine, depending on the whether.

Back to the irresistible force paradox ( ED. We never left – it won’t leave) where the unstoppable force meets an immovable object. In our case, the immovable obtuse object will not listen to available facts, widely available since the 1980s. Our elected representatives, and the companies that keep them, elect to do nothing about climate change. Even though they know better, just like they get vaccines, largely eat healthy foods, and take regular vacations to foreign capitals.

And the climate continues its response to unabated carbon emissions, pollution, sprawl, and their attendant maladies.

Most poignantly, we have, despite the efforts of the best and brightest, figured out what to do. Every little thing but more importantly the big expensive ones. The power of collective action – the real facts we hate – as well as the beauty of slowness and direct personal touch. We also know beyond doubts that ‘big expensive’ will be far more affordable – always with the deadly calculus – than the bigger expensiver denial that creeps closer as we try to maintain that denial rather than a healthy biosphere. The simple human effort required of managing the cognitive dissonance of massive personal vehicles and long commutes, the right to cheap food and expensive entertainment, is plenty enough power to humble us into open minds about a closed system. Yet we cling to the power to resist all we should embrace. Forever batteries, powered by spite.

Meanwhile, more energy hits the Earth every morning than every man, woman and child will use in 27 years, if you’re scoring at home.

Image: screenshot from Bloomberg, but they’re just the messenger.

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From the Christian side

I’m preparing to tape an interview with a philosopher in a few days, and so have been doing some selected reading on a variety of related topics. Sure, some call it maze fun. And sometimes, there’s no better place than to be looking though unsure about for what. One of the things I happened across is this speech, Existentialism is Humanism, by Sartre from 1946. A sample:

Most of those who are making use of this word would be highly confused if required to explain its meaning. For since it has become fashionable, people cheerfully declare that this musician or that painter is “existentialist.” A columnist in Clartes signs himself “The Existentialist,” and, indeed, the word is now so loosely applied to so many things that it no longer means anything at all. It would appear that, for the lack of any novel doctrine such as that of surrealism, all those who are eager to join in the latest scandal or movement now seize upon this philosophy in which, however, they can find nothing to their purpose. For in truth this is of all teachings the least scandalous and the most austere: it is intended strictly for technicians and philosophers. All the same, it can easily be defined.

The question is only complicated because there are two kinds of existentialists. There are, on the one hand, the Christians, amongst whom I shall name Jaspers and Gabriel Marcel, both professed Catholics; and on the other the existential atheists, amongst whom we must place Heidegger as well as the French existentialists and myself. What they have in common is simply the fact that they believe that existence comes before essence – or, if you will, that we must begin from the subjective. What exactly do we mean by that?

If one considers an article of manufacture as, for example, a book or a paper-knife – one sees that it has been made by an artisan who had a conception of it; and he has paid attention, equally, to the conception of a paper-knife and to the pre-existent technique of production which is a part of that conception and is, at bottom, a formula. Thus the paper-knife is at the same time an article producible in a certain manner and one which, on the other hand, serves a definite purpose, for one cannot suppose that a man would produce a paper-knife without knowing what it was for. Let us say, then, of the paperknife that its essence – that is to say the sum of the formulae and the qualities which made its production and its definition possible – precedes its existence. The presence of such-and-such a paper-knife or book is thus determined before my eyes. Here, then, we are viewing the world from a technical standpoint, and we can say that production precedes existence.

When we think of God as the creator, we are thinking of him, most of the time, as a supernal artisan. Whatever doctrine we may be considering, whether it be a doctrine like that of Descartes, or of Leibnitz himself, we always imply that the will follows, more or less, from the understanding or at least accompanies it, so that when God creates he knows precisely what he is creating. Thus, the conception of man in the mind of God is comparable to that of the paper-knife in the mind of the artisan: God makes man according to a procedure and a conception, exactly as the artisan manufactures a paper-knife, following a definition and a formula. Thus each individual man is the realisation of a certain conception which dwells in the divine understanding. In the philosophic atheism of the eighteenth century, the notion of God is suppressed, but not, for all that, the idea that essence is prior to existence; something of that idea we still find everywhere, in Diderot, in Voltaire and even in Kant. Man possesses a human nature; that “human nature,” which is the conception of human being, is found in every man; which means that each man is a particular example of a universal conception, the conception of Man. In Kant, this universality goes so far that the wild man of the woods, man in the state of nature and the bourgeois are all contained in the same definition and have the same fundamental qualities. Here again, the essence of man precedes that historic existence which we confront in experience.

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Nation-Gazing

I’ve been reading a bit of Ernest Gellner recently, but not this piece excerpted below, which is from the The Warwick Debate between Gellner and his former student Anthony Smith, just before the death of the former.

“The question I’m going to now address myself to of course is: do nations have navels or not? Now the point about Adam’s navel of course is not as simple as you might think. It’s perfectly possible to imagine a navel-less Adam because navels, once they were engendered by the original process by which they were engendered, perform no further function. I mean you could live navel-less and there is no problem. Now on the other hand there are other aspects of a human organism, supposing creation did occur at a definite date and mankind was suddenly created, which are rather navel-like but which would have to be there anyway in a kind of misleading way. There are all kinds of rhythms; I’m not a physiologist, but there are all kinds of rhythms about one’s breathing, about one’s digestion, about one’s blood-beat, which come in cycles and the cycle has to be continuous. So even if Adam was created at a given date, his blood circulation or his food consumption or his breathing would have to be in a condition such that he’d been going through these cycles anyway, even though he hadn’t been, because he had just been created. For instance, I imagine his digestive tract wouldn’t function unless it had some sort of content so that he would have signs of a meal, remnants of a meal which in fact he had never had because he had only just been created.

“Now it’s the same with nations. How important are these cyclical processes? My main case for modernism that I’m trying to highlight in this debate, is that on the whole the ethnic, the cultural national community, which is such an important part of Anthony’s case, is rather like the navel. Some nations have it and some don’t and in any case it’s inessential. What in a way Anthony is saying is that he is anti-creationist and we have this plethora of navels and they are essential, as he said, and this I think is the crux of the issue between him and me. He says modernism only tells half the story. Well if it tells half the story, that for me is enough, because it means that the additional bits of the story in the other half are redundant. He may not have meant it this way but if the modernist theory accounts for half of 60 per cent or 40 per cent or 30 per cent of the nations this is good for me. There are very, very clear cases of modernism in a sense being true. I mean, take the Estonians. At the beginning of the nineteenth century they didn’t even have a name for themselves. They were just referred to as people who lived on the land as opposed to German or Swedish burghers and aristocrats and Russian administrators. They had no ethnonym. They were just a category without any ethnic self-consciousness. Since then they’ve been brilliantly successful in creating a vibrant culture.(3) This is obviously very much alive in the Ethnographic Museum in Tartu, which has one object for every ten Estonians and there are only a million of them. (The Museum has a collection of 100,000 ethnographic objects). Estonian culture is obviously in no danger although they make a fuss about the Russian minority they’ve inherited from the Soviet system. It’s a very vital and vibrant culture, but, it was created by the kind of modernist process which I then generalise for nationalism and nations in general. And if that kind of account is accepted for some, then the exceptions which are credited to other nations are redundant.

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Away from the Mist

Some say you have to read Kant before you can understand Schopenhauer. Well, as one of my uncles used to tell us boys, “Can’t never could.”

This is from The World as Will and Idea by Arthur Schopenhauer, from the supplements to the third book, chapter xxxiv, On the Inner Nature of Art

Every work of art accordingly really aims at showing us life and the things as they are in truth, but cannot be directly discened by every one through the mist of objective and subjective contengencies. Art takes away this mist.

The works of poets, sculptors and representative artists in general contain an unacknowledged treasure of profound wisdom; just because out of them the wisdom of the nature of things itself speaks, whose utterances they merely interpret by illustrations and purer repetitions. On this account, however, every one who reads the poem or looks at the picture must certainly contribute out of his means to bring that wisdom to light; accordingly he comprehends only so much of it as his capacity and culture admit of; as in the deep sea each sailor only lets down the lead as far as the length of the line will allow. Before a picture, as before a prince, everyone must stand, waiting to see whether and what it will speak to him; and, as in the case of the prince, so here he must not himself address it, for then he would hear himself. It follows from all this that in the works of the representative arts all truth is certainly contained, yet only virtualiter or implicite; philosophy, on the other hand, endeavors to supply the same truth actualiter and explicite, and therefore, in this sense, is related to art as wine to grapes. What it promises to supply would be, as it were, an already realised and clear gain, a firm and abiding possession; while that which proceeds from the achievements and works of art is one which has constantly to be reproduced anew. Therefore, however, it makes demands, not only upon those who produce its works, but also upon those who are to enjoy them, which are discouraging and hard to comply with. Therefore its public remains small, while that of art is large.

The co-operation of the beholder, which is referred to above, as demanded for the enjoyment of the work of art, depends partly on the fact the every work of art can only produce its effect through the medium of the fancy; therefore it must excite this, and can never allow it to be left out of the play and remain inactive. This is a condition of the aesthetic effect, and therefore a fundamental law of all fine arts. But it follows from this that, through the work of art, everything must not be directly given to the senses, but rather only so much as is demanded to lead the fancy on to the right path; something, and indeed the ultimate thing, must always be left over for the fancy to do. Even the author must always leave something over for the reader to think; for Voltaire has rightly said,” Le secret d’etre ennuyeux, c’est de tout dire.” [my trans – the secret to being boring is to say everything] But besides this, in art the best of all is too spiritual to be given directly to the senses; it must be born int he imagination of the beholder, although begotten by the work of art. It depends upon this that the sketches of the great masters often effect more than their finished pictures; although another advantage certainly contributes to this, namely, that they are completed offhand in the moment of conception; while the perfected painting is only produced through continued effort, by means of skillful deliberation and persistent intention, for the inspiration cannot last till it is completed. From the fundamental aesthetical law we are speaking of, it is further to be explained why wax figures never produce an aesthetic effect, and therefore are not properly works of fine art, although it is just in them that the imitation of nature is able to reach it highest grade. For they leave nothing for the imagination to do. Sculpture gives merely the form without the color; painting gives the color, but the mere appearance of form; thus both appeal to the imagination of the beholder. The wax figure, on the other hand, gives all, form and color at once; whense arises the appearance of reality, and the imagination is left out of account. Poetry, on the contrary, appeals to the imagination alone, which it sets in action by means of mere words.

Leprechauns notwithstanding.