Two Comments on Curiosity

"...[O]ver and above that lust of the flesh...there can also be in the mind itself, through those same bodily senses, a certain vain desire and curiosity, not of taking delight in the body, but of making experiments with the body's aid, and cloaked under the name of learning and knowledge. Because this is in the appetite to know, and the yes are the chief of the senses we use for attaining knowledge, it is called in Scripture the lust of the eyes

...[I]t is easy to distinguish between the way in which the sense pleasure and the way in which they serve curiosity. Pleasure goes after objects that are beautiful to see, hear, smell, taste, touch; but curiosity for the sake of experiment can go after quite contrary things, not in order to experience their unpleasantness, but through a mere itch to experience and find out."

[Augustine, The Confessions, Book Ten, section 35, translated by Frank Sheed]

The simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind, is Curiosity. By curiosity, I mean whatever desire we have for, or whatever pleasure we take in, novelty. We see children perpetually running from place to place, to hunt out something new: they catch with great eagerness, and with very little choice, at whatever comes before them; their attention is engaged by everything, because everything has, in that stage of life, the charm of novelty to recommend it.

But as those things, which engage us merely by their novelty, cannot attach us for any length of time, curiosity is the most superficial of all the affections; it changes its object perpetually, it has an appetite which is very sharp, but very easily satisfied; and it has always an appearance of giddiness, restlessness, and anxiety. Curiosity, from its nature, is a very active principle; it quickly runs over the greatest part of its objects, and soon exhausts the variety which is commonly to be met with in nature; the same things make frequent returns, and they return with less and less of any agreeable effect. 

In short, the occurrences of life, by the time we come to know it a little, would be incapable of affecting the mind with any other sensations than those of loathing and weariness, if many things were not adapted to affect the mind by means of other powers besides novelty in them, and of other passions besides curiosity in ourselves. These powers and passions shall be considered in their place. But whatever these powers are, or upon what principle soever they affect the mind, it is absolutely necessary that they should not be exerted in those things which a daily and vulgar use have brought into a stale unaffecting familiarity. Some degree of novelty must be one of the materials in every instrument which works upon the mind; and curiosity blends itself more or less with all our passions.

[Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Part One, section 1]

Notes from October 26, 2009

—Nicholas Rescher's list of possible reasons as to why philosophy doesn't (seem) to make any progress:

(1) methodological differences lead to different results
(2) psychological differences among thinkers
(3) structural problems
      (a) originality is awarded
      (b) obscurity is awarded
(4) cultural differences among thinkers
(5) philosophy is a pseudo-discipline. Its questions aren't sensible or legitimate

Notes from March 24, 2010

"White on White," Kasimir Malevich, 1918

—Notes on "On the Possibility of Philosophical Knowledge," George Bealer

What are Intuitions?

(a) An intuition is an intellectual "seeming," not a sensory or introspective "seeming."

(b) Philosophical intuitions are a priori intuitions, not physical intuitions.

(c) They are not beliefs. I can have an intuition that something is right (a mathematical proof, for example) and simultaneously believe it is wrong. Also, belief is highly plastic; intuitions aren't.

(d) Not all intuitions are linguistic intuitions, i.e. intuitions about words and their applications.

(e) Not all intuitions are analytic, i.e. arriving from the combination of logic and the definition of terms.

(f) Intuitions can be mistaken. Locally, a single intuition can be wrong. Holistically, a person's systematization can be wrong.

Augustine on Study

"Grant me, then, space for my meditations upon the hidden things of Thy law, nor close Thy law against me as I knock. Not for nothing hast Thou willed that the deep secrets of all those pages should be written, not for nothing have those woods their stags, which retire to them and are restored, walk in them and are fed, lie down in them and ruminate."

[Confessions, Book 11, section 2, translated by Frank Sheed]

Two questions about Romanticism

Student: You mentioned that the psychoanalytic movement looked back on Romanticism. Could you expand on that?

Teacher: They are both very concerned with the process by which experience becomes memory and how the lives we live seem different to us than they actually are. They are both interested in the internal psychic economy. I'm not sure if the link here is causal; in other words, Freud didn't necessarily pick this idea up from Blake (though Freud did say that the poets got there first and he was merely repeating what they said). It may have just been that they were dealing with similar problems and so came up with similar answers.

Student: Wordsworth talks about how we should go to nature to re-orient our moral compass. You hear this idea a lot in the classical authors too. Is the idea the same do you think, or has it changed? Do they mean the same thing?

Teacher: The difference is how they conceive of nature. Virgil writes about an aristocrat's nature, nature idealized away from its connection to peasant labor. In re-writing Virgil, Wordsworth really focuses on the "lower class" elements, how connected it is with the vernacular and a certain form of life.

Notes from January 18, 2012

—Vico's axiom 43: "Every ancient pagan nation had as its founder its own Hercules." It seems clear that George Washington is our Hercules. 

—Washington : God the Father :: Lincoln : Christ the Son

Notes from April 12, 2013

—Three philosophers: the spider, the ant, and the bee

(a) The ant collects
(b) The spider spins
(c) The bee transforms

Notes from Nov. 6, 2010

—Three theories about God and causation:

(a) Conservationist — God conserves objects' existence but they cause things on their own

(b) Concurrentist — God causes things to exist and He concurs with their causation, i.e. there is no causation that He does not accept and His acceptance is a necessary condition

(c) Occasionalist — objects owe both their existence and causation to God

Journal, May 9th

-"They have written about physical and emotional woes, about victories and exploits in affairs of war, of sensuality, of passion, etc. They have overlooked the great misfortune, of not understanding -- or of its opposite, the joy of doing so."

-What Dante learned from the Bible was how to write so that the man in the street could understand but the scholar would be perplexed.

-Al Farabi: the soul is that which is capable of defining and by defining reaching the pure reality of an object.

Lycan on Objectivity in Ethics and Epistemology

"It's interesting that this parallel [between ethics and epistemology] goes generally unremarked. Moral subjectivism, relativism, emotivism, etc. are rife among both philosophers and ordinary people and yet very few of these same people would think even for a moment of denying the objectivity of epistemic value; that is, of attacking the reality of the distinction between reasonable and unreasonable belief. I wonder why that is?"

[William Lycan, "Epistemic Value," Synthese 1985, pg. 137, h/t to Daniel Boyd]

Notes on Hegel's Vision of Freedom

Like everything on this blog, these are the notes of an amateur, and they ought to taken with a grain of salt, if taken at all. 03/18/2016

-At first, you might think that the most fundamental conception of freedom is Selbstbestimmung, self-determination. Let's start with this hypothesis, and see what we can make of it.  Hegel calls this first pass at a definition of freedom "being-with-oneself."

What would absolute and complete full self-determination, complete being-with-oneself look like?

Well, the opposite of self-determination is dependence. Now there is metaphysical dependence: something might depend on something else to exist. Peter van Inwagen's example is a wrinkle in the carpet. The wrinkle needs the carpet to be there for it to exist as well.

And there is epistemic dependence: the way one concept could only be understood with the help of another concept. If this seems obscure, consider the idea that something might only be explained [or at least most helpfully explained] by contrasting it with another idea. If X is totally epistemically independent of Y, then X can be understood fully without recourse to comparison with Y. If X is totally epistemically independent, not just of Y, but of everything, then it could be understood without the use of any other concept. It would be self-presenting or immediate.

Something that were completely self-determining would be both metaphysically independent and epistemically independent. Hegel thinks this is impossible. Nothing has these qualities, in his view.

So any freedom or self-determination that exists has to exist with some level of dependence, either metaphysical, epistemic, or some other kind. Hegel calls this "being-with-oneself-in-another." This is our second pass at an understanding of freedom. But how does this reconciliation of self-determination with dependence-on-the-other happen? It happens because the self stops experiencing the other as an alien and alienating presence.

Now there are at least two kinds of freedom or being-with-oneself-in-another.

(A) The first is speculative or theoretical freedom. This is the free contemplation of the world, a.k.a. philosophy. It's a kind of being-with-oneself-in-another because when we do philosophy we (eventually) come to understand that the world is our home, even though it often seems hostile and foreign in the beginning.

(B) Another kind of being-with-onself-in-another is practical freedom, which is the sort of freedom we exercise by using our will in the world outside our heads. Now practical freedom must be understood in three separate phases.

(1) Personal freedom -- This is when an arbitrary will is able to choose its own ends. Note that it is the will that is doing this, not some other faculty. You have this sort of freedom when you have a bunch of will-less objects or things that you have complete control over. Many teenagers have this sort of freedom; they have their own room, they have their own things that they have complete discretion over. 

(2) Moral freedom -- This is when a will is able to choose its own ends not spontaneously but in accordance with the self's vision of the good, a vision of the good that is reflectively endorsed by the self.   

(3) Social freedom -- This is when a society has created rational social institutions that are able to both (a) help form individuals capable of exercising both personal and moral freedom and (b) give definition and particularity to the citizen's vision of the good.

Journal, May 10th

-In most societies, the most educated class will also be the most effectively propagandized.

-A problem for the Burkean: a person can feel more at home in a foreign culture than the one they grew up in. How is that possible?

"Magna est veritas" by Coventry Patmore

Here, in this little Bay
Full of tumultuous life and great repose,
Where, twice a day,
The purposeless, glad ocean comes and goes,
Under high cliffs, and far from the huge town,
I sit me down.
For want of me the world's course will not fail;
When all its work is done, the lie shall rot;
The truth is great, and shall prevail,
When none cares whether it prevail or not.

[From The Unknown Eros, 1877]

"...To catacombs, caverns, and deserts."

The Hermit, Mikhail Nesterov, 1889

And we, the wise men and the poets
       Custodians of truths and of secrets
Will bear off our torches of knowledge
       To catacombs, caverns and deserts.

[L.A. Lyusternik, quoted in Naming Infinity, by Loren Graham and Jean-Michel Kantor]

Notes from an Old Journal

1. "People said of Sam Ward that he was the only man capable of strutting while seated."

2. "The effect of the telegraphic style is to intimate a whole spectrum of moral discriminations without ever making them explicit."

3. "Is the primary task of human reason to find formal solutions to abstract problems, and impose these solutions on the raw material of the world, as we experience it? Or is the primary task to get acquainted with the world of experience in all its concrete detail, stating our problems and resolving them later, in the light of that experience?"

Two Accounts of Literary Decadence

"What is the mark of every literary decadence? That the life no longer resides in the whole. The word becomes sovereign and leaps out of the sentence, the sentence reaches out and obscures the meaning of the page, and the pages comes to life at the expense of the whole -- the whole is no longer a whole. This, however, is the style of every style of decadence: every time there is an anarchy of atoms."

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, Section 7

"I would define that baroque as the style that deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) its own possibilities, and that borders on self-caricature. In vain did Andrew Lang attempt in the 1880's to imitate Pope's Odyssey, it was already a parody and so defeated the parodist's attempt to exaggerate its tautness. "Baroco" was a term used for one of the syllogistic reasoning: the 18th century applied it to certain abuses in 17th century architecture and painting. I would venture to say that the baroque is the final stage in all art, when art flaunts and squanders all its resources. The baroque is intellectual, and Bernard Shaw has said that all intellectual labor is inherently humorous."

Jorge Luis Borges, Preface to the 1954 edition of A Universal History of Inquity

"Dogs and Other Philosophers"

As far as could be learnt it appeared that the poor young dog, still under the impression that since he was kept for running after sheep, the more he ran after them the better, had at the end of his meal off the dead lamb, which may have given him additional energy and spirits, collected all the ewes into a corner, driven the timid creatures through the hedge, across the upper field, and by main force of worrying had given them momentum enough to break down a portion of the rotten railing, and so hurled them over the edge.

[The dog] had done his work so thoroughly that he was considered too good a workman to live, and was, in fact, taken and tragically shot at twelve o'clock that same day -- another instance of the untoward fate which so often attends dogs and other philosophers who follow out a train of reasoning to its logical conclusion, and attempt perfectly consistent conduct in a world made up so largely of compromise.

[From Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy]